In a creative workshop, whoever is leading is demanding about something, and the group works out very quickly what that something is. If it is the quality of what gets made, the participants hold back, or give up. I propose placing rigour on the depth and sincerity of the relationship, right down to the organising of the sharing of the work, which I hand over to the participants themselves.
The musician hears the wrong note before anyone else
When an institution looks for someone to run a workshop, it asks for an artistic career, a body of work, professional recognition. It assumes, without saying so, that whoever masters an art form will necessarily do good work with people. I want to look more closely at what that mastery does, once it is in the room.
I have often seen the same scene. A professional musician is running a workshop. Someone plays. The musician hears, before anyone else and in spite of himself, that it is wrong. He says nothing, out of kindness, because he knows he must not judge. But he has heard, and his body has shown it, in an imperceptible withdrawal, in a second of silence too many before the encouragement. The person who was playing saw it.
I see no fault of posture in this. You do not come out of twenty years at the conservatoire without hearing the gap before you have even thought about it, and you do not stop hearing because you have decided to be welcoming. You hear, whether you want to or not, and the group notices. The same thing happens with a painter in front of a canvas, with an actress in front of an improvisation, with a filmmaker in front of a badly framed shot. Professional knowledge is not a resource you might keep in your pocket and bring out at the right moment, it is a way of perceiving, settled in the body, which makes you judge before you have had time to think.
I hold no one’s competence against them, and it would be absurd to ask anyone to forget it. I am only asking where the rigour that comes with it is going to settle. When your ear is trained, you place it spontaneously on the quality of what is being made, and the group feels this, whatever you tell them.
Rigour about the relationship has no outside judge
I wrote in the article Creating with people that rigour about artistic work must go together with rigour about the relationship. People often hear that sentence as a softening, a polite way of giving up, when it is in fact a shift.
Rigour can bear on two objects. On the productions, on their conformity to the criteria of the trade, on their accuracy, on their beauty as institutions understand it, and this is the aesthetics of the object, the one our artistic training gave us. Or on the relationship, and this is what I called, in the article Definition of Cultural Mediation, the aesthetics of the relationship.
Being demanding about the relationship requires two things. Depth first: being truly there for each person, listening to what is being sought in what they are doing, rather than settling for surface attention while thinking about the result. Sincerity next: being truly oneself in the relationship, with no professional façade, in agreement with what one feels. I developed in the article The One Who Makes Nothing what Carl Rogers calls congruence, and why it takes work rather than abstention.
This kind of rigour is harder to sustain than rigour about a job well done. To judge a job well done, we have criteria that come from our training and that peers can check. For depth and sincerity, we have nothing of the kind. No one will come and tell me whether I really listened, whether my presence was whole or distracted, whether my encouragement was sincere or manufactured. The only judge is the group, which perceives all of this without always being able to name it. Placing rigour on the relationship therefore means placing it where one is most exposed, and where one cannot cheat for long.
Photographing prohibitions
Depending on where I place my rigour, I assign people a different place. If I expect a fine production, they know they are being judged before a word is spoken, and they then make what conforms, or they give up. If I expect from them a presence and a voice of their own, they know they are expected to be capable, and they respond with a force that surprises me every time.
The Quebec psychologist Yann Le Bossé has devoted his work to translating and rethinking the notion of empowerment, which he proposes to understand as the development of the power to act, that is, the concrete possibility, for people, of exercising greater control over what matters to them (« De l’“habilitation” au “pouvoir d’agir” », Nouvelles pratiques sociales, 2003, then Sortir de l’impuissance, 2012). He asks the practitioner to give up the expert solution and to start from what matters to people, in order to support their own undertakings. In a workshop, the person who masters the medium occupies exactly the place of that expert solution, since they answer in people’s stead.
I saw this at close range when I ran two photography workshops at the Rize in Villeurbanne, within the module “Developing the power to act” of the Paideia approach, which I recount in the article Why the power to act is so often experienced as a transgression. Invited to represent the power to act in a photograph, almost every team photographed prohibitions and the crossing of them. What stops people from acting is not first of all a lack of capacity, it is the feeling of not being entitled to it. When I expect a fine production, I feed that feeling; when I place my rigour on the relationship, I authorise.
