Exhibited at @Mécènes du sud, Montpellier, France, 2021 / @Operation room, American Hospital, Istanbul, Turkey, 2019 

(-)Feel every day. Techniques of resistance, Mécènes du Sud Montpellier, France – 15 dec 2020 – 7 march 2021                                        Rachele Borghi, Laurie Charles, Anne-Laure Franchette, Julia Gorostidi, Raúl Hott, Yes, we fuck!, Jacopo Miliani, Lizette Nin, Helena Vinent, Sofia Azzariti + Sarah Gonçalvès + Héléna Griffault + Marie Féménias + Margaux Larnicol-Primot + Hélène Etchebarren + Mélanie Riba + Fiona Mazza + Juliette Laurent-Martin – exhibition living body.
Curator: Veronica Valentini

♦ Leflet

(-)Feel every day. Techniques of resistance is the setting of a reflection initiated in November 2019 during the series of encounters on curatorial practices and radical sociability Ils font, je fais, nous faisons led by Veronica Valentini which aimed to bring awareness on the individualistic worlds in which we have long been culturally confined.

Organized for 15 participants in collaboration between Mécènes du Sud and the cultural centre of the Paul Valery University in Montpellier, these get togethers led to the invitation of Rachele Borghi – a lecturer in Geography at the Sorbonne and an academic « pornactivist » who offers a performance – to lead a workshop on anti-oppressive and decolonial practices. The result, materialized by the living body of the exhibition, is the creation of the Conscientization Salon which works inside and outside the exhibition space as a tool to approach, question and overcome acquired cultural limits and embrace the collective and the pluriverse in all its forms of expression. Through this exhibition, which places embodied artistic practices, the body and the vulnerability at its heart, the idea is the creation of an ecosystem between the agents involved (curators, artists, students, audiences and artworks) which is built around relationships of care and interdependencies at the somatic, affective, social and cultural levels.
As such, the exhibition acts as a shared living space, open to conversation, the cohabitation and the knowledge of the multiple forms of being, emotions and lives that the works reveal: from physical, sexual and gender dissidence to health, contagion, spirituality, medical science and the plant world. Because it is only from the conscientization of our situated and entangled realities that we can relate to others, that we can listen to each other, learn together and dismantle current and past oppression
and violence. In order to make it accessible to a wider public, the exhibition will also be visible in almost its entirety, through the broadcast of a video with subtitles and produced in sign language.

Flesh and Bone, Operation room, American Hospital, Istanbul, Turkey – May 18 – July 27 / 2019                                                                    Curated by Kevser Güler

“flesh and bone” brings together works that imagine an embodied subjectivity and engage with the body as a becoming that lives, expires, ails, heals, strengthens, withers through various material, historical, social, personal associations and interactions. the exhibition, which features works by alican şahinler, deniz gül, deniz pasha, iris ergül, joachim franz beich, kerem ozan bayraktar, laurie charles, linda dement & nancy mauro-flude, marina papazyan, nilbar güreş, pedro barateiro and şafak çatalbaş, invites the viewer to ponder the body’s powers of becoming, action and exposure, affecting and being affected.

“flesh and bone” started out with discussions and research on artistic productions that address the contemporary forms of perceiving the body, and as the first exhibition of this ongoing process, it aspires to enable new dialogues and encounters through the works it has brought together.

The exhibition points at the historical role the definitions of body and health assume in the construction of social norms and biopolitical domination mechanisms such as colonialism, racism and sexuality. it is interested in the possibilities of espousing the power of feminist critique and philosophy’s forms of understanding the body, and practices of forming solidarity and communities in the context of thinking about the body and vitality today. while looking at the corporeality of life, it highlights the dimensions of bodies that cannot be comprised by physiology. while asking questions that make one consider ecological justice and public space in the context of care relations regarding the existence of the nonhuman, it investigates the possibilities of a wholistic notion of health and healing within practices of living together with earth, soil, vegetation, animal, bacteria, the living and the nonliving. it bids us to think about our relationships of responsibility with that which is not here now; with that which has yet to happen or has long perished, and in the context of these binding relationships about the idea of a justice pertaining to life and living beings.