APPROACHING CREATION THROUGH EXPERIENCE

Abstract

Considering the experience of acts considered by subjects as the most significant of their existence (creating, acting on oneself, undertaking, establishing a love relationship, etc.) presupposes the availability of tools for analyzing the configurations of activities in play, but also the constructions of meanings/donations of meanings operated around them in the paths of the subjects and in their interactions. This is the path explored by a collective research project, undertaken in 2018 by the Unesco Cnam Formation and Professional Practices Chair, extended by the Unesco Chair for Professional Training, Personal Construction and Social Transformation at the Institut Catholique de Paris. It focused on the transversal issues of creative experiences in social and professional life, from the artistic/cultural to the industrial/organizational. Within the framework of a shared anthropology of activities, crossing the construction of activities and subjects, this research associated scientific and professional partners, and aimed at the construction of analysis tools, usable by/for research, training, and the optimisation of actions. The experiences analyzed were identified in different professional fields based on accounts of experience collected in the research process itself or in publications and produced in different contexts: exchange workshops, biographical interviews, explanatory interviews, testimonies, observations or discussions in the field, public seminars, reading groups. The transcribed verbatims provided information on the experiences in the very moments of creation, mentioned in this article, and on the experiences of creators as a life course, on the communication of these experiences in a support/training situation. The research establishes the joint character of the transformations carried out and defines creation as a joint transformation of the product of the activity, the activity itself and the subject in activity.