Organisations working for change gather a great deal of information about the conditions they intend to alter. The link between better information and better action is weaker than programmes assume. What determines whether a group can act on what it knows is not the quality of the data but the quality of the relational space in which the data arrives — whether there is room for what is uncomfortable, or non-conforming, or simply does not fit the frame already in place.
A short-term programme in adult education, carried out in 2022, took this as its working problem. It was called Social change and community development in the field of adult education, and it was composed of six residencies — on learning and living systems, on leadership, on economies, on difference and power, on conflict, on the forms organisations take. Twenty-six participants from Poland, Italy, Argentina and Peru. INDIRE, the Italian national agency for European education programmes, later invited us to present the experience to Italian organisations beginning their own projects.
Paper Bodies
Those who came were not arriving empty. Several had watched projects they cared about come apart, and had already located the point of failure. One wrote that misunderstanding and unresolved conflict are what destroy political projects and shared dreams. Another, after a family permaculture farm had collapsed, traced the collapse to something the soil could not correct: an absence of communication among those working it. A third came looking for ways of listening more closely.
None of them lacked technique.
What each had run into, from a different direction, was the same problem: what a group can know and how it can relate are one question, not two.
What a group brings into a room is not exhausted by six residencies, or by sixty, and every programme produces a remainder. Alongside the residencies, a space was set aside in which nothing was taught, with no technique and no objectives. The space was itself part of the design — the part that acknowledged the design's limit. The capacity to receive what exceeds a frame cannot itself be trained. It can only be given somewhere to happen.
The applications had arrived in the third week of February 2022. In the days when the forms were being completed, Russian forces crossed into Ukraine. Some of those who would take part were already organising transport and shelter for people coming across the border. The war did not enter the room as an item on the agenda. It entered as something the group was already holding, before any session began.
By September, when the work took place, none of this was news any longer. It had settled into the condition under which people were going about their work. Although no session addressed the war directly, its presence was felt through those who could not be there, the longer-than-planned silences, and the urgency with which people reached for the paper when a figure began to tilt.
For ten days the group built human figures out of paper. A forest fire was burning nearby. Ash drifted over the site for the duration of the work, and an evacuation remained possible throughout.
The figures were structurally fragile. A figure could be held by one person; it could not be made to move by one person. Each required several pairs of hands, and the coordination this demanded came before any reflection on it. It was the condition of the work being possible at all.
[VIDEO — paper-bodies_46-73.mp4]
They did not represent anything. They were not symbols, and they were given no words. The figures are never made to speak: the manipulation, and whatever plot emerges from it, is carried out in silence — music at most, scenography improvised from the same paper or dispensed with altogether.
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They functioned as mediators, objects standing between people and making a certain kind of relation unavoidable. What circulated around them was necessity: coordination, breath, the adjustment of one's own movement to the fragility of what was being held. The body had to reorganise itself in real time. Speech was not available inside the practice. Around it there was talk, and laughter, and argument. Those who had come naming communication as the thing that failed them spent ten days at an exchange conducted entirely in the hands.
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A disagreement about power — who speaks and who decides — that had surfaced during the residency returned, not as an argument, but as hesitation. Four people adjusted their grip on the same figure, none of them willing to take control of the situation, and each waiting to be met halfway.
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What the paper bodies demanded — that they be carried by several people, that movement be adjusted to fragility, that attention be given to what could not hold its own weight — was the same material the six residencies were addressing in theory. Not an illustration of it. The thing itself, arriving as a physical requirement rather than as a proposition.
This was the point at which systems awareness stopped being a subject taught. Interdependence, exposure and threat were not the content of the sessions. They were the terms the group was already working under.
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The ash that fell on the paper stood for nothing. It was ash falling on paper. The work did not interpret the world; it made room for it.
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What the work rested on
The programme worked with the group as a shared psychic space — a space in which what passes between people is not only exchanged but produced, and in which each is altered by something none of them authored. René Kaës, writing on group processes, describes the reciprocal co-excitation that occurs when subjects meet: a field of projections and cross-identifications that no participant governs alone, producing effects no individual intended. The group in this sense is a field in which the psychic life of each is continuously rewritten by the others.
From Enrique Pichon-Rivière we took a more unsettling proposition: that a group must confront its own epistemological obstacles before it can define its task with any accuracy. These obstacles are not external difficulties — lack of funds, poor timing, thin communication. They are internal to the group's way of knowing. They operate as blind spots that do not announce themselves; the group does not know that it does not know. Confronting them requires letting the frame itself become uncertain.
Those who arrived having watched a farm dissolve, or a collective unravel at the level of misunderstanding, had already named these obstacles without knowing their theoretical form. What the open space offered was a situation in which the obstacle could be inhabited rather than analysed.
No one goes on being the same "I" while the way of relating to "you" changes. The two are not units that meet; they are made in the meeting.
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This was visible when one of the facilitators, certain of her role on arrival, found herself on the fourth day unable to name what she was contributing — and stayed.
Alongside this, a line of reading on cognition and living systems kept the question of how a system comes to know anything at all from resolving too quickly into method. Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela on autopoiesis, Gregory Bateson's ecology of mind, Jesper Hoffmeyer's biosemiotics: cognition is not the acquisition of information about a world that exists separately. It is the structural changing of a system through its encounters. A living system does not receive data; it reorganises itself in the receiving. What a group can know is inseparable from what it is becoming.
The group that arrived in February was not the group that carried paper through ash in September. It showed in how they sat and in what they no longer kept between themselves and the room.
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What remained open
Programmes of this kind are built to demonstrate that something was transferred. What the work made visible is closer to the opposite: no design, however carefully assembled, covers everything that enters the room where a group is working. Something arrives that the frame did not anticipate. The capacity to receive it cannot be built in advance — only given somewhere to happen.
The ash fell for ten days. Some figures stayed where they were made. Some came apart. Some went home on the bus, in the seat beside the person who had made them. One cannot lift what is fragile alone.
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