Photo: © Serge D’IGNAZIO
Within the framework of the long-term project “Kunst am Wegesrand” (“Art by the Wayside”), which Anette C. Halm has already realized or is in the process of planning in Germany in site-specific formats (in Nürtingen and Ostfildern in 2021, Baden-Baden in 2022 and in Böblingen in 2023), she will organize a “marche rive gauche” through Paris on October 8th, in collaboration with numerous artists who will present performances and actions in and around historical architectural monuments. The locations of the event include the Place de la Concorde connected via the Académie française, the Jardin du Luxembourg, and the Panthéon. The march not only aims to draw attention to the history of women’s rights and the struggle to free women from dependence on a male-dominated society, but also to commemorate women’s rights advocates who were active in Paris in particular. In an accompanying painting project, Anette C. Halm has followed their traces in the city’s historic cemeteries. Together, these two bodies of work provide an authentic account of Halm’s stay in Paris, reflecting both on the lived life and the future. Here, the city of love also emerges as a city of women’s emancipation – with all its light and dark sides.
Wednesday
09.08.2023
09:00 Uhr
Père-Lachaise
Les Grandes Femmes
This video work is the prelude to the “Marche Rive Gauche”, because here in this place rest many “Les Grandes Femmes”. Thus, this work is intended to be a place of remembrance and at the same time a tribute to all the “strong women” who have prevailed in the struggle to abolish old conventions. The battle cry of the French Revolution, which to this day evokes liberty, equality and fraternity, will undergo a small but consistent and logical rededication in the “Marche” – in fulfillment of equality – in the third part, inherent in the whole action as a motto, in dance-like sentiment: Freedom, Equality and … Humanity.
Pour les femmes!
Pour les droits des femmes!
Liberté, egalité, humanité
Anette C. Halm
Dancer & Coreographer: Hsing-Ya Wu
The performances
Sunday
08.10.2023
11:00 Uhr
Place de la Concorde
Womankind
On marche … pour les femmes. Together with the artists involved in her project, as well as guests and other participants, Anette C. Halm presents her performance “Marche Rive Gauche” in honor of the staunch women’s rights activist Olympe de Gouges, also known as Marie Gouze (1748–1793). The revolutionary wrote the “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen” in 1791 and two years later became a victim of Robbespierre’s Reign of Terror – she died under the guillotine. In a dramatic, dialogical confrontation between the personified state and a chorus, these two events are symbolically reenacted through a scripted text and gestural, non-verbal signs: the sign of the cross on the forehead and an aggressive gesture of slitting the throat.
Pour les femmes!
Pour les droits des femmes!
Liberté, egalité, humanité
Anette C. Halm
Sunday
08.10.2023
11:15 Uhr – End
Palais Bourbon
Beinfreiheit (Legliberty)
Attraction isn’t a matter of revealing clothing. In her performance, Andrea Isa reminds us of the French law forbidding women to wear trousers in Paris – a law that has only recently been abolished. Although French women did not obey it, the existence of this unspoken coercion to wear skirts and dresses, limiting the freedom of choice, invites parody. By wearing several pairs of pants on top of each other, hanging from suspenders like shapeless layers, the artist denies the feminine charms imagined by men. Marlene Dietrich (1901–1992) sends her regards. Ninety years ago she said: “First I showed my legs, and the public was outraged; now I hide my legs, and they are outraged too.”
Andrea Isa
Sunday
08.10.2023
11:30 Uhr
Académie française
Faites Votre Jeu (Make Your Play)
Live your life, make your play. Britta M. Ischka slips into the role of the early women’s rights activist Marie de Gournay (1565–1645), who remained unapologetically single throughout her life. The writer and philosopher believed that the human spirit was neither female nor male – she therefore championed self-determination and the development of personal potential. Her spiritual successor can be seen with a fan of fabric unfurling over upward-curving arms, in the pose of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Where better to strike such a pose than in front of the Académie française?
Britta M. Ischka
Sunday
08.10.2023
11:00 Uhr – End
During the walk
Über die Naht (Over the seam)
Approaching each other via the seam. Lana Koeters’s performance takes place in the background – or, to be more precise, in the middle of the action. While the other performers are in action, the artist selects random pairs and temporarily sews them together. She only works when the spectators or marchers are resting in order to watch the other contributions. With needle and thread, she sets about sewing the shirts, jackets, or pants of the supporting protagonists. In this way, she creates temporary living sculptures that are characterized by a sewn sameness and at the same time remain themselves.
Lana Koeters
Sunday
08.10.2023
12:00 Uhr
Lady Liberty
Let’s become changers
Liberty, equality, humanity. France and the US stood together as brothers and sisters in the fight for liberty. As a symbol of this, the world-famous Statue of Liberty – affectionately known as Lady Liberty – was unveiled in New York Harbor in 1866, as a gift from France to the Americans. The sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi (1834–1904) donated the bronze model to the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, and it found its place in the Jardin du Luxembourg in 1906. In her song, Sissi-Madelaine Schöllhuber takes the fact that a goddess (!) of liberty ultimately refers to the idea of “fraternity” as an opportunity to make an impassioned plea for a humanity that, as a third term in alliance with liberty, professes true equality.
