Courtesy Louise Siffert / ADAGP, Paris, 2024.
Courtesy Louise Siffert / ADAGP, Paris, 2024.
Performance by Louise Siffert
Inspired by the archives of the “Reversible Destiny Healing Fun House” architectural project, a “queer eco-community” imagined by artists, poets and architects Madeline Gins and Shusaku Arakawa, WE HAVE DECIDED NOT TO DIE is based on the exploration of bodies in relation to architecture. Louise Siffert transforms these archives into objects in a playful, poetic and more accessible form, within a scenographic space full of textures and colours. In this environment that favours the expression of singularities, Louise Siffert revives the aesthetic and political intentions of the Gins and Arakawa duo, who developed structures capable of emancipating bodies from norms, control devices or idealisation processes, and perhaps even defying death.
This performance is an excerpt from We Have Decided Not to Die (2023), a production delegated by Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers with the support of the Seine-Saint-Denis département, the Île-de-France region, DICRÉAM-CNC, CNAP- Centre national des arts plastiques, and CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de la ville de Bordeaux, Coproduction Ménagerie de verre, Compagnie DCA / La Chaufferie. Show premiered on 7.12.2023 at the Ménagerie de verre, Paris.
Louise Siffert
Born in 1988, lives and works in Paris.
Louise Siffert trained as a scenographer before studying at the Beaux-arts de Paris. The world of work and alienation, the quest for well-being, the place of habits: her performances question and relate these current themes in a theatrical and burlesque setting. Anchoring her work in scientific and sociological reflection (queer theories, gender studies, decolonial studies, etc.), she creates characters with exaggerated personalities, overexploiting the codes of language and behaviour attributed to them. Her work can be found in the collections of the CNAP and the CAPC in Bordeaux, among others.
