Since 2012, in most of the collective films I have people shoot, it is objects that speak: a lost sock, a padlock, an air vent in the ceiling of a museum. Behind the object, everyone can voice their anger or their fear of being forgotten without speaking in their own name. Serge Tisseron, with whom I trained street educators, sees it as an exercise in subjectivation and empathy; I also see it as a way of reclaiming the power to write.
When it is the bin that is angry
The exercise looks childish, and it is, but its purpose, in mediation, is to allow people to say something about themselves without having to say it in their own name. When you ask someone to talk about their anger, their shame, their loneliness, you rarely get anything other than silence or conventional phrases, and that is normal, because talking about yourself in front of a group means exposing yourself. When you ask the same person to lend their voice to a purse, a bell, a padlock, and to put a strong emotion into it, you hear a purse say it feels empty, a bell say it had better fade away, a padlock say it protects without knowing from whom.
I always say you have to go all out, because an object is not alive and you have to overdo it for anyone to believe in it, as in cartoons. This instruction has another function, which I do not mention when I give it. When I ask for emotion, it is of course their own emotions that people go looking for, because they have no others; they project them onto the object, they put them into play, and they do so without danger, since it is the bin that is angry. The object acts as a screen, and behind it one allows oneself to say what one would not have said in one’s own name. This is what I called the symbolising detour in What the gaze of others does to our images: one goes through a third object to approach what one could not tackle head on. The exercise works just as well with eight-year-olds as with audiovisual professionals, because the object puts everyone at the same distance from what they say, and so protects everyone.
Training street educators with Serge Tisseron
Between 2015 and 2017, the psychiatrist Serge Tisseron and I designed and led a training programme for street educators working in specialised prevention, in Paris with the Charonne association and then in Saint-Denis with the Canal association, as part of policies to prevent radicalisation. The programme was called “Using your mobile phone to take ownership of your own life and escape propaganda”. Serge Tisseron provided the theory and his support to the educators, I provided the practice of cinema, and the collective film of talking objects was one of the exercises the educators learned so as to do it again with young people, and we continued this work in the Pocketfilms-Empathie project. Serge Tisseron analysed the exercise in Empathie et manipulations. Les pièges de la compassion (Empathy and Manipulation: The Pitfalls of Compassion, 2017), and I take three things from his analysis.
The first has to do with what he calls subjectivation. He describes in some young people a state he proposes to call “pre-radicalisation”, made up, he writes, of “an unrealistic self-esteem fixed on idealised images, a difficulty with empathic interaction with others and an inability to think of one’s own story as a continuum set within a family and social whole”, and these young people are, in his view, “unable to weave around their daily existence the cocoon of images and stories capable of bringing it, in their own eyes, out of anonymity”. The phone camera, put at the service of telling one’s own story, seems to him able to become a tool of subjectivation, that is, a means of building a narrative identity, because for him “the construction of a personal narrative identity is an essential condition for escaping the fascination of off-the-peg discourses that claim to explain everything about the world”.
The second has to do with the role of the object. He describes the instruction as we gave it, “Take any object, film it and give it a voice”, and what the young people made of it:
“It becomes possible to talk about anger, rage, shame or the difficulty of living by attributing these emotions to an object that talks about itself: for example a shoe, a bin, a pen, a Kleenex… The bin can no longer bear everyone dumping their rubbish in it, the Kleenex being used and thrown away without consideration, the shoe being taken everywhere in all weathers without ever being thanked, and the pen never being left free to tell what it wants.”
Serge Tisseron, “Empathie et manipulations. Les pièges de la compassion”, 2017.
He observes that the young people were the first to be surprised to discover what they were capable of feeling, and even more of telling: “They encounter their inner world and are astonished by it.” Psychoanalysts call symbolisation the movement by which what we represent outside ourselves ends up building us; I proposed a definition of it in The writing being, and I studied in What the gaze of others does to our images, in relation to photography, the part the group’s gaze plays in it. With the talking object, symbolisation passes through the voice and through fiction, and it is all the more accessible because the person does not feel they are talking about themselves.
The third is empathy, or more exactly “the capacity to change one’s emotional point of view”, which he sees constantly put to the test in these films (I presented his model of empathy in The boat of empathies). In the collective film, each person films an object, gives it a voice, passes the phone on to the next, and accepts that their place is taken by someone else; in one variant, each person accepts seeing their own image accompanied by a voice-over thought improvised by another person. When the films are then watched all together, people discover that the same object could have said something quite different, and so they go on changing their point of view. Putting yourself in the place of a shoe is training for putting yourself in the place of someone.
I would like to add a point that comes from my practice rather than from his analysis. Making an object speak is writing, even when you are not writing: you invent a character, a situation, a sentence that begins and ends. For many of the people I work with, writing is a power that belongs to others, to school, to the administration, to those who know; it is the social power par excellence, that of addressing strangers. The talking object is a way of reclaiming this power without going through the page, and of discovering that you had it. Serge Tisseron said the same thing about images, in a sentence we had placed at the head of our programme: “It is by each becoming the producer of our material images that we will remain the producer of our mental images.”
Taking the side of things
Two writers help me think about the object itself, and no longer only about the person lending it a voice. Francis Ponge wrote a whole book, Le Parti pris des choses (Taking the Side of Things, 1942), by taking the side of the crate, the pebble, the candle, the oyster, objects from which no one expects a speech; without trying to make them likeable, he describes their way of being so exactly that the reader begins to see them, and to see at the same time what he no longer saw for having it before his eyes. The objects chosen in the workshop play the role of Ponge’s crate. One almost never takes what already speaks, the framed painting, the star of the room, but what no one notices, the air vent, the chair, the handbag put down on the floor, and the group begins to look at what it was not looking at.
