Investigating the practices and arts of transformation: environments, ethos, transmission

Human communities are communities whose metabolism is simultaneously cultural, social, ecological, biological, chemical and physical. This is why preserving the habitability of our living environments depends on our ability to institute organisations whose imaginations and practices take on the demands and obligations resulting from the interdependence between human worlds, other living systems and the elements that make up the planetary biogeochemical cycles.

"Humanity, as living matter, is inseparably connected with the material and energetic flows of a specific envelope of the Earth - the biosphere".

How can we put the common health of people and the environments on which they depend back at the heart of the way we build society? Embodying this intention and pursuing it with determination opens the way to profound cultural transformations.

The IASPAT hypothesises that this process of metamorphosis and recomposition of the common world is underway, and that it involves the emergence of transformative practices arising from collective and participatory approaches, experienced by small groups and in situ, which bring into interaction and reinvent praxis from very diverse origins and fields: craft practices, culinary practices, gardening practices, ritual practices, agricultural practices, artistic practices, spiritual practices, poetic practices, dreamlike practices, commercial practices, educational practices, somatic practices, festive practices, therapeutic practices, activist practices, political practices, humanitarian practices... as well as scientific practices, legal practices, organisational practices, institutional practices, relational practices, graphic practices, administrative practices, logistical practices... and performative, subversive and revolutionary practices...

"Joy, Spinoza wrote, is what expresses an increase in the power to act, that is to say also to think and imagine, and it has something to do with knowledge, but a knowledge that is not of a theoretical order, because it does not first designate an object, but the very mode of existence of the person who becomes capable of it."

By varying registers, modes of attention and ways of involving non-human entities in the decision-making, representation and knowledge processes, the transformative practices to which the Institute is committed are intrinsically exploratory. They make it possible to accept the radical uncertainty of a changing world, by creating inspiring and accessible ways of giving everyone back the desire and the power to act, and by amplifying, through the sharing of experiences, the evolving capacities within communities. In this way, they broaden awareness and nurture the skills needed to preserve habitable living environments.

"The main intention of The Work That Reconnects is to help people discover and experience their innate connections to each other along with the systemic self-healing powers of the web of life, so that they can be awakened and motivated to play their rightful part in creating a sustainable civilisation."

The Institute is conducting action research in connection with local micro-policy initiatives to:

• develop a reference framework and conceptualise a common language for transformative practices
• produce archives (documentation, interviews) and an investigative report on transformative practices and the arts that drive them
• test ways of evaluating transformative practices
• enable heterogeneous individuals and groups to recognise each other and share experiences by creating contact zones between very different environments that are conducive to the emergence of transformative practices.
• develop the field of transformative humanities, which draws on the arts, design, anthropology and ethnology, history, geography, philosophy, psychology, politics, etc. to examine from multiple perspectives the requirements and environments necessary for the creation and dissemination of transformative practices.

Through conversations with practitioners, investigations of the environments, analyses of practices and participatory experiments, this research programme will explore the following questions in greater depth:

 

• What human and material resources are needed to carry out transformative practices, and how can they be mobilised?
• How can these practices be transcribed and passed on?
• How do we build up an audience and support an organisation's desire for change? And how do we initiate a practice on a regional scale?
• How do we embed the transformations you bring about over a long period of time? How can we take care of the after-effects and transformative consequences of our practices?
• How can degraded practice environments be restored?
• How can transformative practices contribute to the emergence of new forms of representation or collective decision-making?

The IASPAT website will provide accessible documentation to enable practitioners and practice environments to make contact. To this end, we will gradually build up an archive of interviews and put practice scores and stories of experiments online.

"Infinite places are pioneering places that explore and experiment with collective processes for inhabiting the world and building the commons. They are open, possible, unfinished places that establish spaces of freedom where alternatives are sought."

To carry out its research, the IASPAT works in partnership with a variety of practice environments.

We call environment (milieu) an ecology of practices that co-produce their conditions of existence. An environment is thus both the result and the condition of all the practices that have created or will create it. It can be abundant, diverse, open or degraded. A practice may produce different effects in a different environment, or it may be 'prevented' from doing so in a hostile environment. Qualities specific to a given environment may be prerequisites for certain practices.