Siren songs

The catalogue accompanies the exhibition “Siren songs, water as told by artists” open from 4 October 2024 to 13 January 2025 at Villa Medici.

Extract from the exhibition catalogue

“Sirens, or mermaids, are part of our feminist history, and losing sight of this fact leads us to consider them without correlating them to gender, species, race, humanity […] They force us to focus attention on the question of becoming, on that of life in streams of water that make the world permeable and connected, outside any fantasy of total purification. This should serve not as a model, but as a guide: political, artistic, academic, and above all ethical. Becoming-sirens are intimately linked to our futures and to reinventing the subject in these times of our tragic ecologies.”

– Myriam Bahaffou

Authors of the catalogue

Myriam Bahaffou, philosopher; Alix Boillot, artist; Julien d’Huy, historian of myths; Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge, historian of religions; Sarah Rey, historian of Antiquity; Himali Singh Soin, artist; Ala Tannir, architect; Justinien Tribillon, urbanist.

The catalogue includes texts by Seneca and Pliny the Elder.