Contenu du sommaire : Des collectifs éphémères

Literature, art and politics have been closely intertwined in scrutinizing society over the past century. However one of the main aspects that can be stressed is the difficulty of the various movements to last over time. Dadaists, Surrealists, Communists, Existentialists, Situationnists and their offspring could not or would not escape a recurrent ephemerality that was, if not necessary, never the less objectively inherent to their identity. Michel Leiris, the author and participant of several of these movements, is a good example of this fact: their short-lived nature yet their social relevance.

This article aims at understanding a social process: the aesthetic formation of a cinema known under the genre film of “tropical gothic”. In Cali, the third Colombian city, beset in the 1970's by a brusque process of urbanisation, some cinephile friends start a collective with a cine-club, a journal and a partnership for the auto-production of movies. Named “Solar city” after Tommaso Campanella's utopia, the house they live in also host other visual artists, travellers and rebel students. This ephemeral community arises from the ashes of the Colombian “period of Violencia” and of the anomic period peculiar to the whole continent racked with a social and cultural upheaval. As an answer to such a new experience, this generation progressively elaborate, through cinephilia, its own gaze that will lead to the creation of accomplished works of art.

This paper's based on the 21st century's collectives in theatre and on the heritage of the 1960-70's paradigmatics'experiences. Setted up in the 2000s, the young collectives are mainly pragmatics. Intermittents, flexibles, working in subsidized theatre, without concrete program for the “new man” to propose, they focused their resistance in their creation processus, political because collective, and realized an “open work”—as defying Umberto Eco—in the heart of the representation itself. Tied in reality, polyphonic, perpetually moving, this work induces a democratic conception of activity of the audience and reactivates some of the discoveries of the collective creations' in the sixties—especially the emancipations' theory. Paradoxycally, the 21s collectives revive with History and redraw a broken filiation thanks to an aesthetic of mayfly.

This paper leans on an ethnographic research in progress addressing contemporary art production spaces in the area of Bangalore (India). It considers Sangam House, a writers' residency and is centered around three points: the access to the space, the co-existence (or “exister ensemble”) of the writers and the exit of the space. It studies the way an ephemeral community is created, develops and can perpetuate or leave marks on the participants in the current socio-political context of India and globalization. This article pays special attention to the building of ‘commons' in the space and time of the residency, which is essential for the organization of artists' resistance against all the pressures and threats in a new unfolded space, the political space.

The present article examines two clubs for music lovers in N'Djamena, the Guest Star Club and the AJRA collective. Way beyond the strictly cultural and artistic context, these two structures also generate sharing and exchange about other fields of interest concerning life choices related to the passage from adolescence to adulthood.These structures are short-lived and therefore impermanent, all the more so because their members do not seem to consider membership as a permanent feature in their lives. Yet a closer examination of the internal practices in such structures reveals a completely different aspect: they are likely to function along lines similar to the formal rules of other established organisations, which in turn tends to blur or question the limits of their impermanence.Analysis of the social codes within these structures shows they are either at odds or in harmony with life in society and, as such, may be considered as part of the “ways of living together” in an African town currently undergoing considerable change.

Towns and cities lend themselves to the analysis of forms of co-existence (“l'exister ensemble”). Through an anthropological analysis of a number of contemporary urban gatherings, this article seeks to grasp the logics underpinning the production of collectives where the effect of gathering together can be examined in terms of the “ephemeral collective”. The article focuses on two examples of urban Parisian ephemeral collectives: on the one hand, an annual event, Paris Plage, which has become emblematic of the festive detournement of urban public space; on the other, micro-events, namely picnics, involving a more fragmented appropriation of certain spaces in the city. The analysis highlights the momentary inversion and transgression of social spaces and relations as a typically urban euphoric value.

Shared gardens are short-lived community phenomenons. Created in free and unoccupied city areas, they are eventually meant to be destroyed following the urban devellopment. Despite of this characteristic, shared gardens are felt important by those actually involved in such communities—the gardeners themselves. Written upon the results of a field study, this paper aims to describe four types of gardeners, identified by the different ways each one invest their respective land. It then explains how those shared gardens, however ephemeral in their nature, succeed in two ways : not only do they create strong collective dynamics, but they also have long-lasting effects on urban territories around them, reaching beyond the basic gardening activity.

Live action role-playing games are played by adults who dress up to embody a fictional character and immerge in fictional interactive worlds. The groups that form on these occasions are short-term collectives, as participants are only physically gathered a few days per year. Despite a very long preparation time, that keeps organizers busy for most of the year, players have a very short time to get into their roles and into the game. This paper considers the way players collaborate in massive gatherings that can reach up to 8,000 although they may not have met before, or been aware of game rules. The main idea is that the game creates its own space and time frames, which result in accelerated socialization.

On long-haul flights, the technical and sales staff appear to have known each other forever. Yet they have never seen each other before and will probably never meet again: their collective is always ephemeral, both in terms of its composition and the discontinuity inherent in the flight. To understand this “minor miracle”, a team of socioanthropologists undertook a participant observation of the flying staff and demonstrated the significant mobilization of “the sensible” through body language and the sharing of emotions. Time spent outside the aircraft shines further light on the staff's shift aboard the flight, particularly the stopover, during which the members of the collective of flying personnel are immersed in shared memory and the observance of rituals, thereby enabling them to establish a “between-ourselves” mentality that protects them from the outside world. The ephemeral dimension of the collective increases both its intensity and interpretability.

Though outsourcing is leading to the disappearance of traditional collectives, other types of social ties are emerging. The latter are not based on production-directed statuses but on a system of reputation that aims to maintain people on site. Based on observations from two temporary building sites at naval shipyards and a petrol refinery, this text explores these relations from the perspective of the subcontractors and the contracting parties. The first site shows how monitoring one's reputation fits into the work of the subcontractor. The second highlights the ways in which the client's agents feed into this reputation while also seeking to de-emphasize their role as contracting parties, which is a source of pressure on workers. The study as a whole shows that the ephemeral collectives which grow up around these building sites intermesh with other longer-term collectives that are nevertheless based on the principle of the ephemeral.

An “ephemeral collective” could be conceived as a gathering that captures for a brief period of time the tasks of socialization, of building the group by re-arranging standards, norms, socially acceptable ways of doing and feeling to create a new context of intergration and socialization. If an ephemeral collective holds, consciously or not, explicitly or not, in a formalized way or not, the task of building and keeping the group, it will naturally be more moving, more unstable, more fluid, less established and more difficult to study from a sociological point of view. This article intends to start with the exploration of a type of ephemeral collective, riots. This should allow us to propose a path that leads, from the observation of a collective ephemeral, to some type of sensitivity and sociological approach, or to put it in a more academic way, from an object to a method.