These two days will enjoy the musical accompaniment of Alexey Asantcheeff (piano) and Jan Mech (musician, singer), Sybille Cornet, Adva Zakai, Yael Davids (artists).

Free entrance on reservation: please tell us if you are booking for Saturday and/or Sunday, and if you want to stay for Saturday dinner, at reservation@leslaboratoires.org and +33 153 561 590
(for the dinner, there is a 8€ participation, including 1 drink)

HALL

10.30 am. Breakfast
1.30 pm Lunch break (Food Truck)
5.30 pm. Break

8.00 pm. Dinner, with Alexey Asantcheef (pianist), Jan Mech (musician, singer) and Sybille Cornet (artist). Performance by Dieudonné Niangouna (author, director). A participation of 8€ is asked, including drinks.

MAIN ROOM (Grande Salle)

11.00 am. FAQ, Pour Travailler Toujours (To Work Forever)
Performance by Abäke (graphic collective) and Ève Chabanon (artist, head of publications at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers)

     Mack the Knife (Moritat von Mackie Messer), Threepenny Opera, Kurt Weill and Bertholt Brecht

11.30 am. The Work of art at work
Conference by Barthélémy Bette (sociologist). How do art events in exterior work places generate reflection on artists and their work? Social and cultural differences in these professional worlds raise questions about artists’ social path, their representations, their status within society and the aesthetic codes they use.

     Song of the Insufficiency of Human Struggling (Lied von der Unzulänglichkeit des menschlichen Strebens), Threepenny Opera, Kurt Weill and Bertholt Brecht

12.30 pm Theses On Art, Alienation And Labour
Conference by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, followed by a discussion with Ellen Blumenstein and Dora García. Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen is a professor and researcher at the University of Copenhagen, department of art and cultural studies. He has written a number of articles on Situationist art (particularly Danish) and interventionist art (which aims to impact social and political life, or as it says, the difficult fusion between art and politics). Artist groups involved in forms of political action, such as the Surrealists, the Situationists, the Art Placement Group and the Art Workers Coalition will be the subjects of the conference. Ellen Blumenstein is now the director of the contemporary art centre KW in Berlin, but in the past she was one of the people behind the “Haben und Brauchen” (“To Have and to Need”) initiative,  which defines itself this way: “‘Haben und Brauchen’ seeks to defend, both in the field of art as well as in neighbouring fields, a platform for discussion and action. The aim is to establish an awareness of what distinguishes the artistic forms of production used in Berlin in the past decade or so and how these forms of art can be preserved and developed.” The “Haben und Brauchen” initiative works to explore the paradoxes that underlie the concepts of commons, labour, the work of artists and the urban environment.

     Second finale of Threepenny, What Keeps Mankind Alive? (Denn wovon lebt der Mensch?), Threepenny Opera, Kurt Weill and Bertholt Brecht

2.30 pm The rejection of work today
Conference by Maurizio Lazzarato (sociologist, philosopher).

3.30 pm. Reject: on art, work and politics
Discussion with Francesco Matarrese (artist), Mattia Pellegrini (art critic, curator, artist) Stephanie Noach (curator, art critic) and Guillaume Désanges (art critic, curator). Discussion facilitated by Dora García.
Maurizio Lazzarato’s conference will be followed by a discussion with some of the figures concerned by issues of the rejection of work. Mattia Pellegrini, together with Cesare Pietroiusti, Alessandra Meo and Davide Rico, founded the “Museo in Esilio” (the Museum in exile) – a museum dedicated to artists “outside of art institutions”. One of the artists studied in particular by the “Museo in Esilio” is Francesco Matarrese, who voluntarily positioned himself outside of institutions with his “telegram of rejection” sent in 1978 to his gallery in Rome to communicate “his rejection of abstract work in art” and his exile in Bari where he developed the concept of “post-art”. Thirty years after that telegram Matarrese’s rejection goes on. Guillaume Désanges studied Marcel Duchamp’s practice and his paradoxical relationship to work, the concept of artistic silence and the rejection of conventions of language and money. Stephanie Noach is a Dutch exhibition curator: she has just opened “I’d prefer not to” with Stefanie Humber at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, on Bartlebyism in the post-Fordist age.

The Boys in the Backroom and Wenn Ich Mich Was Wünschen Dürfte, by Friedrich Hollaender

6.00 pm Labour Power Plant
Presentation of their research by Romana Schmalisch and Robert Schlicht (artists), as part of the “Chorégraphie du travail” (Choreography of Labour) residency at les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers. What are the implications of being able to do a job that you don’t necessarily find interesting? What methods are put in place to convince us to give meaning to our professional careers? What psychological, physical, social and emotional capacities are required to become a worker, to constitute “human capital”? The upcoming film Labour Power Plant explores these questions through an enormous imaginary “manpower factory” in which the company trains and shapes the human capital that it depends on through a variety of strategies to make bodies conform and sophisticated techniques of emotional influence. The procedures shown in the film are taken from practices the artists have observed in Seine-Saint-Denis in training and education centres in workplaces, schools and counselling centres.

SMALL ROOM (Petite Salle)

2 pm - 7 pm. La Maison des Artistes, casa nostra
Workshop for 1 to 3 people, by Mathilde Chénin (artist). Are you an artist with nothing to sell? Do you always work best during your out-of-work periods? Do you create your experimental art at your job as a graphic designer? Is constituting your annual file a source of serious emotional suffering? Have you developed innovative strategies to cheat on your legal statute as a member of the Maison des Artistes, the artists’ social security; the Agessa for authors and photographers; or the entertainment workers’ coverage scheme? The MDA-casa nostra research department opens its doors to you to learn from your stories and outline what it takes to be an artist today.

3 pm - 8 pm. Abrégé de l’atelier (Abstract of the workshop) – an iconographic study of the artist at work
Workshop for 10 people, by Vassilis Salpistis (artist), every hour from 3 pm to 7 pm. Since Vasari’s reinvention of the figure of the artist as a professional, artists have continually brought up the question of their relationship to work through the production of images. From self-portraits in the workshop to photographic documentation of performances and images produced for communication, they have created or validate representations of themselves at work, for a variety of reasons, but which always reveal something about the creators and the political and social context in which they were made. The Abrégé is similar to a workshop to analyse these representations using a book of images, a personal collection of reproductions and newspaper cuttings, which materially defines a narrative and performative space. Rather than adopting a historicist approach, this is more a collective attempt at oral and dialectical anthropology of the first trade to have invented its own representations. By comparisons and analogies, we will attempt to begin to tell the fragmented, collective tale of these images.

All events will have interpretation in French/English.

With the participation of ENSBA-Lyon, post-performance studio led by Marie de Brugerolle and H.E.A.D. Geneva, art/action stream.