In May 2021, Animal’s Lab research team (UMR Innovation, CIRAD / INRAE / Montpellier SupAgro) organized the show “Anim’Art” to highlight, through a collaboration between the arts and sciences, the role of animals in live performance (circus and dance) and, more broadly, in the production of goods and services within our societies. It is about showing and understanding that any work with animals requires intelligence and commitment on their part and cannot be reduced to a simple relationship of exploitation and control.
Organized in Art Center 3, where it was streamed and then broadcast as a documentary, the event benefited from the participation of four invited companies to produce situations where their animals are real partners. Animals work, they are not props for a show, they are actors, dThe musical horse, the acrobatic hen, the dancing eagle, and the actor dog. By combining scientific presentations with presentations from famous companies in an original way, AnimArt demonstrates that any work with animals requires intelligence and commitment on their part and cannot be reduced to a simple relationship of exploitation and control. Animals are not props for a show, they are actors.
With an aesthetic approach, this event gives the audience the opportunity to discover research themes carried out by the animal laboratory team in an illustrative and lively way: the animals involved in the work invest their personality, bear witness to their agency and participate in the task at hand sometimes going beyond rules and procedures. In the language of landscapes, one can say that these artist animals improvise.
Organizing the show was followed by Oliver Dickinson, who made a documentary called The Invisible in Action.
Live Lab “Animal Lab” – Animals, innovations and live work
animal lab It is a research group that aims to study the work of people living in organizations, to support and generate innovation processes in the different sectors studied (education, agriculture, leisure, care, food, etc.) with the actors involved (professionals, animals, economic, social and political bodies). The work of biologists relates, primarily to domestic animals but also to plants, insects or bacteria whose hypothesis is invoked, hypothetically, by metaphor or by analogy in the field of work, most often by the professionals themselves.
Search Topics
- Exclusion of animals from work. transforming diets; Innovations in replacing animals with plants, animals and plants with alternatives to cellular farming. Transforming productive systems: robots or humans replacing animal labour.
- Include animals in the work. urban innovations and education; Animal work in the city
- Work in organizations: organization of work / end of work, end of life
- Measuring business values (economic, social, ethical, etc.) and their impact on innovation processes
- Work theory and live action
- Agroecology: the work of animals, plants and microorganisms. Neighborhood work and land making
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