L’œil la bouche et le reste

In the beginning there was a choreography work by Volmir Cordeiro, L’œil la bouche et le reste. Or rather not: in the beginning there were images, words, faces that wove this work’s imaginary world; an underlying weave of works that interacted with each other – videos or films joined together by meaningful links, by accents, by echoes, correspondences and intensities. Accompanied by Marcela Santander Corvalán and Margot Videcoq, Volmir Cordeiro transformed the images, voices and motifs that made up this fragmentary world into an exhibition that both extended and went beyond the work. These works suggest critical, political and aesthetic lines of thought: a constellation built around what one might call, following on from Gilles Deleuze, ‘facialisation’: ‘The face digs the hole that subjectification needs in order to break through,’ he wrote. What Joséphine Baker, Samuel Beckett, Valeska Gert and Latifa Laâbissi have in common is a certain idea of the enigma of the face – what it articulates and what it expresses: its expressive power and its power to resist. ‘The face is a map’, wrote Deleuze. The eye, the mouth (and the rest) are arranged on this spatial, temporal, physical map, which has been prominent since the beginning of the 20th century and right up to the present day: these holes through which reality emerges, through which the subject receives and gives off signs, fragments of identity, registers of expressiveness. This exhibition also recounts another history of the body: history with minority overtones that can be deciphered on the margins, and a form of murmuring, harrowing, contorted, hilarious community, whose songs, cries, smiles and murmurs reverberate with us.

Volmir Cordeiro, a performer (with Xavier Le Roy, Lia Rodrigues, Laurent Pichaud, Emmanuelle Huynh and Vera Mantero), uses the body as a place of intermixing, the vehicle for disturbing expressiveness. After a first series of solos (Ciel, Inês and Rue), he created L’oeil la bouche et le reste in 2017. He is also a researcher, author of a thesis on marginal figures in contemporary dance.

A performer, notably for Dominique Brun and Faustin Linyekula, Marcela Santander Corvalán also collaborates with Mickaël Phelippeau. After Époque, a duo with Volmir Cordeiro exploring the expressionist imagination, she presented Disparue during the DañsFabrik 2016 festival. In 2017, she created MASH with the artist Annamaria Ajmone, a piece that combined the choreographic languages that they both embodied. 

After working as Latifa Laâbissi’s administrator and co-director of the Extension Sauvage festival, Margot Videcoq today divides her time between accompanying artists’ projects (Volmir Cordeiro, Grand Magasin, Pauline Le Boulba, Martine Pisani) and programming shows and performances. With David Sanson, she is the curator of the Biennale du Divers.

Movies and film clips presented in the exhibition

Galerie

Joséphine Baker 
La Sirène des Tropiques, 1927
La Meme, 1927
La Plantation, 1927
Le pompier des Folies Bergères, 1928

Luiz de Abreu 
O Samba do crioulo doido, 2004

Nina Simone 
Backlash blues, 1976

Bruce Nauman 
Lip Sync, 1969

Volmir Cordeiro 
L’œil la bouche et le reste, 2017

Vera Mantero
Une mystérieuse Chose, a dit e.e cummings*, 2004

Latifa Laâbissi 
Écran somnambule, 2012

Maguy Marin 
Singspiele, 2014

Studio 12

Steven Cohen 
Chandelier, 2002

Juan Manuel Echavarria 
Bocas de Ceniza, 2004

William Forsythe 
Solo, 1997

Valeska Gert 
Tanzerische Pantominen, 1925

Yvonne Rainer 
Hand Movie, 1966

Richard Serra 
Hand catching lead, 1968

Bas Jan Ader
I’m too sad to tell you, 1971

La Ribot 
Laughing Hole, 2006

Maguy Marin 
Ha ! Ha !, 2008

Lia Rodrigues 
Incarnat, 2005

Latifa Laâbissi 
Self portrait camouflage, 2006

Tatsumi Hijikata 
Hôsôtan, 1972

Abbas Kiarostami 
Shirin, 2008

Marcelo Evelin 
Matadouro, 2011

Micheline Torres 
Carne, 2008

Ana Rita Teodoro 
Fantôme méchant, 2016

Maria Bethânia 
Cantico negro, 1978

Sabine Macher 
Audiodescription de L’œil la bouche et le reste, 2017

Studio 1

10 > 15.03

Tatiana Issa et Raphael Alvarez 
Dzi Croquettes, 2009-2011

16 > 20.03

Loïc Touzé & Latifa Laâbissi 
Love, 2010

21 > 25.03

Antonia Baehr 
Could you please laugh for a day, 2007

Laurent Goldring 
Figures, 2004

26 > 30.03

Mark Tompkins 
La valse de Vaslav, Hommage à Nijinski, 1989
Icons, Hommage à Valeska Gert, 1998
Under my skin, Hommage à Joséphine Baker, 1996
Witness, Hommage à Harry Sheppard, 1992