From muscle

Artists: Zine Andrieu (Subalternes studio), Geneviève Dieng, Samir Laghouati-Rashwan & Trésor, Projet_51_, Elsa Prudent, Sacha Rey, Johanna Rocard, SOÑXSEED, Fanny Souade Sow

Curator: Daisy Lambert

From muscle (Partir du muscle) is a reappropriation of bodies, a legitimisation of existences. The exhibition extends a residency that began in October 2021. 

A year and a half to delve into the links between the notion of struggle (personal and/or collective), of bodies and narratives, through the concept of corpoliteracy theorised by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung. An idea that comes as part of a decolonial reflection, i.e. a critical effort to distance oneself from systemic, hegemonic, dominant knowledge and ways of thinking.  

Corpoliteracy brings together two terms: “corpo”, the body, and “literacy”, reading. It is a sensitive reading of bodies. For Ndikung, this is about interpreting the body as “a platform […] that acquires, stores and disseminates knowledge”. Yet this knowledge differs from that produced through thinking. He studies performed movements as reflections of value systems, social practices and identities.

The categorisation of bodies—according to class, sex, gender, race, etc.—leads to processes of recognition, alliances between or exclusions of different people. Corpoliteracy is therefore a tool enabling us to become conscious of mechanisms that control the way in which people perceive their own bodies and the bodies of others. It recognises that bodies aren’t neutral and that readings of some of them engender discrimination and violence. 

A year and a half, too, to pursue reflections on the use of institutions as places of transmission and as potential political spaces. To include the project in CAC Brétigny’s approach of co-creation: the artists collaborated with different groups from the area.

In Elsa Dorlin’s book Self-Defense: A Philosophy of Violence, “partir du muscle” (from muscle) refers to the possibility of experiencing the phenomena of struggle, fear and violence through feelings and sensations. The author takes muscle as a starting point from which to build a genealogy of mechanisms of self-defence. The residency and this exhibition try to deploy a restricted scope of the practices Dorlin calls “deferred self-defence” as that which occur at a different time to the violence suffered. 

The opportunities for co-creation that arise from this ongoing residency are therefore an invitation to read and connect bodies, to create spaces of corpoliteral expression for the identities and for the experiences they hold. Starting from what is recorded in the muscles, the flesh and the epidermis to draw out knowledge, to create a new kind of archive, new narratives and to transform their perception. The invited artists, started “from muscle” to deploy a tool, a self-defensive, artistic corpoliteracy. Collectively experimenting methods for the reinvention, reappropriation and transformation of bodies.

The exhibition From muscle does not seek to reproduce the experience of the workshops but hints at them. Some of the works are traces left by what a group shared and created together. They take the form of object-relics, objects to be activated , or visual objects in construction. These hints are sometimes more distant because they were not produced during these collective experiences but echo shared methodologies.

Other artists were invited to take part in this exhibition to expand the toolbox.  They approach struggles that have been experienced or inherited transgenerationally from a sensitive perspective. Their works also imply a commitment and a reappropriation of certain bodies.

Together, the artists multiply the sites of resistance for their/our muscles.

Press file available here.

The CAC Brétigny is a cultural establishment of Coeur d’Essonne Agglomération. Labeled as a Contemporary Art Center of National Interest, it benefits from the support of the Ministère de la Culture—DRAC Île-de-France, Région Île-de-France and Conseil départemental de l’Essonne, with the complicity of the Brétigny-sur-Orge’s municipality. CAC Brétigny is a member of TRAM and d.c.a.