Hortense Belhôte

The creation of the Kronenbourg Brewery in Strasbourg; Nicolas Fouquet being sentenced to life in prison, after being the creator of celebrations of the arts in his property Vaux-le-Vicomte; the first edition of the “Plaisirs de l’île enchantée” in Versailles to celebrate Louis 14^th; the creation of the Compagnie des Indes by Colbert, a company dealing in coffee, tobacco, rum, sugar and opium, what is the common point between all these events? They all occurred in 1664. This is not just a temporal coincidence; these events attest to a shift in perspective in terms of aesthetics and politics, from unbridled joy to the entertainment of the dominant caste, from open creation to its regulation by royal academies, from joyful inebriation to addiction. Hortense Belhôte uses these correlated events in her “mental detox” in a performative lecture to find the “joy, the madness and freedom of the first 17^th century” where painting, architecture, ornamental gardens, dance, music and theatre combined in an inspired happening. The artist also calls upon her own memories as a party-loving student and blends together erudition, political commitment and performance in an updated performance of the baroque spirit.

Hortense Belhôte is a cinema and theatre actress and contemporary dancer who performed in Footballeuses by Mickaël Phelippeau; she also taught art history and has been creating feminist and libertarian “performative lectures” since 2019, which combine video-projection, intimate performances and the sharing of knowledge. After Une histoire du football féminin, L’érotisme dans l’art classique or Performeureuses, she is working on a project called Portrait de famille, 1789, which will premiere in 2023 and will evoke the forgotten figures of the French Revolution.