The Nomadic Donbat Institute is the first phase of the Donbat Institute: a mobile and adaptable form of the Institute. It extends the research undertaken around Donbat by temporarily relocating the Institute within specific contexts: residencies, cultural venues, neighbourhoods, schools, community spaces, workplaces or vulnerable environments.

It is not about establishing a fixed institution or applying a pre-existing model to problems that have already been defined. On the contrary, the Nomadic Donbat Institute begins with the situations it encounters. It observes the social, economic, ecological, relational, institutional or symbolic imbalances affecting a given context, then seeks to develop proportionate, inventive and responsible responses.

This nomadic dimension reflects the Donbat method itself: detecting an imbalance, understanding what is at stake, identifying the people involved, the constraints, power relations, available resources and risks associated with an action, then experimenting with a response suited to the scale of the situation.

A Mobile Form of the Institute

This initial form makes it possible to test the Institute through practice before any institutional stabilisation takes place.

Depending on the situation, the Institute may become a laboratory, a temporary school, an Office of Imbalances, a mediation space, an action research platform or a social prototyping workshop. Its function is not simply to produce events, but to create the conditions through which a situation can be read, articulated, shifted and transformed.

The aim is to make the Institute activatable: able to move, adapt to different places, meet the people concerned, produce situated tools and transmit methods developed through experience.

Call for Situations

Each activation of the Nomadic Donbat Institute may begin with a call for situations addressed to residents, users, organisations, workers, artists, associations or anyone concerned by a particular context.

This call seeks to gather concrete needs, tensions, vulnerabilities, obstacles, forms of injustice or dysfunction. It is not about collecting complaints in the abstract, but about opening a space in which situations can be articulated, shared and analysed.

A collection box, a form, posters, public meetings or drop-in sessions may be used to gather these situations. From there, the Institute organises discussions with the people concerned in order to understand what can genuinely be addressed, at what scale, with which resources and within which ethical limits.

Applications of R.I.T.

The Nomadic Donbat Institute activates R.I.T. — Research, Intervention and Transmission — as an operational framework.

Within a residency, neighbourhood, school, cultural venue or community space, R.I.T. makes it possible to transform collected situations into lines of research, hypotheses for intervention and transmissible forms.

This application may take different forms: drop-in sessions, collective mapping, workshops for reading imbalances, mediation systems, situated interventions, solidarity meals or shared working spaces. Depending on the context, it may also produce publications, training sessions, public presentations, accounts of experience or documentary forms.

R.I.T. therefore becomes less a model to be applied than a way of activating the Institute. It enables a transition from an observed situation to a form of action, and from that action to an experience that can be mobilised again.

Donbat Training

Donbat training provides a collective framework for learning how to read a situation, identify an imbalance, understand the constraints surrounding it and imagine an appropriate response.

This training is not intended to transmit a fixed method. Instead, it seeks to activate or strengthen a capacity for attention, analysis and action. Participants may work with real situations, mapping exercises, intervention simulations, ethical discussions and transformation protocols.

The aim is to make Donbat shareable: not as a doctrine, but as a situated practice that others can adopt, adapt and relocate.

An Office of Imbalances

In its nomadic form, the Institute may operate as a temporary Office of Imbalances. It receives reported situations and sets to work on them.

Here, the word “office” does not refer to a conventional administration, but to an organised form of attention. It means giving a place, however temporary, to what often remains dispersed: known but unaddressed problems, latent conflicts, overlooked needs, everyday vulnerabilities, institutional contradictions or forms of precarity for which no framework for action exists.

The Office of Imbalances makes it possible to move from an individual perception of a problem towards a collective development of the conditions required for its transformation.

Possible Experiments

The Nomadic Donbat Institute may host different types of experiments depending on the contexts it encounters.

Interventions in schools may be considered where local partnerships make them possible, particularly around attention to situations of imbalance, collective responsibility, cooperation and the capacity to act.

The Institute’s La.Die Revolte — Solidarity Restaurant may be tested through weekly meals, provided that the necessary technical, economic and legal conditions are met. These meals make it possible to experiment with forms of hospitality, redistribution and encounter through food.

Shared working sessions may also be made available to artists, researchers, cultural workers or practitioners who do not have adequate working spaces. In this case, the Institute acts as a temporary infrastructure for support, resource sharing and cooperation.

Questions of Activation

The aim is not to deploy an already established programme, but to test the very conditions of its activation.

This raises several practical, methodological and ethical questions: how can an institute exist without a permanent location? How can situations be gathered without instrumentalising them? How can a host context be transformed into a space for action research? How can artistic practice, social intervention, transmission and documentation be connected? How can a situation be acted upon without simplifying it or overestimating the artistic gesture?

These questions define the working direction of the Nomadic Donbat Institute. They allow each residency, collaboration or host context to be approached as a field of experimentation, but also as a test of responsibility: what can be activated, with whom, at what scale, with which means and within which limits?

It is therefore not simply a matter of moving the Institute from one place to another, but of understanding what a place makes possible, what it prevents, what it reveals and what it requires us to reformulate.

Project Status

Project in progress.

Areas of Work

Nomadic institution
Action research
Call for situations
Office of Imbalances
Donbat training
Situated interventions
Temporary school
Social laboratory
Prototyping workshop
Solidarity restaurant
Shared working space
Situated documentation
Local cooperation
Proportionate transformation

Keywords

Donbat Institute
Donbat
Institutional nomadism
Invisual Art
Research
Intervention
Transmission
Residency
Situation
Imbalance
Cooperation
Practices of the Commons
Experimental institution
Social transformation
Method