Dinaïg StallA Taste for Clay

Performances/Activations on June 15 et 5 pm and June 16 at 3 pm

Conducted as part of a doctoral research-creation on the specific potential of puppetry to elaborate representations from a queer feminist perspective, A Taste for Clay is an installation project punctuated by performances, which interrogates notions of impermanence and erosion – of materials, bodies, relationships and individual and collective memory. Loosely based on Emma Donoghue’s short story, What Remains, and the lives and work of sculptors Florence Wyle and Frances Loring, this work is dedicated to exploring the singular presence-absence of the puppet and its queer feminist resonances with the social and memorial spectralization, between occultation and persistence, of those who disturb heteronormative temporal conceptions and reproductive expectations. The artist Dinaïg Stall works with raw clay and plaster, materials chosen for their transformative potential and their fundamental place in traditional sculptural processes. Stall seeks to experiment with the long time frame of the installation and to create a hybrid form, at the crossroads between visual arts and theater, which escapes a univocal reading as an art object or as a performance, because it is both at the same time. Constantly between life and death, object and character, sculpture and puppet, figuration and evocation, the different flickering and fleeting incarnations that populate A Taste for Clay bring us back to the space of the studio, to the creative process and the uncertainty of making, much more than to the authoritative grandeur of official monuments; to what lives in the interstice of the stone, in the time of erosion.