Care increasingly appears as an inherent dimension of contemporary artistic practices, and is accordingly being taken up by cultural institutions looking to rethink their social role and their legitimacy to facilitate such projects. In the process, it has become one of a number of programmatic intentions—alongside education or emancipation, for example—whose principles often enter into tension or even conflict with the means by which institutions look to pursue them, raising multiple structural paradoxes along the way. This is why care should be approached on its own terms: not as an abstract value but as a relationship of power, a kind of work, and a category of professions. Yet whether they are chronically ill, disabled or neurodivergent, the people who are to be “cared for” are too often perceived as a specific audience rather than as a general public, and rarely, if at all, as art professionals.
This selection of texts, drawn from the experiences and reflections of participants in a still emerging (still diverging) artistic scene in France, offers a crip reading of the relationship between art and care. They aim to question the physical and cognitive normativity that structure our ways of creating, of representing, and of visiting museums. Whether through public engagement, curation or performance, these texts approach disability not as a subject but as a method.
—Étienne Chosson
BIOGRAPHY
Étienne Chosson is a curator and researcher. His research focuses on creative and experimental practices in accessibility, as well as digital archives of neurodiversity. He co-founded Crash Room, a translation platform that makes texts by disabled and neurodivergent poets, artists and curators available in French, as well as articles from the field of Disability Studies.
My curatorial trajectory began with performance, which I practiced for a number of years before organising my first exhibitions. I started out by programming performances, before quickly moving on to performing myself as part of Modèle vivant·e, a transfeminist collective that pursues dissident representations through the practice of life drawing. There, the drawing workshop was a space in which I could make my way through the ideas raised by queer studies and, by extension, crip studies. It helped me to approach the question of performance in a way that was concrete, political and intimate, and which, because it was plural, allowed me to understand performances of gender, class, race and validity and their possible intersections. It is also in and through performance that I continue to develop my writing.
Being disabled prepared me for the work of curating: like curating, disability is a practice of institutions. Filling in a form to request support from the MDPH [Maisons départementales pour les personnes handicapées, municipal disability support centres] teaches you about institutional dialogue. Their labyrinthine applications ask at one point that you write the story of your “life project,” with the expectation that you express in personal terms your needs, your expectations, and your aspirations. This teaches you to speak the language of the institution, to pick up on its key words, to set out your intentions. What can you say? How can you say it in a way that allows you to be considered fairly? An interplay of fun-house mirrors links the medical institution—its demands for a performance of submission to care—and the institutional art world—which demands a form of productivity.
I see curating as a performance in its own right. You are expected to offer a certain kind of (re)presentation, which is determined by the roles and the perspective of the institutions you work with. You play a role; it’s a space of power. But once you become aware of it, you begin to wonder what to do with it: how to play up to it, play with it, or play against it. I feel like this is what crip curating ventures into, in the way in which I present myself and in which I interact and negotiate with the complicity of artists. I slip through. Being a curator is also a performance, because I live my disability and I spend my time inventing strategies to exist in spaces that are not made for me. The strategy of slipping through is anchored in my bodily engagement with the world. I experienced what it was like to move through hostile spaces long before I became a curator.
The experience of disability has taught me that exhibitions are not only about “showing” but also, above all, about a form of “doing.” The choice to “exhibit” is a performative, political and profoundly ethical act. The term “crip” takes on its full meaning when we employ it as a verb: I can crip curating. It’s not a disconnected, abstract theory, but rather an attention to the material conditions of production, remuneration and human relations: these are central issues and ones where my own curatorial performance can bring about changes. Working in a crip way leads you to anticipate what might lack and to imagine solutions. It means understanding the presence of disabled and minoritised artists in programmes as self-evident rather than as a kind of tokenism. It means understanding that making less inaccessible exhibitions is a fundamental demand, not an option. Working in a crip way means pursuing creative accessibility from the very start of a project. A crip curating necessarily means thinking collectively.
The question, of course, goes beyond material means and entails another way of perceiving time, too. In crip curating and in what I continue to develop with artists and with all those with whom I work, radical softness (from the expression of Be Oakley, “radical softness as a boundless form of resistance”) is a relational lodestar. Radical softness offers a way of accepting, without distinction or judgment, the unforeseeable: fatigue, mistakes, hiccups, (good or bad) moods, skids on black ice. It means orienting the energy of rage towards softness; staying in softness without ever invalidating rage, which remains our fuel. And when I feel my capacity for love declining, it’s my signal to hand over the reins, to take a nap and—momentarily—to ask to be carried by others.
