Alexandra Baudelot is co-director of Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers since 2013, she works for several years as an exhibition curator, editor and author. In 2009 she created and managed the contemporary art platform Rosascape, an independent art centre based in Paris. At Rosascape she curated exhibitions with Katinka Bock, Ulla von Brandenburg, Raymond Gervais, Benoît Maire, Vittorio Santoro, Berger&Berger, Adrian Dan and produced artist books and editorial artistic projects. She is interested in production strategies, the artistic research process and reflections on the role of artwork and ways of sharing it with the public – through formats such as exhibits, performances, conferences, and publications – for all disciplines. In 2016 she will curate a serie of three exhibitions with Ulla von Brandenburg at The Power Plant (Toronto), The Darling Foundry (Montreal) and ACCA (Melbourne).
Rossella Biscotti is born in Molfetta, Italy (1978), she lives and works in Amsterdam and Brussels.
She studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Napoli (1998-2002) and has had residencies at the Rijksakademie Amsterdam (NL), CAC Vilnius (LT), Kunstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin and in 2012 a residency at Kadist Paris (FR).
Rossella Biscotti’s artistic oeuvre encompasses videos, performance, photographs and sculptures. They often illuminate the history and stories about people who become a source of reflection on individual or collective identity and memory. In Biscotti’s art, the starting point of a work is always a social or political event, possibly one in the distant past, which the artist encounters e.g. in the form of documentation or a newspaper snippet and subsequently investigates meticulously. Biscotti employs her works to transpose these found documents in a subtle interplay between concealed or multiple identities, fiction and reality, and overlapping layers of time. Often she connects the social or political event to personal sometimes heroic stories. Rossella Biscotti has shown her work in various international exhibitions and venues including: solo exhibitions at the Museion Bolzano, WIELS Brussels (2014), Haus Esters Krefeld (2014), Secession Vienna (2013), De Vleeshal Middelburg (2012) and CAC, Vilnius (2012), Galleria Civica di Trento (2010), and the Nomas Foundation, Rome (2009). She also participated in the Venice Biennal (2013), Istanbul Biennial (2013), Manifesta 9 Genk (2012), dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel (2012). She won a wide range of prizes and stipends, among in 2014 the Mies van der Rohe Stipend, in 2010 the Premio Italia Arte Contemporanea
Les Cahiers d’Enquêtes Politiques seront présentés par Rémi Eliçabe et Amandine Guibert, sociologues et co-fondateurs du GRAC, un collectif de recherche action coopératif, tous les deux travaillant particulièrement autour des problématiques urbaines, du travail social et de l’intervention politique ; par Josep Rafanell i Orra, psychologue clinicien ; et enfin par François Thoreau, chercheur postdoctorant du FNRS au centre de recherches Spiral, à l’Université de Liège (Belgique), dans le cadre du projet GIGS (2015-2018), où il s’intéresse aux aspects politiques de la médecine génomique. Ses intérêts de recherche concernent les politiques des sciences et des programmes de politique scientifique ou la gouvernementalité des dispositifs. Il invite à une pratique de l’enquête, au sens le plus large de ce terme, c’est-à-dire qui peut être approprié par tout un chacun ou collectivement, indépendamment d’une formation scientifique. C’est dans cette perspective qu’il s’engage dans des projets collectifs comme les cahiers d’enquête politique, des processus de rédaction à plusieurs mains (on en a compté jusqu’à 16) ou encore dans un jardin communautaire.
Jean-François Chevrier, is an alumnus of the École normale supérieure, a holder of the ‘agrégation’ in Modern Literature and a historian and art critic. He has been teaching at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts since 1988. Founder and editor in chief of Photographies journal (1982-1985) and general advisor for Documenta X (1997), he has written numerous texts on exchanges between literature and the visual arts in the twentieth century, on the history of photography, and art since the 1960s. He has also published an essay on the art historian Jurgis Baltrusaïtis and has worked on urban art and architecture. Between 2010 and 2015 L’Arachnéen published seven volumes of his work. He has been working as an independent curator since 1987 and has developed a dozen international exhibitions and accompanying exhibition catalogues. At the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris, the seminar he has been running since 1994 gave rise to the “Des territories” exhibition in 2001, and an attendant journal catalogue (5 issues, 1999-2001). His recent exhibitions include: “Formes biographiques”(Reina Sofia Musuem, Madridand Carré d’art, Nîmes, 2014-2015, cat. Hazan), “Agir, contempler” (Musée Unterlinden, Colmar, 2016, cat. Artlys). Since 2005 he has been involved in a sustained dialogue with architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, and has collaborated with their agency on the museography of the extension of the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar, inaugurated in January 2016.
