PAST OBSCURITY

A curious aura surrounds the idea of the laboratory. Between hypotheses, measurements, observations, experiments and discoveries, the scientific laboratory holds a formidable potential for the imagination and embodies a strong place for knowledge. The structuring dimension of the knowledge that is shaped there is fascinating; it guides our conception of the world and our relationship to it, while retaining a mysterious side, beyond the reach of many of us. Hen the idea of a set of portraits, both fantastical and factual, of research laboratories in Toulouse and its region. Orienting myself in the maze of this environment form a second questioning – that of the renewal of modes of perception at the time of the Anthropocene – I turned to laboratories whose “theme” was one or more of the five natural elements (air, fire, water, earth and ether). Thus, I was welcomed by the Institut de recherche en astrophysique et planétologie, Géosciences environnement Toulouse, the Station d’écologie théorique théorique et expérimentale, the Laboratoire plasma et convertion d’énergie, the Centre d’élaboration de matériaux et d’études structuales and Calligée, a compagny specialising in geological sciences and techniques. From these visits, a serie of black and white silver photographs is emerging, taken in the different experimental platforms I visited. Places of passage and archiving, connections and details of technical installations, walls and ceilings… A few silhouettes. The encounters give rise to interviews specific to each interlocutor according to his current research, his posture, the types of experiments carried out, the vocabulary specific to his field of specialization…they will be assembled in a soundtrack.

Matilda Holloway