Guy Debord, 1955 (?) “Psychogeographic guide of Paris: edited by the Bauhaus Imaginiste Printed in Dermark  by Permild & Rosengreen – Discourse on the passions of love: psychogeographic descents of drifting and localisation of ambient unities”

The OUANPO (Ouvroir d’ANthropologie Potentielle), anthropological variation of the OULIPO brings together researchers, artists or research-creators associating human sciences and artistic creation, anthropology and performance *. We think of artistic projects that draw on the toolbox of ethnography but also ethnographic approaches that operate an artistic lever.

The OUANPO considers the “field” of the ethnologist as a performance exercise, by approaching its ethnographic methods not only as information gathering processes, occasions to produce encounters,  moments creating genuine social situations that make a form emerge, and that Joseph Beuys could have called a “social sculpture”.

We will thus focus on the creative dimension of research in anthropology in the diversity of its states: gaseous or solid, literary or plastic, stage or game, academic or FLUXUS, etc.

OUANPO multiplies “situations” that provoke new encounters, and encourage alternative ways of producing knowledge, generate new formats, and promotes the emergence of new heuristic:epistemic concepts, at the crossroads of genres. Each time it is a question of opening a space of action and thought, which proceeds from the overcoming of the disciplinary, institutional, cultural, generational partitions.

OUANPO produces interventions, object theatre, trails / tours, activations, museum installations / mediations, urban explorations, psychogeographic wanderings, film productions, choreographies, musical creations, conversations, lunches (under the grass), meetings, conferences, workshops and various programs…

OUANPO favours small-format actions, from the salon conference to an urban stroll : actions in situ, outside the walls and all forms of improvisation and situationist “dérives”.

This Workshop for Potential Anthropology is a truant school, une utopie, a heterotopy that proposes to explore the potentials of anthropology, the encounter of art or as art, and which proceeds from the performance. As such, this heterodox approach will not fail to raise polemics, especially because of its hybrid nature, so happily controversial.

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OUANPO acronym in French of Ouvroir d’anthropologie potentielle (=Workshop for Potential Anthropology)  shares, of course, a family trait with the OULIPO (Ouvroir de Littérature POtentielle) replacing Sélitex (for “experimental literature seminar”). The term “potential” is used in the sense of what is possible, achievable if one follows certain rules. All these works are given for object of investigation the work under constraint.