A multifaceted artist, 360° researcher, author and futurist, Raphaële Bidault-Waddington cultivates an open ECOSYSTEM of art-based research LABORATORIES, questioning the frontiers of Art and many domains.
Some are more formal, others more conceptual, but each follows a specific exploratory orientation, progress slowly (slow art approach), and can experiment collaborations between each other’s or with other structures. Due to this temporality, exhibitions are thus sporadic.
Oscillating between urban, pictural and mental architectures, the IMAGE Lab (once called PIIMS), creates photographic collages and installations, photomontages and publications, slide-shows, performative conferences and performative photographic workshops (action shooting).
This lab also generates speculative fictions (text+images compositions) such as the Republic of Images, and knowledge production (with the idea lab below) on topics such as cities and urban imaginaries, the digital sphere, fiction and the post-truth paradigm.
Last exhibition “Space-Image” is in January 2023 at Atelier Martel Architecture in Paris.
Less visible but very active, the IDEA Lab (LIID) operates at the crossroads of art and knowledge, and furthers post-conceptual art endeavors (concept of mental matter). It also dialogs with research on immaterial and digital economies, urban design and foresight (future research).
Its FORMATs include conceptual diagrams and heuristic maps (art documents), installations and research-exhibitions (eventually performative), texts, publications, conferences and sound pieces, workshops and collaborative methods (polygonal research), and special projects called future labs.
Over time and projects, LIID became in 2016 LIID Future Lab, a hybrid foresight research platform, to explore the future, for both outside structures and its own research (R&D).
See all collaborations in France and abroad on www.liid.fr
The R&D labs currently in progress are MESOPOLIS (designing urban utopia model), and TOWARD ALIEN COSMOLOGIES (designing post-human future worlds in the AI, Anthropocene and Post-Truth era).
Both R&D future labs include image-based research (see image lab above).
They continue from previous R&D lab PARIS GALAXIES, on the future Greater Paris Metropolis (2008-17 – see archive website), which was pursued in collaboration with a pool of academic partners, and ended up with the book “Paris Ars Universalis, fiction scenario of a future Grand Paris”, Collection Avant-Garde, L’Harmattan, 2017 (download press review – in French).
And finally, as part of her personal ecology, RBW cultivates a SILENCE Lab producing meditative drawings (silent mental matter), and textile creations. Most recent textile pieces include a noise reduction material and address the border of Art and Design, other frontier explored…