In an artistic mediation workshop, the person who facilitates often makes nothing. This position, which we imagine to be one of restraint, is in fact very active: from it, we give instructions, we worry, we transmit our fears, we impose a framework. A garment placed under a camera made me understand that, from this position, each of us builds an institution, more or less open, more or less sick. I examine here how this happens, and what changes when we make things alongside the people we work with.
The hand hovering over the shoulder
The scene is an ordinary one. A group is working, everyone bent over their material, and the facilitator moves around the room. For a long time I described this circulation as observation: the person who has nothing to make watches, takes notes, documents, prepares their report. This is partly true, and I have done all of it. But if you look closely at what this person actually does, observation is not what dominates. Their free hands find things to do: they point at a piece of paper, they mime the right gesture, they straighten a cut-out that was leaning. Their voice offers advice nobody asked for. Their gaze passes over people’s shoulders, less to receive what is being invented than to check that things are going the way they should, and when things are not going the way they should, they worry, and their worry can be seen, heard, and transmitted to the group. The one who makes nothing is not standing back; they intervene constantly, and their fear is often their main driving force.
If I now put myself in the position of the person who is making something, the situation is this: I am taking risks in front of someone who risks nothing. I cut clumsily, I make mistakes, I start over, I show everyone what I do not know how to do, and all the while a person who will produce nothing that could be judged, who has no hesitant hand and no result to betray them, leans over my shoulder to show me how to do better. They are in a position of superiority, not out of arrogance, but through the sheer mechanics of the position, and they add to it the weight of their worry.
I have often written that fear blocks learning, and that a workshop only works if people feel reassured enough to take risks. What I had not examined closely enough is that the first signal sent to the group is not what the facilitator says, but what they do with their hands while the others are working. A hand that cuts and a hand that hovers over a shoulder do not say the same thing about the nature of what is taking place.
“Everyone is a monitor”
This question was worked on before us, and in a radical way, in institutional psychotherapy. In January 1940, François Tosquelles, a Catalan psychiatrist fleeing Franco’s Spain, arrived at the psychiatric hospital of Saint-Alban, in Lozère, carrying two books in his bag: Jacques Lacan’s doctoral thesis and the German psychiatrist Hermann Simon’s book on more active therapy. From Hermann Simon he retained an idea that turns the perspective around: the hospital itself is sick, sick with its hierarchies, its fixed positions, its routine, and to heal the patients one must first heal the hospital. At Saint-Alban, during the war and after it, caregivers and patients tended the vegetable garden together, cooked together, made a newspaper, ran a club managed with the patients, and this genuinely shared life healed.
Jean Oury, who trained at Saint-Alban with François Tosquelles, founded the La Borde clinic in 1953, where the rule was that everyone was a moniteur, a monitor. Doctors, psychologists, educators, the laundress, the cook: whatever their academic training, everyone took part in the material tasks of daily life. Félix Guattari, who arrived shortly afterwards, turned this into a device, the “grille” (the grid), a rotation chart on which cleaning, cooking, workshops and care circulated among everyone. With this rotation, nobody could settle permanently into the position of watching other people live; nobody was assigned to the sole function of observing others live and imposing a framework on them.
The intuition underlying all of this is that collective life produces care when it is genuinely shared, and that it produces all the less care as positions become fixed. Peeling vegetables together, at Saint-Alban as at La Borde, could have more effect than a consultation, because in that task there is no one who knows and no one who doesn’t; there are people doing the same thing side by side.
I am not claiming to transpose a psychiatric practice into the field of cultural mediation, whose stakes are different. What I retain is the principle: the position of the one who makes nothing is not an absence of position. It is a place, it produces effects, and it should be chosen knowingly rather than occupied by default.
A garment under the camera
One day, in an animation film workshop, some participants brought a garment, a piece of worn fabric, and wanted to use it as animation material under the camera. In thirty-five years of practice, I had never seen that. I have already told this story in the article Letting Go of One’s Criteria, from the point of view of the aesthetic criteria it required me to let go of. What I did not tell there is what happened inside me.
I immediately felt rising in me the urge to tell them to do it differently. Their proposal matched nothing I knew, and I was afraid. Afraid it would be complicated, because the fabric is rough, it has thicknesses and ridges, and the cut-paper pieces you have to slide across it to animate them were likely to snag at every frame. Afraid for the time, because other films had to be shot after theirs, time was tight, and a failed experiment is paid for on everyone’s schedule. Afraid, at bottom, for the balance of my workshop, which this atypical way of doing things, outside my framework, might damage. None of this was absurd; these were a professional’s fears, grounded in experience, expressible as reasonable arguments, and all the more dangerous for it.
