Trust as a Technical Act
The trust that a mediator gives to participants is something that gets built. It requires inner work on one’s own fears and a patient choice of objects. The serenity that results from this is the basic tool of mediation.
What Trust Produces
When a person feels that someone trusts them, they deploy greater capacities, both for themselves and for others. Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson studied this mechanism in an elementary school in San Francisco in 1968, and named it the Pygmalion effect. When a teacher believes in a student’s capacities, that student tends to confirm this belief through an actual improvement in their results. The belief does not produce its effect by magic: it passes through the gestures, the intonations, the micro-decisions by which the one who believes in the other opens the necessary space for them.
Donald Winnicott, the British paediatrician and psychoanalyst, described the same phenomenon at another level. A child only develops within a good enough environment, that is to say a reliable environment, one that responds to needs without intruding and that lets the spontaneous gesture come into being. This reliability of the environment is introjected by the child, and it is what becomes their own self-confidence. What Winnicott observed in the mother-child relationship holds for any situation of mediation. The environment I offer participants, in its very reliability, is what allows them to unfold.
The Third Object as the Passage of Trust
In mediation, this environment passes through objects. Jean Caune, in his work on the ethics of mediation, defines cultural mediation as the articulation of three terms: a subject, a sensible phenomenon, and a frame of reference. The sensible phenomenon, which is the object or the work placed between people, is not a backdrop: it is through it that the relationship takes shape. Without an object, mediation is reduced to mere injunction.
This mediating object is what I call, in my workshops, the machinic third. A camera, a musical instrument, sheets of paper to draw on, a video visualiser. It is through it that the trust I give to participants either passes through or fails to. If I say “you have the right to” but my body betrays anxiety the moment a person picks up the object, it is my gestures that they are listening to, not my words. The trust that passes is the one carried by the whole device. Trust that is merely stated convinces no one.
Inner Serenity as a Technical Tool
If the object frightens me, I am going to unconsciously hold back the people who want to use it. This inhibition does not show itself, it does not take the form of a prohibition. It travels through micro-tensions, watchful glances, instructions added at the last moment. Participants sense it. And they conclude, rightly, that the object is more important than they are, that my primary concern is the preservation of the equipment.
To offer real trust, then, one has to begin by working on one’s own fears. This requires a distinction that is not obvious: between real dangers, those that call for a concrete adaptation of the device, and imagined dangers, those that come from the fear of losing control. The first deserve attention and invention; the second must be defused within oneself, through thought and through experience.
This inner operation has a technical support: the choice of objects. If I know that my video visualiser is solid, if I have tested it for years, if I have a second one in reserve, I no longer need to be afraid. My serenity is built by the material environment I have patiently put together, more than by an act of will. This serenity is the basic technical tool of mediation. Without it, the other techniques I might mobilise do not hold.
Testing and Choosing Objects
Since 1991, I have tried many different models of video visualisers. The model I use today, I found in 2019, and I have been using it for seven years. It is solid, practical, inexpensive. I can throw it on the floor, it will not break, and even if it did break, I have a second one.
This anecdote describes a method. Every object I make available in a workshop has been chosen according to several criteria: solidity, simplicity of use, replacement cost, the absence of obvious danger, and the object’s capacity not to frighten me. None of these criteria is professional quality. An object that is too precious or too fragile is an object that frightens me, and an object that frightens me makes me hold others back. The concrete test, sustained over time, is the only way to know whether an object meets these criteria; no technical specification sheet can tell you in advance.
The musical instruments I make available have been chosen one by one over the years. The ones that made too much noise, I removed, because they disturbed the neighbouring groups. The ones that were fragile, I replaced. Little by little, my material environment has been refined to constitute a setting in which I can be serene. And this serenity is what allows me to offer my trust.
The Bet on the Ninety-Seven Percent
There is a principle I borrow from Isaac Getz, theorist of the liberated company. In his book Liberté & Cie (published in English as Freedom, Inc., 2009; in France in 2012), he describes a simple observation: most organisations have multiplied procedures, controls, and reporting requirements in order to discipline the three percent of demotivated or opportunistic employees that game theory calls freeriders. But by building the entire system around this minority, they hold back the ninety-seven percent who only ask to do well. The controls do not even solve the problem: anyone determined to overstep will always find a way. The lock destined for a minority becomes the hindrance of all.
This reasoning holds for mediation. If I build my device starting from the fear that a few participants might overstep, I am going to infantilise everyone. The trust I give assumes a calculated risk, because that risk is almost always lower than the cost of the locks that would prevent it.
