Cultural Practices in Transition

The cycle

With the cycle Cultural Practices in Transition, the association least promotes continuity between research, field experience, and knowledge transfer. least invites professionals, artists, and the public to take advantage of training sessions designed as opportunities for sharing. Based on the lessons learned by least throughout its practice, these moments are intended to be conducive to acquiring new tools for thinking about the transformation of professions from an ecological perspective. These are opportunities to take a step back and discover new ways of thinking that could enable us to improve practices in our respective fields. Join us for one or more of these sessions and let’s look ahead to the future of our professions together!

Being tigether

With Elisabete Paiva
25–26 February 2027
Hosted by the Museum of Art and History
at GamMAH, Geneva

This workshop proposes exploring different ways of working together, bringing individual experiences and perspectives into dialogue, and collectively developing ideas, reflections and forms of action.
How can we make room for a diversity of experiences and forms of knowledge? How can we organise exchanges, share the floor, facilitate decision-making and invent new ways of collaborating? How can we create spaces in which everyone can find their place and contribute to a shared reflection?
Through collective exercises and protocols inspired by artistic and curatorial practices, we will experiment with different ways of being and thinking together. These approaches will invite us to explore, in particular, how the organisation of space, the arrangement of bodies and the rules of the game shape our relationships and ways of collaborating: gathering around a table, occupying the floor, shifting positions and roles, opening up or transforming a space for discussion… These are just some of the situations that can give rise to different ways of meeting, listening to one another and taking part in a shared reflection.
These experiments will also provide an opportunity to question how we make room for others, share the floor and responsibilities, and collectively create spaces for decision-making. Listening, observing, noticing, unfolding, shifting and welcoming are just some of the verbs we will be adding to our basket.
The aim is not to acquire a method to be replicated identically, but rather to experiment with tools, attitudes and new reflexes that can help develop collaborative practices in different contexts, whether within a team, a collective or a shared project. No artistic practice or prior knowledge of the arts is required. The workshop is open to everyone, regardless of their field of activity, background or experience.

Elisabete Paiva is a performing arts programmer and curator with a particular interest in collaborative practices. As part of her PhD at NOVA FCSH (NOVA University Lisbon), she researches the political dimensions of programming and curating. She was Artistic Director of the Materiais Diversos festival in Alcanena (Portugal), curator of Forum Atos 2025/TNDM II (a travelling forum organised by the National Theatre of Lisbon, with events taking place notably in Madeira), and programmer for the educational departments of A Oficina (a cultural centre in Guimarães) and Guimarães 2012, European Capital of Culture.

Practical Information
Dates: 25–26 February 2027
Time: 9 am–12 pm and 1:30–5 pm
Venue: GamMAH (Promenade du Pin 5, Geneva, 3rd floor)

Registration here

When spring comes

Investigation / Fieldwork

With Nina Kennel
26–27 May 2027
Hosted by the Museum of Art and History
at GamMAH, Geneva

Can we perceive change as it happens? Its subtle shifts, its early warning signs, the clues that a transformation is underway? Or do we only understand it in retrospect, when everything seems to have already unfolded? Can we be observers in the midst of an event, or only afterwards, when all that remains is the retrospective effort to piece together the sequence of events?
How, for instance, do we recognise the first day of spring? And how do we remember it afterwards? The first day of spring, when, as the saying goes, violets begin to bloom. Violets, but also primroses, hyacinths, daisies and dandelions. When the trees, with one notable exception among maple species, are still bare. That is to say, well before the arrival of daffodils, irises and bladder campions, before the cherry trees, acacias, hawthorns and elderflowers, and long before that other defining day when the swallows arrive.
Drawing on the investigative practices of the social sciences, this workshop proposes exploring inquiry as an essential tool for approaching a territory, context or situation before embarking on a project. This preliminary period of exploration and attentiveness allows us to suspend our initial impressions, to make the familiar unfamiliar, and gradually discover the characteristics, uses, dynamics and narratives of an environment. Whether designing an architectural or urban project, developing an artistic intervention or working within a particular social context, conducting an inquiry helps us better understand what is already there before deciding what might come into being.
Through walking and exploring places, observing, meeting the people who inhabit them and investigating their histories, participants will experiment with different ways of building situated knowledge. We will reflect on the forms of knowledge produced through this process, the ways scientific and everyday expertise intersect, and the objects, traces and narratives that preserve the memory of past events and carry their recollection into the present. The aim is to develop investigative tools and habits that can be applied across different professional practices, learning how to look, listen and understand a context before intervening in it.

Four chapters
Sharpening the gaze: observation
Exploring knowledge: interviewing
Gathering traces: documentation
Crafting narratives: presenting and sharing

Tools
Field notebooks
Photography
Audio recordings

Nina Kennel is a researcher and writer. In 2025, she completed a PhD in social sciences focusing on the social practices of cinema. Drawing on anthropology’s practice of field observation, she seeks to describe objects by paying close attention to the material conditions surrounding them. Her recent publications include “S’armer de syllabes” in Les Dossiers du GRIHL, “ouais ouais” in the journal DISPERSANTX, and “hold behold” in the artist monograph Inner GLOw’ replica by David Douard, published by Zzz.