Anne Collod is a contemporary dancer and choreographer. Her work involves the remounting of choreographic works, linking the spectacular dimension, research and pedagogy, with a fi-ocus on utopias of the collective. She collaborates with American choreographer Anna Halprin and, among other projects, presented in 2008 a reinterpretation of one of the latter’s major works, Parades and Changes (1965), which has been touring internationally since and was awarded a Bessie Award in New York in 2010. She also obtained the ‘Aide à la Recherche et au Patrimoine’ from the French Ministry of Culture and and ‘Hors les Murs’ residency from the Institut Français for her project Danses Macabres, which gave rise to her 2014 piece Le parlement des invisibles. She is working on a new piece for 2016 titled Exposure. She is a founding member of the Dingdingdong collective, an institute for the co-production of knowledge about Huntington’s disease and is director of its Dance department. She is also a qualified Feldenkrais practitioner.
Florent Gabarron-Garcia est psychanalyste et chercheur associé (EA 5031 ERRAPHIS, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès). Il travaille également dans une équipe mobile de psychiatrie et en Cmpp. Philosophe et anthropologue de formation, il a d’abord enseigné la philosophie, puis a travaillé à la clinique de La Borde fondée par Jean Oury et Félix Guattari. Docteur en psychopathologie, il a enseigné à l’UFR d’études psychanalytiques de Paris VII plusieurs années et a coorganisé le séminaire utopsy (de 2007 à 2013). Membre de la revue Chimères fondée par Deleuze et Guattari - dont il a co-dirigé plusieurs numéros - il a publié plus d’une quinzaine d’articles dans plusieurs revues où il s’agit de penser les rapports entre clinique et politique.
Dora García is artist, teacher and co-director of Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers since 2013. Her work has been shown in major contemporary art institutions, including the MACBA in Barcelona (2003), the SMAK in Gent (2006), the GfZK in Leipzig (2007), the Kunsthalle in Bern (2010), the Spanish Pavilion of the Venice Biennale (2011). She has also taken part in several biennales, for instance in Istanbul (2003), Sydney (2008), Lyon (2009), São Paulo (2010), DOCUMENTA 13 (2012), and Venice Biennale (2013 and 2015). Dora García reflects on the parameters and conventions governing the presentation of art, on the question of time (real and fictional) and on the boundaries between representation and reality. Through her work, the artist presents reality as multiple and questionable and explores the relationship between the artist, the work, and the public. She often draws on participation and performance.
Emilie Hermant is a writer, clinical psychologist and occasional photographer. She worked with Bruno Latour at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation at the École des Mines de Paris, with whom she produced a photographic sociology book titled Paris Ville Invisible (Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 1999), before working with Tobie Nathan’s team at the Centre Georges Devereux (psychological help centre, University of Paris-8) for nearly fifteen years. She is the author of an essay in psychology, Clinique de l’infortune — la psychothérapie à l’épreuve de la détresse sociale (Les empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2004) and four novels, two of which have been published: Réveiller l’aurore (Le Seuil, 2009) and Pas moi (Lanceur, 2010). She is co-director of Dingdingdong – an institute for the co-production of knowledge about Huntington’s disease.
Silvia Maglioni et Graeme Thomson are filmmakers and artists whose work interrogates potential forms and fictions emerging from the ruins of the moving image, and whose practice also includes the creation of visual essays, sound and videoinstallations, performances, eventworks, radio shows, tube-tracts and books.
Their first feature film, Facs of Life (2009), draws on encounters with a number of former students of Gilles Deleuze and with the video archive in which they appear, navigating between the terrains of documentary, fiction and essay to explore aspects of Deleuze’s philosophical legacy.
In Search of UIQ (2013) unfolds the story of Félix Guattari’s lost science-fiction screenplay, Un Amour d’UIQ («UIQ in Love»), through a series of fabulations and spectral re-enactments, in relation to key social and political transformations of our time from Autonomist struggles to the digital recoding of life.
Since 2005, the artists’ production (and, on occasion, resistance to production) has emanated from Terminal Beach, a constructivist zone for critical reflection, exploring possible new configurations of image, sound, text and politics, using cinema in expanded form to reactivate lost or forgotten archives and histories and to create new modes of collective engagement with contemporary thought.
Their work has been presented in a number of international festivals and art spaces including FID-Marseille, Bafici, Jihlava, Anthology Film Archives, Tate Britain, Serralves, Centre Pompidou, Redcat, MACBA, Ludwig Museum, Castello di Rivoli.
