Georgia René-Worms

Mécènes du sud, Montpellier 2023

 Marianne Berenhaut, Laurie Charles, Won-Jin Choi, Marianne Derrien, Liliane Giraudon, Tanja Nis-Hansen, Georgia René-Worms,
Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Sequoia Scavullo et Jo Spence

Curator : Georgia René-Worms 

“I’m progressing through a life that is no longer my own, finding myself enclosed in a body that is no longer mine, which illness (its tools and consequences) has rendered not only alien but inadequate.The body is no longer an ally, it has become an obstacle, and it is from it that I advance in my vocabulary, slowly unsanding a variety of scenes and actions hitherto inaccessible.”

Liliane Giraudon, Madame Himself

They claimed their autonomy very discreetly, quietly they began to transform. Generating new forms within us: succulent and sticky muscle tissues, flesh growths, cellular proliferations, mutant cartilages, cannibalising cells. Words have been put on each of these movements, scientific words, medical words. It is a new language that came to us, we have been told about these bodies as if they were places where an order needed to be re-established. Our bodies and our history have been exposed to a new language. An authoritarian and rigid language, as if petrified, to talk about our sick bodies and their warm, soft, and moving viscera.

It is bedridden, in a clinic, that the need of encountering those curatorial and emancipating narratives came to me. It is horizontally, in a social temporality up in the air when sickness had rendered me non-productive, that these new bodies built in difference appeared to me.

The anarchic body is the body that finds itself in a sort of flat-share with pathology, a body that at some point in its life took the freedom to empower itself, to mutate as if in reaction to its own biology and exposomes. Our anarchic bodies are also the need for an horizontal pooling of knowledge by the sick themselves, not by opposing medical institutions, but by reorganising listening, a narrative and a self-managed knowledge from within to the outskirts the experience of sickness.

Each of the pieces of this exhibition is a narrative or visual form highlighting various strategies of bringing visibility set up by artists and authors to politically and socially render our experiences apprehensible. Our anarchic bodies aim to operate a paradigm shift; there is no question anymore of being a submissive host but to pass on the experience of sickness on the proactive side, accepting and exposing the moments of power, just as well as the moments of doubt and fatigue.

Here is built a non-linear historiography made of sisters and allies. Breaking down the barriers of the functions they are subjected to, the artists and authors of this exhibition deconstruct the idealisation of the modern activist body. Here, pain, hormon-dependency, chronicity, auto-immunity are not solely words describing pathologies but the starting point of reflections on our intimate and political lives.

Images ©Elise Ortiou Campion