I ran these two workshops on 1 July 2026, as part of the “Developing the power to act” module of the training course for organisers of local cultural rights groups. Asked to represent the power to act in a photograph, the teams mostly photographed prohibitions and the crossing of them. From this I draw the lesson I develop here: what blocks the power to act is not primarily a lack of capacity but a feeling of illegitimacy, and the first task of cultural rights is to build frameworks that give permission.
A module for experiencing the power to act, at the start of an eighteen-month cycle
Réseau culture 21, run by Christelle Blouët and Anne Aubry, has been leading the Paideia programme (“education” in ancient Greek) since 2012, in partnership with the Observatory of Diversity and Cultural Rights in Fribourg. In this action research, participants collectively analyse how fundamental rights, and cultural rights in particular, are taken into account across all public policies, whether cultural, social, educational, environmental or health-related, and work on putting them into practice. It takes the form, among others, of a training-through-action course for “organisers of local cultural rights groups”: six three-day modules spread over eighteen months, after which the participants themselves lead cultural rights initiatives on their own territories. Fourteen groups have already been supported; they have organised more than a hundred events and reached more than seven thousand people. Seven territories are taking part in the third season (2026-2027): Bordeaux, Villeurbanne, the Marseille metropolitan area, the Rouen metropolitan area, Grigny, Grand Paris Sud and Pontarlier.
The second module of this season, “Developing the power to act”, took place from 1 to 3 July 2026 at Le Rize in Villeurbanne. Its starting point is the observation on which the Paideia programme rests: the power to act depends largely on people’s capacity to claim and exercise their fundamental rights, whereas public policy is still most often built on needs to be met and on prescription. And it is not enough to state this intention of making people capable of acting; it calls for active methods. So on the Wednesday afternoon, four practitioners from different fields each ran a workshop drawn from their own ground: Hélène Balazard for research on community organizing, Jean-Pierre Chrétien-Goni for shared creation in vulnerable settings, Christophe Jibard for community social work, and myself for digital mediation. Each participant chose two workshops out of the four; I therefore ran the same workshop twice, with about ten people the first time and about twenty the second, most of them professionals from local authorities, cultural institutions or associations.
These fifty people are at their second meeting, they are only just getting to know one another, and they are committing together to an eighteen-month journey. The power to act the programme talks about is also at stake right there, in the strength of the bond and the trust growing between them, and a shared creation workshop, this early in the journey, feeds that bond through an experience lived in common.
Fifteen minutes to create, much longer to look
Rather than explaining my practice, I proposed that we live one, in fast-forward, because the power to act, in my view, is not passed on like a concept; it is experienced. This begins before the participants even arrive. I had come early and spent three quarters of an hour setting up the room, trying out layouts, moving chairs, because the care given to the welcome is part of the method; when people walk into a prepared space, they feel they were expected. It may seem superfluous, and most speakers use rooms as they find them, which makes sense if the only aim is to pass on information. But if the aim is to live an experience, the place is an active agent, and it therefore has to be prepared with care.
The protocol is that of a photographic creation workshop I have been using for years and which I have already described in the article Participatory reverse photography workshop. In teams of two or three, the participants had fifteen minutes to create a photograph on the theme “developing the power to act”, with a single formal constraint: at least one hand had to appear in the picture. Each team put its photo online by itself, via a QR code, and signed it with the first names of its authors. We then looked at the pictures on the big screen, one by one, with an unusual rule: the authors were forbidden to comment on their own photo, while the others told them what they saw in it, what it evoked for them, what it did to them. I told them: “It’s very frustrating, I know, I admit it, but that’s the game.”
In this way I reverse the usual proportions of artistic practice projects, where almost all the time goes into making and the sharing comes at the end, as an extra. Here the making was short and autonomous, and most of the time went to the shared looking, lived as a genuine practice, which brought the participants real emotions. Because the essential part of this workshop is not the explanations of method I gave afterwards; it is what the participants lived together, the creation of the photos, then what they gained from one another by bringing their own eyes to the others’ pictures.
Half-open doors, no-entry signs, instruments under lock and key
This moment of looking was intense, and that delighted me. We laughed a lot, we were surprised, we played at interpreting. Faced with two open hands against a perspective of paths and trees, someone offered “love is an open road”, and the whole room took up the phrase. Faced with adults photographed in the middle of a cooperative board game, we wondered whether they were “children in adult bodies”. Faced with pebbles carefully lined up on a picnic table, and two hands shaking above them, we hesitated between a ritual of alliance and “the resolution of a pebble conflict”. And faced with musical instruments held by their anti-theft stands, which the group read as instruments “under control”, out of reach, one participant finally revealed, amid laughter, that she herself designed the communication materials for that media library, where those instruments can be borrowed free of charge.
