For the fifth edition of Le Printemps des Laboratoires, Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers will be continuing their fortnightly reading groups, inviting participants to collectively pursue research and investigate a specific problematic approached through different disciplines (art, the social sciences, politics). These workshop help shape the “Printemps des Laboratoires”, a collective research project developed throughout the year via workshops, roundtable discussions and screenings, culminating in a public platform including talks, performances and screenings. This public event will take place in June 2017, offering a global presentation of the projects, on an international level. Each year the programming is organized around a specific problematic which, this year — continuing and expanding on the questions and fields and spheres of inquiry explored last year —  is titled ESP (Extra Sensory Perception).

We will be exploring how to accommodate multiple and contradictory voices in our lives, how to make space for a non-singular ‘I’, the narrative centre of gravity, for non-human entities and other invisible worlds, and how to fill oneself with these presences without being assailed by them. We will be exploring what contemporary mysticism might look like, and what kind of historical, hallucinated and visionary fiction we might wish to locate ourselves in today. We will be trying to identify methods of de-individualisation in order to share these perspectives and make them collective and inhabitable.

In order to carry out this collective investigation we invite you to join us every other Thursday, starting 6th October 2016, from 4-6 p.m. One or several texts will be proposed and/or selected during each workshop for the following session.

Workshop dates are as follows: Thursday 6th October, 20th October, 3rd November, 17th November, 1st December and 15th December 2016, and Thursday 5th January, 19th January, 2nd February, 16th February, 2nd March, 16th March, 30th March, 13th April and 27th April 2017