In July 2022, production residency by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz.
This summer, CRAC Alsace welcomes the artist Beatriz Santiago Muñoz in residence to make a new part of her film freely inspired by Les Guérillères* by Monique Wittig.
Published in 1969, Wittig starts writing the text in 1967, before May 68, in a political context ripe with decolonial struggles and women’s liberation movements. Appropriating the literary canon, she constructs a long epic poem describing a mythical and colourful march to overthrow, guerilla-style, both the patriarchy and the language upon which it’s established. It’s a war of pronouns: They appears [in French: Elles, third person feminine, plural], a collective entity and main charac- ter engaged in a bloody struggle against the patriarchal regime. The book is divided into three sections separated by circles, while a poem composed of a list
of names cuts through the length of the narrative, every five pages. The final section is the one Wittig first wrote, the part where They win and where, heavily armed, They thrash this regime. Then “They say, If I take over the world, let it be to dispossess myself of it immediately, let it be to forge new links between myself and the world.” The first two sections take place after the last section, in the future, one where no class shall take power over another. A future where we invent and decontaminate language. A future where we create new ontologies.
Without quite forming a narrative thread, this book functions as a tool enabling Beatriz Santiago Muñoz to explore the transformative forces of language in a process of decategorization of bodies and relations. Drawing inspiration from the methods of Augusto Boal and the Theater of the Oppressed, the artist engages with a group of actresses a performative work which integrate the camera as an active entity. Initiated in Puerto Rico in 2017, a first version of this film was presented in 2020 at CRAC Alsace within the exhibition Le couteau sans lame et dépourvu de manche. This residency allows Beatriz to continue this project in the native land of Monique Wittig, born in Dannemarie, a few miles from the art center.
With the participation of Nelly Catheland, Neckar Doll, Mélanie Knopf, Camille Moulin, Sopi N'guia and Agathe Nguyen-Duy.
* Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1969.
