Interview
Pierre Della Negra, by lepetitbanc.fr
A place of life for young people in search of meaning
An interview with Pierre Della Negra, teacher and founder at Foyer Michaël
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How would you define the Foyer Michaël in a few words ?
The Foyer Michaël is above all a living space in common for people who ask questions about the meaning of their lives. Students are invited, for nine months, to participate in a pedagogical action at the same time social, artistic and cognitive, with the greatest respect of their personality. Deep and lasting changes can then take place, so that this year becomes a turning point.
« Être perçu et percevoir, c’est exister tout simplement, par delà ses qualités et ses défauts. »
Who are the young people who come to spend a year Foyer Michaël and what are their main motivations?
Most of the people who decide to undertake this training go through a crisis in the good sense of the word. The aim of the Foyer is to help students find what they want to do, and to give them the strength to dare to do it. The meeting is the basis of this training. Paradoxically, being "cut off" from the world, being "isolated" for nine months, intensifies this social bond! This situation works wonders when people dare to show themselves. It puts the student in a particular state in which he can bravely ask himself the question: "Who am I at the bottom?" To be perceived and to perceive is simply to exist, beyond his qualities and faults. The experiences lived within the group, through exchanges, the sharing of daily tasks and participation in events that punctuate the course of the year (biographical evenings, festivals in connection with the seasons, the creation of shows ...) prepare many artistic and craft practices. The artistic dimension is essential, it is our anchor. Our teaching would like to be at 100% artistic. Everything should be, in a way. Art helps us to be more present, to bring about in us a sort of finer, more fluid intelligence, to bind the inner life and the outer life. We follow the movements of life in forms, sounds, music ... The acquisition of knowledge and knowledge, self, the world and the environment are put at the service of a living thought.
A living thought?
« L’art nous aide à être plus présent, à faire advenir en nous une espèce d’intelligence plus fine, plus fluide, à lier la vie intérieure et la vie extérieure. »
Yes, thought can be alive! It is even the condition to understand more intensely the world, the real, from itself. It is what gives us the opportunity to rebuild a link with nature. This thought is alive not because it is taken by ideas, but because it follows the movement of life. The individual is also discovered by entering the rhythms of the living. To enter the rhythmic life is to connect oneself, to feel that one is no stranger to external things, to go beyond the break between oneself and the world and to re-establish contact with life itself. By celebrating the holidays of the year we can connect to the cycle of the seasons. This research is festive, cultural, ecological, artistic, spiritual and in harmony with natural rhythms. To find, with the help of a healthy social life, an artistic activity and the exercise of a living thought, the sense of each individuality, that is the great project of Foyer Michaël !
Excerpt from remarks by Nathalie Calmé
for Alliance Review No. 26