BIOGRAPHY
Lucie Camous develops a curatorial practice at the intersection of intimate narratives, collective experimentation, and political issues. Their work has recently been featured in the group exhibition “En-dehors” in 2024 (Crac Occitanie, Sète). With Helene Fromen and Linda DeMorrir, they co-founded Modèle vivant·e, a transfeminist collective for dissident drawing and representation. And with No Anger, they created Ostensible, a research-creation structure dedicated to Crip & Critical Disability Studies.
Benoît Piéron’s mediums are pastimes. For a long time, they lived at the hospital. She has now left it behind, and for years now, he has lived elsewhere. And yet he is still there, and continues to produce what she had begun to create back then: the little things that you make in waiting rooms, when you have nothing to do. Their practice is at once an opening up to a collective body—one that creates a hospital counter-culture made up of popular arts and traditions, of arts and crafts—and the friction that arises between these forms which stray beyond the bounds of hospital wards and the norms of the museum. They disseminate their gesture without regard for hierarchies and distinctions between different kinds of practice: from gathering hospital sheets to create a patchwork to inviting other people with similar experience to roundtable discussions, where a plurality of voices can offset the abstracting technologies and systems that treat each situation as an exception.
Forms discharge themselves from the hospital, first contaminating the white cube and then returning to the realm of real things, charged with their experience of the art world. At a workshop at Le Grand Café in Saint-Nazaire last winter, participants produced stamps of the “Ministère des passe-temps” [Ministry of Pastimes] bearing a very strange symbol that combined a small bird with a branch held in its beak—both the sign of peace and the logo of the Parisian hospital system—and a bat—a little animal that lives on the fringes or the underside of society, hidden away in the rafters and rarely seen outside, relying on echolocation as an alternative form of communication. Thanks to a small, mobile stage onto which they could climb, the public could stamp the walls of the art centre and colour in the resulting motif, which began to spread throughout the exhibition. This dissemination continued beyond the art world, accompanying Benoît as they return to the hospital, carrying with them one of these stamps that has been passed from hand to hand. This summer, he watched as an endocrinologist took his file, stamped it with a large stamp featuring little metal turrets, then handed it over to him, all in a single whirling choreographic gesture; “it was like Jonas Mekas’ plastic bag between two skyscrapers.” Benoît took their file and, in turn, stamped it with their own stamp of the “Ministère des passe-temps.” This object, which symbolizes the administration’s power to impose its temporality, to create systems for waiting whether in lines or in rooms, was here transformed into a collective, shared and festive practice. What had been relegated to the margins of creative practice—pastimes carried out with constrained time and resources—became a possibility for the creation of a moment of collective gathering.
—Benoît Piéron
as told by Étienne Chosson
[See page 78 for Benoît Piéron’s biography.]
CODA is an American English term that stands for “Child of Deaf Adult.” Echoing the coda in music, a final movement before the score fades to silence, the acronym opts for the word “adult” over that of “parent,” unsettling the notion of parenthood. Little-known in France, CODA is an expression that resists easy classifications. It has been translated by the terms “l’entre-deux” [“the in-between”] (Vittoria Luye) or “les mots qu’on ne me dit pas” [“the words that go unsaid to me”] (Véronique Poulain).
We have good reason to be at a loss for words: in 1998, the rate of illiteracy amongst deaf people reached 80% according to the Gillot Report. French Sign Language is rarely passed on to children by adults: effectively suppressed in France from 1880 to 2005, it was long a source of internalised shame for many deaf people. In hearing people, the rupture of the umbilical cord is compensated by the voice, creating a dematerialised link between caregivers and children. CODA, however, develop a “silent baby syndrome” that echoes the anxiety or the creativity of their caregivers, who are often deprived of medical information, even when they do interact with hospitals (institutions where deaf people have frequently been mistreated by invasive procedures, from trepanning in the 19th century to cochlear implants in the 1990s). And yet, another language emerges in this context: the “umbilical language” made up of improvised figures that use the visual capacity of the body. Before the internet, instructional drawings and videotapes circulated in deaf homes, sports teams and activist collectives such as Les Sourds en colère. From very early on in their lives, CODA find themselves taking charge of telephone calls and medical and administrative procedures, a position which places them in the role of parents. A desire for integration meanwhile leads deaf parents to push them towards the hearing world, even as they lack the social codes that could ensure acceptance within it.
Faced with a state that makes mastery of the French language the yardstick of intelligence and social success, CODA repress the specific condition of their families. An implicit interdiction on considering their parents as different or disabled combined with the absence of political tools for thinking through systematic domination generates an interior conflict. This tension shapes their often-explosive relationships, marked by difficulties in education, transgression and desocialisation. Sometimes, in the housing estates they grow up in, they bond with children of immigrants whose parents have not passed on their native languages.
