Laurent Labourmène works at the confluence of art, science and foresight. For over two decades he has created spaces, projects and works that invite reflection and reimagining, from early roles with the United Nations in Europe and North America, to contributions as a social entrepreneur and foresight practitioner, and, more recently, through an emerging art practice.
Over the last three years, his evolving artistic practice has engaged human and non-human animals, the living and the not-yet-born, silence, sound, text, and the imagination as agents for exploring our interconnectedness with a living planet in the context of geological time and change. During this time he has: written speculative texts intended to unfold in the imagination; built a cinema marquee with rolling text to prompt reflection through a familiar medium; transmitted live forest sounds from a national park into the Ian Potter Southbank Centre in Melbourne; created a hard-etching print of Permostridulus brongniarti (a 270-million-year-old ancestor of modern crickets) for a speculative shrine to honour the first known Earthly voice; sent a silent message from future generations to us, their present-day ancestors; and reimagined the ‘golden spike’ (a geological marker used by stratigraphers) as a tool for orienting ourselves differently in space and time.
His earlier social change work has been profiled in various publications and was included in a social sculpture by American artists Clegg & Guttmann, housed at Melk Abbey in Austria. He was named an Architect of the Future by the Waldzell Institute, holds a background in the social sciences and has trained in field recording and soundscape composition (Goldsmiths, University of London, 2020–21) and contemporary art (Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, 2022–23).