Practical Information
Dates: 26–27 Mayy 2027
Time: 9 am–12 pm and 1:30–5 pm
Venue: GamMAH (Promenade du Pin 5, Geneva, 3rd floor)

Registration here

Imagining Futures (past)

with Giulia Angrisani
March 19–20, 2026
Museum of Art and History, Geneva

This workshop explores how storytelling can bridge past and future, sparking critical thought and imagination.
Blending narrative techniques, speculative storytelling, and futurology-inspired interactive tools, participants will experiment with creating experiences that open pathways to possible futures. Stories—through both their content and form—shape how we live, feel, and inhabit the world.
Here, speculation is key: not as prediction, but as a way to resist cynicism and despair. Storytelling is approached as an act of struggle, resistance, and transformation—an exercise in decolonizing, deconstructing, and awakening imagination.

Giulia Angrisani is a documentary filmmaker and visual anthropologist. After studying sociology and anthropology at the Federico II University of Naples, she moved to Lisbon to research the anthropology of emotions with CRIA. She later specialized in Speculative Storytelling at ERG art school in Brussels. Her first feature-length film, Terra in vista, was screened at numerous festivals, universities, cultural organizations, and squats, including the 26th Jihlava Festival, where it received a special mention at Vienna’s Ethnocineca Festival. Her projects focus on intimacy as political force, weaving together visual research and creative documentary. She currently lives and works between Brussels, Marseille, and Naples.

Becoming Sub-Optimal (past)

with Olivier Hamant
May 12-13, 2026
Museum of Art and History, Geneva

Across science, economics, education, and culture, we are constantly asked to measure results. But the indicators we use capture only a narrow slice of reality. In the arts—especially in process-based and co-creative practices—measurement becomes even trickier: How do you assess the impact of a process that doesn’t aim for a finished product? How do you value an exchange, a transformation, an experience that resists numbers and tangible outputs?
Biologist Olivier Hamant invites us to embrace slowness, inefficiency, and robustness. Living systems do not thrive through maximum productivity, but through diversity, redundancy, and adaptability. Accepting a degree of chaos in our lives, he suggests, could inspire new ways of evaluating processes—tools that are more flexible, fair, and faithful to the complexity of our practices.

Olivier Hamant is a French biologist, research director at INRAE within the Plant Reproduction and Development Laboratory at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. He also directs the Michel Serres Institute and collaborates on interdisciplinary projects connecting science and the arts, focusing on complexity, resilience, and fragility in living systems. In 2024, he was elected to EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organization). He is also the author of several influential books, including The Third Way of Living Systems (2022), The Robustness of Life (2023), and On Incoherence: A Political Philosophy of Robustness (2023).

Listening to the Sourdough (past)

with Marie Preston and Julie Bertrand
October 10–11, 2025
Four banal de Vollèges (VS)

How can we practice real transdisciplinarity—not just placing disciplines side by side, but letting them mingle and cross-pollinate in meaningful ways? How do we build dialogue between such different vocabularies as those of an artist, a baker, a scientist, or a cultural worker? And how can art not only enrich scientific research but also shift its frameworks by introducing new ways of perceiving and imagining?
Artist Marie Preston, drawing on her long experience with research, including that with agricultural engineer Lauriane Mietton, and artistic collaboration, will lead a two-day breadmaking workshop together with Julie Bertrand, farmer-baker. Designed as a space for investigation and collective exploration, the workshop forms part of “Territoire du levain”, a transdisciplinary research project bringing together bakers, facilitators, researchers, educators, and artists.
Through sourdough—not just as metaphor, but as a more-than-human partner, deeply rooted in the territories and communities that nurture it—we will question production dynamics and experiment with concrete ways of “making in common” across disciplines and skills.

Marie Preston is an artist and associate professor at Paris 8 University (TEAMeD / AIAC). Her practice blends art and research, creating works and experiential documents together with people who are not necessarily artists. In recent years, she has focused on baking practices, open schools, libertarian and institutional pedagogies, as well as women working in care and early childhood.

Locating Oneself (past)

with Laurent Pichaud
November 17–18, 2025
Museum of Art and History, Geneva

The work of choreographer Laurent Pichaud centers on the relationship between the body and its environment. Through his research, he explores, via practices of observation and site-mapping, how to interact and coexist with places and their inhabitants—human and more-than-human—by developing approaches deeply rooted in context.
In dialogue with the museum, we will embody ways of questioning and deconstructing the functions, invitations, and reciprocal availabilities between space and body: an exercise in presence that aims to transform our practices. This exploration will draw on the tensions inherent to the museum, moving through its diverse environments and uses, including its extended perimeter. The workshop will unfold over two days inside the museum; part of the second day may also take place outdoors, weather permitting.
This workshop will provide us with sensitive tools to rethink presence, inscription, and collective action, considering movement as a tool for attention and resonance with place—even beyond the artistic framework.

Laurent Pichaud is a choreographer with x-sud art/site (Nîmes), a performer with various other choreographers, and associate research artist with the Dance Department at Paris 8 University. His creations often situate choreography in non-artistic spaces—community projects, site-specific works—opening choreographic practice onto broader societal questions. In 2025, he is artist-in-residence at the Bob Calle Documentation Center of Carré d’Art – Museum of Contemporary Art, Nîmes.