LaboratoireS
artist collective and experimental space
created in collaboration with Marjorie Potiron;
Toulouse / Weimar, 2013–2015
artist collective and experimental space
created in collaboration with Marjorie Potiron;
Toulouse / Weimar, 2013–2015
L. always flirts with extremes,
M. works within means.
L. is a night owl,
M. is undeniably matinal.
L. is joyously pessimist,
M., sadly optimist.
They create a balance, forming a pair of curiously functional oppositions. They find mutual ground through a shared consideration of philosophy, politics and poetry, inducing interrogative forms that align with existentialist and situationist thought. Questioning the every-day and observing society, they highlight anomalies through elements as diverse as exaggeration, the supernatural, détournement, the absurd...
Their practice integrates mediums such as performance and installation, resembling ever more to film as a result of their persistent obsession for incorporating elements of reality. Often the resulting impression is that of being in a scene of science-fiction, or an unsettling near-future scenario à la “Black Mirror”*.
To enter into that universe is to visualize one‘s own world to the last exacerbated detail, to breath life into it, and to witness the impossible; but also to be confronted with what is evident: the hellish image of one‘s own reality. Rather like the play by Jean-Paul Sartre, it is a contemporary“No Exit”.
*British television series created by Charlie Brooker, produced by Zeppotron, 2011
Text by Marine Bourlois
(translated from the French by Darla Murphy)
Laboratoires was an experimental co-working platform co-founded with Marjorie Potiron in 2013. Laboratoires was a space of the plural-S: A Space that could be anything one wanted it to be. LaboratoireS was a cinema, a restaurant, a gallery, an atelier, a museum, a boat, a garden, an enterprise, a travel agency (...). The diverse activities of LaboratoireS included a Vernissage, the Situationist Day, 10am poems, the writing of Manifestos, the creation of performances and exhibitions, eating pâttisserie, skype art, the development of a dictionary, applying to Beaux Arts de Paris, moving to Berlin, sending applications and much more.
This opening to the field of possibilities marks the general concept of LaboratorieS as a dispositive for the meeting of individuals, thoughts, actions, dreams and stories. The first physical representation of LaboratoireS was only a formal pretext to create a symbolic space that can appear anywhere anytime.
Within LaboratoireS the following projects were conducted:
