THOUSAND BASTARDS

A public laboratory of cultural creation

 Alexandre Le Petit initiates the project Mille Bastardz, a public laboratory of what is proposed to be called cultural creation, meaning the process by which we constitute who we are.

For the human being is not given. It individuates itself. There is no pure origin; there is only a defect of origin, and this defect is precisely what is needed: it is from this that all invention proceeds. Bastardness is not an impurity to be corrected; it is the very condition of what will come to be. Nothing is born pure. Everything arises from mixing, from deviation, from encounters with what is not oneself. The impure thus becomes a principle of writing and a driving force for research, and the cultural imaginary, which has neither source nor end, only becomes fertile because it is constantly traversed by otherness. This is what is referred to here as heterogenesis.

Such research cannot be conducted from a single discipline. The separation of knowledge is a dissociation, and every dissociation is a proletarianization, meaning a loss of the circuits through which there is co-individuation. Mille Bastardz stands conversely in a post-disciplinary perspective: an international collective where arts, knowledge, and practices recombine together the circuits of their transindividuation.

This work is driven by desire, what is also more simply called "kiff". And its method is serendipity: finding what one is not looking for while seeking something else that one does not find, that is to say, making room for bifurcation, for the improbable, for that which cannot be calculated. There is therefore neither a fixed program nor a final restitution, because an individuation never truly ends.

What remains is the question of place. A laboratory that would close in on itself would revert to a dissociated environment, where some produce and others consume. Mille Bastardz makes the opposite choice, that of an associated environment: the doors of the places where the work takes place are open every day, to all, all the time, everywhere. Research takes place in plain view. Every person who crosses the threshold does not witness a result; they enter into the process, participating in the collective individuation that unfolds there and caring for what is being sought. Healing and thinking, here, are one and the same.

Mille Bastardz does not propose a finished work but an ongoing individuation. An open factory where the impure and the improbable become the organs of shared knowledge about what it means to create, today, together.

Practical information:

For all audiences

Free

Contact

Cooperation France / United Kingdom / Norway / Denmark

Partnerships: partnership with Cie Noesis, Oblique/s, La Fabrique de Patrimoines, Territoires Pionniers I Maison de l'Architecture, Chorège - National Choreographic Development Center of Falaise, La Coopérative Chorégraphique