TEC brings together seven employees, individual activist members and collective members (business councils, associations)
1.1 “Travail et Culture”, a regional cultural entity dedicated to popular education
The work of “Travail et Culture” is based on the conviction that EVERY INDIVIDUAL HAS A CULTURE and that WORK IS CULTURE. It aims to examine the work world in its confrontation with the cultural changes that transform it. Thus, TEC/CRIAC devotes itself to producing works of art jointly brought to fruition by employees (or the unemployed) and artists, with the help of organisations from the work world: trade unions, business councils, committees of the unemployed, associations, teachers, mutual insurance companies, as well as geographic communities (towns, amalgamated cities, etc.).
Today, reality dictates that we can no longer consider the work world to be centred on the company. It extends to the adjoining social, familial, urban, economic and political realms. This is why TEC/CRIAC attempts to promote cultural practices and critical expression from men, women and young people—workers and the unemployed — both in their workplaces and where they live.
1.2 Centre de Recherche, d’Innovation Artistique et Culturelle du monde du travail (“The Work World’s Artistic and Cultural Research and Innovation Centre”)
Our focuses are:
- to bring together the labour, social and artistic performance fields
- to understand the evolving discourse around labour, whether emanating from trade unions, activists or associations
- to explain, through cultural action, how the economic and social situations of the work world are becoming increasingly complex and violent
1.3 Resource Association
We engage in different partnerships:
- Creation and diffusion of artistic works for and with labour in the context of artists’ residencies
- Trainings for activists, community animators, and elected members of business councils
- Technical and artistic advice from labour organisations, associated and educational partners
- Design and management of school workshops on different forms of artistic practice
- Welcome of trainees
2.1 Ma vie s'appelle « peut être » (“My life is called ‘perhaps’”)
“Ma vie s’appelle ‘peut être’” is a project based on the issue of job precariousness. It took place in Valenciennes when that city was Regional Capital of Culture and lasted a little more than a year. How do people deal with job precariousness at work, at home or in their social relationships? How do they go on building and inventing their lives? What sort of voice do they have in the community and how can they participate in public discourse?
The cornerstone of this adventure is the work and commitment of two creators-in-residence, visual artist Paul Bloas and writer Jean Bernard Pouy. Their encounters with people in precarious situations, their desire to convey and interpret weakness, insecurity, instability, transience and scarcity through pictures and words, constituted a determinative phase of the project.
There were three distinct outcomes of the residency:
> From September 2007, 70 “giants” painted by Paul Bloas have occupied the city landscape, some accompanied by short sentences by Jean Bernard Pouy — anti-slogans put forward for the insight, interpretation or even incredulity of the passers-by, young and old, residents and workers, precarious or not.
> During the European Heritage Days, a series of six musical and poetic readings, spread along the tramway line, that speak to the figures from the paintings.
> The book “Ma vie s’appelle ‘peut être’”, published in February 2008, consisting of the “epic” story made with a collage of images by J.B. Pouy, photos of paintings on location by Paul Bloas and a text by the journalist Laurence Mauriaucourt about “how art affects the community”; the latter is a detailed and subjective recording of the often conflicting reactions of passers-by as they discover the works, which are themselves precarious.
2.2 Le Cabaret de l’union (“Union cabaret”)
The creation of “le Cabaret de l’union” sprang from a desire to inquire, through artistic performances, into the changes in the world of labour. It opened its doors in Roubaix in January 2006 in partnership with, and indeed in the heart of, the Archives Nationales du Monde du Travail (ANMT – National Labour Archives) and with support from the city of Roubaix.
> A place for debate and exchange, the cabaret attempts above all to position workers as central players in the reflection on work.
> A performance space strongly anchored in the goals of “Travail et Culture”, the cabaret comprises a cinema with 200 seats, a convivial space for debates and small-scale live performance (the cabaret has space for 90, of which 70 can be seated), as well as an exhibition space. We wanted it to be warm and friendly, with a bar and food that recalls the workers’ cabarets that flourished at the beginning of the last century in Roubaix.
This “Cabaret de l’union” is a place for exchange and performance — a place that gives rise to ideas for the future.
Responsibility for configuring the space has been conferred on the artists’ collective BAZATO from “Rita” in Roubaix. Admission is free.
From our perspective and in our daily interventions (Travail-Culture’s “co-production” in a social or professional specific context), we witness, with unemployment and, at the same time, work increase, a real work idleness, so as to cite Yves Clot (professor of industrial psychology at the CNAM).
Idleness in the sense that with the accelerated work changes, the space for the undertaking task particularly decreases, work task, collective work task, and even more the possible part of culture task…
Yet, like everybody whom we have formed a founding collaboration with, we think it is urgent and necessary to confirm our idea that Work, in its contemporary forms, can not always signify a meaningless alienation.
The infinite capacity for those who produce to create a subtle, concrete intelligence, to give part of themselves to the prescribed work, remains yet for us an implacable reality, even if unrecognized on purpose.
So, on every meeting, with every action we undertake in the company, we observe that employees are doing a work that not only includes their comprehensive understanding of the product or service but also of the world at stake and the people to which production is directed.
“Travail et Culture” highlights the part of work and construction that participates in the emancipation and otherness process likely to build a resistance against the established strategy. Artistic creation becomes then an incontrovertible way of questioning working environment as well as work itself.
LabforCulture is a partner initiative of the European Cultural Foundation. LabforCulture is grateful for the support provided by its funders.
