Leaving the house in the presence
The lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 ultimately revealed our vital need to go out and share collective moments. This experience questions the meaning of presence and cultural action today.
Forced domestic withdrawal
The mandatory lockdowns imposed on populations during 2020 and 2021 led some of us, particularly those who benefited from sufficiently spacious living quarters, to develop a new form of deeply internalized presence. Digital networks allowed us to maintain connections while staying at home, even creating a trend toward domestic withdrawal perceived as reassuring, while going out represented a potential health danger due to encounters with others.
When we dared to go out, we had to respect a distancing qualified as “social” rather than “physical.” This designation is questionable, especially since it would have been necessary to scientifically demonstrate that the virus was actually transmitted according to these modalities. Fantasies and generalized fears thus orchestrated this reinvestment in domestic space.
From freedom to authorization
Paradoxically, during vaccination campaigns and the health pass rollout, many consented to vaccination so as not to lose their “freedom” of movement. This terminology proves inappropriate: freedom, by essence, is precisely defined by the absence of required authorization. We were facing a prohibition on movement, and the health pass constituted only an expanded authorization to move about. Thus, it was by no means a return to freedom, but rather an authorization regime, which is the opposite! We had shifted from a fundamental freedom regime to an exception regime based on authorization, a consequence of a state of emergency managed in a military manner to respond to a crisis that was not, however, military in nature.
Thus, after reinvesting in the home during lockdowns, everyone clearly observed that to be present to oneself, that is, to exist fully beyond professional activities, we also need to leave our homes and leave behind fear, otherwise the health pass would not have been so successful.
The vital need for collective presence
Frequenting cafés, attending performances, practicing activities, visiting friends, following sports competitions, engaging in amateur artistic practices: the evidence is clear that existence cannot be limited to confinement. The incarceration of people convicted of disturbing social order illustrates this truth: the punishment lies precisely in the deprivation of freedom of movement. What they recover upon release is, above all, the possibility of leaving their homes.
While the lockdowns might have led us to believe we could adapt to a life without movement or outings, the experience profoundly destabilized us. We tried to organize ourselves accordingly, only to ultimately find ourselves unable to live this way. Cultural offerings, concerts, performances, cinemas, therefore retain all their relevance and raison d’être, whether in public or private venues, because they respond to a profoundly human desire.
This desire to circulate, to go out, to dialogue with the world through the movement of our bodies remains fundamental. Leaving one’s home always constitutes an act of presence to oneself. This departure can also take on a collective dimension: demonstrating, joining a group, defending a particular worldview.
In the field of cultural offerings, which is my profession, the primordial element to consider remains, in my view, this active, transformative and constructive presence, both personal and collective. The collective presence of participants truly creates the event. Artists on stage know this well: they intensely feel the presence of the audience.
This shared presence generates absolutely unique moments, capable of marking memories forever, all the more memorable because they are experienced collectively. Certainly, we also retain personal memories experienced outside our homes in solitude. Nevertheless, collective presence in public space shapes something irreplaceable, which cultural actors excel at orchestrating.
Rethinking cultural hospitality in light of experience
However, the development of reinforced domestic presence now requires articulating cultural offerings with more human and respectful attention toward each individual. It becomes fascinating to rethink these offerings by placing greater importance on each person’s presence outside their home, in this collective dimension. This reflection follows in the line of John Dewey’s fertile thinking and pragmatist philosophers, notably in Art as Experience (1934).
For Dewey, art is defined as the experience lived by the human being in its emotional dimension, and not as an external artistic object. Art exists only through our lived experience: contemplating a natural landscape with joy constitutes an authentic artistic experience, even in the absence of an artist. Respecting more deeply the presence of each person in all aspects of the hospitality we offer outside the home seems essential to me for refounding the meaning of cultural action. This attention begins from the moment of the access journey and reception. How long do people wait in line, and under what conditions? How are directions formulated? Do visitors feel legitimately authorized to enter these places? Do these spaces seem truly accessible to them? This is the starting point.
Attention to others must be multiplied.
Presence as the fundamental grounding of our being in the world
Presence constitutes this fundamental grounding that connects us to ourselves and to the world, this quality of attention that transforms lived experience into inhabited consciousness. To be present is to resist the centrifugal forces that disperse us - the imminence that projects us into urgency, the denial that cuts us off from reality, the social injunctions that distance us from our interiority. Presence is neither withdrawal into oneself nor fusion with the exterior, but this creative tension between inner grounding and openness to the world. It is cultivated through paradoxical adaptation that requires sometimes absenting oneself to better find oneself again, through the complex geography of our inner states that vary according to contexts, through resonance with the waves that pass through us. Faced with drama that fractures, submission that empties existence, old age that isolates, presence becomes resistance and reconstruction. It is what allows us to transform the unexpected into opportunity, to maintain our integrity in turmoil, to create connection where solitude reigns. Cultivating one’s presence ultimately means offering oneself the present of the present moment, the source of all authentic transformation.
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