Even if we were content to think of the communal experience within a specific historical framework - let's say: the communes of medieval Italy - it would seem necessary to identify all the surreptitious meanings of what commune means. For the communal experience is also that of the more or less pernicious effects of transparency: through them, different situated experiences of the gathering of bodies are discerned or confused, and the communal experience is also the piling up of accumulated experiences. This is why this history is, from the outset, a history of places, and of the capacity of places to create the common place. But it could just as easily be said to be a visual history from the outset. That's why this general introduction, after setting out a few proposals for a collective inquiry, will take a detour into a singular adventure in archiving different ways of making common ground around the world: that of Albert Kahn's "Archives de la Planète". The images in Albert Kahn's collection convey a " lieu commun " where the desire to bring together the heterogeneous takes shape, in the Foucauldian sense: "This word must be understood as closely as possible to its etymology: things are 'laid down', 'posed', 'arranged' in sites so different that it is impossible to find a space for them, to define a 'common place' beneath them"(L'Archéologie du savoir). The image, as a unitary space-time in which we can "lay down" the world and embrace it in a single synoptic and panoramic gaze, becomes the medium for a demonstration of the common. In this way, it responds to Siegfried Kracauer's "material reality", for whom making visible, through film and photography, "the material environment at our disposal" by extending it in all directions "virtually" produces a shared sense of a world that is "our home" and, more broadly, enables us to interrogate the "communal experience" as an experience of the image of others.
