Les Laboratoires of the commons, artists, subjects
and political bodies

Alexandra Baudelot, Dora García, Mathilde Villeneuve
2013-2018

Our co-direction of Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers ends at the close of 2018. It has been an intense, fragile and happy experience for us three and with those who joined the team in the company of artists and collaborators with whom we have tried to build at the least a common sensitivity, and hopefully combined ones. For six years we have worked on the sharing of knowledge and of know-how, forms of attention and composure. Six years for trying to invent ways of feeling and togetherness in order to counter present dynamics of withdrawal, impoverishment of thinking and ways of living that are more and more rigid.

On each of the artistic propositions that we accompanied, the « us » that progressively took shape in Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers was constantly put into question as contacts were made between researchers and activists who joined in the projects and more generally with the public who attended. A multiplied contradictory « us », with no real fixation, but which continues to be deployed beyond in situ experiences. In retrospect, it is apparent how much artists’ issues and ways of research development differ, forcing our team to question and re-vamp the work, going as far as to remodel the institution itself.

Whether they be field investigative, study groups, workshops, propositions in public places or other non-specified artistic spaces, lectures, performances, exhibitions, theatre, choreography or editions, the development of artistic research implied mediums, partnerships, and participatory modes and dynamics adapted to each entity. In spite of this huge variety of approaches along with the implementation involved there is one thing that our guests had in common : improvement and renewal of our perceptive capabilities, arousal of our state of consciousness, necessity for openness to non-exclusive values of solidarity. It was also important to have the capacity to reconsider art not just for it’s final forms of representation, but to be concerned with processes and encounters, always voluntary, generous and openminded.
Reversing the logics of profit and demand for results which heavily structure the artistic scene, we, as much as our institution, were concerned primarily with artists’ working progress and issues in order to fully understand their timelines and specificities.

Each year the shared research platform Le Printemps des Laboratoires established links with work done by artists within Les Laboratoires. Along with researchers in human sciences, professionals from eclectic fields and a public concerned about the themes explored, we have worked to put into perspective artistic and theoretical applications. With them we have explored the complex notions of the commons and of communities, relations between art and work, the critical dimensions of the artistic gesture in public spaces, forms of care constructed in the margins of institutions and medical requirements, perception and extra-sensoriel experiences and the way they operate in our rational world, and finally the notion of togetherness in its attempt at emancipation from different forms of debt.

Along with artist residencies, it was particularly important for us to welcome and give visibility to words and artistic communal practices from within and outside the realm of art. We have hosted political, social, art and film magazines, as well as classes from art schools and universities who offered fascinating insights on pedagogical turning points. We gave room to extraordinary personalities and the necessary conditions required so that these people could inter-react with the largest and most varied audience possible.
The path we have taken in the past six years has been everything but unequivocal and solitary. In the like of the artists who have marked Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, it is composed of a plurality of voices and forms shaped by the meetings that we initiated and by those who came of their own accord. We gratefully thank all who accompanied us.

                                                  Mémento :
                                                  Invent counter-stories.
                                                  Accept hybridization.
                                                  Refuse to be one.
                                                  Demolish binary thinking.
                                                  Not fear the apocalypse.
                                                  Mutate without promise.

Alexandra Baudelot 
Dora García
Mathilde Villeneuve