Towards a policy of Refuge ?

Résumé En

Following the path opened by Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway – who conceive our contemporary crisis through the disappearance of refuge spaces – and the concept of “asylum spaces” (Tia DeNora), we will show how the collaboration between researchers and artists in Calais during the project Atlas of Transitions opened “spaces of refuge”. We will first present the context of the collaboration, and of the migration of transit in Calais, a highly conflictual public space. In these conditions, our contribution aims at pointing out the importance of what is not “public” in the work of creation. Workshops, rehearsals, meetings and communication practices can be places for valued performances, engaging forms of transformations through the constitution of alliances between exiles and other actors of the city and, in some cases, becoming possible “artistic asylum”. Secondly, we will present the theoretical frame and the methodology adopted. Our theoretical frame is built from the “care” perspective, re-worked by Sandra Laugier and Patricia Papperman, paying attention to who is doing the “emotional work”, but also to how emotions in a situation are expressed or not. Finally, we will present how design anthropology (Tim Ingold), more than participant observation, can be a tool to undertake collaborations between artists and researchers, moving beyond an economy of creation and research from an « extractive » process (data collecting) to a relational process, where the process of creation and research can be a site to foster worlds of relations.