Magali Molinié is a clinical psychologist and lecturer of psychology at the University of Paris-8, a member of the laboratoire de Psychopathologie et Neuropsychologie (EA 2027), and associate professor at Cornell University in the Department of Romance Studies, Ithaca, NYS.
Linking data from the fields of psychology and anthropology, her research is concerned with mourning and the apparatuses through which human beings make the dead into social beings. She has published numerous articles on this topic and a book, Soigner les morts pour guérir les vivants, published by Le Seuil in the Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond series. She also edited the collective publication Invisibles orphelins, published in 2011 by Autrement, and contributed to the collective publication L’enfant confronté à la mort d’un parent, published by ERES in October 2013 and edited by Patrick Ben Soussan.
She has been actively involved in the French voice hearers network (REV France) since it was founded, and is currently its Vice Chair.
Tobie Nathan, born in Cairo in 1948, is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Paris-8, and is the main theorist and practitioner of modern ethnopsychiatry — a discipline that takes into account cultural allegiances, transformations, identities and migration. He was a student of Georges Devereux and completed his doctoral thesis under the latter’s supervision. In 1979 he established the first ethnopsychiatry practice at the Avicenne hospital in Bobigny (Greater Paris region). He has devoted most of his clinical work, research and teaching to the psychological health of migrant populations. He was director of the Bureau de l’Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie pour l’Afrique des Grands Lacs, in Bujumbura (Burundi) from 2003 and 2004; he also acted as cultural advisor in Israel and in Guinea-Conakry, from 2004 to 2011.
Tobie Nathan is the author of 27 essays, including Quand les dieux sont en guerre (La Découverte, 2015), L’étranger ou le pari de l’autre (Autrement, 2014), Philtre d’amour (Odile Jacob 2013), La Nouvelle Interprétation des rêves (Odile Jacob, 2011)… L’influence qui guérit (Odile Jacob, 1994).… And ten 10 novels: Saraka Bô (1993), Dieu-Dope (1995), 613 (1999) both published by Rivages… Qui a tué Arlozoroff ? (2010) and Ethno-Roman (2012) both published by Grasset (awarded the Prix Femina de l’essai 2012)… and his most recent publication: Ce pays qui te ressemble (Stock, 2015).
Grace Ndiritu, (Kenya / UK) studied Textile Art at Winchester School of Art, UK and De Ateliers, Amsterdam 1998-2000. Recent solo exhibitions include Klowden Mann in Los Angeles (2016), Glasgow School of Art (2015); La Ira De Dios, Buenos Aires (2014), Chisenhale Gallery, London (2007), the 51st Venice Biennale (2005) and Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2005). Recent solo performances and screenings include Museum Modern of Art, Warsaw (2014), Musee Chasse & Nature and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2013), ICA Artist Film Survey, London (2011), Artprojx at Prince Charles Cinema London (2009). Ndiritu has been featured in Apollo Magazine 40 Under 40 (2014); Phaidon: The 21st Century Art Book (2014) and her work is also housed in museum collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and Modern Art Museum, Warsaw and private collections such as the Walther Collection, New York and Germany. She took the radical decision in 2012 only to spend time in the city when necessary, and to otherwise live in rural, alternative and often spiritual communities. Her research so far has taken her to both Thai and Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, permaculture communities in New Zealand, forest tree dwellers in Argentina, neo-tribal festivals such the ‘Burning Man’ in Nevada, a Hare Krishna ashram and the ‘Findhorn’ New Age community in Scotland. Her experimental art writing has been published by Animal Shelter Journal Semiotext(e) MIT Press, Metropolis M art magazine and Oxford University Press.
Josep Rafanell i Orra is a psychologist and psychotherapist. He has been working in healthcare institutes and social work centres for over twenty years. His research stands at the crossroads between a pragmatic redefinition of a situated politics and an opposition to the workings of state management and economic inclusion. He is the author of En finir avec le capitalisme thérapeutique. Soin, politique et communauté, and has published articles in the following journals: Futur Antérieur, Alice, Chimères, Ecorev.
He co-founded a political inquiry collective focused on the construction and transmission of narratives relating to practices of collective autonomy. He is one of the facilitators of the Paris Hearing Voices network (REV) and, with others, he has established a self-support group for voice hearers and their supporters, family and carers. He has been running a workshop in Brussels over the past year, investigating care and social work practices with Juliette Béguin et Cédric Tolley.
Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, is a curator based in London. She is currently Curator of Temporary Exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection, where she is developing ‘This is a Voice’, a major exhibition on the complex psychological and physiological origins of voice production, and ‘Bedlam: the asylum and beyond’, exploring the rise and fall of the mental asylum and the post-asylum current environment. With an emphasis on interdisciplinary and performative practices, she has curated projects in the UK and internationally including ‘Bonnie Camplin: The Military Industrial Complex’, South London Gallery, co-curated with Anna Gritz, which earned the artist a nomination to the Turner Prize 2016; ‘Latifa Laâbissi, Écran Somnambule’, Freud Museum, London; ‘Inanimate Beings’, Casa Encendida, Madrid; ‘Nervous systems’, Kunsthal, Aarhus; and ‘The Cipher and the Frame’, Cubitt, London, co-curated with Fatima Hellberg. As a writer, she has contributed to Afterall, Concreta, Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers and various independent publications. She holds a master’s degree in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London.
Valérie Pihet’s work currently involves research and experimentation at the crossroads between the arts and social science. She previously worked in collaboration with philosopher Bruno Latour, with whom she co-founded the Programme of experimentation in arts and politics at Sciences Po Paris (2010-2014). She also set up the Sciences Po medialab and has coordinated exhibitions, including Iconoclash. Beyond the image wars in science, religion and art and Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy. She co-directs Dingdingdong – an institute for the co-production of knowledge on Huntington’s disease. She is a member of the orientation committee of the Forum des Vies Mobiles and the research group Parse (Platform for Artistic Research Sweden). She is president of Council, directed by Sandra Terdjman and Grégory Castéra.
Pticarus, is a curious, versatile and chaotic explorer who likes to share his discoveries. He likes to exhibit in a range of ways the findings of his expeditions in the deepest reaches of the world.
Veronica Valentini is a Barcelona-based Italian curator and researcher. She is co-founder and curator of BAR project, an independent, mobile, non-profit organization dedicated to promoting artistic exchange through a residency program for international artists and curators in Barcelona. Valentini’s area of interest lies in forms of subjectivity and production of today’s arts practitioners and her practice explores curatorial and artistic strategies combining exhibitions, performance, new technologies, live events and independent publishing. In 2014 she has been curator for «On Ambiguity and Other Forms to Play With» within the 2nd CAFAM Biennial, CAFA art museum (Beijing). In 2015 she takes part in the GENERATOR programme at 40mcube (Rennes, FR) and is curator in residence at BF15 contemporary art centre (Lyon, FR). Graduating with an MA in Theory and Art criticism from the PEI Independent Studies Programme at MACBA (Barcelona, SP) she has also attended the International Curatorial Training Program at Ecole du Magasin, Le Magasin-CNAC (Grenoble, FR) 2009-2010. Prior to this she graduated with an MA in Visual Arts/Historical and Artistic Heritage and a BA in Fine Arts both in Italy. Recently curated exhibitions and projects include: A(p)partment, Studio MAIO (Barcelona), GAP-Global Art Programme 2013 (Milan/Valence/Barcelona), The Original Doubt, Plataforma Revolver (Lisbon), The Inner Perimeter, Institut Français (Barcelona), Ouverture, Sala d’Art Jove (Barcelona), The inhabitant of the floor above, Homesession (Barcelona), SI-Sindrome Italiana, Le Magasin-CNAC (Grenoble, FR), How to act in the public sphere, Le Magasin-CNAC. http://www.veronicavalentini.org/.
Alexandre Vaillant, is a clinical psychologist and for the past three years has been facilitating a mutual help group (MHG), l’Entre Temps de Sanit Denis. He trained in institutional analysis at the La Borde clinic and l’École de la Neuville, among other institutions, and is also a member of the “À Plaine Vie” association which began a research-action project in 2015 concerned with the care and support of people suffering from psychological difficulties in the Plaine Commune area (Greater Paris region).
More information on the ‘Entre Temps’ MHG: https://gemsaintdenis.wordpress.com/.
Mathilde Villeneuve is co-director of Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers since 2013. Graduated in Modern Literature at the Sorbonne, Paris as well as in Humanities and Cultural Studies at the London Consortium. She lives and works in Paris. From 2006 to 2012 she coordinated the external projects of the Art School of Cergy (ENSAPC) and ran the exhibition space La Vitrine in Paris. Also as an independent curator and art critic, she has organized several exhibitions and writes for different magazines and artists’ catalogues. She is particularly interested in cinema and performance, in documentary approaches, the relation of artistic production to its environment and in the mechanics of writing history. In collaboration with Virginie Bobin she has edited in november 2015 the book “Re-publication” (Archive Books ed.), centered on artistic practices using process of re-publication to make forgotten or withheld information available (with Mathieu Abonnenc, Sally Price, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Rémy Héritier, Julien Prévieux, Marie Voignier, Lene Berg, Franck Leibovici…).