S’assouvrir
In the guise of an operetta or a release party, the performance
S’assouvrir invites Medea, the destructive matrix figure, into Jagna Ciuchta’s exhibition “The Fold of the Cosmic Belly”. Her story, recalling the destiny of the divas of yesterday and today, is re-set to music in original creations and rearranged compositions from Nuages by Claude Debussy to Chemins d’amour by Jean Anouilh and Francis Poulenc, and vibes by Ariana Grande, Beyoncé, or Toni Braxton.
S’assouvrir is a musical interpretation that seeks to make use of the dramaturgy employed in the Numin project, initiated by Eden Tinto Collins. Numin oscillates between poetry, net-art, in situ performance and space opera. Seen as a strange object by the members of the project who do not really want to set it to music,
S’assouvrir is like a techno hit, yet another highly feminine pop hymn
Suzanne Husky
Earth Cycle Trance, led by Starhawk , 2019, Video, 32’, commissioned by the 16th Istanbul Biennale, produced with the support of Berrak & Nezih Barut
An ecofeminist activist, permaculture teacher and American author, willingly claiming the title of witch, Starhawk (born in 1951) speaks candidly to Suzanne Husky. The interview takes place during a ritual, like those she has been conducting since the 1980s at political demonstrations, congresses and during retreats. A fixed frame against a black background, holding in one hand a drum on which she plays a few captivating notes, she guides the audience through a narrative that traces a cycle of growth and life, decomposition, and death then renewal. Her springboard is an organic and sensory experience of matter that transcends inter-species relations. For Starhawk, ritual is a political and collective mechanism, to be reappropriated as a tool and a means of action.
Commissioned from the Franco-North American artist, Suzanne Husky, for the 16th Istanbul Biennale in 2019, this film is part of her multidisciplinary practice, which incorporates and mingles sculpture, weaving, ceramics, and video, with agricultural techniques and garden landscaping.
Suzanne Husky
Suzanne Husky is an artist, gardener, and mother, she has taught landscape history and ethnobotany in the School of Art and Design in Orleans (France), and Plant Matters at the San Francisco Art Institute. For the past 20 years, Suzanne Husky has developed a mixed-media creative practice focused on human, plant, and earth relations. She’s a founder of the artistic french duo Le Nouveau Ministère de l’Agriculture that creates artwork on agribusiness and agtech but also regenerates soil and plants forest gardens. Suzanne Husky studies agroecology and agroforestry and implements it inland she stewards and spaces she’s invited to landscape as an artist. Suzanne Husky’s podcast called Mother Goose and other earth stories threads connections between mythology, agroecology, and earth knowledge, it’s broadcasted on Point Reyes Radio Station. She currently volunteers weekly at Alemany, a farm dedicated to food justice in San Francisco.
Eden Tinto Collins
Poetess, video maker, visual artist, performer and singer, Eden Tinto Collins develops a hyper media practice rooted in collaboration and the circulation of words, images and motifs. Often co-signed with other artists, her creations take different forms, but share a rhythm and a principle of superposition borrowed from obsessive digital scrolling. Not without humour, her short films borrow clichés from superhero and horror films, or from tutorials, enhancing these homages with commentaries on racist and ableist discrimination, and on feminist issues. Eden Tinto-Collins pays attention to language, its codes and its polysemy; across different mediums she reuses and transforms a continuity of textual elements and references, along with her alter ego figures Layla Numin and Jane Dark.
For Jagna Ciuchta’s exhibition “The Fold of the Cosmic Belly”, she invented a performance using Medea, the matrix and destructive figure as her starting point.
Eden Tinto Collins (born in 1991) developed her artistic practice studying at the École nationale des beaux-arts in Paris-Cergy (2011-2018) and during an internship in Ghana (2015) at New Morning managed by Bibie Brew. A hyper media “poetician”, she collaboratively explores the idea of networks and interdependency, f.r.ictions and mythologies. The relational and noetic (connecting thought and mind) mechanisms she uses are deployed across the spectrum of performance and experimental cinema. She is part of several groups like the le Gystère live Gang, the Black(s) to the Future Collective and Yoke, and has appeared in several films, shows and performances. With Nicolas Worms, she is developing the group project Numin, that oscillates between poetry, net art, in situ performance and space opera.
Céline Shen
Céline Shen is a French artist and designer. Trained in Paris, she studied philosophy at the Sorbonne University. Her passion for fashion and dance led her to train as a designer at the Ecole nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, while studying choreography at the Académie royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Her collection is inspired by the traditional bridal trousseau and couture craft techniques learnt at the fashion house Alaïa. Between art and fashion, her creations are at the crossroads of several disciplines: digital arts, photography, performance, installation, video and choreography.
Nicolas Vair
After graduating from the sound section of the ENS Louis Lumière in 2016, he cultivated his interest in various fields of sound that evolve in parallel and sometimes meet. Mixing and musical production, sound creation and expertise for businesses specialising in sound, are some of the domains that keep him busy since he graduated. Since 2019, he has been working with Eden Tinto Collins on several projects involving sound (radio play, short films, musical pieces and stage projects…).
Nicolas Worms
Born in Paris in 1993, Nicolas Worms, attracted by the relationship between music and dance, composes and plays on stage for choreographers like Radhouane El Meddeb and Bruno Bouché. Alongside composition, his activity as a music arranger has led him to work with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, l’OFJ and numerous festivals while composing for classical ensembles. He has also orchestrated and recorded original soundtracks for feature films by Christophe Honoré, Eric Judor, Christian Schwochow and Quentin Dupieux. He is currently working on “Numin”, a space opera, in collaboration with the artist Eden Tinto Collins and “l’Île de Pâques”, a music-fiction.
