The bond that sets us free

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 mediation, care or pedagogy. Emancipation passes through the bond, through a quality of relation that is at once political, in that it engages a relationship to power and to the institution, and therapeutic, in that it conditions what can be deposited and transformed between subjects. How this bond comes into being, and under what concrete conditions, is what I would like to examine here.

A domination unaware of itself

What I am about to describe, I have experienced myself in my own practice before observing it in others. More than thirty-five years of workshops, residencies, and mediation projects, in highly varied contexts: film workshops with children, adolescents, adults; art-therapy programmes in psychiatric hospitals and day hospitals; projects in day shelters for homeless people; after-school activities in working-class neighbourhoods; museum mediation; residencies in medico-social institutions. And just as many years spent leading training programmes for mediators, mostly around audiovisual workshops. These thousands of interactions, and the research I have conducted on my own practice along the way, have made me attentive to situations that recur, everywhere, in much the same form.

Art therapists who do things in place of the people they accompany. Who pick up the scissors, who guide the hand, who say “no, not like that, like this.” In all good faith. When I have pointed it out to them, they have thanked me, because no one had ever told them. This soft domination is so naturalised in our professional milieus that it has become invisible.

Artists working as facilitators, pressed by the institution to display fine results, who end up holding the participants’ hands and homogenising what they produce, draining the activity of its meaning. Small-film competitions, with prizes, for children, and the violence inflicted on those who do not win first prize. Professionals who themselves redo the participants’ photographs to make them “more beautiful” before showing them to funders; participants who discover a retouched piece of work that is no longer their own, and experience it as a betrayal.

Young people, too, who discover their own image on a large screen in front of an audience, who find this violent, who feel exposed in their identity in a way they had not anticipated. Who ask, after the fact, that the film not be shown. But because the film has become an object of institutional validation, expected by funders, the local press, the hierarchy, professionals will do everything to push past the refusal: convincing the young people that it is not so serious, convincing the parents, negotiating, sometimes forcing. The very structure that claimed to work on self-confidence and on the relationship to one’s image ends up in a complete denial of the right to one’s image and of informed consent. The project was serving ends other than those it announced.

There is also a figure I encounter often in the after-school sector, that of facilitators looked down upon by the institution: those who make films with children but in reality for themselves. They choose their favourite music, which has nothing to do with the children’s culture. They edit the film alone in their corner. The children end up as actors in a project that is not theirs, in which the facilitator takes pleasure in making something of their own. That mediators take pleasure in their work and are enriched by it is the very basis of good mediation: one does not accompany well if one does not also find one’s own ground in the work. But this pleasure has value only when shared, on condition that the place of the other is fully preserved. When it is exercised at the expense of that place, it is no longer shared pleasure but domination, that is to say pleasure without bond. And pleasure without bond, in any human relation, builds nothing: it can on the contrary lastingly damage the person on whom it is exercised.

And then, above all, there is the gesture that strikes me as the most systematic today in film-making workshops, whether they are aimed at children, adolescents, people in care or people in social reintegration: that of the facilitator who edits the film alone. The shooting is shared, the writing is sometimes shared, but when it comes to editing, it is the expert who closes the door of the editing room and emerges later with the film. This confiscation of the most decisive stage, the one that determines what the work will actually be, robs participants of responsibility for what they have made. It instrumentalises them while the project was announced as educational, therapeutic or emancipatory. And this practice remains largely the norm, even in projects whose initial intentions are beyond reproach.

I have also seen the reverse. Very old people with severe mental illness succeed in making cut-paper animation films. Autistic children seize a camera and film things I would not have imagined. Homeless people, who came into a day shelter just to charge their phone, stay four hours cutting paper and making a film. Each time, the same condition: they had not been told how to do it. They had been given a framework and tools, they had been trusted, and they had been allowed to do.

What is at stake in mediation lies in the way one conducts the situation, not in the situation itself. Making a film, fabricating an object, producing something together, are never more than supports for a work whose value depends, in every case, on the quality of the bond within which it is conducted.

The good we think we are doing

These situations raise a question that is hard to hear, beginning with myself: the good we want to do for others can be a form of domination. When I tell someone how to take their photograph, when I correct their framing, I take power under the appearance of help. I am saying: I know better than you what is good for you, my criteria are superior to yours.

