Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology self-organized curatorial platform for experimental exhibition and publishing makings situated in Denmark founded in an urge of cultivating practices of soft resistance. We are committed to intersectional ecologies of care, to the anticapitalist and decolonial struggles for planetary survival and social justice.
We work with the embodied, theoretical and political implications of global, but unequally distributed environmental breakdown in response to multispecies worlds in urgent need of regeneration and care.
We facilitate a myriad of multidisciplinary events, exhibitions, workshops and symposia across landscapes, disciplines, contexts and histories spanning from rural spaces, festival sites, ocean shores, boats, academic- and exhibition spaces and more. Our methods are experimental and flow through and across genres. We aim for long durational, cross-pollinating knowledge productions in conversation with many partners.
We try to stay with the trouble of cultivating relations and ethics that point towards and rework the different response-abilities ‘we’ carry on a planet wounded by the violence of colonialism, white imperialism and extractive capitalism, while also reconfiguring the already exclusive and non-innocent notion of the Human. Born and raised within eurocentric, western structures, we work from within the troubled histories of our own privileges situated, as they and we are, within global structures of inequity and oppression, and we try to challenge our heritage of exploitative, pathogenic and destructive systems and norms. We strive to facilitate openings for the mourning of past, present and future worlds lost, while also holding space for radical joy, insurgent play and modest hope – guided by an intersectional feminism that is anti-capitalist and anti-racist – driven by the urgent need to cultivate practices for soft resistance. We work towards the composing of collectives, resilient and vulnerable and intergenerational, in the ambition to imagine and co-create liveable worlds otherwise.
Alongside and as a part of our curatorial practice, we also run a small publishing house that publishes and translates work that shares, extends, supports and forms our thinking. Our publications explore intersections and crossings between the poetic and the academic, the affective and the scientific, the personal and the political.
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The collective consists of the co-founder and curators
Dea Antonsen & Ida Bencke
We are currently based in the Det Lilla Rum (The Purple Space) in Cph and at Fanefjord Fælled (Fanefjord Commons) at Møn. All sales of our books from these two spaces are distributed to aid in Palestine.
~ From 2018—2023, Andrea Fjordside Pontoppidan filled the position as LAE responsible publisher and editor. Acknowledgements and gratitudes to her for bringing such a rich and beautiful series of publications into the world.
Get in touch labae.contact@gmail.com
Please note in terms of resources We are an independent platform with no structural funding. We depend on project-to-project fundraising and our financial and temporal resources are limited.
Our publishing practice is currently in hibernation modus and we do unfortunately not have time to consider new manuscripts. We are using all our time, efforts and strength on the two curatorial projects Hosting Lands and Ømme Knapper that honestly require more octopus powers than we can pull off!
Bear with us if we are running late on replies or other things. It’s far from perfect, but we do our best.
