"Cap pour l’île des vivantxs"*

In 1973, Le corps lesbien, Monique Wittig’s third book, was published. It was an unclassifiable and pioneering work in its use of language and in its political stance. This book follows the opening of a new breach that Wittig, writer, theorist and lesbian activist, will continue to expand, in the wake of materialist feminism and the struggles of sexual and gender minorities, between France and the United States, until her death in 2003. It is thus a double anniversary, the fiftieth anniversary of Le corps lesbien and the twentieth anniversary of the author’s death, which is celebrated for this "Wittig year" in 2023.

The Cap pour l’île des vivantxs* program will be deployed during the course of 2023, beginning with monthly sessions of collective surveying session written or translated by Wittig and her intellectual entourage, and presented by those who have (re)published, studied, interpreted and transmitted them. A series of special events will be held in December, with a variety of meetings to celebrate, complexify and actualize Wittig’s memory and the actuality of artistic struggles and practices: a workshop to deploy the links between Wittig and typography, meetings around the history of lesbians reviews, materialist feminism, but also racial struggles within the feminist and lesbian movements in France, collective workshops of translation and radio creation, non-mixed karate initiation, as well as performances and readings of young authors.

On this occasion, Bétonsalon is renewing the links that the art center has already established with Wittig, whose editions and archives were presented in the exhibition ‘Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent’ (commissaires: Aliocha Imhoff and Kantuta Quiros, le peuple qui manque) in 2013, which borrowed its title from Les Guérillères. The same year, 36 Short Stories was published, as an anthology published for the tenth anniversary of Bétonsalon, including the article ‘History’ written by Wittig and Sande Zeig for their 1973 Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes (English edition : Lesbian peoples: Material for a dictionary, 1979) .

Cap pour l’île des vivantxs is a proposal by Mathilde Belouali-Dejean in collaboration with L’association des ami-es de Monique Wittig and the complicity of Suzette Robichon and Stéphanie Garzanti

Visual : Courtesy Cécile Bouffard

* Quote from The lesbian body that might translate into : “you steer for the isle of the living” (ed. William Morrow, 1975, p. 82).

Note : collective readings are held in French