Exhibition

Déplier baroque –
Unfolding the Baroque

Curated
Marina Nordera

Maquette de costumes de Sylvie Skinazi pour le ballet Platée, recréé en 1989 par Jean-Claude Malgoire et François Raffinot. Fonds Sylvie Skinazi, Médiathèque du CN D
Maquette de costumes de Sylvie Skinazi pour le ballet Platée, recréé en 1989 par Jean-Claude Malgoire et François Raffinot. Fonds Sylvie Skinazi, Médiathèque du CN D

17.11 > 17.12.22

CN D Pantin

B arroca

A rtifice

R epetition

O mbre

Q ueer

U chronie

E xotic

This exhibit is organized around a playful game of diffraction of the baroque imaginary over a large panel of suggestions. Each figure infinitely multiplies signs to eschew any articulated definition of what the Baroque could be, and to invite the audience to get lost in its many manifestations. The baroque arises in what is full of colors, weird, twisted, like the “Barroca” pearl it supposedly gets its name from. It hides behind Artifice, and thrives in an artistic process relying on constraint and rigorous technique. It multiplies and diffracts in all the variations of impossible Repetition: restitution, reconstitution, reconstruction, recreation, revival, reactivation, reenactment, … The spiral which wraps around the void organizes its cycles before it dynamizes the structure and ornament of architectures and bodies. It hides in obscurity, in forgetting, in the shadows (Ombres) of Caravaggio, in the abyss of the unconscious that produces light. It plays with metamorphosis and the subversions of the body, and is a political and timeless aesthetic laboratory for Queer practices. It blurs time and space in utopia and euchronia (Uchronie), folds and unfolds constantly the intertwined narratives of plot and action, of presentation and representation, memory and history. It often wears the face of the Other and appears in foreign landscapes – strange, stranger, erotic, Exotic – including in ecstasy, exultation, exaltation, and out-of-body experiences. Each of the seven sections of the exhibit opens like a cabinet of curiosities containing objects, documents, testimonies, experiences that are works in progress, future works, or past ones that can be archived. All the items are regrouped in clusters of words, images, gestures and sounds. Each allows the audience to reach the past through a crack it opens in the present, therefore revealing the embedding process of time, knowledge and the experience of what baroque dance could be today.