Our educational principles
and artistic
Milieux Sensibles is a space for artistic and educational experimentation where the arts and sciences interact. Projects take many forms:
Devices, performances, meetings, teachings, shows, concerts, texts. From artistic expressions - dance, theatre, drawing, music, writing - the objective is to decipher the contemporary world by linking our sensitivity to our analytical capacities, and to connect the personal and the political.
Our mind
Our projects are immersive and implement a conception of cultural mediation as a creative and political act, a meeting place between social worlds, a place of synergy between different ways of understanding reality, a place of transformation.
Sensitive Environments creates immersive and participatory performances, sensitive agoras, where speech is triggered by works - dance, music, drawing, theatre - and deepened in collective debates, punctuated by theoretical contributions, workshops and artistic expressions.
How can we love each other as equals in a patriarchal society, share common ground between different spiritualities, transform the colonial past, think about money, live in respect for nature, and conceive of the place of children?
"There is no work of art that does not appeal to a people who do not yet exist."
Gilles Deleuze,
conference at the Collège de France
on artistic creation in 1987
"Art is to life what a mountain peak is to the earth."
John Dewey,
Art as experience
Artistic mediation as a creative and political act
From the Latin "mediatio," meaning "intermediary," "between," or "between," mediation is the act of translation from one world to another, from one discipline to another, from one person to another. Creating spaces for sensitive mediation means staging a space where sensitivity contributes to the debate, where different worlds converse, where words, thoughts, emotions, and imagination circulate. It means creating the possibility of new connections between things and people. The framework and the contextualization are imbued with ethics and potential. These connections can emerge within a carefully considered space-time. We can call these spaces-times "experiential settings" or "sensitive agoras." Individual and collective experience is stimulated and structured within them, according to certain principles, but the precise outcome remains uncertain.
Sensitivity as a tool for shaping the world
Poetic inspiration as a starting point
Whatever the initial topic, our performances begin with artistic expression. The discussion revolves around this shared object, this third object that is the artwork, upon which thought flows. Whether it evokes emotion, offers a humble testimony, or represents liberation, each person receives the artwork in their own way.
Regarding artistic material, two ideas are dear to us. First, art and life are not separate; they are made of the same material. Artistic expression is a modality, one of the manifestations of the matter that composes life. This is why it is found not only in works of art but also in moments, for example. Second, art does not reproduce reality; it co-produces it. They influence each other. The top modifies the bottom and vice versa. Everything moves, everything is in motion.
Artistic sublimation is as much an illustration as it is an imaginative path towards alternatives to reality. Free expression, reinventing language and recomposing reality, allows us to imagine new paths, for ourselves and for the world.
Illustration, reinterpretation, transformation, this interplay of influences between poetic thought and social reality is rich in possibilities.
In our projects, we stimulate interactions between works and society, and observe the effects of these exchanges on representations and on the imagination.
The artwork is therefore our raw material.
Languages unbound, worlds connected
In a world dominated by quantification and analytical rationality, free association, analogy, metaphor, the unknown, the irrational, the illogical, the mysterious, the unusual, but also intimate testimony and the singular, give rise to emotions, activate the unconscious, and renew our perspective on things. The resonance found allows each individual to build bridges between their private words and feelings, and public, political discourse.
Often, ideas take shape during the course of discussion. We see thought develop and its externalization in its transformative capacity.
Political thought lies as much in form as in content
Principles of horizontality
Maieutics people give birth to their own opinions equality of intelligences, respect for every voice, collective intelligence, curiosity about the other’s point of view, and rhetorical rigor the ability to argue one’s position — are the principles that animate these encounters.
We seek to establish a freedom of tone that allows each person to reveal their mental architecture, often still under construction.
If we disagree, that is a good sign. If people change their opinions throughout the exchanges, that is a good sign. We create sensitive civic agoras that rehabilitate the richness of dissensus, grounded in respect and attentive listening.
Acting on representations
Individual and social behaviors are guided by representations. Here, we welcome them, gather them, question them, dissect them. Why do we think the way we think? Where do our representations come from? Is my thinking consistent with my actions? Are my actions aligned with my ideals? Ideas and conceptions are brought into collective discussion and subjected to the critical examination of the social sciences.