This stance is one we have all internalised, because it is the stance of school. School taught us that knowledge descends from the one who knows toward the one who does not, that quality is measured by conformity to the expert’s criteria. We reproduce this logic, in spaces of care and mediation, at the very moment when we believe we are stepping out of it.

I remember a conversation, at the end of a lecture in which I had raised these questions, with a photographer who had been working for years in social-mediation workshops. He said to me, sincerely: “But for me, my role as a photographer was precisely to hold the hand, to explain, to bring my knowledge to people.” His surprise was not feigned, and that is what struck me. He had simply never imagined that another mode of intervention could exist. The role, in my view, is something quite different: to create the conditions for an encounter. The photographer comes with their history, their training, their skills. The participants come with their own histories, which are just as dense. And it is together, in this co-presence, that something can be co-created. The professional’s competence is not suspended: it is placed at the service of a process that does not belong to them.

Paulo Freire, in *Pedagogy of the Oppressed* (1968), called this the “banking” conception of education: the teacher deposits knowledge in the pupil, as one deposits money in a bank. Knowledge is a thing that one party possesses and that the other receives. This conception is not neutral: it reproduces relations of domination, it keeps the oppressed in their position by telling them that they know nothing and that someone who knows is required to educate them. What Freire says of education also describes what happens in mediation and in care whenever a professional imposes their own criteria of beauty or success on what the people they accompany produce.

Stepping out of this vertical relation requires more than a change of attitude. We need to be able to name what takes its place, and that is why the word *bond* must be taken seriously.

What do we call “the bond”?

The word *bond*, in our practices, has become a catch-all. Everyone says “creating bonds,” “rebuilding bonds,” “social bonds.” Through overuse, the word no longer says much. We must therefore try to be more precise about what it means, in what I am describing here, for a bond to be present, and for it to be perhaps even the central engine of the work.

Group psychoanalysis, since the work of René Kaës gathered in Le groupe et le sujet du groupe (1993) and then in La parole et le lien (1994), distinguishes the intersubjective bond from objectified relations between individuals. The bond is not a thread between two persons considered as already constituted, like two poles exchanging messages. The bond is the fabric within which each subject takes shape and is transformed. For Kaës, there is a group psychic apparatus: each person’s psyche is in part worked by the others, and the others are in part worked by them. This is not a metaphor; it is a clinical description of what happens in any setting where subjects speak and create together. A workshop, in this perspective, is not the simple sum of people doing things separately in each other’s presence: it is a space in which each person becomes slightly otherwise because the others are there.

Florence Giust-Desprairies, who extends this tradition on the side of clinical psychosociology, shows in L’imaginaire collectif (2003) that groups are constituted not only through rules or objectives, but through shared imaginaries that operate without the awareness of those who compose the group. These imaginaries can be confining, when they freeze positions and replay old scenarios. They can be opening, when the setting allows another narrative to take shape. What is at stake in a creative workshop is not merely the production of an object: it is the setting in motion of an imaginary that held people in a certain place, and which can open onto something else.

Marcel Mauss, in his *Essai sur le don* / *The Gift* (1925), posited that the social bond rests on a threefold obligation: to give, to receive, to reciprocate. What circulates between persons through this threefold gesture is not only objects: it is what constitutes them as connected. Vincent de Gaulejac, in La société malade de la gestion (2005), takes up this insight to describe what managerial rationality does to our societies: by transforming every relation into a market transaction, it dissolves the symbolic obligations on which the bond rests. Public services, voluntary organisations, care institutions are not ill because they are poorly organised; they are ill because the attempt is being made to replace functioning by the bond with functioning by evaluation, results and performance.

This diagnosis sheds light on what is at stake in our practices. The professional’s confiscation of the creative process is not a personality flaw, it is a direct consequence of the institutional pressure to produce visible results. When a funder expects a beautiful film, the facilitator who does the work in place of the participants is not acting out of malice: they are responding to a demand for visibility that weighs on the project. Soft domination is the effect of a commission, more than of an individual failing.

The bond rather than the good

Vincent de Gaulejac’s formula, “the bond rather than the good,” seems to me to capture quite exactly what we are seeking. In a mediation, in a workshop, in a consultation, what we produce matters less than the quality of the relation in which we produce it. And this quality of relation is not a matter of kindness or good will: it is a matter of framework, tools, and distribution of power.

