Quand les artistes font forme en habitant ensemble. Usages, présences, imaginaires

Taking root within a historical and transversal perspective of communities of artists at work, and of the relationship that they nourish with the places that host their creative activity, the present research intends to bring to light the grammars of "the commonality in the plural" such as they are composed at the crossroads between a "living together" and a "working as an artist". It thus aims to offer a pragmatic turn to the activity of creating artworks, or more broadly forms, in order to consider the latter as a specific regime of engagement (THEVENOT 2014). In order to do so, the research gets a foothold in the pragmatic examination of two collectives of artists, who contribute to shape, build, and fabricate the place where they both inhabit and carry out their professional activity, in a diffuse and almost permanent way. From this observation, it points to a certain number of displacements as to the way in which uses, presences and imaginaries are put into play and into practice, from the activity of inhabiting and of the one that consists in creating forms. Opening the way to a de-hierarchization of the gestures of the making, the activity of fabricating the common place serves here as point of anchorage of an "art in use". Operating under the auspices of a heterodox, idiosyncratic and singularizing use of the technique, this "making together" favors a singular attentional and somatic opening, as well as a regime of engagement that one can qualify "of resonance in presence" (THÉVENOT 2019). Finally, in view of the imaginary, the narratives that are forged from the singular and familiar experience that people have of the place they build together, weave a "commonality in affinity", which contribute to make the "communities of practice" porous (ZEMBYLAS and DÜRR 2009). The research is based on participant observation, as well as on archival research, in three places of life and artistic work which are the artistic residency and former artists' colony Moly-Sabata (Sablons, France); the place of research and artistic experimentations, La Déviation (Marseille, France), and bermuda, shared workshops of production and research in contemporary arts (Sergy, France)