"Cap pour l’île des vivantxs"*

In 1973, Le corps les­bien, Monique Wittig’s third book, was pub­lished. It was an unclas­si­fi­able and pioneering work in its use of lan­guage and in its polit­ical stance. This book fol­lows the opening of a new breach that Wittig, writer, the­o­rist and les­bian activist, will con­tinue to expand, in the wake of mate­ri­alist fem­i­nism and the strug­gles of sexual and gender minori­ties, between France and the United States, until her death in 2003. It is thus a double anniver­sary, the fiftieth anniver­sary of Le corps les­bien and the twen­tieth anniver­sary of the author’s death, which is cel­e­brated for this "Wittig year" in 2023.

The Cap pour l’île des vivantxs* pro­gram will be deployed during the course of 2023, begin­ning with monthly ses­sions of col­lec­tive sur­veying ses­sion written or trans­lated by Wittig and her intel­lec­tual entourage, and pre­sented by those who have (re)pub­lished, studied, inter­preted and trans­mitted them. A series of spe­cial events will be held in December, with a variety of meet­ings to cel­e­brate, com­plexify and actu­alize Wittig’s memory and the actu­ality of artistic strug­gles and prac­tices: a work­shop to deploy the links between Wittig and typog­raphy, meet­ings around the his­tory of les­bians reviews, mate­ri­alist fem­i­nism, but also racial strug­gles within the fem­i­nist and les­bian move­ments in France, col­lec­tive work­shops of trans­la­tion and radio cre­ation, non-mixed karate ini­ti­a­tion, as well as per­for­mances and read­ings of young authors.

On this occa­sion, Bétonsalon is renewing the links that the art center has already estab­lished with Wittig, whose edi­tions and archives were pre­sented in the exhi­bi­tion ‘Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent’ (com­mis­saires: Aliocha Imhoff and Kantuta Quiros, le peuple qui manque) in 2013, which bor­rowed its title from Les Guérillères. The same year, 36 Short Stories was pub­lished, as an anthology pub­lished for the tenth anniver­sary of Bétonsalon, including the article ‘History’ written by Wittig and Sande Zeig for their 1973 Brouillon pour un dic­tion­naire des amantes (English edi­tion : Lesbian peo­ples: Material for a dic­tionary, 1979) .

Cap pour l’île des vivantxs is a pro­posal by Mathilde Belouali-Dejean in col­lab­o­ra­tion with L’asso­ci­a­tion des ami-es de Monique Wittig and the com­plicity of Suzette Robichon and Stéphanie Garzanti

Visual : Courtesy Cécile Bouffard

* Quote from The les­bian body that might trans­late into : “you steer for the isle of the living” (ed. William Morrow, 1975, p. 82).

Note : col­lec­tive read­ings are held in French