Beyond this joy, I was struck by how consistent the photographs were, from one group to the next. A door ajar on a restricted area, hinting at the other side without showing it. Another door, marked “no entry”, this time pushed open by a multitude of hands, in which the group read that the collective legitimises transgression, that together we have the right to go where it is forbidden. Three hands laid on a DVD sleeve titled “Ni Dieu ni maître” (“Neither God nor master”), which became, under the group’s eyes, an oath, almost a ritual. A public bench covered in inscriptions claiming an “owner of the bench”, and the question of whether one may sit on it.
The teams had not conferred, and yet, asked to represent the power to act, they mostly photographed prohibitions and the crossing of them. Spontaneously, we picture the power to act as an infraction, as taking what we have not been given, and the participants confirmed this in the discussions that followed. One participant in the first group put her finger on the limit of this representation, noting that if the power to act can only be gained through transgression, the message becomes a trap. If acting is experienced as transgressing, it is because we do not feel authorised, and developing the power to act then consists less in giving capacities than in moving the line of what is experienced as a transgression.
“Making the effort to receive”
This feeling of illegitimacy, the participants felt it in the exercise itself, and that is what gives the protocol its pedagogical value. Making a creative photograph when you are not an artist is no small thing. You may tell yourself that what you produce belongs to the “socio-cultural”, the not-serious, that real creation is elsewhere, with the professionals, and by that reasoning you deprive yourself of your own power to act. Several people told me about their embarrassment when their photo came up on the big screen, the impression that theirs was the weakest of all, the fear of what the others would say about it. And when the others look at the picture and see things in it you did not put there, you may want to protest: “we didn’t put all that in our photo!” In a gathering, what stops people from moving into creativity is not a lack of capacity but the fear of judgement, as I wrote in Giving Ourselves Permission to Create. And that fear has deep roots, because thinking for yourself, creating in your own way, means exposing yourself to not doing as the others do, and so risking exclusion from the group, which, for a gregarious species like ours, ranks among the greatest dangers.
It was only that day that I really understood what the silence imposed on the authors does to this feeling, although I designed this workshop nearly four years ago and have run it very often. Being denied the right to explain forces you to make the effort to receive, and receiving what the other brings us is perhaps the hardest thing there is, far harder than giving. We would like to answer, to justify, to put our intention back at the centre. Instead, we discover in our own picture riches we had not put there and which the others nonetheless saw. One participant, who assesses cultural project applications within a Cité éducative, drew a lesson for her own work from it, saying how funny it was to hear what the group had seen, “because we hadn’t asked ourselves nearly so many questions”, and how this gap between what the artist wants to convey and what people actually receive deserves to be taken into account when building a programme.
By sending back to each person what it has seen, the community legitimises that person’s work, and through it a little of their identity. The others, through their gaze, institute me and teach me, and I do the same for them; it is because there is a community that one can build oneself in one’s own identity, because it is recognised, and even named, by the community that comments. No aesthetic judgement is passed, and none can be, since a creation is, in the etymological sense, something new, for which no criteria exist yet; the 23.4 million people who, according to the DEPS survey on cultural practices, have an amateur artistic practice in France are no less legitimate than the professionals. The first names noted at the start of the session, the signed photos, the trace kept online and archived are all part of the same movement: each person becomes anchored in the value of what they do, and that is how heritage takes shape concretely, all the more so as these creations will remain online, on my own servers, which do not depend on the GAFAM. This is the first foothold of cultural rights, the value each person can give to their own culture, and we can see that it is not a statement of principle but an experience that a set-up can produce or prevent.
A very tight framework, which produces freedom
It remains to understand why such a constrained framework, an instruction, an imposed theme, fifteen minutes, a compulsory hand, the authors’ silence, produces freedom rather than obedience. The answer lies in what psychoanalysis calls the third, whose use I have detailed in the article The symbolic third, a tool to connect. A two-way relationship, the one in which I give an instruction and the other carries it out, is what is called a “dual” relationship, a relationship of power, whatever the good intentions. The object placed between people, here the QR code and the photographic instruction, makes it possible to step out of that dual relationship, since each person makes their photo as they see fit and the only thing that matters to me is that there be one photo per team, whether or not the instruction is followed. The framework, in this conception, is not made of prohibitions; it is what gives permission, what allows people to feel entitled to act, and they experience it concretely: they really were free to make their photo, then to say what they wanted about the others’ photos. So we built power to act, and it was the framing that made it possible. I hope this method will give people ideas and that its logic can be taken up elsewhere. And I always bring more material than I have planned for, so as not to be the prisoner of a single protocol if the group heads in another direction.
