Pauline Curnier-Jardin

Inspired by Jean Genet's 1950 homoerotic "Un Chant D'Amour", this short film interrogates patriarchal credo through the lens of its unseen bodies. Shiny young male bodies are replaced with post-menopausal women, who celebrate their erotic power after shedding the patriarchal construct which places them ‘of the market'(as author Virginie Despentes would say).

The Italian countryside was once full of fireflies, but now the flickering of far-off headlights pepper the fields as johns go hunting for a one-night mate. In the heat of the night, the reflective glow of other bioluminescent bodies returns the magic of twinkling lights to the darkness.

The island of Giudecca, south of the historic center of Venice, is the home of the Convent of the Convertite, which for about 200 years has been a women’s jail for the imprisonment and rehabilitation of condemned prisoners. Even before that, the building was a convent where prostitutes and women considered immoral were locked up against their will. Nevertheless, behind those walls, and in particular in the parlor, there is another story, and according to this story women performed for high society offering shows of transvestism, sometimes even blasphemous.

Short film release

It’s August. Feel the suffocating heat of the sun penetrating your skin. All around you, an abundance of flesh is spinning. Thousands of men offer up the naked bodies of baby boys to the angelic icon of San Sebastian. Screams, colours, chants and explosions. Money-garlands. Imagine no women except for me. Wait, yes, behind us women are following with devotion, all dressed up in well pressed clothes and their stocking feet. Now, come back here. Imagine how badly I fell in love with this. I desperately want to be part of it. To be there. I wanted to belong. But I know I can’t. And so, I try to capture it on film. I go there and film it every year, over and over, again and again. One day I will tell the story of a poor and sterile man who wants to replace San Sebastian. But more summers will have to pass before our hero appears.

Transcendence and hedonism are two of the inner contradictions we experience in new conceptual constellations in a work dedicated to collective rituals in Europe’s public spaces.

This film belongs to the multi-media installation "Viola Melon, Baiser Melocoton". Through the eyes of the goddess Demeter (a sofa where you are invited to lay on, so called “the Femme-Salon-Cinema”) you can share a bit of her vision, two girls talking about the damages of alcohol among teenagers. The tale ends surely and badly, the goddess wants to punish them, their livers turn into meringue.

A collaboration between Josefin Arnell & Pauline Curnier Jardin

On 12 October 2023, in a performative journey through the urban planning and fascist architecture of EUR and its colonial spectres, the present, the past and a utopian future led the public through a discovery of Via Cristoforo Colombo. EUR is the result of a fascist urban planning system which was meant to inscribe into the city’s road pattern straight trajectories of expansion toward the Mediterranean Sea, as a symbolic representation of the regime’s colonial project. On October 12th, a day celebrated in many countries as Columbus Day, such references were poetically and irreverently subverted by Feel Good Cooperative, as a collective and desiring body of more than one hundred people was guided on a performative journey to re-signify those sites of exploitation and power through a polyphony of voices.