Two other pieces of research go in the same direction. Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson showed, with the Pygmalion effect, that an adult who believes in a child’s capacities lets the child know it through minute gestures, which leave the child room to deploy them, something I developed in the article Trust as a Technical Act. And Jacques Rancière, in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987), founds emancipation on the presupposition that intelligences are equal, and not on the transmission of a mastery.
Three mediations in two days at the Institut pour la photographie
Within the city of Lille’s “Classe culture” scheme, I accompanied a class of ten-year-olds at the Institut pour la photographie to create and install a photographic exhibition, as part of Lille 3000’s “Nature and Utopia” programme, which I recount in detail in the article “Cultural Class” : creation of a photographic exhibition with a CM2 class. I placed no rigour at all on the quality of the photographs. From the outset I set up a frame in which each child was given a precise responsibility, decided together with them: drawing, making music, preparing the display, making objects, taking photographs, cutting out images, building huts from the branches lying about in the courtyard.
I started from their desire to get their hands on the tools. It is the surest foothold I know. I find it again in the digital workshops run with Cultures du Cœur, which I reported on in the article Digital technology, a tool for mediation and cultural democracy, where people whom institutions describe as distant from culture take hold of a camera, a microphone, a piece of software, and discover, as they handle it, that they have something to say. The desire comes from the tool itself, and it is by taking it in hand that one becomes an author.
Then comes the question of what is done with the work once it exists, and this, to my mind, is where everything is decided. In most projects the sharing comes at the end, as an extra, and professionals arrange it: they choose the images, edit the film, hang the exhibition, present the work to the visitors. The participants then watch their own work come back to them, shaped by someone else. I do the opposite, following three principles:
- The result of a workshop is the account of the process, not the object that comes out of it. What people went through, decided, botched and began again, that is what there is to pass on, and the object is its trace.
- The sharing belongs to the workshop just as much as the making does. It is not a bonus added at the end if there is time and money left.
- The participants are the ones who organise it, in very concrete terms, right down to the words addressed to the visitors. In this way they answer from start to finish for what they have made, instead of receiving an object arranged by professionals.
With the ten-year-olds, everything happened sooner than expected. On the afternoon of the very first day, visitors came, and the children ran the mediation of their exhibition. The next morning, institutional officials came by, who could not come at any other time, and the children received them as visitors and presented their work to them. At the end of the second day they did it again, in front of the Institut’s staff. Three mediations in two days, when nothing was ready in the sense a professional would mean.
Nothing was spoiled by that. In talking about their images to adults they did not know, the children experienced why they had made them. A work exists in order to be passed on, and for as long as no one receives it, it remains in suspense. This time it was they who entered into relation with those who received, and rigour about the relationship changed hands.
The children took a good thousand photographs, put an exhibition online reachable by QR code, then, a few weeks later, prepared a very precise layout on two large panels for a public event bringing together all the city’s “classes culture”. The final exhibition was tightly constructed.
I find the same shift in the Collective films I have been making for years with adults, in quite different settings. Each person brings a sequence, a voice, an intention, and the rigour bears on the sincerity of that contribution, never on the quality of the shot. Here too, the public screening is part of the workshop: the films are shown in cinemas, to people who know nothing of the process and of whom no particular indulgence is asked.
It is often feared that shifting rigour in this way lowers the quality of the works. I have never seen it happen. People who are treated as authors work with an intensity that is never obtained by seeking what conforms.
“My speciality is the badly made”
Robert Filliou gave this reversal an artist’s formulation. In December 1968 the Schmela gallery offered him an exhibition, and for the occasion he completed his Principe d’équivalence, in which he set out as strictly equivalent a red sock in a carefully yellow-painted box, a footless sock in a badly painted box, and an empty box. The exhibition, Création permanente, opened in Düsseldorf the following year.
