Sandra Lahire (United Kingdom, 1950–2001) was a feminist experimental filmmaker whose work has had a lasting influence on numerous artists and filmmakers, yet remains insufficiently recognized to this day, particularly in France¹. Like many of her contemporaries in London, she was affiliated with the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative (LFMC), a self-organized structure dedicated to the production, exhibition, and distribution of experimental film². Active from the late 1960s onward, the LFMC constituted a key center for a dynamic cinematic movement united by a shared commitment to exploring the materiality of film, notably through direct interventions on the film reel. From the mid-1980s, while continuing her formal investigations into the material properties of the film medium, Lahire incorporated autobiographical and documentary dimensions into her practice. She situated film in constant relation to other forms of matter: human and non-human bodies, landscapes, and the flows that traverse them. Through a wide range of experimental techniques generating stratified, textured surfaces, she gave form to the co-implication of bodies and the physical continuit connecting herself to other living beings—human, animal, and vegetal—conceived as organic and perishable matter. Drawing on her own bodily vulnerability—Lahire suffered from anorexia—her work gives form to what feminist theorist Stacy Alaimo has termed a “transcorporeal space”³, in which human corporeality is inextricably bound to the environment through a shared condition of permeability and contamination. The exhibition title, “Overexposed, like an X-ray”⁴, borrows from the work of American poet Sylvia Plath (1932–1963), whose voice resonates throughout Lahire’s films . While not directly drawn from a specific film by Lahire, the phrase frames the exhibition through an overlapping of entities—Lahire herself, women workers and residents living near nuclear facilities, the film strip, and the earth—subjected to processes that penetrate and erode its material integrity. Under exposure to X-rays, flesh, emulsion, and mineral matter are attacked, hollowed out to their fragile supporting structures. X-rays operates on multiple levels: literally, as a reference to clinical imaging and nuclear radiation; and metaphorically, as an index of the invasive power of medical authority, the military-industrial complex, and, more broadly, the patriarchal, colonial and capitalist system. In Lahire’s films⁵, “exposure” speaks to the material vulnerability of both human and non-human entities, not only as a means of critiquing relations of domination and exploitation, but also as a way of affirming a contingent, porous corporeality inseparable from the material world that constitutes it. This perspective aligns with what Stacy Alaimo, in Exposed, describes as an “ethics of exposure”⁶, grounded in the recognition of our material continuity with our environments. “Dwelling in the dissolve”, as Alaimo suggests, is to acknowledge permeability as the basis for an ethical relationship to the living. The exhibition brings together four key films from the early phase of Lahire’s practice in the 1980s—she would go on to produce ten films between 1984 and 1999. These works trace a progressive expansion of corporeal concerns: from an exploration of her own bodily vulnerability, shaped by anorexia and fostering an empathetic relationship to other living beings, to an engagement with environments affected by the invisible toxicity of nuclear radiation, power plants, and uranium mining. The first two films, Arrows (1984) and Edge (1986), approach film as a body—as a “skin” (Laura Marks⁷)—establishing parallels between cinematic editing and surgical procedures through a deliberately discontinuous montage. They also introduce the figure of the animal, tracing a shift from metaphor — the animal as image of freedom — toward an acknowledgment of shared suffering. Lahire draws connections between the objectified female body within dominant representational regimes—extended through invasive medical practices—and the animal subjected to human domination, both fragmented into slices, evoking Sylvia Plath’s expression of “pathological salamis”⁸, cited in Edge. Terminals (1986) and Serpent River (1989) respectively open and conclude a series of four anti-nuclear films. Terminals examines the working conditions of women in a nuclear power plant and their exposure to radiation. Its title refers both to monitoring interfaces—pervasive instruments of control—and to the terminal stages of illness. The image is held at the threshold of disappearance, as though the film itself were subjected to the same radiative forces as the bodies it depicts. Serpent River, the final work in a trilogy shot in Serpent River, Ontario (Canada), addresses the ecological and human consequences of uranium mining by the multinational Rio Tinto Zinc. Lahire renders perceptible the otherwise invisible toxicity of radiation as it circulates—fluid, diffuse, and chromatic—across mined landscapes, through living streams, into human bodies, and onto the filmic surface itself, whose textures and colors evoke the entanglement of bodies and the substances that permeate them. Across these works, bodily fluids, blood circulation, underground waters, and tidal movements converge into a shared substrate of contaminated matter. The materiality of film mirrors the entanglements it articulates: the filmmaker’s body, those of local inhabitants, the depths of the earth, the filmic medium, and the spectators are bound together in a shared vulnerability.. Lahire thereby suggests that an awareness of the mutual porosity of bodies and environments—and of their interdependent fragility—may constitute the foundation for an ecofeminist ethics grounded in embodiment, challenging Western conceptions of the subject as fixed, bounded, and autonomous. The exhibition design is conceived by artist Jagna Ciuchta, whose practice–characterized by processes of permeability, contamination, and the incorporation of other artists’ works– extends and reactivates key gestures and motifs present in Lahire’s cinema.

Far from being neutral tools, technologies and media profoundly shape our emotional relationship, intimacies, and our ways of seeing the world. They fuel our imaginations, forge our identites and define the networks in which we evolve, whether digital, geographical, based on shared interests, or all of the above. The uses we make of it, and especially those we invent, derive our possibilities for action and resistance. This exhibition sets out to unfold these contemporary issues through the lens of a career: that of Nathalie Magnan (1956–2016), a significant yet still little-known figure in the history of media, technology and feminism. From the 1980s to the 2010s, Nathalie Magnan explored these questions from various fields of thought and action. Retracing her career through archives and films, and bringing together artists with whom she has worked or whose practices extend hers, the exhibition constructs a collective biography that highlights the current scope of her struggles for gender issues in technology and for a critical reading of media. Media theorist, filmmaker, cyberfeminist, and navigator of both the seas and the internet, Nathalie Magnan has contributed to the history of thought, media and technology, feminism and LGBTQIA+ struggles in a transdisciplinary, lively and generousmanner.Teacher,webmistress, hacktivist and artist,whithout ever having used this label, Nathalie Magnan has acted as a bridge between geographical scenes, intellectual and activist backgrounds, and disciplinary fields that rarely intersect and do not always engage in dialogue. Favouring collective work, using feminist and rhizomaticmethodologies where the ‘do-it-yourself’ approach is both inspiring and contagious, Nathalie Magnan has always worked to collect and bring together images, texts, people, struggles and machines. Having passed away in 2016, she leaves behind a legacy of her incisive questions about how the media shape our worldviews, her belief in everyone’s agency to create their own representations, her participatory investigative methodology, and her humour.