Hortense Belhôte

Hortense Belhôte is an actress, author and art historian. She is the creator of Merci de ne pas Toucher, an Arte web series directed by Cecilia de Arce, which looks at masterpieces of European classical art from a feminist, queer and decolonial perspective. As an actress, she has performed in plays and films and taught drama. She has been a contemporary dance performer since 2017, for the piece Footballeuses by Mickaël Phelippeau. At the crossroads of her practices, she has created a bespoke form for herself: the performancelecture, whose catalog has unfolded over the years. A history of female soccer has been touring since 2019; in 2021, Histoires de Graffeuses was commissioned by the Besançon CDN; in 2022, Performeureuses (a history of performance in contemporary dance) was created for the Théâtre de Vanves, followed by Et la marmotte ? (a historical and sociological approach to the mountains) commissioned by the Grenoble CCN, and 1664 (a thorough debunking of Louis XIV’s absolutism) at the CN D. In 2023, Portraits de Famille – les oublié.es de la Révolution française, produced by L’Espace 1789 in Saint-Ouen, was part of this vast rereading of heritage beyond the boundaries of the arts and conventional wisdom. In 2024, Hortense Belhôte will be artist-in-residence at the Musée d’Orsay, where she will create Escape Game XIX, a spectacular tour of the collections, which will be presented in its final form in the museum’s auditorium in the Spring of 2024.

For Camping, Hortense Belhôte proposes to share her methodology around the dialogue between ancient and performing art, using a video projector. The device is a pretext for overcoming supposed opposites: past and present, historical heritage and contemporary creation; tradition and emancipation; visual arts and live performance; science and creation; digital projection and the human body; words and skins... Autobiography, pop culture and the unveiling of the self will be readily invited into this quest for the blind spots of mainstream culture, towards the construction of an individually and collectively more welcoming horizon.