Practicing Democracy
(2019-2022)
Our interrogations
Echoing history and current challenges related to respect for human rights and the rule of law, to the evolution of our traditions and our political ideals, what narratives can we elaborate or relay to strengthen democracy as an ongoing process?
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What conceptions, practices, rights, duties and freedoms are we referring to? What individual and collective tensions are we going through? What types of commitments do citizens want to make and with what intentions? By whom are the initiatives, and can they be implemented?
Are they authorized? Who is concerned? On what representations are they based? At the service of which democratic dynamics?
Our investigations
In order to investigate the multitude and multiplicity of European realities, Practicing Democracy offers a framework of transnational collaboration bringing together a diversity of professional practices with others that are more associative or amateur and incorporating civic engagement.
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This initiative aims to offer participants and beneficiaries the opportunity to mobilize and build together spaces for experimentation, negotiation and learning, and to meet and strengthen each other.
​Partners : Duncan center (GR), Lokomotiva (NM), Myaamala2 (FIN & IT), I-Eum Center (KR), université Paris 8 (FR), GE.CI.TE Gestioni Cinematografiche e Teatrali (IT).
The project sets the framework for multilateral action (2020-2022) and combines three fields of intervention :
Experimentation#1
Observe practices that stimulate the exercise of democracy: analyze and relay initiatives and singular modes of action via field surveys that will be the subject of documentation and contribution at the local, national and international level.
Experimentation#2
Unite the artistic workshop and the public space to face the question of our social coexistence and the way we understand it.
Rely on the transformative capacity of art to imagine protocols aiming at expression and dialogue, doorways to debate, and gestation of common spaces.
Experimentation#3
Speculate on modes of organization: co-construct and promote spaces of direct democracies via situated systems using collaborative and multidisciplinary methods, at the service of territories and their inhabitants.
Project commencement - fall of 2019:
In 2020, as part of experimentation n°1, extrapole collaborated with three SPEAP master's degree students, a master's in political arts at Science Po Paris: Arthur De Buren (architect), Saïd Abdelmalek Chaoui (consultant in socio-cultural innovation), Benoit Pinero (cultural operator).
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Together, we tested a first survey method for the future deployment of the project. This first terrain took place in Aubervilliers, France, at the Ecole des Actes. This method was in response to the following request:
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"Based on an observation of the work units instigated and the actions carried out by the members and participants of the Ecole des Actes, establish a map of possibilities.
In the study of the articulation between the individual dynamic and the school's group initiatives, the principles of governance and their implementation will then further allow imagining and speculating on the evolution of the existing activities. "