La Piscine
Performance. 2016
La Piscine was a collective project that gathered different artistic practices and works addressed to a single spectator/participant. Similarly to a actual swimming pool, which holds the mixing water together, La Piscine held the space for such practices to mix and transform each other, so that each encounter was a unique experience and a work in itself.
La Piscine treated each work and practice involved as tools to produce experiences able to question our usual regime of attention. Its liquid form made it possible to include and remix new practices as well as old ones or others that only emerge in the doing. La Piscine happened in functional places that kept being used in their original function during the event (e.g. a pool, a park, a school etc.).
A first edition of La Piscine was set up at the municipal swimming pool of Pantin, Paris, in October 2015 and organised by Les Laboratoires d’Aubervillers in the context of a research residency of Myriam Lefkowitz. There seven artists (Jean Philippe Derail, Valentina Desideri, Ben Evans, Géraldine Longueville Geffriaud, Alkis Hadjiandreou, Julie Laporte, Myriam Lefkowitz) learned each other’s practices and experimented with mixing them.The second edition of La Piscine was set up at the Pauls Stradins Museum for History of Medicine, where architecture, exhibitions and visitors will become the containers of the new mixes.
Artists' Bios:
Valentina Desideri (1982) is a performance artist based in Amsterdam. She trained in contemporary dance at the Laban Centre in London and later on did her MA in Fine Arts at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. She makes Fake Therapy and Political Therapy, co-organises the Performing Arts Forum in France, speculates in writing with Prof. Stefano Harney and engages in Poethical Readings with Prof. Denise Ferreira da Silva.
Géraldine Longueville (1981) curates art projects that explore formats of exhibition. From 2005-2009 Longueville ran La Galerie Exterieure, a mobile gallery offering various contexts to make art happenings. Black Garlic, a studio for art and gastronomy, is her most recent project.
Myriam Lefkowitz (1980) is a performance artist based in Paris. Since 2010, her research has focused on questions of attention and perception, through different immersive devices involving one spectator and one performer.