Lichen
Body, gender & sexuality - 2014
Extract -listen with headphones-
Hida Viloria
creation process
Commissioned by the city of Reims, this new creation from Pierre Redon took shape at the beginning of 2012. In January, a public open call spread in the city, offered the opportunity for Reims’s cityzen to gave a testimony about theire vision and praticing about gender and sexuality.
A second series of interviews were collected during cessions of hypnosis an empathic medecine that reveals the sensitive body.
Pierre Redon took his site-specific work in sound and cartography one step further with a series of photographs that combine performance art, installation, fictionary and documentary work.
This creation is a reflection on the themes of “Body, gender & sexuality”. It addresses the issues of normality, hermaphroditism and empathetic medicine and explores how these themes find echoes outside of the Western world, through a work of ethnographic fiction.
The interactive book
This new creation will be available in three versions from the smartphone application : French, English and the original version as recorded (Fr / Eng).
The interactive book is a journey through 200 pages of photography.
A QR code allows the user to download the app for free. The user is then autonomous and can experience the interactive book. From chapter to chapter, sound tracks are triggered by new QR codes that you can find on the pages. A relationship images, voices and sound creations then emerges.
The sound tracks, as binaural recordings, are designed to be listened with headphones thus reproducing the sensation of natural sound.
The hermaphrodisme
TERATOLOGY
In the 19th century abnormalities that did not find a medical explanation were studied within a science called teratology. Through Teratology medicine and its rational approach has taken the ascendant over mystical approaches and clearly identifies the fundamental categories in line with which it is possible to divide the genders. If hermaphrodisme was studied within teratology and matter to society it is because they unbalance the cultural assumptions on which our societies are founded, notably within the family and education.HERMAPHRODITE OR INTERSEX?
In order to give a voice to the problem of gender, such as it can be approached in our time, the american intersex activist Hida Viloria was invited to be involved. This representative of the contemporary hermaphrodite wants to demystify the dark image of a bisexual monster and replace the intersex person in a new type of social normality that negates the concept of sex and gender.SHAMANISTIC FIGURE
Faced with this modern identification emerging from teratology we find in some traditional cultures outside of the western world, hermaphrodites in the role of shaman, at the heart of the social group and having a special relationship with knowledge. The interest in such a figure resides therefore in that which it teaches us about the relationships of all bodies existing in different human groups.