This does not mean that the formal quality of what is fabricated is indifferent. On the contrary: when the bond is right, what is fabricated is very often striking, sometimes deeply moving. But this result is not the objective: it is the consequence of functioning by the bond rather than by performance. If I aim at the beauty of the object, I will take charge again and do everything myself. If I aim at the rightness of the bond, I will set up a device that allows what is searching for itself to take shape, and almost always something will come out of it that exceeds me.

When the result is set as the priority, the bond becomes a means, and the people accompanied become means as well, supports for the project. When the bond is set as the priority, the result becomes a trace, among others, of what has been at play. The two logics do not produce the same objects, and above all they do not produce the same effects on people.

I would like to mention here a project in Normandy with which I was recently associated. The director Amaury Voslion led a film workshop at the résidence Séraphine in Rouen, an inclusive housing facility for people with psychic disabilities. His stance is in many respects exemplary. He himself says that he makes films *with* people, not *for* them. He inscribed himself within a technical team in the strong sense, where each person held their place. One participant, Océane, very early grasped the structure of the film: a filmed discussion group, interspersed with fictional sequences. This vision, which Amaury recognises as the vision of a director, structured the entire project. He did the editing alone, and explained it without evasion: editing with the participants would have meant doubling the budget and the time involved, which was not possible within the funding obtained. But he discussed the editing with the participants as the work progressed, they reached agreement on the choices made, he entrusted the composition of the music to a participant who did not wish to appear on screen and who saw the edit advance step by step, and he organised a preview where all the participants saw and validated the film before the public screening. This way of working with constraint, by multiplying entry points into the process where shared editing was not possible, is, in my view, a good way of doing things in imperfect conditions.

I encounter this question constantly in my own practice. The response I have gradually built up shifts the problem: rather than sharing the editing in its classic sense, I arrange things so that the shooting makes editing almost unnecessary. I work almost exclusively in long takes. Concretely, this means that each scene is shot in one continuous take, without cuts, and that one can see, the moment the take ends, what has been made. The “editing,” if there is any, then consists merely of assembling the successive long takes, of choosing which takes to keep and where they begin and end. It is a short technical task, which can be done collectively, without becoming laborious, by validating choices together as they are made. For more complex choices, on the writing of the scenario or the order of the sequences, I make extensive use of mind-mapping, which allows the options to be laid out collectively and decisions to be taken as a group.

The long take has another virtue, perhaps even more important from the point of view that concerns us here: it places the participants in connection with one another at the very moment of shooting. For a long take to work, everyone has to be on deck at the same time. I therefore organise the shoot so that each person has a concrete function: a prop to bring in at a precise moment, an ambient sound to produce live, a light to hold, the camera to operate, a movement to perform within the frame. No one waits for the others to finish. Everyone is interdependent. And this interdependence is in no way metaphorical: it is immediate, technical, palpable. If one person misses their cue, the take collapses. The device makes it so that people are bonded without having to declare it, simply because the situation requires it.

There remain situations where these displacements do not suffice and where one must do otherwise. In a virtual-reality project I recently led with secondary-school pupils, I had only a single day of intervention. I had to do the editing alone, because materially I could not do otherwise, but I had prepared it with them well in advance, discussing at length the choices that would arise. In this situation, I found myself in the same position as Amaury Voslion in Rouen: making do with what the commission did not provide.

Conversely, I recently directed a documentary on children’s right to speech in a progressive school, where I had also entrusted cameras to the children, and where I took all the time needed. This was not a workshop film, it was a documentary. The right to use the children’s image had been granted by the parents, I was legally bound to nothing further. I nevertheless did two things that did not stem from legality but from ethics. The first: organising a screening, with all the people filmed, before any release. A person can be very enthusiastic about taking part, six months earlier, in a day of filming, and not have realised at the time that they would see themselves in close-up on a large screen, exposed to an audience. This is a point that raises a real ethical problem when a documentary film is selected for a major festival that requires a world premiere, and therefore the absence of any prior screening. The people filmed then discover the film in a situation of institutional sacralisation (the festival, the prize, the press) which removes from them any capacity to say that it does them violence: institutional pre-emption is such that they can no longer even acknowledge to themselves what they feel. The second thing: taking six months for the editing, showing each month a new version to the collective of commissioners and also to people outside the project. This was not in order to produce a more polished object. It was because the editing itself was meant to make a bond. Each return advanced the film. After six months, it was nourished by everything that had circulated, and it was far better than what I could have written alone in the silence of an editing room.

