Pauline L. Boulba and Aminata Labor

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© Alban Van Wassenhove

J.J. borrows the initials of the American dance critic, performance artist and radical lesbian feminist Jill Johnston (1929 - 2010). Crafted by Pauline L. Boulba & Aminata Labor, it is a journey through the real and fictional lives of Jill Johnston. Through the invention of archives, the use of quotes, the use of voices and drag kinging, the two performers reflect on dyke practices in art. The piece J.J. is part of a multifaceted project including a forthcoming film and a book to be published in 2022 and 2023. Presented as a work in progress last October as part of the Move Festival at Paris’s Centre Pompidou, it will premiere at the Ardanthé Festival in Vanves in March 2022.

Premiere March 24, 2022 at the Théâtre de Vanves, during the Ardanthé festival.

Concept and interpretation Pauline L. Boulba # Collaboration and interpretation Aminata Labor # Sound design Sandar Tun Tun # Lighting design and technical direction Jean-Marc Segalen # Accomplices Lydia Amarouche, Nina Kennel, Soto Labor, Rosanna Puyol, Louise Siffert et les cookies dans le sas # Production : Margelles / Charlotte Giteau & Mélanie Bichot # Co-productions : ICI CCN Montpellier Occitanie / Pyrénées Méditerranée, CDCN La place de la Danse Toulouse, centre chorégraphique national de Caen en Normandie, Centre Georges Pompidou, réseau international Be My Guest, Centre Chorégraphique National d’Orléans, DRAC Ile-de-France. # Aid: La bellone (Bruxelles), Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, BUDA (Courtrai), les Rencontres Cinématographiques de Cerbère, le Centre National de la Danse. # This project benefits from a “Résidence sur Mesure” from the French Institute.

Opening

Tuesday – Februray 1st – 7pm

at the CCNO

Free entrance with reservation

Exhibition

Un hectare d’amour de soleil et de son – One acre of sun love and sound

By Nina Kennel, Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Soto Labor, Rosanna Puyol, Louise Siffert and Sandar Tun Tun

Thursday 3 February through Friday 4 March 2022

Hall of the CCNO

Free, normal opening hours of the CCNO

Opening Vernissage

Thursday – February 3 – 8pm

One acre of sun love and sound – this phrase from Bash in the Sculls, a 1970 Village Voice text by Jill Johnston, opens this group exhibition by Nina Kennel, Pauline L. Boulba, Aminata Labor, Soto Labor, Rosanna Puyol, Louise Siffert and Sandar Tun Tun. This space is intended as an echo chamber for what is unfolding in the studio during the residency for J.J. For the occasion, some of the team will share a little of their working methods. The films Gut Feelings by Louise Siffert and Shaker d’ailleurs by Sandar Tun Tun, Katia Barrett, Nina Kennel and Rosanna Puyol will be shown for the first time in Orléans, Soto Labor will present some of her text-poems, Pauline L. Boulba & Aminata Labor’s mouth-watering podcasts of the radio programme L’eau à la butch will be aired, texts by Jill Johnston as well as fragments of unpublished translations chosen by Nina Kennel and Rosanna Puyol will also be featured on site.

Pauline L. Boulba is a performance artist and dance researcher. In 2016 she met Aminata Labor - who also does performance as well as drawing - at the Dance department of the University of Paris 8. At the time, Aminata was conducting research (published by Atelier Téméraire) on the experiences of women during demonstrations against the new French labour law, while Pauline was engaged in a research-creation project focusing on preconceived responses and impacted criticism (to be published by Presses Universitaires de Vincennes). Together, they are active in several collectives and co-founded “la flemme”, an amateur rap group. For the past year they have been hosting the programme L’eau à la butch on Radio Galoche. Pauline has been fascinated with Jill Johnston for years and enlisted a group of friends to create a new piece, book and film that will be released in 2022 and 2023. Soon they will be travelling to the USA to continue their investigation into Jill Johnston and lesbian legacies.

Nina Kennel

is a writer and researcher. She focuses particularly on works and events that do not seem to have ‘made history’. She is completing a thesis at the EHESS, School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, and teaches at the Besançon Fine Arts School.

Soto Labor

is a poet and visual and performance artist based between the cities of Rennes, Paris and Brussels. His interest in the conditions of exercise of discourse and its forms of enunciation has led him to explore forms of narration, performative collaborations and self-fiction. Strongly influenced by the world of hip-hop (rap, slam, dance, battle), he situates his writing in the field of orality in order to tell (his) stories – in readings, performances, writing workshops or open mic sessions. His writing practice crosses different genres. He produces poems, fables (Lunettes Modernes, 2019), rap texts, spoken word (Ice Floe, 2021) and short forms. He recently published Trompette (2021) at the invitation of Théo Robine-Langlois, a publication that appeared in the recent Presage Pamphlets series, After8books (Paris).

Rosanna Puyol

is a publisher and poet who collaborates with artists to organise exhibitions and performance and video programmes. Co-founder of the non-profit publishing house Brook, she has published translations of works by Laura Mulvey, Shulamith Firestone, José Esteban Muñoz, and Stefano Harney & Fred Moten. Rosanna also organises readings, and writing and translation groups, often with friends.

Louise Siffert

was born in Strasbourg in 1988. She studied stage design before entering the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts in Paris. She is a member of DOC!, a self-managed artistic space in Paris. The world of work and alienation, the search for well-being, the role of daily routines: Louise Siffert’s performances question and interconnect these contemporary themes in theatrical and burlesque staging. Anchoring her work in scientific and sociological thought (queer theories, gender studies, decolonial studies…) Louise Siffert creates characters with exaggerated traits, overexploiting the codes of language and behaviour that are attributed to them. Her work has been shown at the Palais de Tokyo, the MO.CO Panacée in Montpellier, the Synagogue de Delme, the Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, L’Atelier de Paris - Carolyn Carlson (2019), the CAC Brétigny, the CAPC in Bordeaux and in a solo exhibition at the BBB art centre in Toulouse. She is a laureate of the project “La Vie Bonne” in 2020, sponsored by AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, research and exhibitions and the CNAP-Centre National des Arts Plastiques. Her works are in the collections of the CNAP and the CAPC of the city of Bordeaux.

Sandar Tun Tun

Artist, DJ and composer Sandar Tun Tun structures her work around storytelling, new collaborative alliances and trajectories. She works with other artists and friends on installations, workshops, compositions, performances or collaborative creation, cultivating approaches to listening and sensitive and critical responsiveness. Sandar embodies the musical identities Nay Thit (DJ, producer) and SD S (noise, electronic music) and is also one half of BARE-TT, an experimental music duo formed in 2016 with researcher, artist and biologist Katia Barrett. BARE-TT is a conceptual audio-visual project exploring the potential of sonic storytelling at the intersection of queer feminist science fiction and symbiotic relationships of life.