The “Shared Factory” is a framework inspired by the desire to allow different practices and different cultural workers (artists, theoreticians, but also the audience) to meet, by means of a format that encourages this exchange : not a conference, not a tribune or a speech in front of a passive audience, not an artist’s talk, but an open and horizontal space where the different languages and sensitivities can really meet, exchange, and nourish each other.
description :
Gathered around tables of 4 or 5, the participants are encouraged to share and exchange knowledge sparked by a first inaugurating question, formulated according to the essential issues and themes proposed by the host structure.
A microphone is placed at the centre of each table, and the voices are transmitted (via headphones) to the kom.post team, who become the vector of the global content by projecting successive layers of transcribed speech onto a screen which follows the development of the discussions.
An internet connection allows the kom.post team to add to the transcribed content images, links, and extra information, following, adding to and questionning the issues raised within each table group.
At any moment, the participants can look at the screen and consider other possible directions for this shared reflection.
After a while, a second question, based on the different discussions, is announced in order to generate a new reference point. This moment is often a time to concretely imagine a common object (summary, manifesto, proposition, series of questions…), but it can also be a simple conclusion or perspective on the previous exchanges of knowledge.
This framework’s aim is to build or restore the structure necessary for interdisciplinary dialogue, and must, in order to allow this, transform its size, adapting itself to an interpersonal form: not a group of 50 people, but, for example, 10 tables with 5 people at each. This way, each table can truly enter into a process of exchange of knowledge where the spectator can dialogue with the artist or the philosopher since all of them are taken into the same thinking process proposed and opened up by kom.post. The content as well as the direction the discussion takes changes all the time depending on the specific context within which this ephemeral community of artistic sharing takes place.
Nevertheless, the “commons” is not anticipated from the first and global question asked: it is, precisely, created and produced during the factory, by the working tables. The work and creation of each table is at once completely “local” and intimately concentrated, AND connected to the other active tables. More then isolated islands for micro societies, they become motors of the general dynamic of this new collective time-space that we can name that of an “archipelago”. How is this connection established ? Via a simple device : each table has a microphone which can be used for sharing the most relevant ideas. This doesn’t imply a complicated and uncomfortable “speech”, because the different microphones are connected only to headphones worn by one or two kom.postians, who type what they hear and project it onto a screen which gathers this global and anonymous discourse, creating criss-cross-references that each participant can react to and integrate into the production at his or her table.
The factory is made up of what is shared, its product is created by the differences at work: a dis-sensus able to attain public visibility without having to be smoothed into the form of representative discourse.
The shared factory was first invented in collaboration with Relais Culture Europe, as an ideal frame for experimenting political construction : a commons with differences. It was proposed in May 2010, in the CENTQUATRE in Paris and, since this first fruitful attempt, different versions have travelled, been developed and remain to be invented!