Last year, I made a documentary in an experimental school, on children’s right to speak. The film was about the right to speak; my filming protocol itself had to give voice to the children. I had four cameras, all the same model: mine and three others. I did not give the children inferior cameras. The same ones, including for the youngest children in nursery class. It was a choice that surprised and worried the teachers, but I had factored that possibility into the budget. No camera was broken, but that is not the point. The trust I gave the children changed our relationship. They were saying to one another: I have the right, he told me I had the right. This authorisation produced emancipation, and images I could never have made myself.
In a difficult neighbourhood, I led a project with children for four years. I gave them real cameras, not toys, and I let them go off for hours to film whatever they wanted. My colleague was terrified. The cameras cost two hundred euros each. In four years, only one camera did not come back. Just one. And during those four years, children made films of great beauty, in complete autonomy, without aesthetic instructions or supervision. If I had set up locks, loan forms, parental consent forms, return checks, those films would not have existed.
Adapting Rather Than Forbidding
In some contexts, certain objects pose real problems. Scissors in a psychiatric ward, knitting needles, sharp tools. There, the anxiety is not imagined, it corresponds to a concrete risk. The answer, however, is not blunt prohibition, which planes down expression and installs an atmosphere of mistrust. If scissors make me anxious in a given context, I do not bring them in and I propose something else: tearing, folding. Other aesthetics emerge, other gestures become possible.
Adaptation is an invention. It consists in finding a path that allows expression without creating danger or anxiety, neither for the participants nor for myself. My own fears must not become the limits of others; but they must not be denied either, in the name of a principle of trust that would oblige me to bear what I cannot bear. Finding the right object means finding the point where my serenity and the autonomy of the other coincide.
The Loop of Emancipation
The aim of mediation is to allow participants to develop their capacities in the most beautiful way possible. Trust is the condition for this. This trust is built by going back up the chain. It depends on the serenity of the mediator; this serenity depends on a work on one’s fears; this work passes through objects, because mediation itself passes through objects.
When this chain holds, participants discover themselves capable of gestures they would not have dared elsewhere. This transformation is the very object of the work of mediation. And what makes it possible, upstream of any particular method, is the serenity of the mediator: a technical work on oneself, which begins with the patient choice of objects.
Cultural mediation, as I conceive and practice it, is not primarily a set of techniques, but an ethics of relationship. It consists of creating the conditions for a singular experience for each person, with respect for their dignity and cultural identity. This section brings together methods I have developed through my interventions, as well as reflections on the contemporary challenges of mediation.
These methods share a few common principles. They place the person, not the artwork or knowledge, at the center of the process. They recognize that receiving is creating, and that each participant generates their own experience. They are rooted in the perspective of cultural rights and cultural democracy, that is, in a horizontal rather than top-down logic.
In practice, these methods often rely on creation: making a film with one’s phone, animating a paper cutout image, writing collectively. Creation is not an end in itself, but a means of bringing about an authentic experience, of allowing each person to reveal themselves to themselves and to others. Constraints of time, format or technique are not obstacles but frameworks that liberate expression.
I share these methods here not as recipes to be applied, but as invitations to experiment. Each context, each group, each person calls for adaptation. What matters is the quality of the relationship one establishes, the space of trust one creates, the place one gives to the other. The reflective articles that accompany these methods aim to nourish this permanent attention to what is at stake in the encounter between people around art and culture.
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The bond that sets us free
Toward an ethics of the bond in mediation and support work.
To emancipate those whom we accompany, and to emancipate ourselves in the same gesture: this, in my view, lies at the heart of any practice of (…) -
Letting Go of One’s Criteria
What the practitioner must agree to lose for mediation to work.
In the cultural and therapeutic mediation workshops I lead, the challenge is to create the conditions for people, often unsure of their own (…) -
Receiving, or the difficulty of doing nothing
The mediator’s invisible time and the energy of welcoming.
By the end of the day I am tired, with a physical tiredness, even though “I have done nothing,” because I have spent the day placing myself in a (…) -
Work and Mastery (2)
Distinguishing work from mastery in mediation-based creation.
Work (as a process by which people are transformed through doing) and mastery (as the illusion of control over what one produces) are two distinct (…) -
The process, not the result
What needs to be told for mediation to be understood.
An artist is brought in, and results are expected to match the professional who has been paid. This expectation threatens every mediation (…) -
The framework that authorizes
For a reflection on space, time, and institution in therapeutic mediation.
When we speak of a frame, we often think of what contains and what forbids. This understanding is partial. In the analytic cure as in mediation (…) -
What the gaze of others does to our images
Reflections on symbolization, identity, and the unconscious in photography-based mediation.
