XEROS - A mobile and reproducible project on sexualities and space.
From 22 June to 19 July 2002
Planning familial de Grenoble

Curated by: L'École du Magasin, XIe Session
Damien Airault, Valerie Chartrain, Stéphanie Garzanti, Estelle Nabeyrat, Benoit Villain.

We now live and consider our sexualities as something diverse. In our project we are striving to show this plurality by examining its relationship to space, using Michel de Certeau's term: space as "a practiced place", as "composed of intersections of mobile elements", "actuated by the ensemble of movement deployed within it". Mobility that characterizes space echoes the mobility of today's sexuality constantly on the move, in a permanent process of construction/deconstruction, to the point that every discourse takes the risk of being only a temporary witness of its reality. We would like to show, at the same time, how sexualities appropriate spaces and pervert the usual functions of these spaces, and, inversely, how spaces influence sexual conditions and practices. Beyond this statement of fact, examining sexualities - as pratices and as representations - and their relationships to spaces, is to show sexualities "in situation", and to inscribe-them in the physical space of an exhibition. In order to convey these connexions, we chose to invite about twenty contributors (artists, researchers, social workers, etc.) and ask them to provide us with printed matter taken from their personal archives, or coming from existing works. A specific request was made to each of the participants to determine a precise content. Then, these documents, which are completed by our personal selection of texts and pictures, are pinned on boards of different formats. So, in this way, we would like to emphasize the working process (rather than the finished artwork) and the collaborative and open character of the final result. Moreover, the reproducible value of these contributions corresponds to the project of publishing the exhibition, make it mobile and "displayable" in other spaces. For the presentation of this project, we looked for a place which could underline such a discursive dimension and offer a specific context to the issues we are dealing with. In Grenoble, the Family Planning, a non-profit organization created in 1961, was a pioneer place in terms of reflexion about sexualities. Moreover, being in this location corresponds to our wish to confront different points of view with different publics and enables us to create crossroads between contemporary art visitors and Family Planning users.
An evening video screening at Le Magasin will be added to our exhibition, in the framework of Grenoble's Gay and Lesbian Week in order to put forward some artist's points of view on the questions of homosexuality and gender.

Bernard Bazille (1952, Paris)
Bernard Bazile uses everyday imagery to appropriate art world's codes and history. We are presenting publicity posters for the "minitel rose" and coloring booklets against pedophilia for children titled It's O.K. To Say NO, that he used in his work ten years ago.

Ursula Biemann (1955, New York / Zurich)
Ursula Biemann uses the video combined with research methods in order to reveal social and political issues relating globalization. We present here one of her video called Remote Sensing and some interviews chosen from it. This documentary deals with the sex market and shows a topography of the movements of prostitution across the world's borders.

Monica Bonvicini (1965 Berlin, Los Angeles)
In a protean production (from drawings to videos), Monica Bonvicini questions sexual identities with art history and today's social reality, notably in relation to architecture and design. We are showing preparatory works for Bonded Eternmale (an interactive and olfactive environment) and a mural calendar made of drawings, clippings of advertising inserts and old men's magazines.

Carol Bove (1971, New York)
Working from eroticjeminist and naturist publications characteristic of the end of the sixties and seventies, Carol Bove elabDrates both installations and drawings. Here we are displaying reproductions of her watercolors with the illustrations from the magazines that inspired them.

Tom Burr (1963, New York)
Using minimalist vocabulary (form, color, material) to show the political and critical potential of an artwork, Tom Burr takes photographs and makes sculptures which relates his work on public spaces and intimacy. In his Black Bulletin, he pinned together film imagery from homosexual subculture with minimalist sculptures in order to recode it and create esthetical crossover.

Jeff Burton (1963, Los Angeles)
First a photographer on pornographic movie sets, Jeff Burton became, for his artistic work, more and more interested in the pornographic movie industry. He shows movie sets' details linked to this type of representation of sex in sexualizing objects and props. Jeff Burton 's work will be present with a series of proofs and contact sheets which are at the origin of his photographs and books.

Alain Della Negra (1975, Tourcoing)
Alain Della Negra works mainly with video at the Fresnoy School, in altering televisual and cinematographic codes. His games with langage question today's conditions of communication. We are presenting here his film Dropping out as well as the different scripts used by the actors.

Michel Dorais (1954, Québec)
Michel Dorais is professor and researcher in Social Science at the University of Laval, Quebec. He has mainly led research on violence against women, suicides in young male homosexual and bi-sexual groups and the strategies of young sex workers regarding HIV transmission. His refiexions on sexual diversity are equally part of his activism with associations for the well-being of gays and lesbians. We invited him for his research on bi-spirituality, an Amerindian tradition in which couples composed of two people of the same sex lived completly integrated in the community.

Christelle Familiari (1972, Paris)
Since the piece Christelle Familiari made for herfinal project at the School of Fine Arts in Nantes, her work deals with physical and personal engagement which is quite provocative. She plays with different notions such as desire and libido, treated in a cynical way. In our Xeros project, we are presenting a series of reproductions of her preparatory drawings for her performances.

Johnny Jensen (1965, Copenhague)
Johnny Jensen works on the private versus public issue regarding sex. In the Meeting Places series, he took photographs of specific places: parks with the remains of the night's activities (kleenex, condoms, etc.) and semi-private spaces such as sex-club rooms. He participates in our project with pictures of these series.

K8 Hardy (1977, New York)
K8 Hardy graduated in Film and Women Studies from Smith College in 2000. She has been making short films and videos since she was 19 years old. Her research is about feminist and queer identities. In 2001, she made Semiotics Of The Bitchin'
with Theme Youngblood (that we are presenting), a remake of Martha Rosler's Semiotics Of The Kitchen (1975).

Nadine Norman (1964, Paris/Montréal)
Nadine Norman uses installations, performances or multimedia-based projects to involve and question the visitor on sexual representations. We took excerpts from the diaries of the actresses of the Call Girl Project performance that took place during Winter 1999-2000 at the Canadian Cultural Center, in Paris.

Marion von Osten (1963, Zurich/Berlin)
Artist, essayist, but also curator, Marion von Osten has organized Sex & Space I and Sex & Space II in Zurich and Graz. They were a combination of debates and exhibitions about the question of sexuality and space, where artists, intellectuals, architects or social workers could intervene. We are including a partial translation of one of her essays as well as the statisties and illustrations that are the sources of her work.

Planning Familial de Grenoble
The Family Planning of Grenoble, a non-profit organization, was, in 1961, the first official one created in France. At its origin, it was clandestine. Since 1961, the team has been working for more freedom (the pill, abortion, PACS, etc.). We are interested in the campaign they elaborated in 1984 in order to increase public awareness. That year, the Family Planning decided to advertise and talk about Love on hoardings and in the local press. The slogans were considered, at this time, as provocative and the Family Planning was taken to court. It won.

Mickael Tramoy (1976, Lyon)
Using different mediums such as photography, sculpture and video, his work deals essentially with gay culture (night clubs, backrooms, parks). We will show a reproduction of his piece titled Cruising, a blueprint of a two-floors utopian meeting-place.
Marnie Weber (1959, Los Angeles)
Marie Weber uses video, photocollage and sculpture to tell dreamlike tales. We are presenting pictures from her archives: mostly clippings of body parts taken from pornographic and erotic magazines she uses for her collages.