For his·her exhibition “Shadow Polish,” Benoît Piéron has developed a new body of work, including an abstract erotic film that takes the form of a shadow puppet theatre set against an uncanny backdrop. Drawing on functionalist urban design and the register of the marvellous, this staging gives form to the idea of impermanence—of statuses, identities, and physical and psychic states—to become a space of collective imagination.
SALOMÉ BURSTEIN I’d like to talk about a letter you sent me by email this summer. It was a Word document with your initial intentions for your exhibition project at the Palais de Tokyo, which you had dictated into an AI transcription program. And from that dictation exercise—where you said the punctuation of the sentences aloud—bug-formulas emerged, which lent imagery to the reading. I was reading “the bus-shelter-period,” “the hospital-comma,” and these glitches in the form of portmanteau words felt self-evident. No doubt because a large part of your work is interested in the experience of waiting—how it is spatialised, how it is experienced, what it allows, what it disrupts. Your works seek to extract us from a standardised, clocked time. This exhibition—which has considerably changed since that first letter—still interrogates places in suspension, (de-)punctuated. What happens in this shadow polish*?
BENOÎT PIÉRON It is a coven of glitter. Mathematical objects quietly drink from Dorothy Allison’s intense pools of black ink. On the deserted court of Roland garrot in Abney Park, it’s Spoon Theory. Institutional fatigue can be read in the stream of sighs. The Wolpertinger has erased the contours of the groves. Otherine has baked gingerbread loaf with honey from Prospect Cottage for afternoon tea. We’re waiting for Margarete Steiff and Josef Sudek, again. It’s the same, but different. Punctuation marks float under Tiffany’s cranial vaults. At one point, I thought I was going to make a periodic table of punctuation marks around the world—because punctuation marks are also silences, and that seemed the most appropriate way to talk about the pieces I’m working on. These marks did, in fact, burst into our early exchanges in a rather burlesque way. It was summer, the season for postcards, and we began with this back-and-forth correspondence. I had written nineteen pages in my notebook; I was exhausted from writing so much and at the same time I felt a sense of urgency, because I knew you were waiting for a reply—so I paid for a Word subscription, which I used for voice dictation. That created a splintering of meaning through eruptions of ill-timed punctuation.
SALOMÉ BURSTEIN A splintering that was welcome—if not downright necessary. Over the past few months, you and I have talked a great deal about language: its fallibility, its treachery; about the violence that sometimes lies dormant in the simple act of setting down words, putting ink on a page, letters on a keyboard—that urge to pin meaning down. What has made language inadequate?
BENOÎT PIÉRON Language took on a great importance for me this summer. I spilled a lot of ink. I bought a piston fountain pen so it would flow, so there’d be something sensual about it, and so that I could control the flow. At the same time, I read miles and miles—I’ve never read so much. I was in a state of total disorientation, searching for words that might resonate with what I was experiencing: the discovery that I am intersex. For me, the only materiality of language that can feel right today is that of puddles. As soon as language is fixed, as soon as it’s printed… it’s as if, all of a sudden, a jammer kicks in. Suddenly, things can’t be clear. They slip away from meaning. There’s something about cryptography here that interests me. At one point, we talked about creating a leak—making puddles on the floor. I’m using the institution’s walls to come out. With the realisation that I’m intersex, I have also changed status: I’m no longer simply an artist labelled as “ill.” Intersex people are not ill; their connection to hospital has to do with the medical norms that constrain intersex variation, but intersex variation is in no way a disease or an abnormality. By opening that window, I allow myself to talk about something else. My work is still situated—I’m lying on my sofa—but it has taken a particular turn: since discovering the reassignment surgery that sought to alter my body, I’ve taken some distance from sewing, from patchwork—from that slightly Frankenstein-like side to it, reassembling little Moniks from several pieces. That need has disappeared; it has shifted towards hyper-ergonomics—the part of design made for the interiority of bodies—which you find both in hospital furniture designed to accommodate bodies that are opened, and in sex toys.