When I invite a group of people to each take a photograph and then look at them together, with the rule that the author cannot speak while the (…) -
The Image as Evidence
What Machines Do to Us.
When an image is born of a machine, it attests. This property, which distinguishes photography from drawing and cinema from theatre, gives (…) -
Building, Not Valorizing
What the collective gaze does that valorization cannot.
In supported creation workshops, whether they fall within cultural action, arts education, or therapeutic mediation, people often speak of (…) -
Place as an Operative Concept for an Emancipatory Cultural Mediation
Taking one’s place is not about occupying a position, it’s about being able to move.
“What place for young people?” The question is wrongly framed. Place is not a position to occupy, it is the capacity to move within a relational (…) -
The Selfie, the Filter, and the Two Bodies
The image of self as therapeutic working material.
A young woman retouches her ID photo using artificial intelligence. The educator accompanying her tells her: “That’s not you. You’re already very (…) -
The object that disposes
What machines change in mediation.
When we choose a tool for mediation, we choose a device of relationships. The technical object carries within it a history, a politics, ways of (…) -
Trust as a Technical Act
How Inner Work and the Choice of Objects Build the Conditions for Emancipation.
The trust that a mediator gives to participants is something that gets built. It requires inner work on one’s own fears and a patient choice of (…) -
Not judging people’s digital practices
Non-judgment and non-hierarchization as conditions for mediation.
Judgment damages the very connection that mediation seeks to build. It goes hand in hand with a more subtle hierarchization, which places the (…) -
The Eye in the Hand
Why the same tool produces a radically different experience depending on the frame you give it.
We all have a camera in our pocket. We use it dozens of times a day, without thinking, for countless purposes. It has become so much a part of us (…) -
The contemporary functions of images: beyond memory
Towards an anthropology of image-as-speech and its consequences for mediation.
We think we know what an image is. We think it is a trace, a memory, a proof. But images have changed function without our fully realising it. For (…) -
Artificial Intelligence, a Tool for Emancipation in Mediation
How conversational AI is opening up new possibilities for cultural and therapeutic mediation.
Since I began using conversational artificial intelligence in the context of cultural and therapeutic mediation in 2023, I have observed effects I (…) -
The Fertile Margin
Reframe cultural and therapeutic practices within the current reality, where digital culture has become the dominant culture.
Publicly funded culture has become marginal in the face of digital practices. Rather than lamenting this, this article proposes to embrace that (…) -
Audiovisual Workshop in Therapeutic Mediation
Elements of a Course in the University Diploma in Arts and Therapeutic Mediations (Paris 7 – Université Paris Cité
How ordinary audiovisual tools — the phone, the camera — become therapeutic mediators: an account and analysis of a pedagogical practice in (…) -
Vision is a reconstruction
What the eye does not see, and why it changes everything about our relationship to images.
We believe we see the world as it is. We believe our eyes capture an objective image of what lies before us, the way a camera would capture a (…) -
Creation as the energy source of cultural mediation
Moving beyond hierarchies to unleash the power of making together.
Cultural mediation is going through deep questioning about its professional identity. Beyond the legitimate claims for status recognition, I wish (…) -
Creating with people
Methods of cultural mediation for shared creation.
This text brings together the principles that underpin my approach to cultural mediation. They are not rules. They are reference points, shaped by (…) -
Engagement in Time
What matters in cultural mediation is not the duration of actions, but the quality of shared time.
The duration of cultural actions is often considered a guarantee of quality. I defend here a different approach: what transforms people lies in (…) -
Definition of Cultural Mediation
An ethics of relationship in service of singular experience.
Cultural mediation is often reduced to a set of transmission techniques. Here I propose a definition that places the person at the center: an (…)
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In the same room Calligrams
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Artificial Intelligence, a Tool for Emancipation in Mediation How conversational AI is opening up new possibilities for cultural and therapeutic mediation.
Since I began using conversational artificial intelligence in the context of cultural and therapeutic mediation in 2023, I have observed effects I (…) -
The framework that authorizes For a reflection on space, time, and institution in therapeutic mediation.
When we speak of a frame, we often think of what contains and what forbids. This understanding is partial. In the analytic cure as in mediation (…) -
The object that disposes What machines change in mediation.
When we choose a tool for mediation, we choose a device of relationships. The technical object carries within it a history, a politics, ways of (…) -
Out of the comfort zone Pedagogy
In collective work, paradoxically, it is when one does not feel reassured that one works best. But how does it work?When we prepare for a job (…)
