

Performances by Nicole, Lisa Lecuivre, Estelle Benazet Heugenhauser, Helena de Laurens, Star Finch & cl✰ra.
This evening of performances is part of the “Borborygmi” programme, conceived for the été culturel 2025.
Programme:
• Nicole
At Your Feet (Count the Days Until)
At 4:30 and 7 pm
Two women sit cross-legged, fuchsia tights stretched over their skin, their white pumps covered in mud, dirt clinging to their soles, staining the ground beneath them. The dirt is deliberate, unavoidable – a striking contrast to the calculated sensuality of their gestures. Each woman holds a lollipop, sliding the sticky sweet over her lips in a slow, exaggerated fashion before putting it into her mouth. Their tongues swirl, glistening, spreading the sweetness over their teeth, chins and fingers. The sound is wet, almost obscene, a slow, decadent gluttony floating in the air. Their oversized blonde wigs quiver slightly as they bow in the act, as if each lick, each bite, is a silent performance. The dirt remains, motionless, anchoring them even as their seduction unfolds in excess.
At Your Feet (Count the Days Until) is the third occurrence in a cycle of performances entitled Are You at Your Feet by the artist Nicole, initiated as part of the exhibition “El fantasma de Tennessee” at the Marcelle Alix Gallery (23.05.2025 – 26.07.2025). These performances take the form of a series of tableaux vivants in which women are caught between two gestures: their fetishised feet are often passive (heels in water, stilettos soiled with earth, or their bare feet immersed in a bath…), while their hands are active, and the women are absorbed in a task, detached from the outside world.
• Lisa Lecuivre
“To relax”
Behind a ventriloquist is a hot dog eating contest. I think the excess is a way of saying that it’s not going down well.
• Estelle Benazet Heugenhauser
Incontinence Made in Europe
Exhibitionist delirium and socio-cultural critique, Incontinence Made in Europe stages the national charge of the orificial impulses of a body that speaks and writes between France, Austria and Italy. Michel Sardou, Sissi the Empress and Rocco Siffredi cross paths.
This text will be published next autumn in Trou Noir n°5.
• Helena de Laurens
With this performance, Helena de Laurens extends her research into the grotesque, the grimace and facial dance by exploring opera singing and the operatic imagination. By transforming herself into a dysfunctional diva, she goes in search of a hybrid form of singing in dialogue with theatre and dance.
• Star Finch
Spit in my mouth and then spit in my other mouth
A performance reading based on drama and drool, and drool as drama. The salivary gland finds its involuntary function, and a defeated narrative flows from it. All this blends with a quirky queer eroticism that seeks revolt, in and around the body.
“I feel your fingertips against the back of my throat. Swear you’ll never break my heart. There’s no way I’m simplifying the experience. No. What I want is a taste of release and dignity where your wrist smashes into my hot tongue.”
• cl✰ra
DJ set
At 9:30 pm
Nicole
Born in 1997 in Quito, Ecuador. Lives and works in Paris.
Nicole explores the stereotypes of exoticization and the domination of the gaze through video, performance, and installation. Her work plays with the codes of eroticism, fetishism, and personal branding on the internet, adopting a conceptual and subtle approach to reframe intimacy, spectacle, and power. Graduated of the Beaux-Arts de Paris (DNSAP, 2024). Her current work is on view at Marcelle Alix (Paris) in “El fantasma de Tennessee” (2025). She has also exhibited at FRAC Île-de-France, Bétonsalon, Exo Exo, and the Maia Biennial. In 2025, she was featured on the cover of Art Interrupted, Línea Recta.
Lisa Lecuivre
Lisa Lecuivre explores areas of ambiguity, fragmented narratives, dissonant logics – and is fond of what escapes immediate reading. Drawing on anecdotes, news items and chance encounters, she sets up devices in which reality wavers, distorts and reinvents itself. The voice, often present in her work, becomes a vector for free associations, shifts in meaning and almost hallucinatory mental projections. She questions the need for meaning, while cultivating forms of aporia: when the accumulation of information prevents any clear position from being taken. Her work is less concerned with making clear-cut decisions than with revealing the complexity of the world, in all its tensions, contradictions and strangeness.