How the bond comes into being: the conditions of the device

Several concrete conditions seem to me indispensable for this bond to come into being: letting go of one’s criteria, building a framework that authorises, treating trust as a technical act, and designing the device so that participants are indispensable to one another. I have devoted a separate article in this section to each of the first three, where they are developed in detail. Going back over them briefly here makes it possible to see how they hold together within the perspective of the bond.

Letting go of one’s criteria means accepting that the criteria one carries are only one’s own, and that they have no vocation to be applied to what others produce. This does not mean renouncing all rigour: it means that one’s rigour is displaced. It no longer bears on the conformity of what is produced to one’s expectations, but on the rightness of what is being sought through what is produced. I remember a cut-paper animation workshop in which participants used a piece of clothing as material for animation. In thirty-five years, I had never seen this. My first impulse was to think it was complicated, impractical. Then I welcomed it, and something invented itself that I would never have imagined. What I must let go of is not my knowledge: it is the idea that my knowledge exhausts what is possible.

Building a framework that authorises is the opposite of a framework that forbids. The frequent confusion between framework and coercive discipline prevents us from understanding what, for example, the framework of the analytic cure does: a strict device, but whose function is to authorise speech that could not be risked elsewhere. In our workshops, constraints of duration, protocol, and technique are not restrictions: they are conditions of possibility. They hold the space so that people dare to engage in it. Donald Winnicott spoke of *holding* to designate the function of an environment reliable enough that a subject can explore without fear. The framework that authorises is never given once and for all: it is built each time, with the people who are there, and it is this very building that is part of the therapeutic or emancipatory process.

Treating trust as a technical act means refusing for trust to be a moral posture and treating it instead as concrete work. Working on one’s own fears, choosing one’s tools accordingly, accepting that a camera lent to children may not come back, accepting that a camera entrusted to very young children may fall. I give children high-quality cameras in difficult neighbourhoods, and I let them go off on their own for hours. In four years in one housing estate, only one camera did not come back. The rule borrowed from management sciences, “not governing for the three percent,” says the same thing: if a system is organised around the minority that might abuse it, everyone is infantilised. If it is organised around trust, there will be marginal overflows, but as a whole it will be freer, more alive, and one will obtain works and words that no protocol of control could ever have made possible.

Designing the device so that it makes a bond between people is the other side of the first three gestures. Letting go of one’s criteria, building a framework, treating trust as technical, are conditions on the side of the practitioner. But the intersubjective bond in Kaës’s sense does not deploy itself only along the vertical axis between practitioner and participants. It deploys itself also between the participants themselves. It is for this reason that the material organisation of the work matters as much as one’s stance. The long take with distributed functions, of which I spoke earlier, is one example. But the principle holds beyond that: each time one designs a workshop, one must ask whether the device makes the participants indispensable to one another, or whether it merely juxtaposes them in shared presence. This fourth gesture would warrant an article of its own in this section.

These gestures are not juxtaposed techniques: they are the concrete conditions through which an intersubjective bond, in Kaës’s sense, can deploy itself. If the criteria of judgement remain in place, the practitioner remains in an evaluative position that holds the other in the position of pupil or patient, and the bond does not establish itself. If the framework is not built to authorise, engagement does not hold, because nothing supports it. If trust is not equipped, it remains a declaration without materiality. If the device does not produce a bond between participants, the workshop remains a juxtaposition of individuals in shared presence, without a true working group ever taking shape.

A detour through the reverse: autonomy that dominates

On the reverse side of what I am describing here, devices have developed over recent decades that simulate autonomy while reproducing domination. Reinhard Höhn, jurist and SS-Oberführer, escaped denazification after 1945 and founded in 1956 the Bad Harzburg Academy, which trained hundreds of thousands of German managers in the so-called modern management methods. It is he, notably, who contributed to imposing the expression “human resources,” subsequently generalised throughout the world. His Nazi past, redocumented from the 1980s onwards, reveals a troubling continuity. Designating the human as a “resource,” on a par with mineral, water or energy resources, inscribes the human within a logic of extraction and accounting management which found its extreme outcome in the concentration camp system, where human beings were literally treated as raw materials. That this logic could, after the war, redeploy itself in the management of companies under the seemingly innocuous vocabulary of the “human resource,” and remain intact there to this day, is what the historian Johann Chapoutot makes legible in *Free to Obey* (2020). The term “human resources” is never innocent: it carries, in its very formation, a dehumanised vision of the human being, to which repeated use has rendered us deaf.

