This year, a new series of reading workshops will allow us to look collectively at the issue of “Performing opposition”, which will also serve as the title of the next Printemps des Laboratoires, an international event that will be held in June 2015 at les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers.

Workshop #3
This session will be the occasion to read the Manifeste Accélérationniste, by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek (published in French in revue Multitudes, n°56, sept. 2014). This text provides an analysis of the movement of acceleration of neo-liberalism (as an economical system, but also as an ideology). If this movement is not thought with more meaning, according to the authors, it will lead us to catastrophy. In its shape, it is the "manifest" expression of a clear stance, of statements, of a call to react and to change the orientation. We can analyze it as public speaking: it is then up to us to understand in which spaces and under which forms of action this "opposition" take shape.
You can read (in French) the interview of the two authors as published in Libération newspaper ("Nous avons perdu le futur", 17/10/2014)

Performing Opposition
Remarkable oppositions are born in public spaces. Oppositions reconfigure the actions that are performed there either by artists or by activists, whose work makes these places visible.Through antagonistic situations which give rise to different forms of opposition, protest, appropriation and creation, open, shared places are created. These are the public spaces we wish to examine.

This series of 15 text analysis workshops will explore various contexts such as the demonstrations and uprisings that have been gathering steam over the last ten years and virtual space on the internet which has largely shifted the public space paradigm; it constitutes a tool to support and spread these revolts as well as a reserve of information and source of private data and the ideal platform for control.

We are interested in how artists work directly on these questions, leaving behind the realm of art institutions and favouring public spaces that contain the questions or let them overflow, inventing forms of protest and confrontation as tools of shared radical experience.

The reading workshops are open to all. They take place every two weeks, on Thursdays, between 4 to 6 pm, on inscription. To get the texts and the summaries of the sessions, as well as to participate, contact Clara Gensburger at c.gensburger@leslaboratoires.org

Dates: Thursdays 16 and 30 October, 13 and 27 November, 11 December, 8 and 22 January, 5 and 19 February, 5 and 19 March, 2, 16 and 30 April (from 4 pm to 6 pm)