The absence of linguistic transmission coincides with a search for identity: psychoanalysis posits language as the essence of an individual’s being and relation to the Other. Though not in the medical sense of the term, we CODA are deaf socially and culturally. This paradox challenges scientific norms which hold that political identities must correspond to individual medical diagnoses. Like deaf people, we take up the image and the body to ward off the anxiety of the invisible. These strategies invite us to interrogate normative hierarchies: whereas oral and written languages privilege abstraction through conventions that dissociate the referent from the signifier and the signified, sign languages are figurative and make the links between these elements legible. Deaf and CODA culture thus stands in opposition to the stoic ideal of the white, masculine, bourgeois, heterosexual and able body which casts suspicion on any corporeal expressiveness, dismissing it as excess, gesticulation or deformation, and which relegates the image to the register of ornament, infantilisation or an amalgam of the popular and the commercial.
It was based on these reflections that I carried out the project Pop Parade in 2024 with curator Lisa Colin and the Maison Populaire in Montreuil, offering deaf children and children in exile the possibility to use painting on fabric to create a protest march on their own scale. Alongside this, I began an ongoing project with the psychologist Isabelle Basset that aims to help restitute identity and relationships to the residents of a specialised care facility within the Amiens psychiatric hospital, the majority of whom are non-verbal, have no identity documents, and are eventually destined to be buried in a closed cemetery within the hospital grounds. We will raise flags that will be visible over the wall that encircles and occludes the hospital in order to disrupt the valid gaze, which conflates what cannot be seen with the monstrous. The wall, here, will no longer be a form of protection for the world beyond against a fantasised danger but rather a fortress rampart protecting those within.
Moving from personal experience to a collective narrative has enabled me to lay claim to a situated knowledge and reaffirm the importance of human relations in artistic and political projects, so as to ensure that collaboration not be confused with exploitation. This is a method I began with République, a series of banners based on the stories of protestors who I met while I was working as a waiter in a bar on Place de la République, and later those of bodybuilders in a low-cost gym who were countering the exploitation of the body as labour power by reappropriating it as an image.
I deepened this approach through my work with Danièle Le Moënner, the deaf woman whose child I am. It was through psychoanalysis and the distinction between interpersonal relations and systemic violence that I was able to fully accept the deafness of my parents. Tout ce dont vous n’avez jamais entendu parler [Everything You Have Never Heard Of] is the result of my astonishment: neither my participation in the educated milieu of the institution nor family transmission had enabled me to understand the reality of deaf people and CODA. Through a series of filmed interviews with Danièle, I became conscious of recurring motifs in the stories of other deaf families, whether I had come across them in novels, through my research or in personal accounts. The synthesis of this project was a twenty-five-metre-long figurative fresco on silk that draws on the formal vocabulary of Cristoforo de Predis, a 15th-century deaf artist rediscovered by Yann Cantin, himself a deaf historian from a generation that was among the first to be authorised to undertake further study. I filmed Danièle as she commented the fresco in sign language, which I do not master. She evoked the history of deaf activism with precision and ease; a single take was all we needed. In doing so, she embraced the status of author whilst releasing me from the role of CODA-translator.
Our conversations continued with Préhistoire, presented in the exhibition “SILENCE” that I co-organised with Geoffrey Badel, Estelle Labes, Max Taguet, Sylvanie Tendron and Échangeur22. A series of framed documents shared with visitors the archive that Danièle had compiled, a common practice in deaf families. It began as a shoebox full of press cuttings, photographs and documents retracing the “integration” of deaf people and their limited access to work. Danièle was born in 1953, and her aspirations were systematically thwarted: deprived of the opportunity study, she was encouraged to pursue a qualification in “arts ménagers” [“home economics”]. The collaborative writing of her biography as an artist for this exhibition was a gesture that sought to undo the assignation to the domestic sphere that was inscribed in the very title of her diploma. As a child, I remember that she used to say to me: “we are intellectuals.” Though our house had no books in it, she passed on to me intelligence, power and humour in the face of the violence of difference. This phrase was a gesture of resistance; thirty years later, our shared projects have given it a concrete form.
BIOGRAPHY
ARTHUR GILLET is a visual artist and performer. A graduate of the Rennes School of Fine Arts, he also trained in contemporary dance at the Musée de la danse. He grew up in a d/Deaf and neuro-atypical family on the fringes of the labor market. In his work, the artist delves into themes of desire, identity, social struggle, and media; through his practice of performance and happening, he engages with public or institutional spaces.
Traduit par James Horton