The principle of management thus conceived is simple: an objective is defined, the means to attain it are widely delegated, and individuals are made personally accountable for execution. The person managed in this way experiences themselves as autonomous, creative, free to organise their own work. But they have no grasp on the ends, and they are entirely subject to an evaluation system that measures their capacity to attain objectives fixed without them. It is a tactical autonomy at the service of a strategic heteronomy.

This historical genealogy, which has rightly been discussed and qualified by other historians, does not have the function of establishing an equivalence between contemporary management and Nazism. It has the function of naming a structure: there exist devices that produce the appearance of bond and engagement while confiscating what gives them substance. The open-plan office, agile methods, 360-degree evaluations, permanent reporting, give the impression of a horizontality and a sense of responsibility that are in reality very effective forms of control.

This same structure is found in many medico-social and cultural institutions. There is much talk of benevolence, participation, co-construction, empowerment. But when one looks concretely at what professionals do with the people they accompany, one sees that this vocabulary often covers the very same practices it claims to combat: doing in their place, retouching the images, editing the films alone, choosing the works to be exhibited. The bond of which we are speaking here is the inverse of this trompe-l’œil autonomy. It does not consist in letting people be “free” to produce within a framework whose ends escape them. It consists in sharing, as far as possible, the very definition of the ends. What the people I accompany produce does not resemble what I would have produced: it is precisely by this that I know the bond has operated.

Emancipation is mutual

All that precedes might suggest that the right stance consists in withdrawing in order to let the other emerge. That would be another way of keeping control, through the mastery of withdrawal. Emancipation through the bond is not the gift of a freedom by the one who would hold the power to give it: it is a process in which all the people engaged in the bond are transformed, including the practitioner.

When I let go of my criteria, when I welcome a creative gesture I would not have imagined, I learn something. My field of vision widens. My own intellectual tools are reconfigured by what the people I accompany bring to me. If I were to remain in the belief of a superior knowledge, I would deprive myself of this.

Freire called this co-education: no one educates anyone, no one educates themselves alone, human beings educate one another, mediated by the world. The same holds in care and in mediation. People build themselves together, mediated by the objects, the images and the spaces that we place between them. The professional who believes they can remain unchanged, standing above the process, reproduces domination even as they claim to oppose it.

It has often happened to me, at the end of moments of exchange with professionals from care and mediation, to see eyes widen. These people were perhaps hearing for the first time that the therapeutic, pedagogical, artistic relation can be thought without domination, that the framework can be that which authorises rather than that which forbids, that letting go of one’s criteria of judgement is a condition of openness. This discourse is not common. I have been told this many times. And it is precisely because it is not common that it produces something in those who hear it. The emancipation toward which we are working concerns just as much future practitioners as their future patients or participants. It also concerns, ceaselessly, those of us who have been practising for a long time and who must, at every workshop, at every session, begin again to learn.

Working on oneself, working on the institution

I do not wish to leave the impression that any of this is simple. Letting go of one’s criteria of judgement is the work of every instant. A work on oneself, on one’s fears, on one’s need for recognition. Accepting that the workshop will not unfold as planned, that the participants will do things one does not understand, that the visible result will fall short of what one could have produced oneself.

I remember an animator, in training with me. We had sent some young people off to film on their own for forty-five minutes. After ten minutes, she was saying to me, alarmed: “But we’re not working! What are we doing? We’re doing nothing!” And yet we were doing something very demanding. We were placing ourselves in a state of receiving what the others would bring back, without knowing what it would be, without judging, in a state of being able to send back to the other what we had seen of value in what they had done, even if it was not what we had been expecting.

This work of reception is exhausting. It happens that I am drained at the end of a workshop day, with an almost physical fatigue, even though to outward appearances I have done very little. I have not fabricated, I have not directed, I have received. When one truly opens oneself to what the other brings, without filtering it through one’s criteria, receiving demands considerable energy.

