ELISE
GOLDSTEIN

La SOURCE is an institution designed as a living artwork, operating as an international research center dedicated to “Love-Studies”. Sited on a restored 17th-century flax farm in Brittany, France (housing up to 14 people), the work comprises the total architecture of an environment [physical, social, methodological, and temporal] in which the conditions for radical creation are continuously generated and refined. Initially inspired by participation in a co-creative performance theory conference in Brussels organized by a.pass in 2012, The Tender Institute - La Source, as an experimental space asks: “How can an institution commit to tenderness as a fundamental principle - to shift with each arrival and departure from the container, remaining ever-responsive to continuously evolving constellations of actors within the frame, yet still sustain a coherent purpose and identity? Do institutions really need to be rigid to survive?” The project was launched in 2020, during the isolation of the pandemic, when the need for love became sharply evident through fear, estrangement, and political polarization.  Once a site was acquired, we began constructing an "art/life laboratory": a process-based structure in which the boundaries between artistic practice and daily existence dissolve, and in which the full complexity of human experience [somatic, emotional, relational, spiritual, intellectual] becomes the material of collective inquiry. Since then, the center has hosted 130+ artists, researchers, and creators from more than twenty countries, each entering a frame designed to catalyze transformation through shared presence and co-creative play. The conceptual core of La SOURCE is an insistence that love, as a force of orientation rather than sentimentality, constitutes legitimate and urgent terrain for rigorous artistic research. This choice is deliberate and uncomfortable. Love has been systematically exiled from institutional discourse: dismissed as naive, exploited by commerce, drained of its unifying capacity. La SOURCE is a rescue mission, and a laboratory for developing the methodologies through which love might be studied, practiced, and transmitted. The institution itself is the primary artwork: its ethos, its rhythms, its spatial and social architecture, its accumulated protocols for creative intervention, and its collective life.​ The methodology developed onsite, Integrative Inquiry, asks participants to engage all faculties [rational and nonrational, critical and devotional] in the creative act. Research here is understood as practice-led, embodied, and relational. The site operates through a participatory frame in which there is no clean division between host and guest, provider and consumer; all residents participate in the care of the grounds, the animals, the collective spaces, and each other. This co-creative structure is not a utopian performance but an ongoing experiment in what forms of attention, rhythm, and reciprocity invite emergence to occur. The outputs of La SOURCE are multiple: the encounters and connections themselves; the practices invented and shared; the video archives, research logs, and documentation that accumulate across seasons; and a forthcoming publication gathering the insights of this sustained inquiry. But the primary artwork is the situation itself, its ongoing duration, its capacity to generate conditions in which something real can happen. In a culture that prizes product over process and visibility over vision, La SOURCE returns to the root: a place where artists can access the love and freedom that propelled them toward creation in the first place, and where that access can be collectively held, studied, and deepened. The work at La SOURCE has been created (and made possible) through collaboration with coordinators: Remi Confida, Windika Lemercier, Virginie Michel, Pierre Etienne Raby, Radu Lazar and Cléo Munro.

The TEMENOS is a nested work within La SOURCE: a durational structure for intensive art/life research, now in its fourth iteration. The name derives from the Greek term for a sacred precinct, a terrain "cut off" from conventional life, dedicated to an extraordinary purpose. In Jungian usage, the temenos is a space in which the unconscious can reveal itself and integration becomes possible. The fellowship has been designed as precisely such a container: an art incubator where radicality is understood etymologically - from the root. Each TEMENOS cohort gathers a small group of interdisciplinary creators (10-12 participants) who commit to living and working together within a shared frame. The first three cycles (2023–2024) were three-month containers; the current iteration (2025–2026) extends to a full year. The structure asks participants to engage two disciplines simultaneously:  the expression of Self - developing clarity in understanding, shaping, and articulating one's own world;  and receptivity to the Other - cultivating the capacity to perceive and engage worlds markedly different from one's own.  This double practice addresses what I consider the fundamentally reciprocal invitation at the root of all creation and all true meeting. The work operates through a skeletal score of practices:  - Seed Sourcing - a weekly co-writing / storytelling ritual in which fellows access the deeper currents beneath surface experience.  - the Process Window - a weekly structured space for sharing work-in-progress without the burden of formal critique, nor the pressure of production.  - Open Labs - twice-weekly participant-led workshops that circulate methods and capacities across the collective.  These structures form the living architecture of the fellowship. There is no imposed curriculum; simply a light frame within which coalescence becomes possible. Central to the TEMENOS is what I call FieldCraft: the subtle, disciplined art of creating and maintaining the conditions in which confluence can happen. Atmospheres are not incidental; they are shaped by attention, rhythm, attunement, and attitudes. The fellowship operates through an exploratory, proposition-based structure in which all gatherings beyond the minimal frame are initiated by fellows themselves. Everyone cares for "the vibe" and what it generates. The mundane sites of collective life [the kitchen, the courtyard, moments of disagreement or personal collapse, resistances or hungers, celebration] become the primary sites of the research itself.  The implications of this work are immense. If we can hold both dimensions, Self and Other, in attentive balance, we become capable of facing the challenges of our time together: developing appreciation rather than fear of difference, anticipating the consequences of our creation rather than acting in ignorance, cultivating the forms of intelligence urgently needed to respond to the crises of our era. The TEMENOS is not a utopian performance of collectivity, but rather the daily enactment of creative agency within the ordinary. A living response to the multi-crisis of today, a contribution toward building futures founded on integrity, coherence, and generosity. The TEMENOS proposes that the future depends not on the construction of a single common world, but on our capacity to hold many worlds together. It is a work of art in the form of a situation: an ongoing experiment in what becomes possible when creators shape not only works, but new conditions for living.

