Events
If you require the presence of a foreign or sign language interpreter, please let us know at least 4 days ahead of the event that interests you, at the following e-mail address:
publics@betonsalon.net
THE ANARCHIST BODY: ANATOMY OF VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS
A series of lectures proposed by Julie Pellegrin
Henrik Olesen, Some Illustrations to the Life of Alan Turing, 2008, 16 parts, inkjet print on newsprint, 33 x 48 cm each (detail), courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York
In relation to her forthcoming book on the politics of contemporary performance, Julie Pellegrin explores the hypothesis of a relationship between performative and anarchist practices. With this series of lectures, she intends to engage in an exercise of speculative anatomy based on the ”Members and the Stomach” and the fiction of the dissociated body suggested by the fable of La Fontaine.
As a good moralist, Jean de La Fontaine was prompt to call the strikers to order and put them back on the right path – that of work and the body of the state. But if the members had not obeyed, what alternative anatomy could they have generated? By refusing to be one with authority, what new alliances could they have imagined? Could this body, decomposed and then recomposed according to the principle of free association, have been qualified as anarchist?
The organic metaphor between the individual and the social body, as mentioned in the fable, has proved to be increasingly popular since the 19th century, including among anarchists. But for the latter, it allows us to rethink redesign the relationship between the individual and society in terms of interdependence, and not opposition or representation.
Some artistic practices offer non-hierarchical forms of relationship to the self and to the community, through a complex work of composition. This first session will be an opportunity to think with them to understand what ungovernable bodies they make possible, and to outline some elements of reflection around refusal, disorder, heterogeneity, free will and reciprocity.
Thursday 27th May, 6pm
« Exhibition scene » by Julie Pellegrin
Lecture
Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, Moving Backwards, 2019, installation with DVD ingraved 16mm film and 47 photographs, 15 min, courtesy Marcelle Alix, Paris and Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam
Thursday 10th June, 6pm
The mutualist body, with la facultad - Myriam Lefkowitz and Catalina Insignares
Discussion
©Jean-Philippe Derail
Several hypotheses of anarchist bodies were evoked during the first session: recalcitrant, de-hierarchized, illegible, unfounded, desiring and overflowing. Far from constituting new categories, this anatomical exercise based on the artworks has more than revealed qualities, or faculties, open to free association. This "cabinet of practices" conceived by Catalina Insignares and Myriam Lefkowitz is designed for exiled people and their companions. It mingles somatic, choreographic and energetic practices, sometimes influenced by tarot reading, hypnosis or telepathy. They use all these mediums to experiment with other forms of relationship to oneself, to others and to our social environment.
Thursday 24th June, 6pm
The self-determined body, with Kapwani Kiwanga
Discussion
This third session offers to examine the ambivalent idea of self-determination throughout Kapwani Kiwanga’s work. We will revisit her conference-performances practice with a few deviations around some of her other artworks (Ujamaa and the socialist villagisation in Tanzania, or The Marias and women rights to their own bodies…) to try and connect bodies’ self-determination and self-governance lifestyles, between domination, care and corporal knowledge, and between alienated, alien and cyborg bodies.
Following Kapwani Kiwanga’s speculative and anthropological approach, we will discuss the way some esthetic operations such as disidentification, assembling or anachronism, can offer lines of thought for a self-determined – social or individual – body.
Kapwani Kiwanga’s solo show Cima Cima is currently presented at Crédac – Centre of Contemporary Art, Ivry (until July 11th, 2021).
Thursday 8th July, 6pm
The non-performing body, with Béatrice Balcou
Discussion
Béatrice Balcou, Container #08 (Ctenolepisma longicaudata & Henri Matisse), 2020
Image © Julie Pellegrin, opening of the exhibition L’usage des richesses, Salle Principale, Paris
This fourth and final session will be the opportunity for an exchange with Béatrice Balcou, focusing on her recent works and the release of the major monograph dedicated to her by MER. Paper Kunsthalle*.
At his conference “Blackness and non-performance” at the Moma in 2015, the poet and theoretician Fred Moten formulated the concept of “non-performance”. The latter is not so much a refusal to perform, but rather a qualified refusal — highly strategic and political — to perform in accordance with the normative rationalities that condition and impose their own logics as the only ones possible and permitted.
In an attempt to apprehend Béatrice Balcou’s work through the prism of this idea, we will move between the unique glass sculptures that contain vestiges of works of art or insects, “devourers of legacies”, a forthcoming book that tears down the very idea of the monograph to better reinvent it, ceremonies held without an audience, and other “non-performances” that are in development. We will see how, working against and through a series of constraints (economic, physical, social, material, symbolic, etc.) the artist multiplies the variations on the theme of refusal, simultaneously proposing alternatives that establish their own rules. Finally, we will examine her artistic strategies that consist of stalling, opacity, anonymity, unproductivity, working at a reduced scale, and with a certain vulnerability, all of which she assumes responsibility for, to identify the way bodies—hers, the audiences, those of objects or other non-human beings—resist the injunctions of neo-liberal performance.
*The meeting will be followed by the official launch of the publication Ceremonies &. The work looks at all the Cérémonies (2013-2020) by connecting protocols drawn up by the artist, texts by various authors (Vanessa Desclaux, Christophe Gallois, Zoë Gray, Béatrice Gross, Julie Pellegrin, Émilie Renard, Septembre Tiberghien and Eva Wittocx), as well as exchanges with artists, collection directors, gallerists or publishers — providing a range of perspectives that allow us to follow the choreography woven by these unique performances, between work gestures and care gestures.
THE BOOK CLUB
Concept: Myriam Lefkowitz and Cécile Lavergne, in discussion with Igor Krtolica
Created in collaboration with the artists Jean-Philippe Derail, Thierry Grapotte, Catalina Insignares, Julie Laporte, Florian Richaud and Yasmine Youcef
©Carol Lefkowitz
The Book Club proposes a reading experience that takes the form of a dialogue between Myriam Lefkowitz and a visitor, who is invited to lie down and close his or her eyes for an hour: an attempt at attunement that originates in the sharing of a modified state of attention, close to hypnotic induction.
Gathering a corpus of philosophical texts all involving specific alliances between humans and non-humans, The Book Club is a two-voice experiment that speculates on a form of reading in which thinking, feeling, imagining, dreaming, moving... come together and generate an alternative mode of understanding and thinking - so many new faculties for apprehending the world to come.
One hour sessions at 11am and 2pm
Tuesday 15th to Friday 18th June
Monday 21st to Thursday 24th June
Monday 28th to Wednesday 30th June
Monday 12th to Thursday 15th July
More information: publics@betonsalon.net
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