Pauline Curnier Jardin - films & talk

Programme

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  Fat to Ashes (Pauline Curnier Jardin, 2021, 21')

  Fat to Ashes combines three storylines, starting with a religious festival in honour of St. Agatha. According to legend, the Roman prefect Quintianus had Agatha tortured and her breasts amputated because she refused his advances, hence her position as Patron Saint of rape victims, breast cancer patients, wet nurses, and bell founders and a protector to victims of fire.
  
  The film cuts from Agatha’s festival to Cologne Carnival, a week of excess that runs from so-called 'Fat Thursday' until Ash Wednesday which marks the beginning of Lent and a period of reflection. The third line is the ritual slaughter of a pig in an Italian mountain village, on a dark, cold morning demonstrating vividly how agriculture becomes culture as living flesh becomes meat.

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  Adoration (Pauline Curnier Jardin, 2022, 9')

  Through drawings made by female prisoners, the film depicts, in collage style, the forgotten story of Casa di Reclusione Femminile, a Venetian women's prison that used to house a convent. In the 16th century, sex workers and other women who did not conform to the social norm were forced to enter the convent. There, they performed annual plays for the Venetian elite as a way of making themselves heard. Adoration premiered at the Venice Biennale last year.

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  Ausgeblutet, Bled Out, Qu'un sang impur (Pauline Curnier Jardin, 2019, 16')

  Qu'un sang impur began as a loose remake of Jean Genet's Un chant d'amour (1950), a homoerotic love story between prisoners, under the languorous eye of a sadistic prison guard. In Curnier Jardin's film, shiny young male bodies are replaced by post-menopausal women, who celebrate their erotic vigour after ridding themselves of the patriarchal construct that takes them "off the market" (as writer Virginie Despentes would say).
  
  Having escaped the endless reproductive cycle, the artist ascribes a special power to this phase in women's lives, disconnected as objects of desire. In their moment of need, they bleed again.

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  Fireflies (Pauline Curnier Jardin, 2021, 7')

  A collaborative meditation on liminal spaces and desire. The film was developed together with the sex workers from the Feel Good Cooperative in Rome, which was co-initiated by the artist in an effort to provide financial assistance to sex workers during the pandemic.
  
  It was shot on the margins of the ancient imperial city. Long ago, there used to be fireflies there. Today, the headlights of cars act like searchlights, while suitors spot sex workers through erratic flashes of light. They in turn may be lit up by a flashlight directed at their invisible bodies, a brazier or little bonfire. In this instant, the mostly trans sex workers working and performing there are themselves reminiscent of fireflies.