The mediator’s profession was built at a time when access to works was rare and public expression non-existent. Both conditions have changed. This is not the end of the profession, it is a considerable displacement of its purpose, and the teams I meet feel it long before they can put it into words. I write a great deal on this subject, including on the side of therapeutic mediation, where I teach. Here is what I can come and work on with you.
First direction: the bond before the content
What emancipates in mediation is not the content transmitted, it is the quality of the bond in which it circulates, and that can be analysed very precisely: each person’s place, what the frame authorises, what happens in other people’s gaze on what one has made. This is the densest talk I offer and the one that speaks most to experienced teams. It comes from The bond that sets us free, Place as an Operative Concept for an Emancipatory Cultural Mediation and The framework that authorizes.
Second direction: stop showcasing, start building
Showing participants’ productions in an exhibition or a final screening seems self-evident. Yet showcasing does not produce what the collective gaze along the way produces, and it often installs a hierarchy the project claimed to undo. A very concrete direction, with criteria applicable to your next workshop. See Building, Not Valorizing and The process, not the result.
Third direction: the workshop we will only run once
The long-term project has become the sector’s ideal, and the one-off action its poor relation. I contest that assumption, with arguments and examples, because it leads to despising brief encounters that genuinely transform people. A useful direction when a team has limited means and feels guilty about not working long-term. See The workshop we will only run once.
Fourth direction: shame, judgement, and what prevents speech
Why teenagers do not speak in post-show discussions. Why participants say what they believe is expected of them. Why the question “so what did you think of it?” produces silence. This direction links serious clinical elements to immediately usable methods. See Shame, the invisible emotion of the adolescent spectator, Not judging people’s digital practices and Receiving, or the difficulty of doing nothing.
Fifth direction: mediation when artists do it
For companies and artistic teams, the question arises differently: how to stage the reality of the encounter and not only the show, how to leave behind the extractivism that consists in making elsewhere and coming to consume places and people, when the theatre begins and who its author is. See Training a company in participatory mediation, Artistic Extractivism and The Art of Hospitality.
Sixth direction: machines within the relationship
What technical objects change in mediation, what the image becomes when it serves as evidence, what a conversational AI opens up as possibilities of emancipation and what risks it carries. A direction for teams that want to think their tools rather than endure them. See The object that disposes, The Image as Evidence and Artificial Intelligence, a Tool for Emancipation in Mediation.
What happens in the room
A talk on mediation that was not itself an act of mediation would be worthless, so I build it as a demonstration. Very short exercises, often a two-minute creative instruction, whose effects on each person we then analyse: that is usually the moment the room understands what I have been saying for twenty minutes. I add timed exchanges in pairs and a wall of written contributions.
What remains
The analyses the group produces about its own exercises stay online and form internal working material. For a team revising its practices, it is this document, written by the team itself, that carries authority for what follows, far better than a report written by me.
Formats and preparation
An hour and a half, a day, or training-action in several sequences, with real workshops run between the group sessions. I prepare with the managers and, when possible, with two or three members of the team, because what a mediator lives through day to day does not always reach the top. I can also support a mediator from your team in carrying this message before their peers, which is consistent with everything this page says [see the page “What if someone from your team did the talking?”, to be linked once published]. Talks are given in French and in English.
Some past talks
The photography workshop : creating, showing, looking together; Creating to think; Raisons d’Agir Festival : When Collage Gives Voice to Ideas; Cultural Mediation as a Device for Symbolic Emancipation.
All the resources: Cultural mediation methods and Theatre and its contradictions.