Marine Thévenet

Artist led organisation, L’Amicale is a cooperative platform of live projects. We create and produce performances and live installations. We always thought content and form iterative to each others: in art projects as much as in the organisation itself, convinced that the producing tool as an influence to the creation itself. Created in 2010 by 3 artists and 2 producers, it is now a cooperative per se, with 12 artists, 4 producers, 1 director, 1 administrator, and a good number of artistic collaborators, where we share values and tools, tools being whether human, technical, financial or inspirational. Our backgrounds vary from visual art to performing art, from international producing to coop economics model engineering, from philosophy to self taught specialisation in orchids reproduction. Our artworks have toured locally (Lille/Bru) and internationally, in particular Germinal which is still touring across the globe.

As we believe in new ways of governance, as we believe that collaboration and cooperation bring more to our society, we transformed the organisation from a non profit ‘association’ to a proper coop where all the employees are take holders of the organisation. The cooperative model is now in our status, although has been in our values since the beginning. We are in the making, we are still inventing, we are even more than ever experiencing elements to make it work. We don’t know, we hit difficulties, but we still have faith.

RESHAPE echoes a lot of our questions, specifically when comes to the questions of flexible governance models and transnational. L’Amicale is based in Lille (F) and has a strong activity in Brussels (B), and the border hasn’t stop us to work and invent ways of being here and there. For instance, we have set up an Interreg program for art practitioners on the topic of work and poetry between Flanders, Flandres, & Lille; or imagined a bi-national producing model of the Flemish artist Diederik Peteers, in collaboration with SPIN.