SALOMÉ BURSTEIN We already find instances of this in some of your earlier works. I’m thinking, for example, of that sex toy in the shape of a make-up brush, placed delicately beside the bed you showed in your exhibition “Fabric Softener” at Taro Nasu in Tokyo [The Bed II, 2024]. At the Palais de Tokyo, sex toys make a new appearance; they are no longer camouflaged as cosmetic tools, but become the characters in a shadow-play film, their contours blending with those of casts of your own body, with French curves—those dressmakers’ curves used to adapt a garment pattern to the figure—or with mathematical objects from the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris. How did you do the casting?
BENOÎT PIÉRON Mathematical objects are teaching models—attempts to visualise complex equations in space. The ones I chose come from that collection, which contains over 600 pieces made from a variety of materials since the late 19th century. The most recent ones were crocheted by women mathematicians! What interests me about these objects is, again, the notion of cryptography. They are forms whose meaning escapes most people, except for the few dozen in each country who are able to see them as expressions of an equation. It is therefore a language of great precision for some, but one that slips away from meaning for the majority, and is more akin to poetry. To such an extent that one of the best-known mathematical objects—among those Man Ray photographed between 1934 and 1936—turned out, in the end, to be only the base of the model, not the model itself. I think it was that dialectic between the pursuit of precision and the incomprehensible; the way “hard science” suddenly comes across as absurd and outmoded in this old, dated modernist building, once frequented by the Surrealists—that intrigued me. I was recently talking with Magali Le Mens, an art historian and a pioneer in the history and representations of intersex people, who was telling me about the major roles that ceroplasty, geometry and numbers had played in assigning intersex people to the binary categories of male/female—determining, to within a few millimetres, what those people were. I find it interesting that, intuitively, I felt the desire to go back and look again at these objects tied to the search for a truth that would be singular—one that refuses to be shaken by doubt. There is, in my work, this interest in excess, a desire to disarm the tools that generate numbers and calculations.
SALOMÉ BURSTEIN That reminds me of one of our previous conversations, when you were describing the made-to-measure production of your Monik costume [the cape, 2023] for your exhibition in Vienna, “Monstera deliciosa.” Numbers had got muddled—you told me you’d had to send nudes to the tailors.
BENOÎT PIÉRON What is a pattern? Simply numbers, which you smooth out using patternmaking curve rulers—French curves—which vary depending on the region and the period. It’s also what dictates bodies; there’s a normative aspect to a pattern. That calibration of my body took on a very concrete form for the first time when I designed this costume for the exhibition with curator Manuela Ammer at mumok in Vienna. The aim was for me to become Monik—to become a bat—to make myself leggings, a corset and wings. We were working with the costume designers from Vienna State Opera, and because I was in residence at the Pinault Collection in Lens, it was difficult for me to travel just for a fitting. So, I was given a chart to fill out about my body, and I took my measurements with a friend and sent them to the designers. They thought there must have been a mistake, and I was asked for additional measurements. I measured from the neck point to the tip of my breast, and a whole bunch of other things. The curator then told me that the designers couldn’t read my body—so I had to send photos. With that piece, without realising it, I’d touched on exactly the right spot. Afterwards, I wanted to customise hospital pyjamas to make them more desirable. As I’d never learnt to sew from a flat pattern, I had to move on to draping; I ordered a cast based on those same measurements. What came out of it was a Stockman, which I then covered with patchworks made from discarded hospital sheets—and the whole thing became a work in its own right [Ko.u.r.ê.os, 2024]. It reminded me of the libraries of bodies, which allow norms to travel. That’s what modelling agencies use to share the measurements of the people they represent. Personal shoppers can even walk around with their clients’ bodies in their bag. I found this proximity to luxury and fashion quite interesting—especially because it came from the rags of hospitals. There’s this idea of reclaiming certain models. That’s where the title comes from: Ko.u.r.ê.os, an inclusive variation on kouros and kore, terms referring to those sculptures of young men and women meant to embody gendered bodily ideals in Ancient Greece.
