This training seminar held on 12 December at the Château de Kerminy attracted strong interest fo Transformative Territories. It brought together around a dozen participants, including staff members from Concarneau Agglomération (CCA), artists, researchers and representatives of local associations, in a setting conducive to exchange and collective experimentation.

Framed around the question “How can the arts contribute to making a territory more liveable?”, the day built on the insights of the Transformative Territories programme. Its aim was to share methodological reference points drawn from artistic practices rooted in lived environments, capable of supporting fair and sustainable responses to ecological, social and democratic challenges.

The training introduced and discussed the concept of Transformative Artistic Practices (TAP). These refer to approaches whose primary objective is not the production of artworks, but intervention within the dynamics of a territory, over the long term and in close connection with lived environments. Discussions highlighted how such practices operate simultaneously across three complementary dimensions:

• Representations, by transforming ways of seeing, narrating and making visible issues that are often overlooked;
• Practices, through the experimentation of situated gestures (walking, cultivating, listening, celebrating, etc.) that become shared ways of inhabiting and caring for a place;
• Collective structures, by contributing to the evolution of institutional frameworks, rules of use and forms of territorial cooperation.

The territory was approached as a living matrix, at the intersection of ecological, social, political and cultural dimensions. Acting within a territory requires composing with a multiplicity of actors, uses, narratives, tensions and latent resources. In this sense, Transformative Artistic Practices provide a framework for strengthening the capacity for action of local communities and supporting a lasting appropriation of socio-ecological issues.

The Kampus-Kerminy Nourishing Plot served as the guiding thread of the day and as a concrete field of exploration. Developed within the Learning from Living Environments dynamic, this project illustrated how a situated artistic initiative can become a genuine infrastructure for territorial cooperation, articulating agricultural practices, research-creation, knowledge transmission and local alliances.

The structure of the day alternated between theoretical inputs, a sensitive exploration of the site and practical workshops. Participants worked successively on:

• identifying needs, challenges and transformative intentions;
• building engaged publics and territorial alliances;
• ongoing evaluation and the construction of durable commons.

These collective working sessions fostered the emergence of a shared vocabulary, common methodological reference points and initial pathways for transposition into other territorial, cultural or institutional contexts.

In conclusion, this introductory training demonstrated in concrete terms what artistic practices can achieve when they are embedded in lived environments: making invisible issues visible, transforming narratives, experimenting with forms of socio-ecological cooperation, and opening up perspectives for sustainable action at the intersection of arts, ecology and public policy.