Adolescent centres and youth drop-in counselling services rest on the face-to-face of speech: a young person, a professional, an office. Some teenagers never enter, because talking about themselves is precisely what they cannot do. Making images opens another path, provided it is built with the teams and within the framework of care, and not laid on top of the institution as an activity.
Where speech does not reach
The core work of youth counselling services is support through speech, face to face. That is their strength: a confidential, free space, with no file, where one can come and set down what is overflowing. It is also their limit, which the teams know well: the young people who push the door open are those for whom speech is already a workable tool. Those who are furthest from it, the silent ones, the agitated ones, those whom the interview freezes, stay outside or do not come back. Serge Tisseron explained it during a training course we were leading together: when nobody has ever really listened to a child, the mastery of language as a tool to speak oneself has not been built, and identity construction looks for other paths, including the making of images. Fernand Deligny made a method of it with children whom language did not reach; the film Ce gamin, là (Renaud Victor, 1975), shot within his network in the Cévennes, shows images more constructive than many discourses.
The detour through the object
Concretely, what does “making images” mean in such a place? A simple proposal: each person, young people and professionals alike, makes a photograph from an open instruction, then the images are projected large and watched together, the author of each image keeping silent while the others say what they see in it. I described in the article What other people’s gaze does to our images what this protocol produces: the person discovers that their image contains things they did not know they had put there, and this discovery, inscribed in the image, goes neither through confession nor through a third party’s interpretation. Nobody assigns a meaning; the group shares ways of seeing. It is this detour through the object that makes the device workable for young people whom face-to-face burns: we do not talk about them, we talk about an image, and it is exactly for this reason that something of them can circulate. The framework of this work, its conditions and its limits, in particular the border with care proper, are detailed in the article Audiovisual workshop in therapeutic mediation: the mediator is not a therapist, and knowing when to hand over is part of the device.
A workshop cannot be laid on top of an institution
I worked with the team of an adolescent centre which had experienced, before my arrival, the failure of a workshop around young people’s video practices. The project had been decided vertically, entrusted to a practitioner whose competence, real as it was, was that of individual consultation, and organised by asking the local branches to “supply” groups of young people to the central site, without the educational stakes, the dynamics of a group or the place of the teams having been worked on. Almost nothing happened, and I consider this failure reassuring: the professional community did not give in to a proposal that was instrumentalising it. The lesson is worth a method. A mediation workshop cannot be plated onto an institution; it is built with it, starting from the team’s real practices and tensions, giving a real place to the educators and reception staff, whose role I described in the article The one who does not make, planning supervision, and leaving the device open, so that other branches or other professionals can join along the way. My place in these projects can be said in a few words: I take on the welcoming, the diplomatic dimension counts as much as the technique, and plasticity is a skill.
Collective moments in places built for the individual
A counselling service that opens up to creation first gains collectiveness where everything was individual: young people who would never have crossed paths share a gaze on images, and professionals from different trades, psychologists, educators, reception secretaries, find themselves participants on the same footing. It then gains another face: a place where something gets made attracts young people whom the idea of “going to talk” kept at a distance, and the workshop becomes a doorway towards counselling, never the other way round. It finally gains on one condition: that what is made does not become a showcase. The temptation exists, showing the productions to funders, communicating, exhibiting; I said in the article Process versus result why it is the process that must be told. Young people’s images belong to them, and a counselling service that forgets this loses, along with their trust, the only thing that makes it exist.