SALOMÉ BURSTEIN This act of reversal, of reappropriation, I believe is a kind of template for much of your work. Waiting rooms, laundromats, snow globes, flashing beacons, mannequins… you replay, filter, amplify, invert. You make things strange. You render them dreamlike. That’s also what we find in this exhibition, particularly with a shadow-theatre set-up from which you made a film. Theatre, if we go back to ancient Greek again, is etymologically the place from which we look, from which the gaze is directed. There is the idea of a scopic or scrutinising regime, which we also find in the English expression “operating theatre” or “OT”—the surgical suite.
BENOÎT PIÉRON Yes. Magali Le Mens told me that the intersex artist and activist Ins A Kromminga talks about how intersex people’s bodies are absolute surfaces for society’s projections. That’s certainly true. The moment I tell an audience that I’m intersex, the first thing people start wondering is what’s in my underwear. I took that principle of projection literally. There’s an almost hallucinatory effect in this dream machine. To make it, we set up a little Méliès-style studio—something both very high-tech and very simple in terms of effects—which the Palais de Tokyo teams installed in my home. There’s a screen with a gel filter, onto which shadows are cast by a projector set up on my worktable. It was important to me that it happened there, on that table, which is similar in size to a body. We make slightly mischievous and slightly nasty nods to the Surrealists; there is something about this sentence…
SALOMÉ BURSTEIN “The chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.”
BENOÎT PIÉRON Here, the umbrella is the bat; the sewing machine is still there, right next to it. On this table, I handle curve rulers, replicas of mathematical objects, as well as sex toys, and also casts of my own body, made by the mould-maker and artist May Hughes, which allow me to put it at a distance, to turn my body into an object I can get a grip on. And then the projected shadows work according to a principle of anamorphosis, which further derealises these elements. All these templates cluster together into a kind of kaleidoscope. There’s a sort of reenactment taking place on this operating/operation table (mathematical, surgical…)—this time to defuse anything that might be weaponised against the body: all the violence that may have been inflicted on intersex people, whose lived experience, sensitivity, and so many other things are so often diminished.
SALOMÉ BURSTEIN And this reenactment is precisely what produces, here, a film of pleasure.
BENOÎT PIÉRON Yes: a film that offers a crip gaze on sensuality, sexuality, pleasure—recovering and rediscovering an alternative kind of joy. Caregiving, cared-for, sick and disabled bodies already form part of the mainstream erotic imagination, but that eroticisation always tends towards the exploitation of vulnerabilities. In those channels of production and distribution, you don’t find narratives or representations that use illness as a source of pleasure, or at least that deal with it in order to make something of it. Crip counterculture offers the possibility of expanding the erotic imagination through a host of sensuous experiences that are inaccessible to able-bodied people. For example, with my hypermobility of connective tissue, I can feel air bubbles inside my body. It’s a bit unpleasant or painful when it comes to feeling air between my veins, but when it comes to anal penetration, it starts to get interesting. Or when taking gabapentin, one’s clitoris may become so sensitive that they may have multiple orgasms per night depending on the fabric of the bedsheets. That kind of dialogue with your own interiority really helps, I think, to build a sexual identity specific to crip people. And it’s an identity that isn’t shaped by norms, by anything muscular—much more by abstraction, by what has to do with fascia, or even by nothing at all. That’s why, for me, working through abstraction felt completely logical.
SALOMÉ BURSTEIN Yes—you actually describe this piece as an abstract crip porn film.