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Sensitive agora = creation of public space
By acting on representations, we seek to take part in the composition[1] of the world. How can we orchestrate these divergent viewpoints in order to move toward a more just, more caring, more coherent society?
The common world is not already there; we must reflect on what we want to see come into being.
It is about creating a public space, crafting it, bringing it into existence, giving it both body and spirit.
A political object
Encounters around the arts, sensibilities, and tastes become occasions for confrontation or friction between legitimate culture and popular cultures, between generations, social classes, neighborhoods, and genders. It is a meeting of worlds, of histories. “To study the mediations of culture is therefore to take into account the double nature of culture: it is both what separates and what connects.”[2] What is at stake is therefore political from the outset.
Oratory arts were considered by the Greeks as an art form in their own right. Today, in an era of polarized opinions, social media, and short media cycles, it seems that we have lost some of our capacity to listen and to respond in alignment with what has just been said. Placing this back at the heart of collective intelligence processes means working on this dimension of citizenship: the art of debate.
Crossed approaches
The journey between sensibility, opinion, and knowledge compels humility. The deeper we enter into a social issue, the denser the forest of questions becomes.
The philosophical spirit doubt meets the valuable insights of the social sciences.
The social sciences allow us to provide a theoretical framework, to return to facts, scales of magnitude, trends, dates, long-term processes in order to deepen, refine, or broaden discussions, to move beyond historical amnesia, and to enter into complexity and nuance.
A framework within which to improvise
“Form is content[3],” this quotation from Victor Hugo aptly captures the thinking behind an experiential dispositif. Form is created to allow content to emerge; its ergonomics shape what arises. Moreover, the contours of the encounter must reveal the ethical and pedagogical principles of the project: are we physically on the same level as the participants? How are they welcomed? We seek to embody our principles, to “walk the talk[4].”
The conditions of implementation matter: the format, the place, the composition of the group, the production conditions, etc. The rhythm, the attunement to collective vibration, requires attention, calibration of words, resonance with moods. The encounters are orchestrated in order to make participants feel at ease and to guide them into an unfamiliar sensitive space. The framework is staged, the rhythm is written yet within the frame, one never knows what will be expressed, what energy will emerge, what the experience will be.
Experimenting: living what we speak about
It is not about announcing what we are going to do; it is about doing it. These encounters are first and foremost immersive dispositifs to be lived. They often require extended time and a small group of individuals. But anything is possible. The work is the experience.
Transforming sensitive investigations: producing narratives
These meeting spaces are created out of personal questions about the world. They are fields of inquiry. Starting from identified contradictions, frictions, and feelings of injustice, we share our reflections, investigate the experiences of others, and open a space for exchange and reflection.
How do you approach love, politics, and your relationship to history? What guides your actions? What are your beliefs?
We collect testimonies, gestures, and expressions, which serve as investigative material that we can organize scientifically, or poetically, in a poetic rendering of gestures and narratives. This material is also used in documentary, video, and audio productions.
Exchanges, opinions, gestures, reactions are a precious poetic and political material.
Transforming this material means highlighting a state of affairs, a state of relationships, restructuring what has been observed, and inventing alternatives. Producing narratives.
Craftspeople, mediators, free and rooted in reality, following in the footsteps of others before us, multidisciplinary explorers, alternative educators, research artists, we open spaces for encounters, to create connections, work on representations, discover others, delve deeper into questions, conduct investigations in sensitive areas, which we transform to leave traces of what has been deposited in our souls. And to change in turn.
We believe in the power of art, of encounter, of respect, in the richness of otherness, to bring about the solidarity, love, critical thinking, and nuance we need. We want to believe in it, or at least do our part.
Sensitive environments, a thousand possible connections.
"The race will be close until the very last moment."
between utopia and destruction
Buckminster Fuller, in Critical Path (1981)
[1] To talk about these hybrid practices, Bruno Latour uses the term Composionism in the manifesto for his School of Political Arts
[2] In Observatoire des politiques culturelles, article by Marie Christine Bordeaux
[3] Victor Hugo in The Usefulness of Beauty
[4] Walk the talk is an expression used to talk about consistency between idea and behavior, "from action to speech"