This conception rests on a philosophical tradition that cultural rights inherit. John Dewey writes in Art as Experience (1934) that art is not an object but the experience lived by human beings; I devoted an article to this link, John Dewey : an inspirer of cultural rights ?. If we follow Dewey, artistic rigour does not depend on the quality of the final product but on the quality of the bond, and more precisely on the degree of power to act we leave to people; my experience confirms that when this bond is cared for, the artistic productions are of an altogether different quality. Jacques Rancière says something close in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987), where explaining something to someone already amounts, through the set-up itself, to assuming they are incapable of finding it on their own. A very concrete consequence follows for shared creation projects, which are so often judged, at the moment of presentation to funders and supervising bodies, by professional aesthetic criteria, pushing artists, so as not to lose their legitimacy, to intervene over the top of the creations of the people they are working with. This leads projects to the opposite of what was intended. Presenting the process rather than the result, by documenting it throughout the project with photos, logbooks and accounts, and by entrusting the presentation to the participants themselves, makes it possible to escape this trap. Since cultural rights have been written into French law since 2015 and 2016 (the NOTRe and LCAP acts), this approach now has texts that legitimise it against the obligation of results imposed on such projects.
Professionals too need to feel authorised
The mechanism I am describing does not concern audiences alone; it also affects professionals. In the workshop before mine, Jean-Pierre Chrétien-Goni described his work in prisons, his choice not to show a play before creating with the inmates, because a ready-made model imposes and inhibits, and those presentations where an elected official who has been absent from the whole project arrives at the last minute, gives a four-minute speech and leaves, which the participants experience as an aggression. Participants in my second workshop made the connection between his account and mine by themselves. We describe, each from his own ground, he in prison theatre, I in digital mediation, the same institutional symptoms: the prescription that inhibits and the presentation that dispossesses.
In the great majority of participants, I sensed discovery and joy, the joy of allowing oneself something one had not been granting oneself. A few people also voiced resistance, and that resistance is precious, because we find in it the logic the photographs had already shown. The people on this course work with generosity and conviction in the very institutions whose symptoms we describe, and words that question the usual frameworks of cultural democratisation can be heard as questioning the people. The objections put to me were, moreover, often fair: on the distinction between competence and hierarchy, which is first of all a matter of stance; on groups that call for a framework when they are left with a “do whatever you like”; on relational competence as a competence in its own right. Changing one’s professional stance, questioning habits that one’s institution expects of oneself, is also a form of acting that is first experienced as a transgression, and professionals need, as much as audiences do, frameworks that give them permission. A training course like this one is such a framework, provided the controversy can unfold within it without anyone having something to defend, neither the witnesses their practice nor the participants their institution.
Cultural rights at work in the workshop, in three families of powers
To conclude, I propose reading this workshop as a miniature demonstration of how cultural rights can be used, not as principles to recite but as tools for building a set-up. They can be grouped into three families of powers (Anne Aubry’s typology):
- The power to exist. Identity runs through the first names noted at the start of the session and the signing of the photos, because identity is the most fragile thing there is and because respect for the dignity of persons is the bedrock of cultural rights. Diversity runs through the plurality of readings, since on almost every picture opposite readings coexisted, all legitimate, without any one truth prevailing. Heritage runs through the trace, since the photographs are kept, archived, and belong to those who made them. Community is what legitimises the whole, since it is the others, through their gaze, who institute the value of what each person has done.
- The power to know and to make known. Education and information run through the time when we come back together over the method, through putting words, together, on what we have just lived, and through the documentation of the process, which then makes it possible to recount and pass it on.
- The power to organise. Participation and cooperation are written into the set-up itself: autonomous teams, uploading done by the people themselves, a presentation carried by the whole group; and trust is the thread running through it all.
This is the way of working the participants will take back to their territories, since the very principle of Paideia is that they then organise their own initiatives locally. In my view, artistic creation can have its full place there, within local cooperation, provided we do not forget what the participants experienced that afternoon: that artistic rigour depends on the degree of power to act we leave to people. The photographs created during these two workshops remain online, below, together with the recordings and summaries of the discussions. They belong to those who made them.
