I am not sure this anecdote is the best one to illustrate what I am talking about below but this discussion came about at the same time I was having thoughts on the relationship between the thought process and the practice at El Warcha.
Wajdi and I were walking towards France ville in Tunis and while we were doing a pause on the steps of a building. Wajdi who was working on a play told me about this scene that they were rehearsing. A couple is on stage and they must each make a certain number of dance steps punctuated by a sequence of text before finding themselves in the centre. The director couldn't figure it out. Wajdi decided to take it upon himself to find a solution. He measured the distance to be covered, the number of steps the actors had to take, and edited the text to synchronise the movement and the rhythm of the voices. After a few minutes of planning the scene could be played smoothly and it only needed a few more tries to be finalised.
This story echoes a reflection that we regularly have at El Warcha. The activity inside the workshop is essentially manual, it is an intuitive practice, a process where playfulness is of great importance. Getting people around a table to reflect on our practice and putting things into words or even planning, is not always easy. Discussions regarding the work can seem peripheral to some of our team members. The talking happens when we are not working basically, when we take a break or when we have a coffee. Our approach is often slow and full of stopping and restarting, like the director who blindly searches for dance steps. Our work is a sort of collage, assembling things, a game which is not necessarily effective in terms of productivity but which is very creative and enjoyable. Our goal is above all to create a space for experiment and exchange through a common practice.
The fact remains that we are regularly confronted with the limits of this approach. Thoughts put into words seems to be the highest form of expression, both from an academic and artistic point of view. A project begins with words, we tell a story. When speaking about El Warcha we refer to “Public space”, “collaboration”, “citizenship” a language which is essentially used for the external communication of the project and fundraising but can sometimes feel a little off with our daily practice. The theoretical wording is basically something that happens backstage in an office, just like the excel sheets and other administrative work that no one wants to do. The project wouldn’t exist without it but they are not part of the routine of most people who walk through the door of the workshop. At the workshop reflection and action coexist, but one is not the logical result of the other. The workshop is open onto the street, we are constantly in direct relation to our environment, and it is rare that the plans that we have made the night before come to fruition. There is always an unexpected event, someone not showing up or maybe a toilet flood. Many good reasons to change or plans or not make any. In a small publication that I discovered a few years before the workshop opened: “The Rest is Silence” Emanuel Almborg describes a project on an abandoned site in London in the 90s. People get together and start building a structure, they work in silence, with a single rule not to speak to one another. The only language they are allowed is the one of the hands and the body assembling wooden planks. It may be idealistic but that's kind of the question we asked ourselves with Taha when we opened the first workshop in 2016. What would happen if we opened a space with a few tools and material where people could experiment freely and make things.
At the opening of the second Warcha in 2017 the approach was a bit different, we tried to bring people together and have roundtable discussions. We wanted people to decide what they wanted to do before initiating a project. As it happened, discussions were not really valued, participants felt they would not amount to anything. Worst, Marouan whom we had initiated the project with had a name for those roundtable discussions, he called it: “faire l’association” which literally meant pretending to be doing something. This was a reference to many associations which had opened after the revolution in Tunisia. They had a reputation for having never ending discussions but never taking actions.
This raised the question for us about planning and team meetings, how much does it need to be formalised if people don’t actually enjoy it or do not actively take part. Working in collaboration with others means we have to find a way to make decisions. The lack of planning or formalised time to exchange ideas can often be seen as non-collaborative. That said, we cannot force it upon people. In a way El Warcha resolves this issue by being really organic, the project evolves depending on the people who are physically present in the room at a given moment and not necessarily on a plan that might have been made previously. This said there is still a lot of planning necessary beyond the scene and administrative work that needs doing but somehow it remains open enough and allows for a lot of freedom inside the workshop.
This discussion about theory and practice resonates particularly when we talk about education. Theory on education is something we are interested in as we work a lot with young people and sometimes describe ourselves as an educational project. Schools traditionally want children to be sited listening to the teacher, knowledge being passed down to them by the master. In reaction liberal or anarchist education as presented by Alexander Sutherland in “Summer Hill '' is not limited to the classroom, the children learn by experimenting, they can play, run around, explore the space that surrounds them without being subject to the authority of a master. Taha had found a second hand copy of the book in a nearby bookshop and we both took turns reading it and discussing it before opening the workshop in the morning. At El Warcha none of us have been trained in carpentry and each project is a new opportunity to learn something even if it often means reinventing the wheel. This pedagogical approach couldn’t be further away from the Tunisian school system (inspired by the French) who is centered around learning lessons by heart and a really rigid code of conduct.
Michelles Serres in Petite Poucette expands on this critique of traditional education at the time of new technologies: “Today knowledge is accessible to everyone on the internet and it can no longer be the simple object of education. New forms of teaching must be developed, critical mind, creativity or emotional intelligence are more than the sum of knowledge.” Does the body still need to be seated in its listening position if the student is no longer there to store information. Another relationship to the body may be possible, manual work may be reconciled with intellectual process. The classroom space needs to be redesigned.
By Ben
Bibliography :
The rest is Sience, Emmanuel Almborg, 2009
Summer Hill, a radical approach to child rearing, A. S. Neil, 1960
Petite Poucette, Michelle Serres, 2012