Estelle Benazet Heugenhauser
Estelle Benazet Heugenhauser (1985) is a franco-austrian writer, researcher and performer. Her creative output brings together textual theory and fiction as well as visual arts elements, and revolves around bodies which feel desire, hunger, and physical exertion, in order to undo established order structures and generate new disorders. Her texts have been published as monographs (Le Régime parfait, Rotolux Press, 2022 ; Bêcher son visage, 2020, éd. La Chambre verte) and also in magazines (TrouNoir, La Déferlante, Jef Klak, Sabir, A.O.C.). Furthermore she have authored public literary happenings (Point Ephémère, Les Subs, Centre Pompidou, Villa Médicis Académie de France à Rome, Franco-Irish Literary Festival) or conferences in art or academic context. Currently, she is a Doctoral Scholar at the Université Côte d’Azur and Dublin City University, finishing a PhD in Creative Writing, the working title of it being : “Écrire avec les affamées, manières de (se) nourrir dans la littérature contemporaine” (Writing with Hungry Women, Ways of Eating in Contemporary Literature).
She is also working on her next novel untitled Taurine. Every week, protagonist Christa, a sports and cultural guide in Salzburg (Austria), follows her routine. In the morning, she makes her group of tourists sweat through a series of gymnastic exercises. In the afternoon, she fills them in on national history during visits to heritage monuments. Between protein-packed appearances by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Empress Sissi on Red Bull, Christa recalls her training sessions in Rome on the main thoroughfares of the rationalist EUR district, the feeling of power due to the effects of her gastronationalist diet.
Helena de Laurens
Helena de Laurens is an actress, dancer and choreographer. Her work explores the grotesque, metamorphosis and the ways in which the face is staged in theatre and dance. She studied Dramatic Art at the Conservatoire Erik Satie (Paris) and wrote a thesis on Valeska Gert as part of a Master’s degree in Cultural History of Dance at the EHESS, La grimace et l’inouï: danse et visage chez Valeska Gert. She performs in cabarets, museums, gardens and bookshops. She regularly collaborates with Esmé Planchon, Clara Pacotte and Sophie Bonnet-Pourpet. In 2018 she was a resident at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. As a performer and choreographer, she plays in two solos written and directed by Marion Siéfert: Le grand sommeil (2018) and _jeanne_dark_ (2020), which received the Prix numérique (special mention for the show) 2020/2021 from the Syndicat Professionnel de la critique de théâtre, de musique et de danse. In June 2021 she created a performance based on Jean Cocteau’s La Voix humaine at the Centre Pompidou as part of the “Tableaux Vivants” event. In 2022 she will star alongside Emmanuelle Lafon and Frédéric Leidgens in L’Homosexuel ou la difficulté de s’exprimer by Copi, directed by Thibaud Croisy. In 2023 she plays in Cabaret Brouillon by Loïc Touzé. In 2024 she created a performance entitled Toujours pas prêt at the Théâtre de Gennevilliers as part of the Sur les bords 8 weekend of performances. In spring 2026 she will play Adela in La Maison de Bernarda Alba, directed by Thibaud Croisy.
Star Finch
Born in the United States and based in Paris, Star Finch writes and performs weird experimental pornography, at the intersection of theory and poetry. Their literary performances are regularly presented in art institutions in France and internationally (Palais de Tokyo Paris, ICA London, CAPC Bordeaux, Badischer Kunstverein Karlsruhe). Their ongoing research interests include vomit and dildos, exploring how these materials function as literary technologies. In 2024, They received a doctorate from l’Université Paris 8 in Gender Studies for their dissertation that traced the literary queerfeminsms of Kathy Acker, Hélène Cixous, Violette Leduc, and Audre Lorde. With the collective RER Q, they stage the performance of sexually explicit literary texts. Their poetry collection Crache dans ma bouche puis crache dans mon autre bouche [Spit in my mouth and then spit in my other mouth] was published in 2024 by Les petits matins. Their first novel, Fuck Me Judith, will be out very soon, with After 8 Books. Their other literary projects include Kathy Acker 1971-1975 (Éditions Ismael, 2019), and contributions to Lettres aux jeunes poétesses [Letters to young poets] (l’Arche, 2021) and Kathy Acker: Get Rid of Meaning (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne, 2022). With sabrina soyer, they translated the poet Lisa Robertson into French, in Debbie: une épopée [Debbie: an epic story] (Joca Seria, 2021).
cl✰ra
cl✰ra is a DJ with fluid selections. She navigates between different styles and energies: from fast, percussive sets to slower, textured and introspective atmospheres. From trip hop to idm, via bass, dub techno and more experimental sounds, she seeks to create intense and sensitive listening moments.
Since 2024, she has been developing kiki radio, a platform dedicated to radio experimentation, based between France and Italy. kiki documents the work of underground musicians and DJs, offering a space for connection through sound. The aim is to explore the role of radio practices in contemporary contexts, both online and offline, while preserving its heritage as a tool for cultural and social communication.
The Direction régionale des affaires culturelles d’Île-de-France – Ministère de la Culture