SOSENS is the Social Sensibility Research Institute.

The Research and Developments about Social Sensibility explores the roots of creativity, human relationships, individual freewill and society development.

The term Social Sensibility has been coined together by Alessandro Rolandi and Guillaume Bernard in 2010 and it defines an original kind of embedded interaction between artists and real life contexts, such as daily working-life in the corporate world.

The Social Sensibility R&D department is dedicated to develop an organic kind of interaction between artists and individuals in the working place, articulated in the form of a R&D research department that serves as a transversal function within a company and/or an institution.

At present it is the first of such kind of department designed within the corporate world.

Through a constant presence in the company’s environment, artists and employees carry out creative research projects together, based on voluntary-based dialogical and practical interactions whose aim is to explore, tackle and act on internal relational dynamics and individual interests.

This interaction is built on the belief that the integration and constant exposure of artists and art practice to real life situations and systems, has a mutual influence on the all the viewers and actors involved, by both expanding and testing artists and art itself and by enhancing and nourishing people's sensibility both on the individual and on the social level.

Without giving art and art practice a precise purpose, ideology or goal (to avoid the risk to deprive art of its unique flexibility and capacity to exist within endless contradictory forms, concepts and practices), the department’s activity relies on the ‘collateral effects’ triggered by this non-necessary and non-mandatory encounter between art, life and work, through conversations, presentations, direct practice and informal teaching & learning  exchange.

The encounter between artists and employees, managers and workers is legitimized by a flexible structure, within which the rules of engagement need to be negotiated at all times.

People can chose to become art-users instead of only art-viewers, if they wish, as they can invent the way to engage with artists and art in a more direct, spontaneous, critical and egalitarian way.

A specific attention to everyone’s own story and experience, carefully re-elaborated and socially re-distributed in a difficult environment, such as the working daily-life context, through the complexity of an individual and collective creative dynamic, generates the potential for a unique, experimental shift in the circulation of knowledge and stimulation of social imagination.   

A Social Sensibility R&D Department named SOSENS R&D Department is a transversal team integrated in the organization's chart and directed by an artist.

The first SOSENS R&D Department was founded in Beijing in 2011 by Alessandro Rolandi at Bernard Controls China as a manager of the company to develop it. It is currently active in the Bernard Controls group in Beijing and in Paris.