The Reverence Solution examined reverence as a viable response to planetary crisis. The project operated on a central premise: that our collective emergencies stem not from a lack of solutions, but from a fundamental posture - an underlying orientation toward the world that no policy or institution can adequately address. Before developing ‘actionable strategies’ - we must search for a postural shift that will allow us to escape the logical system that produces these entangled crises to begin with. What if reverence is that shift? The work unfolded through allegory and archetype : an expedition team ventures into a subterranean cave in search of a forgotten source - an inexhaustible wellspring of insight. This fictional (and gamified) frame held ground for spontaneous, instinctual and native insight to articulate in non-explicative, discovery-based form: mornings devoted to phenomenological, philosophical, and theological study; afternoons to collaborative world-building through collective storytelling around a fire. The method insists that concept and experience remain inseparable, that ideas must be lived to be understood. The project brought together an international collective of thinkers, makers, and practitioners for a residential intensive of one month. Together, we asked what reverence is, what it demands of us, and what it might make possible. The Reverence Solution is a propositional experiment to imagine that “saving the world” cannot begin with re/action, but by finding a shared quest for a new cooperative mode of perception.

Monks and artists share an unlikely kinship: both have chosen to organize life around a point of reverence, departing from conventionality to give form to something they can be guided by but never fully possess - like a star in the sky.  The Monastic Lab tests how this kinship can become a methodology. Inside this Lab - the participants enter a shared frame of silence, ritualized phases of the day, and collective (albeit parallel) devotion; they adopt monastic technologies of attention to see what this transposition might yield for artistic process. The question is not whether artists can simulate religious life, but whether the structures that contemplatives have refined over centuries [such as constraint, rhythm, renunciation, regularity, and co-occupation of dedicated spaces] can function as creative catalysts when stripped of doctrinal content. The Lab is also an experiment in emergent collectivity. The frame is fixed; what arises within it is not. Participants bring their own points of guidance, their own practices, their own resistances. The structure holds them in proximity without dictating the outcome.  The frame is crafted and stable [the guidelines, scores and protocols], but what arrives within it is different with each iteration as it is filled and animated by passions and visions of each and all “monks” as they evolve in their work.

How do we discover what we most deeply long for - beneath the prescriptions of mind, beneath the stories we've been told about what is possible and what is not? The Storyverse Collective is a practice of collective storytelling designed to surface desire and locate the perimeters we draw around our own freedom. Participants gather before dawn around a fire, laptops open to a shared document, and take turns writing entries about themselves in third person - beginning in the exact here and now (this place, this morning, these people) and then suspending all natural, physical, and social laws. Anything can happen. Entries are read aloud; between turns, participants generate images to illustrate what has just been written and shared. This is not "yes, and -" practice. Paths CAN and DO contradict, collide, ignore, and interweave. The living can summon the dead. The impossible is welcome. What emerges may be mythic, fantastical, tender, quiet, mundane or strange - the point is to follow what excites, to practice sovereignty in the presence of others doing the same. The method reveals something that conversation cannot: the texture of another person's interior universe, experienced from within rather than reported from outside. The differences [in image, in tone, in imagery] allow participants to know one another in ways that years of friendship often fail to reveal. We see, first-hand, how radically different our worlds are. And how rarely we are invited to inhabit them together. 2024 - ongoing (over 40+ participants up until this points, many of who have organized spore-gatherings to continue this practice independent of facilitation)

The Transformatorium was a nomadic performance and experience-design structure dedicated to cultivating empathy through training the acuity of listening. The project hosted participative processes at sites where relational attention was urgent: refugee centers, schools, elderly care facilities, ecological activism camps, and cultural festivals. The work proceeded through a series of relational scores designed to slow perception and open channels of connection typically foreclosed by social conventions and fear of exposure or otherness. These included durational sound-based works, witnessing circles built on rigorous protocols of receptive silence, and somatic exercises exploring eye contact, touch, voice, and silence as communicative media. Each score proposed listening as an active, ethical practice. The Transformatorium entered contexts of need, and adapted its protocols to the specific social and institutional conditions accordingly. It operated at the intersection of performance, pedagogy, institutional intervention and social practice, investigating what forms of connection become possible when listening is treated as a discipline, and when the space of difference is held with deliberate care. The work prefigured ongoing concerns with co-creative methodology, the ethics of attention, and the design of conditions for genuine meeting.