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Mudam Luxembourg presents The Collective Laboratory, an experimental project that unfolds in Mudam’s first-floor galleries, turning them into a residency space. Six independent publishing and performance collectives based in different European cities are taking over the empty galleries during seven weeks.
This project draws on the long history of artists working collaboratively to share skills, knowledge and ideas, to achieve a common project. Throughout the Middle Ages until the Renaissance, guilds involved artists and artisans working together to produce artefacts, often dismissing individual authorship. In the twentieth century, the formation of collectives became a political and creative project per se, with avant-garde groups such as the Dadaists and the constructivists, who were eager to challenge the myth of the solitary genius artist. These alternative methods of creating art continued throughout the turn of this century and extended to curatorial and publishing practices.
The Collective Laboratory takes place at a time when artists are increasingly turning to collaborative approaches as necessary ways to rethink, reshuffle and at times circumvent institutional models and methodologies. The Collective Laboratory aims to support emerging collectives by providing them with the infrastructural, financial and material resources they often don’t have access to, while also sharing their approach to reimagine how institutional spaces and resources are used. The Collective Laboratory also presents a concrete response to the scarcity of spaces available for artist residencies and studios globally and in Luxembourg in particular. In line with curator and art historian Clémentine Deliss’s notion of the ‘metabolic museum’, The Collective Laboratory intends to temporarily subvert the static function of the gallery as an exhibition space, transforming it into a lively place dedicated to artistic production. The East Gallery, allocated to collectives working with performance, becomes a dynamic space for open rehearsals and other happenings. The collective gobyfish turns the gallery into a food laboratory, experimenting with ancient preservation practices, while crème soleil adapts an existing dance piece to the museum context. OMSK Social Club develops a fictional world in which Mudam’s visitors are invited to immerse themselves.
Simultaneously, the West Gallery hosts the behind-the-scenes and often invisible activities of independent and editorial work (research, writing, translation, collective readings), allowing publishing to enter in dialogue with other disciplines. moilesautresart conducts research for their next publication, dedicated to geological, virtual and metaphorical holes. The two collectives-in-residence that follow each explore the transition between their digital and analogue existence from distinct angles. Mnemozine invites the public to join performative events drawing on technological obsolescence, while Éditions Burn~Août aims to improve their online presence as a tool for the free dissemination of knowledge.
Both galleries are accessible during the museum’s opening hours, allowing visitors to observe projects in the making, and gain access to the creative processes that lie behind the sleek appearance of a museum exhibition or event. The exhibition spaces will gradually transform as each collective settles for a two-week residency in the museum, occupying and activating the galleries with their work in progress and leaving behind traces of their passage – eventually leading to an open-ended exhibition.
The residency period is punctuated by workshops conceived in close dialogue with Mudam’s Publics department, as well as public presentations of the collectives’ work through performances, experimental food tastings, readings or listening sessions. The Collective Laboratory’s unique format gives the collectives the opportunity for a ‘dress rehearsal’, allowing them to test their ideas on and with the visitors of the museum, while offering Mudam’s audiences the occasion to witness the multitudes contained in the processes of artistic production.
