„All our divisions cannot undo the fact that we are in common, all of us.“
This claim is made by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy in his text on „The Confronted Community“ (orig. 2001). What he aims for is radical: a new thinking of community by which community is not understood as being based on having something in common – a religion, a nationality, etc. – but on being in common.
In this understanding community does not appear to strive for completion, homogeneity or totality but on the contrary: Community, Nancy insists, is necessarily open and uncompleted. It is not a state, but a happening. A question, a task, a challenge.
Following up Nancys thinking of being-in-common – and in conversation with him – our film sets out to search for and explore various forms and (maybe) a new meaning of communality, of community: open, heterogeneous, always in motion. In the city and on the countryside, in everyday practices, in community-based projects, in the arts.
The film takes the form of an essay as this genre has a lot in common with the understanding of community we are looking for: posing a question more than an aswer, exploring, projecting itself onto an unknown future, in a open form.
