Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology is a platform for planetary becomings.

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 press 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

Dea Antonsen (co-founder and curator)
Ida Bencke (co-founder and curator)
Andrea Fjordside Pontoppidan (publisher and editor)

Get in touch
labae.contact@gmail.com

Please note
We are an independent platform with no structural funding.
We depend on project-to-project fundraising and our financial and temporal resources are limited.
At the moment we do not take in new manuscripts and our publishing practice is on hold, as we are using all our time and effort on the two curatorial projects Hosting Lands and Ømme Knapper.

Find our publications in the following bookstores in Copenhagen

Møllegades Boghandel ~ Det Lilla Rum ~ Politikens Boghal
BRØG Litteraturbar ~ Charlottenborg Kunsthal

Or order the books through your favorite bookstore