Heinrich von Kleist, in On the Marionette Theatre (1810), gives a dancer the idea that the puppet, because it has no consciousness of itself, attains a grace that the human dancer, too preoccupied with his image, has lost. I do not know whether the objects in our films have grace, but I know that the people who lend them a voice say things they would not have said in their own name, and that the need to exaggerate, because the object is inanimate, pushes them further than they would go playing a human character. This is what links it to animated film, where one also works with inanimate things and where emotion must be amplified for anyone to believe in it: the technical constraint is the same, and it has the same effect, forcing you to go further in search of emotion.
From an outdated camera to Ghislaine
Most of the seventy-two films in the Collective films section of this site, shot between 2012 and 2022 with children, teenagers, researchers, educators, students, local government staff, make objects speak. I have chosen a few, from 2014 to today. In Stars of yesterday (2014), a camera introduces itself: it is not that old, but high-definition video has arrived and its life is over; a clapperboard says that people used to write in chalk on its father, in marker on it, and that its children are digital. In The unspoken words of the objects (2014), shot in a cinema, a shoe bought in the sales would quite like, just once, to be thrown in a dictator’s face. In I exist (2016), a Casio watch proclaims that it was a star because it is waterproof, after saying, on behalf of all the objects in the film: “We are something for others, but to ourselves, we’re nothing.” In Still speech (2018), a padlock is there to protect, but to protect from whom, from people who are frightening, from people one does not know, and the unknown is frightening. In The unusual and obsessive life of the teenager (2018), a purse feels too empty and a staircase says it is stuck in the middle, growing up, in a hurry to be at the very top. In Talk to me (2019), a sock lost on the floor explains that it has gained an aura of mystery from it. In 16 moments of solitude (2020), a bell, tall, slender, white, wonders whether it meets the standards of an image fit to be shown and concludes that it must fade away. And at the MUba Eugène Leroy in Tourcoing, at the end of September 2026, during the workshop I recount in Going all the way, an air vent in the ceiling introduced itself under the name Ghislaine, said it was used to being ignored, that it was not jealous, that it was useful, and that it was just afraid of being forgotten.
I do not comment on these sentences, and I never comment on them in the workshop. Everyone hears in them what they want, and that is the principle. I only note that the fear of being forgotten, vanity, the feeling of being empty, the question of whether one is worthy of being shown, come back from film to film, whatever the audience, and that they are said with a precision rarely reached when speaking in one’s own name.
An exercise everyone enters as equals
No one needs to know how to film, act, write or tell a story to take part; an object, a voice and an emotion are enough, and the first object that comes along will do. All it calls on is a capacity for projection that everyone has, and the adult leading the workshop does the same exercise as the others, and does it first. The diversity of the objects still has to be protected: if the first object is sad, the whole group risks becoming sad after it. Finally, one learns something about the place. In a museum, a community centre, a classroom, the objects people lend a voice to are almost always those designed to go unnoticed, and the collective film becomes, without anyone having sought it, a portrait of what the place does not show of itself. In Tourcoing, a student had wanted to make the surveillance cameras speak, and a member of staff told her that surveillance cameras were not to be filmed; so a camera placed on a chair took the role, with the same text, and we learned something about the museum that no one could have told us.
From visiting the place to putting the film online, that same evening
When I lead this exercise, I hold to a few rules:
- The object is taken from the place, on the spot. Not brought along, not chosen in advance. I ask people to explore first and let an object stop them, and only then to look for its voice. The object found already carries half of what it is going to say.
- In the first person, with a strong emotion and a reason to speak. I put it this way: the object has emotions, it has something to say, and you have to overdo it. With a neutral voice, all you hear is someone talking next to an object.
- The workshop leader gives the demonstration, and does it badly first. Once in a neutral voice, so that people hear that it does not work; once with excessive vanity or sadness, saying you are ashamed and doing it anyway. From then on, no one in the room can be more ridiculous than the person leading, and everyone can allow themselves to be ridiculous in turn.
- Intelligible despite the emotion. Anger makes people speak fast, sadness makes them speak low; you have to stay understandable, by articulating and speaking close to the microphone. An object no one understands takes the viewer out of the film. I develop this requirement in It’s not a private joke.
- Do not listen too much to the others. During the shoot, each person prepares their object on their own, without adjusting to what they have just heard, so that the film keeps its variety of moods.
- A topical pretext can help to get started. Serge Tisseron gave the example of Donald Trump’s election: how is the shoe, there, in front of you, concerned by this election? The pretext is not the subject, but it gives the object a reason to speak.
- You can write beforehand if you wish, but you do not have to. Some people need three lines on a piece of paper; others improvise. Both are equally valid, and I never correct the text.
- What the place forbids is information, not an obstacle. If the institution refuses to let a given object be filmed, you replace it, you carry on, and you keep in mind what you have just learned about the place.
- We watch together, straight away, and talk about the choices. Why this object, why this emotion, what did we hear in our neighbour’s. The authors first listen to what the others have understood before explaining what they meant. That is where the exercise of empathy plays out, as much as during the shoot.
- We do not comment on what the objects have said about their authors. Each person has put into their object what they wanted, and the group has no business decoding it. The screen protects, provided it is left in place.
- The film is put online that same evening, titled and signed. As with any workshop film, it belongs to those who made it, and it goes on speaking to them when they show it to others. I explain how I go about it in Keeping the Trace.