Sissi-Madelaine Schöllhuber
Sunday
08.10.2023
11:00 Uhr – End
During the walk
In-fragilité
The fairy tale of the fairy tale with the glass slipper. The image of the glass wedding slipper might be considered dreamy if it weren’t so terribly uncomfortable and unpleasant to wear. Yena Kim’s glass slipper performance references the fairy tales of Grimm’s “Aschenputtel” and Walt Disney’s “Cinderella,” which can be traced back to Charles Perrault, who published the fairy tale “Cendrillon ou la Petite Pantoufle de verre” in 1697. Using glass slippers, the performance exposes the transparent, invisible shoes as a sign of hidden dependency and discrimination.
Yena Kim
With the kind support of Hyung Jin Park
Glass studio: FLUX
instagram@glassart_flux
Sunday
08.10.2023
12:30 Uhr
Jardin du Luxembourg
Dem Unerreichbaren Nahe (Dance is liberation)
It’s easier to dance without a corset. Beate Herdtle’s performance is a tribute to the expressive dancer Isadora Duncan (1877–1927). Isadora Duncan revolutionized dance through free and natural movements, which broke away from occidental stage dance with its pointe and corset. Herdtle draws signs in the gravel of the Jardin du Luxembourg as she dances.
Her expressive movements illustrate the liberation from the corset. This performance picks up on the fact that women were already freeing themselves from the corset to better defend themselves during World War I, and adopts symbolic dance as a political statement.
Beate Herdtle
Sunday
08.10.2023
13:00 Uhr
Fontaine Médicis
Beschwerte Befreiung (Weighted Liberation)
The burden of being a man. Nico Rost questions masculinity and how we deal with traditional ideas that seem to have become obsolete in the coexistence of the sexes. He calls his ambivalent performance “Beschwerte Befreiung” (“Weighted Liberation”). We see him dragging the ballast of a weight behind him, or carrying it, thus conveying the liberating feeling of freeing oneself through action from what he sees as “toxic” gender roles and the pressure of outdated expectations on men. The shedding of the heavy burden at the end of the journey represents a newly acquired freedom and mobility – both physical and mental – that also signals a positive change in our social interactions.
Nico Birk
Sunday
08.10.2023
11:00 Uhr – Ende
During the walk
Du musst mehr tun, als nur ein paar Blümchen malen (You need to do more than just paint some flowers)
The black veil harbors secrets. In art, especially in film, it is used again and again with great effect, and at the march it will draw viewers’ attention. Angela Vanini will slip in and out of these moments, veiled for the entire duration of the action – as a visibly invisible person. She also alludes to forms of oppression that are hidden, draping herself with chains: burden, restricted freedom of movement, symbol of the imposed narrowness of female possibilities for growth.
Angela Vanini
Sunday
08.10.2023
13:30 Uhr
Panthéon
Hair Cut
Hair for women’s equality. Wearing a simple dress, Ezgi Böttger walks up to the consecrated site of the Panthéon and offers her cut-off braid of hair as a kind of sacrifice. In doing so, she reminds us that since Sophie Berthelot was buried in the Panthéon in 1907, just six women – compared to seventy-five men – have found their way into the hallowed halls. The most recent was Josephine Baker, who was laid to rest here in 2021 – not in the flesh but with a cenotaph. These days, though, it’s impossible not to think of the brave women in Iran who cut off their hair to demonstrate against the compulsory headscarf.
Ezgi Böttger
Sunday
08.10.2023
14:00 Uhr
Place de la Sorbonne
Säbeln, Knebeln, Hebeln (Sabers, gags, levers)
Hair It’s the cabbage that does it. Marie Zbikowska’s work is about reconciling motherhood and life as an artist, or the difficulty of combining the two. From the perspective of the dual fields of “art and work,” “art and motherhood,” “work and motherhood,” and “work and success,” she recites relevant French texts while eating cabbage – dressed in a lab coat. The rich symbolism of cabbage, sometimes negative, sometimes positive, lends an enigmatic quality to the action. The performance aims to address the everyday reality of the double burden and of work itself, calling for improvements that are long overdue in the 21st century.
Marie Zbikowska
Sunday
08.10.2023
15:00 Uhr
Cité internationale des arts
Danae_2023
Danae’s role reversal. We know that Zeus appeared to his many lovers in all sorts of disguises and magical manifestations. He met Danae, who was imprisoned by her father, in the form of a golden rain. Fabian Widukind Penzkofer breaks open the myth – which was meant to show the omnipotence of the father of the gods – by transforming himself into Danae (or perhaps her twin brother?) and posing under a profane shower of water. Here, the (male or perhaps female?) voyeurism that accompanies myths, and that art history in particular has been so fond of putting on canvas, is doubly challenged.
Fabian Widukind Penzkofer
With the kind support of the Ministeriums für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst Baden-Württemberg, Cité International des Arts Paris, SV SparkassenVersicherung, Stiftung der Landesbank Baden-Württemberg, Marli Hoppe-Ritter Stiftung, Kreissparkasse Böblingen and Kunstverein Böblingen e. V.