Opening the 11th edition of the Vagamondes Festival, the accomplice duo Superpartners decompartmentalises La Filature to explore mutant identities, celestial transitions, journeys in the jungle of human and non-human metamorphoses.
In 2020, the magazine The Eyes, which explores contemporary cultural and societal facts through the photographic medium, offered the Superpartners duo a carte blanche, which became the book Transgalactique : a photographic journey around the work of LGBTQIA+ star-artists, trans and/or queer, who have shaken up the notion of gender and overturned the stereotypes associated with it. Thanks to historical and contemporary portfolios, and conversations with activist Lalla Kowska-Régnier, philosopher Paul B. Preciado or the art historian Elisabeth Lebovici, the magazine makes room for artists directly concerned by the question of transition, fluidity, confusion, mutation of genres.
This research was part of the research and creation work of SMITH, trans artist and transdisciplinary researcher (holder of a doctorate from UQAM, Montreal) – work already presented on the occasion of two exhibitions at La Filature in 2022 –, which unfolds in all the directions of the imagination: photography, cinema, performance, but also through the curation of exhibitions and collaborations with other artists and researchers.
Thus, the Trans(e)galactique exhibition presents itself as a new chapter in the reflection carried out by SMITH with Nadège Piton for several years, around the observation that our contemporary civilization has lost something of its relationship to the invisible, to the distant , to the non-human, to the cosmos. We construct who we are within a system made up of borders, separations, distinctions, exclusions, sclerosis, dominations. In this capitalist world, under general surveillance, where opacity, mystery, secrecy have disappeared – which highways and byways to clear to become what we are: pirates, tricksters, divergents of all kinds?
As an artist, researcher, curator, through projects such as Spectrographies or Désideration, SMITH implements strategies to invite spectators to constantly change their point of view, to operate displacements, to feel in themselves the presence of all that is beyond us, of all the possibilities, of the invisible and of celestial things. His new research, inspired by his meeting with Corine Sombrun, pushes him towards the experience of non-ordinary states of consciousness (self-induced cognitive trance, Amazonian medicine, practice of weightlessness within an Air Zero-G flight ) to find strategies that allow us to connect with all living things.
The Trans(e)galactic exhibition thus echoes this mysterious link between gender and state transitions, the ways of undoing and connecting the obsolete binaries that oppose, rather than connect: the masculine and the feminine, the visible and the invisible, the dream and the awakening, the human and the non-human… It presents itself as an investigation into what is trans(e), and weaves links between different worlds to dream of a movement to abolish borders, binarities and assignments.
“We made the choice to show our faces, our bodies – dissident bodies, trans, queer, binary and non-binary, valid and non-valid, white or non-white, so many body-vehicles of the idea of a passage, a transition, a journey on the spectrum of the genre. » SMITH, program « Par les temps qui courent », Marie Richeux, France Culture.
Within the exhibition, nearly a hundred works (photographs, videos, paintings, drawings) proposed by 35 international artists accompany this journey of thought through the establishment of new subjectivities through cross-dressing, surgery, make-up, editing, tattooing (Pierre Molinier, Marcel Bascoulard, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Gal & Hiroshima, Yannis Angel, Balthazar Heisch); the redefinition of the contours of the family portrait and the diary (Laurence Philomène, Darko de la Jaquette); documentary practices around contemporary and historical LGBTQIA+ communities (Amos Mac, Christer Strömholm, the collection of Sébastien Lifshitz, Del LaGrace Volcano, Cha Gonzales, Leonard Fink, Romy Alizée, Marc-Antoine Bartoli, Annie Sprinkle, Cassils); the creation of new images to tell of invisibilized, invisible, unthought bodies (Brandon Gercara, Kama La Mackerel, Pepe Atocha, Prune Phi + Tal Yaron & Kianuë Tran Kiêu, the Sexecology project, SMITH with Act UP – Paris, Corine Sombrun & Jeanne added); pictorial proposals integrating an imaginary of the intimate (Tom de Beijing, Fredster, Lazare Lazarus, ISAVince); up to a hybrid presence of plants and photography with Roberto Huarcaya’s Amazogram.
Trans(e)galactique
Curators Superpartners (SMITH et Nadège Piton)
Until May 14, 2023
La Filature, Scène Nationale de Mulhouse
20 allée Nathan Katz
68100 Mulhouse
03 89 36 28 28
www.lafilature.org
