Nurturing creativity despite distance: the ambivalent metawork of creative professions in the COVID-19 era[« Nourrir » sa créativité malgré la distance : le métatravail ambivalent des métiers créatifs à l’ère de la COVID-19]

From a critical perspective and based on a comprehensive approach, this contribution intends to initiate a reflection on creative work in the context of ovid 19 on people working in the creative industries. Individuals working in these sectors are often self-employed workers with various precarious contracts, being responsible for their own employability, with reference to the concept of "self-production" proposed by André Gortz. We mobilize the concept of "meta-work", which means work allowing work according to Salzman & Palen (2004), to understand how nurturing one's creativity becomes a tool of the "meta-work" of workers who must produce their own employability. Our empirical data resulting from qualitative interviews with six people working in the creative industries in Quebec and in France made it possible to identify axes of analysis, through a method of grounded theory. This allowed us to understand the nurturing of creativity as a condition of employability through the prism of what we call "creative meta-work". This research, taking place in the distant context of the covid- 19, revealed that the creative professions would have been more affected than those of other industries, since the distance made even more difficult the 'creative meta-work' of nurturing their creativity during informal experiences and interactions.