What interests me is the way he names the three terms. The well made is the model, the badly made is the learning, the not made is the concept. He does not say that the result is a matter of indifference, he says that the badly made has a function of its own, the one through which we learn, and that this function is worth as much as success. He declared that his speciality was the badly made.
Depending on whether or not one holds to this equivalence, one does not value the same thing in a workshop, and people try to make what is valued. A group that senses that the well made is expected will produce it, or give up. A group that has understood that the badly made is a place of learning will allow itself things. Now a person with a trained ear can only hold Filliou’s position at the cost of a permanent inner struggle, since their whole training has taught them the opposite, whereas a person who does not know how to do it holds that position effortlessly, not out of virtue, but because they have no means of ranking what they cannot judge.
Making the frame is a craft
The frame is a competence in its own right, and it owes nothing to mastery of the medium. Making the frame means arranging a space and setting out a time, putting materials within reach, making sure that everyone has room to take a risk, promising that we will see it through and keeping that promise, holding back one’s own urge to intervene, waiting when nothing comes, prompting without directing, organising the moment when we look together at what has been done. It can be learnt, it is demanding, and technical virtuosity plays no part in it.
I would go so far as to say that it is for want of a technical competence to defend that one can give all one’s attention to the frame and to the relationship. The person who masters the medium is busy with an inner struggle, having at every moment to hold back judgement, not to correct, not to show how it ought to be done. That struggle costs them a considerable amount of attention, which they no longer give to what is happening between people, that is, precisely to the object on which I propose to place rigour.
I see this confirmed in the podcast workshops I run. I am not a sound engineer. I know a few principles, the distance to the microphone, the reverberation of a room, but I do not have a professional’s ear. And yet the quality of the sound can be heard immediately. When a group records and then listens back, no one needs to be told that the microphone was too far away. They hear it, they move the microphone closer, they listen again, it is better, and they have learnt something by themselves. If I were a sound engineer, I would know before the recording that the microphone was badly placed, and I would say so, out of professional honesty, to spare them wasted time. The sound would be better and the learning would not have taken place. They would have obtained good sound without knowing why, and above all they would have learnt that there is someone in the room who knows. My relative ignorance is one of the conditions that make their autonomy possible, because it prevents me from short-circuiting it.
Having been clumsy in front of a material
I wrote in the article Creation as the energy source of cultural mediation that mediators must develop their own creative skills and the confidence that goes with them, not in order to become artists as institutions understand the word, but in order to be able to create genuinely with the people they welcome. This may seem to contradict what I am arguing here, and I want to remove the ambiguity. The intimate experience of creation has nothing to do with the mastery of an art. It is having been in difficulty oneself in front of a material, having failed, having shown others something clumsy, and having survived that gaze. A mediator who once in her life made a very bad film and showed it to people knows more about what is at stake in a workshop than a prize-winning filmmaker who has never been afraid of her own production. So I do not ask mediators to be competent in the medium. I ask them to have been vulnerable in it.
When an artist is the one running the workshop
Many workshops are run by artists, and that is often a richness. A dancer, a visual artist, an actress bring a material and an intensity that no one else would bring. I am not asking them to give up what they are, but to be aware that their knowledge is also an obstacle, and to build their set-up accordingly, deliberately shifting their rigour towards the relationship. This translates into very concrete decisions:
- Not showing an example before the group has begun, because after a professional’s example no one dares any more.
- Never commenting on the quality of a production, and entrusting the collective look to the group rather than to oneself, as I described in the article Building, Not Valorizing.
- Preparing the sharing with the participants from the very beginning of the project, and leaving them the floor in front of those who come to see.
- Putting oneself in the position of doing something one does not master, by changing medium, or by imposing a constraint that cancels out the advantage.
- Placing one’s rigour, at every moment, on one’s own presence: am I really listening to this person, is my answer sincere, am I with her or with the result?
I therefore propose changing the question we ask ourselves when we run a workshop. Not “what do I know how to do?”, but “what does my knowledge prevent from happening here?”. It is an unpleasant question, which no doubt explains why it is so rarely asked. Yet it is by asking it that we put rigour back where it serves people.
