Shaping an island, a safe place, a safe house. Shaping its entries as if they were discrete trails half-hidden in the bushes, protecting us from a harsh light. Designing soft structures where everyone can act and evolve without any preestablished direction, but just grow from their experiences and desires. What do we love? What do we care about? Ideas that have something pleasant, things we would like to share, taking part in a community strong enough for becoming a supportive place and soft enough for giving space to each individual and each sensitivity.
Thus, the project is to design this focal point around which we will build sharing practices. We want to restore the ties between the hand and the spirit. We think, the matter is thought, the matter is all crossed by our thoughts: we handle it and live through it. Which kind of matter do we manipulate, and which kind of thinking arise from it? To speak as the archaeologist Ian Hodder, humans are beings able of an experimental thinking, a form of thinking that takes shape by making and sensing. From that point it seems easy that any human community—moreover a human community of artists—grows in both practice and the thoughts that arise from it.
Starting from this idea of a common space of thought and practice, our project is to build a sort of library. More than a mere shelf where one’d accumulate literate references, we wish to prompt the messy accumulation of a sort of treasure, a thesaurus where everyone brings what they care about: unanswered questions, answers without questions, works in progress, drawings, objects, anything. This, without any attempt of hierarchising contents according to their nature or their authority, but rather trying to find articulations and links between the diversity of thinking modes. A layering that would constantly reshuffled, reorganised and investigated.
Practically, what would we like to put in this space? Things we care about. Thoughts we love. Thoughts that we would like to share, whether in plain sight or in the intimacy of a sentence read in the middle of a notebook. Deposits made in the kind protection of anonymity, then emerging to the light without being judged from its source and crystallise as a collective thinking. Stakes and risks also can be taken. We want to foster the rising of a thinking mode that is spontaneous, loving, generous and courageous. In front of the incertitude of future, the need for an economy, a society of a shared knowledge that is open-minded, available and ambitious, as notably formulated by Marc Luyckx Ghisi, is more needed than ever before.
 
Context
As an institution founded on the linear transmission of knowledge, the school is the place where thinking is distributed. University in its turn, aspires to something larger: a place of exchange where ideas of all disciplines cross and circulate; the ideal of universalism. At the same time reality always demand actions. Knowledge, the art of living together and the art of doing things form a continuum of the know-hows of the life in society. What do we know? What can we share? What can we do? Those three questions are in the core of everyone’s life, but the institutionalisation of knowledge favoured its strictest, most theoretical form, too often cutting it from its social contexts and applications.
Far from being stuck in static identities, people evolve in dynamic fluxes. Instead of describing someone as an artist, a student, a citizen, a worker, we could rather use the notion of agents: beings that act and think in their contexts, that carry the influences of the outside world but also can have a visible impact on this outside world. This is where the distinction between theory and practice finds its limits. We thus refuse to keep those arbitrary divisions: fine arts versus crafting, the artwork against objects of consumption, intellection against sensuality.
This hierarchisation of thinking, as it manifests now by scholar institutions, is reflected in the hierarchies between teachers and students. This workshop aims to open an escape plan from those structures and foster mechanisms of mutual consideration, cooperation and giving instead of mechanisms of control and judgement. What does interest us here and that is crucial, is to finally get out of the defensive mode that is imposed on students in assessment procedures. We demand no justification for the quality or the pertinence of a production. We want to build a space of trust from were new possibilities can take shape. We want to build a space of sharing where individuals and community function in a flexible and harmonious articulation, a space where this community is not a dull compromise based on bottom lines, but a dynamic point of exchange of individual experiences.

Introduction