Les Laboratoires d’Aubervillers are proud to present Special Issue, a publication that brings together a series of dispositifs for the production of live discourse. It is performed from time to time in varied contexts. Special Issue #0 takes place from April 29th to May 1st 2011 at Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers.


Image: g-u-i


For nearly ten years, artists, critics and curators have been invested in establishing new conditions for discourse production. Beyond art books and other publications, a babble bubble has spread through the multiplication of seminars, artist talks, interview-marathons, curatorial projects around speech, lecture-performances, schools and critical communities, Internet platforms, community experiments, and so on. This diversification of formats criticizes and renews the conventions of discourse on art.

While the performative dimension of artistic practices is currently one of the main subjects of theoretical and critical investigation, numerous artists do not always recognize the models of analysis that are applied to them. They end up constructing their own theoretical tools, by means of performance.
The game is a favored dispositif. Played according to rules, games establish a situation conducive to unconventional manners of speaking, acting, thinking or being in relation to others.
On the other hand, some discourses require articulation between texts, documents or other pre-existing materials and their live commentary.
The public presentation of an archive is yet another field of current investigation – from it emerges the necessity of taking into account the process-related character of constituting an archive, from the integration of new documents to the conception of dynamic classification. Conventional exhibition formats don't always answer the needs.

Each of these dispositifs infers a particular form of thought. Their critical potential touches on the distribution of speech within a group, the notion of expertise, the authority commonly attributed to written discourse at the expense of oral discourse, or even the notion of an audience created by a shared activity.

These observations are at the origin of Special Issue, a publication that brings together a series of dispositifs for the production of live discourse. It is performed from time to time in varied contexts. Special Issue #0 provides an opportunity to gather together contributors, as well as other artists associated with the project, at roundtables on the issues raised by these practices and their presentation in the framework of a performed publication.

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Special Issue #0 is published with the support of Arcadi