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

Reservation here

More infor­ma­tion: public­s@­be­ton­salon.net