Le Laboratoire

Laboratoire develops specific urban artistic interventions which take their source in the human, social, historical, or urban peculiarity of the place of intervention. These works combine the local identity sensibilities slowly accumulated with the contemporary reality made up of population migrations and swift transfer of global informations.

Each work is specific and composed with very diverse urban and social contexts such as Lyon, Marseille, Grenoble, Rio de Janeiro, Sarajevo, Johannesburg, Algiers, Douala, Köln, Abidjan.

These territorial interpretations attempt to renew the public space by representing it otherwise, in order to contribute to the initiation of a shared space of serendipity, this positive disorientation that sharpens in contact with the unexpected to invent new sayings.
In each realization, Laboratoire creates a « medium-associated » which combines the languages ​​and skills, while implementing disciplinary alliances, more complex each year. Artists, writers, geographers, urban planners, philosophers, sociologists or composers, hundreds of artists and researchers from around the world, were invited to participate over time in this patient transverse reconstruction work.

This is the case of the writers Patrick Chamoiseau, Jacques Lacarrière, Ismail Kadaré, Ahmadou Kourouma, Abdelwahab Meddeb, the artists Rekha Rodwittiya, William Kentridge, Ester Grinspum, Rachid Koraichi, Lu Shengzhong, the philosophers Bruno Latour, Pierre Sansot, Daniel Bougnoux, Bernard Stiegler, Yves Citton, Osamu Nishitani, Stefano Boeri, the sociologists Yves Chalas, Henry Torgue and the geographers Luc Gwiazdzinski or Augustin Berque.

Since 2003 LABORATOIRE develops an edition entitled local.contemporain, a renewal of the look associating pedagogues, artists and philosophers around emerging social forms. Local.contemporain also proposes collaborative initiatives, favoring the emergence of collective intelligence. So It’s Sunday! A random collection of photographs in 2005, collection of collections at the request of Marseille-2013, or landscapes-in-situ, a game of forger in 2015.

From 2016 to 2020, LABORATOIRE has been composing the artistic line of landscape> landscapes, a platform of innovations and initiatives around the landscape, carried by the Department of Isère on the 7431 km2 of its territory.