I made the effort to go against my own will, that is to say against my fears. And I did not simply let them get on with it: I helped them. The fabric kept slipping, it had to be held so that they could animate on top of it, and I found myself supporting with my own hands something that was beyond me and that I thought would probably not work. Instead of being above, I was underneath, my hands under their material, in the service of ideas that were theirs and not mine. By helping, I helped things go well. I helped them, and at the same time I helped the overall framework of the workshop hold, since their film got made and the following ones could be shot. That day, holding the framework and serving what overflowed it turned out to be one and the same gesture.
What they produced had great plastic richness. The garment handled under the camera opened up possibilities that cut paper does not allow: a weight, a way of falling, folds that settle differently, a memory of the human form haunting the image. I discovered this that day, and I would not have discovered it from a chair, with a notebook, nor by advising them to go back to paper. The new knowledge did not come to me through observation or through instructions; it came to me through my hands. I am attaching the film to this article, so that you can see what it was.
The fact remains that I could very well have said no, with good reasons, kindly put, and nobody would have found anything wrong with it. That is what stops me when I think back on it: if I had acted on my fears, I would have built, with my own hands, in my own workshop, a sick institution.
The institution is not the walls
This word, institution, deserves a pause. In everyday usage, it evokes buildings, organisation charts, regulations, something external to us, which would be there before us and in spite of us. The walls matter, they carry the scars of what has been lived within them, and written systems of organisation give us the impression that the institution is there, in those documents, outside of us. But that is not where it is made. An institution is made by people, and it does not take many of them: a single person, in an interaction with a single other, is already making institution. In any case, we institute ourselves. So the question is not whether we are making institution, we always are; the question is which one, more or less normative, more or less open, more or less sick.
René Lourau, in L’Analyse institutionnelle (Institutional Analysis, 1970, untranslated), describes the institution not as a thing but as a process, a permanent tension between the instituted, the established forms, and the instituting, that which overflows and renews them. And he insists on a point that concerns me directly: nobody analyses an institution from the outside, each of us is implicated in it, each of us carries it. I have detailed in the article The framework that authorizes what institutional psychotherapy and institutional pedagogy mean by institution, and the notion of the institution of the moment, that ephemeral institution a group gives itself for the duration of a workshop. What the garment under the camera taught me is that this institution of the moment plays out in tiny gestures, and that it is decided at the moment when a hand reaches out to help or to correct, when a sentence begins with “it would be better to” or with “show me”.
The potentially sick institution, that day, was neither in the walls of the place nor in the written project of the workshop. It was in me, in my professional’s fears, ready to pass into my gestures at the first instruction. How can we hold the overall framework of a workshop, which is my role, without being castrating, without being normative, without taking the place of the other person’s emancipation? I have no general answer, but from that day I keep a compass: when the other becomes autonomous, exceeds us, destabilises us, we must help them, even if, and especially if, it is not what we had imagined.
Running a festival by asking people what they needed
I have also practised this way of holding a framework outside mediation, in teamwork. When I created the Pocket Film festival in 2005 with the Forum des images, I was running the festival and, at the same time, I was building my team’s work tool myself, a sophisticated and very practical piece of software. I asked people what they needed, and I helped them in the direction of their needs and their autonomy, within the culture of the project. That culture was what I held: we were there to discover forms of audiovisual expression in the process of inventing themselves, forms we sought as much to spark as to discover, and so we always had to invent, always discover, never judge by our pre-established criteria. A festival is an enormous amount of organisation, and organisational problems devour mental space. The tools I built for the team served that purpose: saving time on organisation in order to keep the mental space to open up, to move beyond our codes and habits.
Directing by asking people what they need may seem paradoxical. Yet it was fully part of my role as director, and it was perhaps its most useful part. The stakes of mediation and those of teamwork meet here: in both cases, the person who holds the framework serves the autonomy of those who work within it, and they do it all the better when they too are making something concrete for them.
Not doing things for people is not doing nothing
One principle seems to me hardly negotiable in mediation: we do not do things in people’s place. The temptation is permanent and comes in benevolent forms: it’s quicker, it’s more efficient, we’re afraid the person will fail. Doing something in someone’s place takes away from them what made the workshop worthwhile for them, the experience of having produced something by themselves.
I remember a workshop making animated films with very elderly people living with dementia. An art therapist had prepared this workshop before I arrived and, during the sessions, she did a great deal in the participants’ place. It did not come from bad intentions; it came from wanting things to work. I left more room than she did, even when what came out of it was not exactly what one might have wished. She told me afterwards that she had learned something that day.
The principle is right and I stand by it. But I believe it has produced in many mediators, and for a long time in me, a confusion: from “don’t do it in their place” we deduced “don’t do anything at all”. These are two different things. Not doing something in someone’s place means not touching their material unless they ask, not correcting their gesture, not taking over their film to improve it. Making alongside them, on my own material, with my own clumsiness, takes nothing away from them. And helping them when they ask, in the direction of their own idea, takes nothing away from them either: holding a slipping fabric while another person animates it is not doing it in their place, it is putting oneself at the service of what they are doing.
