Welcome and Wonder or The Sponge Manifesto
(2025) Care Ethics Research Consortium (CERC) — Location: Utrecht (23.January.2025)
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- Abstract
- This communication introduces a short documentary film on Brussels’ Places for Connection (PfCs) or lieux de lien in French. Places for Connection (PfCs) are “co-managed facilities that have been established in Brussels with the aim of enabling people to reconnect with themselves and with the community by taking an alternative look at social institutions and mental health” (Thunus & Zabeau 2024: 46). The places are driven by this political ambition, which situates them in the deinstitutionalisation process going on in psychiatry and mental health for decades, all over the world. Their development had been accelerated following the COVID-19 pandemic, to tackle social isolation. Today, there are about 20 PfCs in Brussels. In these places, everyone is welcomed and considered a member, including the few paid workers, and most members had a history of contacts with mental health care. PfCs intend to be as inclusive as possible by voluntarily de-emphasizing “both social and diagnostic categories in everyday interactions” (idem). They are “open to the public (…) mostly centrally situated and accessible to anyone passing by, regardless of their mental health history” (Walker & Thunus 2020). They do not “provide psychiatric or medical treatment but allow for opportunities to develop ties within a local community through the organization of collective, social and cultural activities” (idem). "La Bienvenue" In 2022, we launched a research & creation project in order to understand these places and their mode of operation, but also to be able to share how they could care for their members and the society at large. Indeed, on the occasion of a previous research project (2017-19), we felt that much of what we were experiencing in the PfCs, which seemed fundamental to mental health, resisted being articulated and shared through using standard social sciences research methods. Furthermore, as researchers with no experience of psychiatric institutions and mental health services, we could not claim to have the same experience of these places as their members. The research & creation project includes three interrelated elements: cinematographic work, design workshops, and contributory research. First, the cinematographic work has been conducted horizontally through the immersion of the filming team within the places and the alternation of moments of meeting, exchange, and filming, during which members are filmed and film themselves, taking hold of a camera made available to them. Second, the design workshops supported the co-creation of four mobile image-capturing devices or "camera mobiles": the caméradeux, the caméraconteuse, the camérassembleuse, and the camérafeutière. These devices were intended to circulate among the places, in order to be used by their members. Third, community research involved human and social science researchers, designers, and the filming team in a collective reflection, which took the form of guided group discussions enriched with visual and textual materials. The reflection focused on the places, their modes of operation, and what differentiates them from psychiatric and mental health services, and from the global society. In this communication, we reflect on how the question of care is reflected in the research and cinematographic work and in their interrelation. More specifically, we offer to question the short film from a care aesthetics perspective (Thompson 2022: 54), by examining both “the sensory and embodied practices” of care that we perceived in the PfCs, and how the filmmakers and researchers’ practices may have taken care of the PfCs and their members. To do so, we rely on the short film created in the framework of the project, which is available from March 2024. The short film constituted a step in the project which will lead to a collective book and a longer film by the end of 2025. It has been used as a support for discussing our research and cinematographic work with different audiences including the PfCs’ members, researchers and students in social sciences and public health. Their feedback was taken into account to adapt the contributory research’s device, and it nurtured the making of the long film. First, we share our own understanding of how the film might witness to care as it unfolds in PfCs, and of how it might take care of their members and ourselves, as researchers and filmmakers, by redistributing roles among the research participants. Secondly, we dive into the process underlying our research & creation project to highlight three specific moments at which we felt that it was deeply transforming our habitual practices, as researchers and filmmakers. Thirdly, to summarize this process we argue that we have been drawn into the deinstitutionalization process claimed by the PfCs, which brought us closer to a feminist ethic of research and cinema.
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Citations
Thunus, S., & Duverdier, M. (2025). Welcome and Wonder or The Sponge Manifesto. Care Ethics Research Consortium (CERC), Utrecht. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/271641