OuViePo was born from three sentences.
The first, by Robert Filliou: “Art is what makes life more interesting than art.” The second, by Joseph Beuys: “Jeder Mensch ist ein Kunstler“, every human being is an artist. The third, from the Nguni Bantu proverb: Ubuntu, I am what I am because of who we all are.
Three sentences. Three convictions. One project.
The central idea is simple, almost insolent: to draw inspiration from OuLiPo, the Workshop for Potential Literature, founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and Francois Le Lionnais, not to constrain writing, but to constrain life itself. To take Perec’s formal rigour, Calvino’s combinatorial logic, Queneau’s mathematical discipline and apply them not to the blank page but to everyday existence. To the body. To time. To objects. To relationships. To urban space.
OuLiPo had understood something essential: constraint does not imprison creation, it liberates it. By reducing the field of possibilities, it forces the author to find what they would never have sought otherwise. Georges Perec wrote an entire novel without ever using the letter E, and that novel, A Void, is a work of art. Not despite the constraint. Because of it.
OuViePo starts from the same principle, but shifts the terrain. It is no longer language that is constrained. It is life. The daily gesture. The way you walk down a street, photograph an object, count your days, follow a stranger, listen to what you never listen to. Each constraint is a protocol: precise, reproducible, open. Someone reads it. Someone does it. Someone leaves a trace. And starts again.
This project doesn’t address anyone in particular. It addresses everyone. There is no target audience, just people who haven’t yet found their constraint. A trainer in career transition, a bored teenager, a retiree who hasn’t touched a pencil in forty years, a developer who has forgotten they have a body. Beuys was right: every human being is an artist. Most simply don’t know it yet.
Ubuntu says the rest: no one creates alone. OuViePo is an “ouvroir”: a collective workshop. The constraints are proposals, not commands. The traces are responses, not performances. And the whole, gradually, becomes something that resembles a shared work.
Three sentences. That’s enough to begin.