The Institute of Donbat is an artistic, civic and research-based initiative dedicated to the exploration, formalisation and transmission of Donbat: a practice of detecting imbalances — social, ecological, economic, relational or symbolic — and initiating situated processes of transformation.

The word Donbat is a neologism. It combines the French word don — gift, giving, donation — with combat or combattre — struggle, to fight. Yet Donbat does not refer to confrontation in the usual sense. It proposes a form of struggle based on giving, attention, responsibility and transformation. To “donbat” is not to fight against someone, but to engage with a situation in which something is blocked, damaged, neglected or unequally distributed, and to invent a proportionate response.

Rather than producing isolated artworks, the Institute develops protocols, interventions, collective situations and forms of mediation that address concrete conditions of coexistence. It operates at the intersection of artistic practice, social inquiry, public intervention and experimental institution-making.

The Institute of Donbat is conceived as a nomadic and evolving structure. It can take the form of a temporary office, a field laboratory, a school, a platform for collective research, or a place where local tensions, needs and fragilities are gathered, articulated and transformed into shared forms of action.

Its work is organised around three main areas: research, interventions and transmission. Through these, the Institute investigates how artistic practice can move beyond representation and become a method for reading situations, redistributing attention, activating common capacities and inventing situated responses to specific imbalances.

The Institute does not aim to repair the world in an abstract or heroic sense. It seeks instead to create conditions in which people, places and institutions can re-examine their relations, test modest but meaningful shifts, and develop new forms of responsibility, cooperation and agency.

As part of Jérémie Pujau’s broader artistic practice, the Institute of Donbat extends previous research into public space, invisual art, minimal intervention and the political dimension of relational forms. It proposes art not only as an object or image, but as a situated process capable of acting within the fragile structures of shared life.