This year, a new series of reading workshops will allow us to look collectively at the issue of "Performing Opposition", which will also serve as the title of the next Printemps des Laboratoires, an international event that will be held in June 2015 at les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers.

Workshop #1
After showing Dora Garcia’s film The Joycean Society as a lead-in to the rules for discussion that will be followed throughout the year in the reading workshops, this first meeting will look at extracts of a text by Michel Guet L'infini saturé: espaces publics, pouvoirs, artistes ("The Saturated Infinite: public space, power, artists", untranslated). In the "Performing Opposition" series, this approach will provide the opportunity to look at several issues that are key for public space – and its counterpart, private space – and to highlight certain changes that have come about as techniques changed through history. Some areas of discussion will be contemporary public space as saturated space, commodified space, space for communication and exercising power. Who holds this power, how does it work, what do we do with it, how do we make counterbalancing powers visible and active? What is the artist’s vision and role (or lack of a role) therein?


Performing Opposition
Remarkable oppositions are born in public spaces. Oppositions reconfigure the actions that are performed there either by artists or by activists, whose work makes these places visible.Through antagonistic situations which give rise to different forms of opposition, protest, appropriation and creation, open, shared places are created. These are the public spaces we wish to examine.
This series of 15 text analysis workshops will explore various contexts such as the demonstrations and uprisings that have been gathering steam over the last ten years and virtual space on the internet which has largely shifted the public space paradigm; it constitutes a tool to support and spread these revolts as well as a reserve of information and source of private data and the ideal platform for control.
We are interested in how artists work directly on these questions, leaving behind the realm of art institutions and favouring public spaces that contain the questions or let them overflow, inventing forms of protest and confrontation as tools of shared radical experience.

The reading workshops are open to all. They take place every two weeks, on Thursdays, between 4 to 6 pm, on inscription. To get the texts and the summaries of the sessions, as well as to participate, contact Clara Gensburger at c.gensburger@leslaboratoires.org

Dates: Thursdays 16 and 30 October, 13 and 27 November, 11 December, 8 and 22 January, 5 and 19 February, 5 and 19 March, 2, 16 and 30 April (from 4 pm to 6 pm)