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-rays ”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.

A media theorist, filmmaker, cyberfeminist, navigator of seas and internets, Nathalie Magnan (1956–2016) contributed in a transdisciplinary, vibrant and generous way to the history of thought, media and technologies, feminism, and LGBTQI+ struggles. A teacher, webmistress, hacktivist, and artist—though she never claimed that title—Nathalie Magnan played a crucial role as a connector between geographic scenes, intellectual and activist communities, and disciplinary fields that rarely intersect or enter into dialogue. Favouring collective work, with feminist and rhizomatic methodologies in which do-it-yourself practices were both empowering and contagious, Nathalie Magnan consistently worked toward collecting, bringing together and intersecting images, texts, people, struggles and machines. As a student at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the 1980s, she worked as an assistant to philosopher and historian of science Donna Haraway, and later translated into French Haraway’s seminal essay A Cyborg Manifesto. Nathalie Magnan was also involved in the public-access television collectives Paper Tiger Television and Deep Dish Television. After returning to France in the 1990s, she directed several films, including Lesborama for Canal+’s first Nuit Gay in 1995. A co-founder and for a time president of the Paris Gay & Lesbian Film Festival (now Chéries-Chéris), and a contributor to the magazine Gai Pied, she later became a professor at the École nationale supérieure d’art in Dijon, and subsequently in Bourges. Deeply engaged in cyberfeminist, tactical media and hacktivist circles, Nathalie Magnan organised digital counterculture events, moderated feminist mailing lists, coded websites, wrote and translated texts, and coordinated collective publications. In 2000, in response to the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) held in Paris without a single woman speaker, she organised an ISEA Off event in a women-only format at the Information and Documentation Centre of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. In 2004 and 2005, in Finland and later in the Strait of Gibraltar, she organised two sea crossings entitled Sailing for Geeks, bringing together artists and activists around communication technologies, thereby drawing a parallel between sailing at sea and navigating the web. Nathalie Magnan passed away at the age of sixty following metastatic breast cancer. She leaves behind a legacy of struggles around gender and technologies, incisive reflections on how media shape our worldviews, a deep belief in each individual’s agency to produce their own representations, a participatory methodology of inquiry, and a sharp sense of humour. Many of those who knew her wonder what she would have thought, written, or done in relation to our present moment: social networks to which we entrust our intimate lives and data; a pandemic that has reshaped our relationships to distance and vulnerability; the possibilities of artificial intelligence; mainstream media controlled by the far right; and genocides broadcast live in the palms of our hands. Many are also deeply engaged with her archival collection, deposited at the Archives de la critique d’art in Rennes by her partner Reine Prat—a collection that joyfully blurs the boundaries between private and professional life, institutional culture and self-organisation, activism and transmission, reshuffling the deck of disciplines, genders and questions of legitimacy. The exhibition is not intended merely as a portrait or a tribute, but rather as a collective biography open to the present—one in which the thinking, struggles and bridges that Nathalie Magnan created resonate across different generations of artists and thinkers.