SUMMER LAB MONTPELLIER – August 2011

 

In late August about 35 artists and scientists from all over Europe came together at domaine d’0 over 4 days to talk, listen, learn, experience, and create around the theme of the “forest”.

” We walked through the Mont Aigoual forest, reading aloud the knowledge of the trees. Stood in a clearing, the forester suggested this was the most exciting part of the forest. The frontiers between two biotopes, where the most intensive forms of exchange happen.
The potential of any lab, for me, is in how it’s structure facilitates the meeting of knowledges, how distinction between things are broken down to whatever components. The assumptions on how knowledge is produced are challenged and our very positions from where we produce are blurred. How does culture happen in response to environmental issues? What does the production of culture look like at it’s boundaries, where the trees meet the meadow? 
Scientists presented ideas to artists and artists engaged scientists in creative practice. Alongside this, affinities where felt out, networks spun in shared meaning and common language. It is radical pedagogies and collective action that are fabric of such affinities. These are the things found within laboratories. “
- Richard Houguez, Artist-Activist, UK

Click here for an account by Croatian artist Zeljko Zorica.