The Laboratory of Immunology is a project space founded by artists Alice Gancevici and Remus Puscariu in 2012. The space is located downtown Bucharest, within the confines of an un-renovated house dating back to the early 1900s.
Formerly the residence of the late Drs. Colette and Gheorghe Gancevici, both medical researchers in the field of Immunology, the house presently inherits a wide range of tools, books, objects, and furniture from its previous owners, and provides a sheltered working space as well as an outside working ground.
The Laboratory provides studio space for artists, after previously reviewing their project proposal/motivation. The basis for accepting proposals depends on the artists' expressed interest in employing a collaborative practice involving fellow artists or students in their work. The outgrowth of such encounters may eventually lead to the development of co-authored works and public presentations, which are then organized into a one-day event, a lecture or an exhibition.
Our aim is to generate a working environment, which can yield critical inquires about what working as a group entails, or, as participants further undergo negotiations, what working with or towards consensus actually subtracts from our individual selves. Acknowledging both the differences and the mutual standpoints, the particular contributions in forms of either knowledge or ideas that have been shared in the course of a conversation, or the skill and physical strength that has trained the work into a certain form, can we accept and assume that the work brought on collectively is a non-divisible whole when referencing to roles played out in its realization? Meant as a place fit to harness such experiments on conjointment, the Laboratory of Immunology should provide an ideal ground, in its bare and raw form, for new constructions of social knowledge and cohabitation to be tackled.
While concentrating on the idea of shared authorship, informal discussions, experimentation, and mutual engagement in the production and installment of works, we are finally addressing the sustainability of breeding collectives as well as the coherence of art practices at the periphery of the generally established white cube, within a space which fits neither the frame of functional living quarters nor that of a generic gallery, but that nevertheless unveils itself as a melting pot and, ultimately, a test tube.
