A mobile and reproducible project on sexualities and space
Curated by: L'École du Magasin, XIe Session, Damien Airault, Valérie Chartrain, Stéphanie Garzanti, Estelle Nabeyrat, Benoit Villain.
with: Bernard Bazile, Ursula Bieman, Monica Bonvicini, Carol Bove, Tom Burr, Jeff Burton, Alain Della Negra, Michel Dorais, Christelle Familiari, Johny Jensen, K8 Hardy, Nadine Norman, Marion von Osten, Planning Familial de Grenoble, Mickaël Tramoy and Marnie Weber.
Curated by: L'École du Magasin, XIe Session, Damien Airault, Valérie Chartrain, Stéphanie Garzanti, Estelle Nabeyrat, Benoit Villain.
with: Bernard Bazile, Ursula Bieman, Monica Bonvicini, Carol Bove, Tom Burr, Jeff Burton, Alain Della Negra, Michel Dorais, Christelle Familiari, Johny Jensen, K8 Hardy, Nadine Norman, Marion von Osten, Planning Familial de Grenoble, Mickaël Tramoy and Marnie Weber.
We now live and consider our sexualities as something diverse. In our project we are striving to show this plurality by examining its relationship to space, using Michel de Certeau’s term: space as “a practiced place”, as “composed of intersections of mobile elements”, “actuated by the ensemble of movement deployed within it”. Mobility that characterizes space echoes the mobility of today’s sexuality constantly on the move, in a permanent process of construction/deconstruction, to the point that every discourse takes the risk of being only a temporary witness of its reality. We would like to show, at the same time, how sexualities appropriate spaces and pervert the usual functions of these spaces, and, inversely, how spaces influence sexual conditions and practices. Beyond this statement of fact, examining sexualities - as pratices and as representations - and their relationships to spaces, is to show sexualities “in situation”, and to inscribe-them in the physical space of an exhibition. In order to convey these connexions, we chose to invite about twenty contributors (artists, researchers, social workers, etc.) and ask them to provide us with printed matter taken from their personal archives, or coming from existing works. A specific request was made to each of the participants to determine a precise content. Then, these documents, which are completed by our personal selection of texts and pictures, are pinned on boards of different formats. So, in this way, we would like to emphasize the working process (rather than the finished artwork) and the collaborative and open character of the final result. Moreover, the reproducible value of these contributions corresponds to the project of publishing the exhibition, make it mobile and “displayable” in other spaces. For the presentation of this project, we looked for a place which could underline such a discursive dimension and offer a specific context to the issues we are dealing with. In Grenoble, the Family Planning, a non-profit organization created in 1961, was a pioneer place in terms of reflexion about sexualities. Moreover, being in this location corresponds to our wish to confront different points of view with different publics and enables us to create crossroads between contemporary art visitors and Family Planning users. An evening video screening at Le Magasin will be added to our exhibition, in the framework of Grenoble’s Gay and Lesbian Week in order to put forward some artist’s points of view on the questions of homosexuality and gender.