And then there is the institutional question. The institutions in which we work are often ill, in the sense of institutional therapy, but also in the sense given to it by de Gaulejac. They reproduce relations of power and fears that pass from one to the next. I have seen knitting needles become dangerous in a hospital because one day, a patient had done something with knitting needles, and from that day on knitting needles were forbidden. I have seen children forbidden from handling anything at all because the institution had been frightened. The institution’s fears become prohibitions for patients and users, and these prohibitions protect no one: they reproduce domination.

I have in mind a workshop I was running in Évry, within a programme I had set up, the Marathon Cinéma, an annual festival of creation preceded by months of workshops in school and out-of-school settings. I would sometimes go and run some of these workshops myself. One day, in the school library of a secondary school, at the lunch break, with a group of young people in difficulty, some staff from the school and from the cultural department of the local council, I was running a long take in which each person would film an object and make it speak before passing the camera to their neighbour. One young man did not want to speak. I told him that was fine, that he could simply take the camera and pass it on. First take: he does not speak. The film runs to its end, I propose that we do a second one, as I often do, because it allows everyone to feel more at ease. And during this second take, the young man says he is going to make an object speak. He takes from his bag an ordinary canteen knife, with nothing alarming about it, and lays it on the table to film it. Several adults, people from the school, people from the cultural department, take fright: a knife, you cannot film a knife, it is dangerous, it is violence. I had to hold firm for the take to be able to happen. What was actually unfolding was the exact opposite of what they feared: this young man had found his place in the bond, he was daring to express himself because a device authorised him to, and the object he chose to make speak was perhaps simply what was most immediately within reach. The adults were not in the bond. They were projecting their own fear onto what was emerging. Our work, as professionals, is precisely to accept being disturbed so that the other can take their place. When we project our fears onto what is emerging, we cut the bond at the very moment when it was beginning to form, and we let ourselves believe, and let the institution believe, that this is done out of caution.

The bond produces here a paradigm shift that one must learn to recognise. It is feared, because one imagines it will overflow, give the other too much power, open the door to all transgressions. Experience shows the opposite. When one accepts to listen to what the other is bringing into being without seeking to master it, one is not overwhelmed: one is enriched. People take their place in the shared work, they do not seek to take power.

It is not enough, then, to have the right personal stance. One must also work on the institution, on the relations of power within which one is inscribed. This work is political, and it engages a vision of what the relation between professionals and the people they accompany should be.

A politics of the bond

What I am describing here is not only a question of individual method. It is a paradigm shift. When the bond becomes what counts, rather than the result, it is the whole relationship between institutions, professionals and the people accompanied that is transformed.

There is a political dimension here: to renounce soft domination is to renounce a professional comfort and a legitimacy acquired through expertise. It engages the way power is exercised in spaces of care, of mediation, of education. It also engages, more broadly, a critique of the managerial rationality that today permeates most institutions and renders inaudible the modes of organisation through the bond.

There is also an ethical dimension. The practitioner’s responsibility toward the singularity of the people accompanied is translated into concrete gestures: the right to one’s image, informed consent, the prior validation of works before any release, are not legal formalities but the daily marks of a practice that takes seriously the humanity of the people it works with.

Anthropologically, what we do mobilises a certain conception of the human being. Mauss posited it a century ago: what holds a society together is not the calculation of interests but the circulation of gifts, recognitions, places. This anthropology is today largely covered over by managerial rationality; it falls to us, in our practices, to make it again practicable. Sociologically, this means working to transform the institutions within which we intervene, because it is they that produce the fears and the prohibitions that prevent the bond from taking hold.

And it is, finally, methodological. None of what precedes remains true unless it is incarnated in concrete choices of framework, tools, protocols, material organisation of the work. The long take with distributed functions, mind-mapping for shared decisions, collective editing where it is possible, the prior screening for validation, trust as a technical act, are ways through which this thinking of the bond can take form. These are things that can be learned, transmitted, refined. An essential part of my work, for a long time now, has consisted in trying to make them available to others.

I do not claim to have resolved anything. I am myself crossed by reflexes of control, by aesthetic judgements that impose themselves before I have time to deconstruct them. The path of renouncing domination is not an acquired state: it is work begun again each day, in each encounter, in each workshop. Nor does it run in only one direction. The practitioner who lets go of their criteria, who accepts not knowing better than the other, who welcomes the unforeseen, walks the same path of emancipation as the people they accompany. The bond that emancipates is shared work, never settled, through which people build themselves in the attention they give each other and in the place they make for each other.