For the virtual visit, please note that the Traits d’union.s exhibition takes place in both the chapel, as well as in two of the Centre de la Vieille Charité rooms. Please scroll down to find the additional virtual visits of the two rooms.
The Almshouse: The Odd, The Poetic and The Possible looks and listens to Marseille’s multi-layered linguistic landscape. It explores the city’s complex cultures and their often competing narratives: the unexpected breaks and the occasional poetic resonances between them, the dialects, if you like, that form and inform the multiple identities of Marseille.
Much like language itself, La Vieille Charité has fulfilled many confining functions throughout its life: an almshouse, an asylum, a hospital, a cloister, and now several museums. It was once the architectural embodiment of Marseille’s social immunology, in other words a place designed to confine anyone who threatened to contaminate the social body: the homeless, the beggars, the prostitutes, the mad and the poor.
The Almshouse The Odd, The Poetic and The Possible hyphenates the historical spectre of contamination with poetic incursions into the institution of language: a place to listen with your eyes and see with your ears. It reflects the emergence of hybrid voices and subjectivities, promiscuously intermingling in defiance of a purified body politic.
Participants: Anna Boghiguian* (1946, EG), Aoziz* (Béatrice Pedraza, Ludovic -Mohamed Zahed, Andrew Graham) (Network, FR), Judith Scott (1943-2005, US), Gisèle Vienne and Dennis Cooper (1976 FR, AT / 1953, US), Pauline Curnier Jardin (1980, FR), Lionel Soukaz (1953, FR), Reena Spaulings .
Avec des œuvres historiques de : André Acquart (1922-2016, FR), Antonin Artaud (1896-1948, FR), Roland Barthes (1915-1980, FR), Georges Bataille (1897-1962, FR), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940, DE), Leonora Carrington (1917-2011, UK), Pierre Guyotat (1940-2020, FR), Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891, FR), Hélène Smith (1861-1929, CH).
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