The following page presents a lexicon of words, people and places related to this project.

Many approaches to the concept of ‘power’ have been built around the idea of institutional and governmental control (Krippendorf¹⁾, 1995). Despite these stances being useful to under-stand the complex web of power relations in the context of a project, for us ‘power’ finds special relevance as something referring to the individual and collective capabilities present and distributed throughout society (Foucault²⁾, 1980; Holloway³⁾, 2002). This implies taking into consideration situations of domination within society, yet focusing on and highlighting the capabilities of individuals and groups as means to break free from them. Following Holloway and Foucault, the focus on power is made on the ‘power-to’, as it is related to doing, instead of the ‘power-over’, which refers to conditions of domination: “Whereas power-to is a uniting, a bringing together of my doing with the doing of others, the exercise of power-over is a separation.” (Holloway, 2002, p. 29). The power-to is about my doing (action), but embedded within the doing of others, which brings forth the collective potential of power. Social and citizen movements are a clear example of how power can be exercised and not only resisted. Similar arguments seem to have driven the final speech of Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator (1940), when he said that the real power resides in men, not in one man, but in all men (human beings), for we are the ones who “have the power to build machines, to build happiness and to make life free and beautiful” (Chaplin⁴⁾, 1940).

In art and design practice, plenty of attention has been put on the produced objects (painting, product, project, performance, etc.), but very little has been said about the conditions that support them, that which allows them to stand. Celine Condorelli and Gavin Wade (2009) have precisely attempted to unpack the concept of ‘support’ (structures) by generating an archive of different initiatives and cases that illustrate the foregrounding of support in art and design (architecture) practices, as well as drafting a taxonomy to speak about it. Further exploring the concept of support in art and design practices (and research) may allow to foreground the role and agency of previously invisible actors (e.g. construction workers of a building, factory workers of a given product, etc.), shifting the focus away from the ‘object’ to the ‘relationships to context’. This means understanding and approaching the interconnected web of relations necessary for a given project to take place, as well as nurturing them to allow the project ‘to stand’ (Condorelli & Wade⁵⁾, 2009). The lens of support also allows shifting the focus away from art and design practitioners and researchers as the central actors of a given project, to the networks of trust within specific neighbourhoods or communities. In such case, projects take place thanks to a complex web of relations rather than to a single empowered person. This distribution of agency throughout a network results in “sustainable mutual support structures in the form of physical spaces, services, economic funds” and other resources that its members can rely on (Yank⁶⁾, 2015, p. 153).