The Cooperative Laboratory for Artistic and Ecological Practices is an informal training framework for adults, artists, and art professionals designed to foster the acquisition of ecological knowledge applicable within the context of artistic practice workshops. These workshops are aimed at children and adults, with a particular focus on “priority” audiences.
LABECO is supported by the European Union and carried out by DDA CONTEMPORARY ART, based in Marseille, in collaboration with O Gabinete de Madame Thao, based in Lisbon.
objectives
Our aim is to enhance the skills of participants specializing in the fields of art and culture, by learning sustainable and inclusive best practices. The aim is to pass on knowledge through workshops designed for our “priority” audiences. The study of new materials and new fields of eco-responsible artistic expression connected to the urban, natural and digital environment will give us back the power to act.
implementation
LABECO promotes the exchange of best practices and learning through mobility, with trips scheduled to Lisbon from February 2 to 8, 2025, and to Marseille from May 11 to 17, 2025.
Artists from France and Portugal participating in the program will explore their respective fields of action and experimentation, and visit specialized initiatives. They will engage in workshops focused on materials and share ideas about methods for transmitting knowledge to their audiences.
A public meeting with experts will take place in Lisbon on February 7, emphasizing experimental practices and research involving natural and ecological materials. Another public meeting with experts will be held in Marseille on May 16, focusing on a more theoretical and scientific approach to biomaterials research and its sociological implications.
A publication will be produced to share the outcomes of these exchanges with as many people as possible.
results
We aim to achieve positive qualitative and quantitative impacts through LABECO, based on the high-quality content we propose concerning transmission and inclusive, ecological artistic practices.
By offering tools that can be reused and accessed by a broad audience, we will be able to widely disseminate the results obtained. This will enable us to move on to a larger scale.
a collaboration with
D.D.A CONTEMPORARY ART, founded in 2012 in Marseille, is an inclusive artistic platform dedicated to supporting contemporary art and accompanying artists. It has been developing a social action axis since 2021. It focuses its actions and reflections around questions linked to the hijacking of technologies, ancestral technologies and their mutations. Since 2019, the links between art and nature, the consideration of the living, the different types of ecology, are the axes that inspire these programmatic choices.
participating artists
Laurent Eisler is a visual artist based in Marseille, whose practice is distinguished by a multidisciplinary and experimental approach. A graduate in graphic arts from Lyon in 1998, he has since developed a versatile body of work embracing a variety of mediums, from painting to video, as well as construction and the art of fire.
In recent years, his interest in ceramics has led him to delve into experimental firing practices. He creates clay- fired kiln-sculptures, functional works of art designed to fire other sculptures. In parallel, he has undertaken a rediscovery of traditional Raku and has ventured into extreme firing techniques, probing the limits and
transformations of clay as a material.
Rooted in a perpetual quest for meaning and the transcendence of material boundaries, Laurent Eisler’s work resides at the intersection of craftsmanship, sculpture, and conceptual experimentation.
Mélanie Métier is an architect and sound artist. She coordinates, produces, and executes art projects both under her own name and in collaboration with several art collectives. At “La Déviation,” a space for artistic creation in Marseille, she welcomed many artists and managed this self-administered venue for several years. Following that, for over three years, she developed art and educational projects with the Association Image Clé. She taught herself radio techniques at Radio Panik in Brussels and then joined the Radio Monobloc collective in 2020.
Since 2021, she has been creating works that combine architecture and sound, often involving isolated and little-heard people.
In her projects, Melanie pays attention to the coherence between the space, the approach, and the creations on display, particularly by shifting our perspective and attention towards hidden places or the margins of society, focusing on works that experiment, explore, and fully engage with their environment.
Textile artist Aurore Pélisson graduated from the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Lyon in 2009 and subsequently moved to London, where she created artistic collaborations with, among others, Central Saint Martins School of Art.
In 2011, she returned to her native Provence and opened a textile workshop in Avignon. In search of textures, techniques and imprints that reflect her utopias, Aurore Pélisson works to make visible our intrinsic correlation with the living world. Aurore’s work is visceral, invoking our organic matter: giving us the opportunity to see and feel a different aesthetic, a different way of looking at things, less polished, less straightforward.
This vision comes to life through healthy materials, on the scale of his own body. Her techniques reject plastics and other toxic materials ; she prefers to work with raw plants, using vegetable dyes. Her practice never ceases to evolve in line with her purpose – an ode to the living.
Born in 1974 in São Miguel (Açores), André Almeida e Sousa studied at the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and in the advanced course of fine arts at Ar.Co school in Lisbon. He was a Scholarship holder of Fundação Victor e Graça Carmona e Costa in 2001. He lives and works in Lisbon.
A visual artist and dynamic contributor to the Portugal art scene, André has taught art since 2002 and is currently running with Patricia Sasportes A BASE Escola de Arte.
He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Portugal and abroad, including Arquipelago-Centro de Artes, Ribeira Grande (Açores), Istituto Centrale Per La Grafica, Roma (Italy), Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado, Lisbon.
Nina Fraser, b. (1984) St. Albans, UK, graduated in Textile Art from Winchester College of Arts (UK) in 2006, and completed a Masters level course in Commissioning & Curating Contemporary Public Art from the University of Gothenburg in 2023. Nina creates artworks that reflect upon a sense of place to shape memory traces into physical form. Investigating ways of being, she explores ideas of transformation, connection and belonging through modes of thought, human and non-human systems and structures. Working with a multidisciplinary approach that roots itself within the materiality of paper, she harnesses ephemera from her location to produce collages, paintings, and sculptures, intercepting other disciplines such as performance and poetry to activate meaning and generate connections. Often working site-specifically and/or collaboratively, notions of authorship are blurred and the found image might be appropriated, contaminated, altered or destroyed.
Rita Thomaz (Lisbon, 1979) lives and works between Lisbon and São Gregório. Her artistic practice focuses on drawing, currently exploring the relationship between materiality and landscape.
Since 2019, she has been experimenting with handmade paper as a medium for constructing drawings, where the paper sheet ceases to be merely a support and takes on an object-like quality. Support and drawing are constructed simultaneously, layering cotton pulp and colored pulp, manipulating this matter in a fluid state, drawing until the final drying phase.
In 2022, she began creating an archive of colors and plant fibers from the flora of Aldeia de São Gregório (OSSO), incorporating this raw material into her creative process along with the time and methods involved in its gathering, archiving, and later transformation. The drawing-objects have now become time-based drawings. The color variations of São Gregório’s landscape throughout the year have been revealed in chromatic devices displayed in dialogue with the architecture of various spaces.
partners
