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Meeting with Gisèle Vienne
10.09.2022
Villa Medici joins forces with international performing arts festival Short Theatre and welcomes artist Gisèle Vienne to present her work for the 17th edition of the Festival, entitled “¡Vibrant Matter! Choreographer, director, puppeteer and visual artist, Gisèle Vienne has radically rethought the paradigms of the performing arts scene in recent years.
Her works can be seen as assemblages, capable of eliciting both laughter and horror, which treat the body as a territory for manipulation between eroticism and violence. Interested in the limits of representation, the artist explores the organic/inorganic mix through scenic worlds inhabited by dolls, zoomorphic beings from popular folklore and humanoid robots. Disturbing the threshold between the perceived and the imagined, her multifaceted production – installations, performances, films, books – disrupts established imaginations, so that doubt never ceases to contaminate reality.
The meeting organized at Villa Medici will be an opportunity to present the book Palcoscenici Fantasma(Phantom Scenes) by Bernard Vouilloux, published by NERO, the first publication of the text translated into Italian, which traces Gisèle Vienne’s work from its beginnings. Artist Gisèle Vienne will discuss this publication in dialogue with Piersandra Di Matteo, artistic director of Short Theatre, and Barbara Leda Kenny, co-founder of Tuba, the women’s bookshop in Rome’s Pigneto district.
Saturday, September 10, 2022 at 5 p.m.
Pavillon ProtoCAMPO – Jardin de la Villa Médicis
Meeting in Italian and French with simultaneous translation in both languages
Duration: 1h30
Free event. Advance booking required
➝ I RESERVE
Please consider cancelling your reservation if you no longer wish to take part, so that we can offer other people the chance to attend the event.
No recording or rebroadcast of this event is planned.
The meeting will take place in the ProtoCAMPO pavilion designed for the Festival des Cabanes at Villa Medici by the French architectural firm WALD. This open architecture, consisting of a wooden structure on which rests an inflatable dome, is located in the historic gardens of Villa Medici.
Gisèle Vienne
Gisèle Vienne is a Franco-Austrian choreographer, director and puppeteer. After graduating in philosophy, she trained at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts de la Marionnette. She works regularly with writer Dennis Cooper, as well as with other artists, including the recently deceased Austrian composer of experimental electronic music Peter Rehberg (aka Pita).
Over the past two decades, his work has been performed throughout Europe, Asia and America. Her shows include I Apologise (2004), Kindertotenlieder (2007), Jerk (2008), This Is How You Will Disappear (2010), LAST SPRING: A Prequel (2011), The Ventriloquists Convention (2015) in collaboration with Puppentheater Halle, Crowd (2017), L’Étang (2020). In 2020, she and Étienne Bideau-Rey will create the fourth version of Showroomdummies at Kyoto’s Rohm Theater. In 2021, she directs the film Jerk.
She also exhibits her photographs in numerous museums worldwide, including the Whitney Museum in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires.
Photo credits:
Cover image: © Short Theatre
Portrait of Gisèle Vienne: © Karen Paulina Biswell