“It looks as though it all happens by itself”
In 2026, as part of virtual reality filmmaking workshops with secondary school students, I organise days on which each pupil receives a precise role, something important to do, something singular, and the roles complement one another. Then, throughout the day, they do everything their own way. I am there to lend a hand if necessary, but they are the ones making the decisions. A teacher specialised in progressive education attended one of these days. She told me she was astonished, even destabilised, to see how autonomous the children were and how they made decisions, and she confided that it worried her, that she wondered whether they would manage. They managed very well, and the films they made truly resembled them.
Going that far, to the very end of this framework, takes much more work than directing. If it seems to happen by itself, it is because we have managed to bring people, through the quality of the bond built with them and the institutional place we give them, to settle into confidence in themselves. And we must be extremely present, because bad reflexes, theirs as much as mine, can come back very fast. What keeps them at bay are tiny things: a small word, a small gesture, a way of helping or not helping, a way of stepping aside when necessary. It is extremely fine-grained, it cannot be seen from the outside, and that is where the essential part of the work happens.
Carl Rogers, in On Becoming a Person (1961), wagers that the person possesses within themselves the resources to direct their own development, provided they are offered a climate in which this can happen. What we usually remember of him is what the helper refrains from: directing, advising, interpreting in the other’s place. But Carl Rogers describes this climate through three attitudes, and none of the three is an abstention. Unconditional positive regard is an act, empathy is work, and the third, which he calls congruence, engages the helper’s very person: being genuinely oneself in the relationship, without a professional façade, in accordance with what one feels. A mediator who is afraid and does not work on their fear is not congruent, and their fear will pass through anyway, in the tone of their voice and in the hovering hand. The fine-grained attention I am talking about, the small word, the gesture held back or risked, requires first of all this work on one’s own fears. The climate is not made only of what the helper refrains from; it is also made of what they consent to risk, and of what they are.
Making without ceasing to see
In the workshops I facilitate, I make things. I cut alongside the others, I make my film, I take my pictures, I put my phone on the table with theirs. This does not prevent me from holding the framework, being attentive to what circulates, stepping in when someone is stuck. The framework is not threatened by the fact that my hands are busy; if anything it is secured by it, because I know from the inside what I am asking people to go through.
It is true that when I make something, part of my attention goes into my own material. I first thought of this as a loss I accepted. I put it differently today: being at once engaged in the action and attentive to everything that is happening is the very place of the mediator, and that is why it is so difficult to hold and consumes so much energy. From the outside, you see someone having fun, making films with the others, and it looks quite simple. It is in fact a very high level of attention, which cannot be seen. People who facilitate in pairs can share out the positions, one makes while the other remains available, then they exchange their perceptions; when I facilitate alone, I hold both at once. I have described in the article Receiving, or the difficulty of doing nothing how much availability is in itself work; making things with people takes nothing away from that work, it adds to it.
What seems certain to me is that the question must at least be asked. A mediator who, throughout an entire workshop, has made nothing, shown nothing, failed at nothing in front of the others, and who has spent their time advising, correcting and worrying, occupies a place they must be able to account for. That place is not given by the nature of things; it is chosen.
Concrete gestures for changing one’s place
This section of the site is meant to be methodological, so here, to finish, are a few concrete gestures drawn from this path, for anyone who would like to shift their place as a facilitator:
- Make your own material in every workshop. Make your film, your pictures, your cut-outs, with your clumsiness visible, and show it on the same footing as the other productions, no more, no less.
- Put your tools on the shared table. A phone placed among the other phones tells the group that you are playing the same game, with the same risks.
- Never touch a participant’s material without an explicit request. And when you help, help in the direction of the person’s idea, not your own: they direct the gesture, even if it is your hand doing the holding.
- Name your fear before saying no. When a proposal falls outside the planned framework, identify for yourself the fear driving the refusal, time, equipment, the result, the commissioning body’s gaze, and only then decide. A named fear weighs far less than a fear disguised as common sense.
- Build slack into the schedule. When every minute is allocated, we refuse almost mechanically any unforeseen proposal; slack makes the yes possible.
- Look at your own hands from time to time. Are they making, holding, helping, or pointing and correcting? They say more than any intention about the place you occupy.
- In pairs, explicitly alternate positions. One makes while the other remains available, then you exchange perceptions, and you switch.
- At the end of a workshop, ask yourself what you risked. What did I make today, what did I fail at in front of the others, what did I help that was beyond me? These three questions are enough to take stock of the place you occupied.
