BAITS Ritual

Crypt of Notre Dame de la Croix, Paris, April 2023

In a threatened forest, entities with reversible and porous carapaces unfold like flowers with sharp petals. Through ogival openings, they allow a glimpse of the interior of their vegetal armour and the naked bodies that inhabit them. By opening up, these entities eager for new forms become desirable fruits, baits reaching out to the other to become other.

In this porosity of intertwined worlds, metallic objects are found alongside them, extensions of consciousness born of these chimerical bodies and the wild power of this nomadic thought. Deviant and inconstant, these autonomous entities multiply the possibilities, escaping and resisting any stifling normative form through their differences.

The collection is composed of reversible garments that evoke these organic entities. Thus the garment embodies a multiplicity of differences and the porosity of supposedly hermetic categories such as inside and outside, human and non-human.

Steel and fabric sculptures made from the clothing patterns become extensions. Some are organisms of open and incomplete form, chimeras trapped in steel structures, the result of a shock, a collision between foreign bodies. Others evoking charred plants/insects can potentially become musical instruments through which entities manifest themselves.

Based on an improvisation, the two-act performance makes visible and audible the links between clothes, sculptures, the environment and the unstable and changing entities that animate them.

“Viviero de Castro makes us understand that for Amerindian cultures, the other is not only indispensable. They are a prefiguration of the self. The self desires to be this other represented by the foreigner, or the enemy neighbour. It desires to become it, but on its own terms, without abdicating the essential. This means that in this world, identity has no borders, but is necessarily unstable. “ Preface by Daniel Barbu and Philippe Borgeaux, P.18
The Inconstancy of the Indian Soul by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Labor et Fides, 2020

Performers _ Sébastien Forrester, Low Love, Sasha Petersen, Laetitia Sigogne, Ryme Chatillon, Océane Seraline
Music direction _ Sébastien Forrester
Light Design _ Bertrand Dussart
Styling Consultant _ Pierre De Mones
Special Thanks _ Amandine Piango, Pascal, Studio Scald