BENOÎT PIÉRON Yes, for me, that’s also where reappropriation comes into play: in the very notion of pornography. In my view, the medical gaze on bodies is a pornographic gaze. There are these murals in hospital on-call rooms, depicting extremely violent sexual scenes—racist, sexist, homophobic…—and they form a kind of bawdy med-school culture defended by the medical profession. Their presence is justified by the supposed need to compensate for the constant exposure to death in these jobs through contact with the life drive and with sexuality. So I tell myself: OK, fine—but it’s still only one kind of sexuality, and one that, again, plays out through the exploitation of certain bodies’ vulnerabilities. And the problem is that these aren’t just fantasies: you don’t have to talk to many crip people to hear utterly shattering testimonies. So yes, there’s the challenge of reversing that burden. When I talk about sexuality, for example, I never use pet names; on the contrary, I always use terms with a medical, technical precision, but I make them slip into poetry—something at the other end of Laennec’s clinical gaze. It’s much the same with this film, which speaks about pleasure, flow and fluidity, but through abstraction and shadow. I also see the connection between the medical and pornographic gazes in the way light is used: that desire to see everything, even through things—a shadowless lighting that leaves no room for doubt. They’re going to light up every nook and cranny of your intestine to flush out whatever might be lodged there; it’s the same in pornography, where everything is exposed, where bodies are crushed by light.
SALOMÉ BURSTEIN The exhibition is actually structured around another lighting device: a series of street lamps diverted from their original function and filled with glitter, as if they’d been hacked by a rave. Here, they no longer serve to illuminate or police the nocturnal urban life. They shift from a utilitarian, normative mode of perception into an experience of confusion and contemplation. You spent a lot of time looking at these lamps in moments of wandering and drift. The aim was for the exhibition to convey this feeling, or at least to evoke it; for it to work a little like a compass of disorientation—to borrow the title of one of your earlier works.
BENOÎT PIÉRON These street lamps are often seen in far-right towns. They’re used to shine a light on supposed thugs hiding in the shadows. What interests me isn’t manipulating lighting to cultivate fear, but rather choreographing flows that diffract the light, and that make it possible to get through better hours—even if it’s just thanks to a night-light on the bedside table in a hospital. These street lamps are night-lights on a city scale, tools for collective vigil. They create spaces for contemplation that allow you to step outside regulated time. They also point to that abyssal depth of night—its velvety texture, its vertigo—which is also that of gender dysphoria, and which I was caught up in last summer. I spent a lot of time contemplating the night, and the lights that illuminate the urban canyon—those kinds of northern lights created by the few people who stay in Paris in August, and who watch TV until 3 a.m. This installation makes it possible, in a sense, to get inside the head of someone living through an experience of disorientation, as I did when I discovered my intersex variation. The Boussole de désorientation [Compass of Disorientation] is a piece I made for the Beaux-Arts de Paris graduate honours exhibition in 2008. I made it without really knowing its meaning, but clarity does its work: the sense becomes sharper little by little as I understand who I am and what I’m trying to say. The night’s black ink drips, the compass spins constantly. I am currently in a zone of heterotopia: there’s no longer anything natural, original or artificial, no inside or outside. On my cheerleader trainers, made for a Pride, it says Be True. But no—be fake! The only true that’s possible is the fake. For me, things are completely fused together. I exist right now in a vaporous state. I’m glitter suspended in the air.
Translated by Cléo Verstrepen
BIOGRAPHIES
BENOÎT PIÉRON is a crip intersex artist. Her·his works offer experiences of suspended time, waiting, hallucination and daydreaming by subverting a functionalist and hygienist aesthetic. By reintroducing softness and desire wherever they have been evacuated, the artist unfolds alternative stories of bodies, affects, and spaces linked to illness.
SALOMÉ BURSTEIN is an independent curator. Her projects deal with affects, eroticism, and questions of attention and transaction. She has carried out research in the fields of theatre studies and visual studies, as well as into collective artistic practices. Since 2021, she has directed Shmorévaz, an independent art space in Paris. She is co-curator of Benoît Piéron’s solo show at the Palais de Tokyo.