This founding text has undergone several changes. Indeed, the collective and individual practice brought several layers of diverse experiences, adjustments had to be brought little by little spread over several years. Here is a version from 2013 and still prevails today.
We?! We have already changed! At the end of the day we are a generation of finishers, a form of fringe builders, full-time, open-ended live-workers who will finish everything we touch. The Experimental Creation Workshop is a higher form of silence in the face of nuisance politics. It is a peaceful and bright noise in new desires and not in morbid fantasies.
« There is nothing that we would not like to change, even the ground that our feet tread! »
The A.C.E. is a non-profit organization whose members are scattered throughout France and beyond. It is composed of individuals with variable artistic practices and individuals without practices: musicians, visual artists, scientists, researchers, philosophers, scenographers, authors, technicians, jack-of-all-trades in photography, video, painting, sculpture, theater people, inventors, designers, friends, retirees, idlers of all kinds, and anyone else close to our ideas and intentions. We escape alienating conformity to reinvent ourselves at every moment by imagining other ways of apprehending and approaching our environment, the people who make it up and our relationship with others. We must take ownership of our history and our existence in which the market system has more power over us than individuals have over themselves. And it is together, through the multiple exchanges of knowledge, the various experiences acquired and with all those who wish to do so, that we will succeed in bringing to light an important number of elements of which we are unconscious.
The A.C.E. organizes meetings, concerts, conferences and public interventions and participates in various projects. The A.C.E.’s objective is to bring tracks and median ways in front of the stakes of dominance, to question the hierarchical structures of domination, the conditioning and the compartmentalization of the individuals in their socio-cultural automatisms. This is what we are trying to question and to enlighten. The project is certainly ambitious but it is only in praxis that we can sometimes answer our questions. It is this permanent practice which makes the theory in movement and not the opposite which freezes and inhibits.
There is a world between ideas and acts, between biological logic and social logic, between desire and desire, the individual and the group, order and disorder. To hear is not to understand and to understand is not to act. The obvious is used to hide the truth. Psychology to possess individuals before they possess you. The news is used to distract and the entertainment is used for submission. The setting in situation sometimes makes sensitive what is not or little. Imagination is not only the fortuitous meeting of elements that make up chance. There is something else, to make perceptible the invisible it is the faculty to represent what does not exist. We are pushed by a desire of illegality that nothing can satisfy and an irresponsible desire of Being. It is in this indefinite space, blurred, without real visible limit, escaping the social and political logic that the organization Experimental Creation Workshop takes all its substance: the imaginary as a revolutionary ALL. The action that an individual can have on himself is his power to act and nothing else. Our reason for being is to Be!
Art Schock 