PERFORMANCE

The ancestral sport of climbing, pursued in often extreme conditions, is envisaged by Laurence Aëgerter as an allegory of life journeys, dotted with difficulties, with each individual having to find their own way. For her project, the photographer worked with youth from specialised social homes, in France and Germany. The visual vocabulary of climbing is transposed to photographic compositions expressing the essential role of sport in the development of one’s personality and the multiplication of one’s chances.

Nestor Benedini got into breakdancing well before his discovery of photography. Now behind rather than before the camera, he represents this expression of hip-hop culture from the vantage point of his long belonging to its community. Breakdancing became an Olympic sport in 2024, during the Paris Games. Considered an artform or a sport, depending upon one’s point of view, breakdancing is revealed by Nestor Benedini as simultaneously a performance-based feat, a physical prowess, and the expression of a globalised culture, abolishing borders and promoting values erasing social identities to create a collective. His images are purged of the usual visual codes that accompany breakdancing, to instead focus on the moves, either frozen or dynamically demonstrating the movement and energy flowing through the bodies of the b-girls and -boys. The large-scale Battle Scene shows fragments of bodies linked together to perform a virtuoso figure born of that ‘ground energy’ tension.

The performance artist and athlete Yassine Boussaadoun invents imaginary sports, provided their own specific regulations, based upon which he holds competitions. This project was born during the pandemic, when it was essential to find ways of existing outside constrictive rules. His performance videos, earnestly made in collaboration with his competitors, explore the possibility of failure or the impossibility of some skill, to the point of engendering a feeling of success. These fictional sports, such as the sneezing championship, the cuckoo marathon, or the out-of-the-ordinary object relay race, are represented by mimicking the aesthetics of sporting broadcasts. Through his sense of humour and the absurd, the notions habitually associated with competition are distorted or subverted to consider the fragility and beauty of sporting communities. By offering an escape from the societal constraints weighing upon individuals, sport here becomes a space of freedom, joy, amity and poetry. 

For her ‘Roche ailée’ project, Suzanne Hetzel returned to rock climbing, having been an assiduous climber in the early 2000s. Drawing from her own experience in confronting the void, the artist closely considers the rock wall, observing it intensely, as a space inhabited by a multitude of life forms. The climber’s hand slips into the crevices to become one with the rock. In the crack serving as a hold, she notes the most minute plants, lichens, and traces left by animals, not to mention other members of the human species. Ceramic sculptures are associated with the photographs to bring us closer to this identification of the hold as a place where other lives thrive and find lodging. This pursuit of a ‘slow sport’, echoing the ‘slow food’ movement, allows the artist to explore a meditative, sensorial and poetic approach to photography that expresses a certain philosophy of existence, comprehensive of the richness and complexity of the living world.

The Smart ArM team at the Sorbonne Université is shown repairing a prosthetic arm in preparation for its participation in the 2023 Cybathlon Challenge. To highlight the tools augmenting or replacing the human body, Mana Kikuta explores the world of applied research, where robotic devices are designed and experimented. At the university laboratory, she observes the scientists and technicians, in their moments of technological development and training a person equipped with an artificial arm. This athlete is preparing for the specific events of the Cybathlon sporting competition, meant to improve such devices designed for disabled persons. Through this timed performance race, the photographer underlines the beauty of movements made possible by a life-transforming technology. By playing with the depth of field, she simultaneously considers the capacity of photography to intentionally blur and the capacity of technology to create new possibilities of living freely with one’s deficiencies.

Based upon an iconographic exploration of motorcycle wheelies, Samir Laghouati-Rashwan approaches this unofficial urban sport from a sociological and anthropological perspective. By creating an out-of-the-ordinary imagery, bringing up-to-date a long history of masculine figures expressing various forms of power by rearing up their steeds, the artist moves beyond the usual gendered and stereotyped divisions, to consider the ignored or overlooked history of female, non-Western and diasporic riders. Combining texts with images, he invents a unique form inspired by the photographic novel. His overhead speech bubbles express the memory of forgotten lives, breaking away from a weighty world. 

The body, its appearance and its physical capabilities are at the heart of Lila Neutre’s oeuvre. The artist-researcher works with twerkers, with this dance form seen as a space of emancipation fighting stereotypes. The body is approached as both an athletic and symbolic vehicle, with the dancers experiencing the power of transformation and performance, comprehended as a physical competence and a form of self-staging. The artist argues that ‘Being an object of desire and working upon one’s appearance is not synonymous with submission to any patriarchal model, but on the contrary symbolises a strong woman in control of her body.’ Her affirmation of the political dimension of performance is inspired by the aesthetics of competitive twerking, as well as by her decontextualising the members of a Marseilles-based collective, La Famille Maraboutage, through their portraits in rocky landscapes, thereby underlining the performative dimension of self-construction.

For her ‘Echo des rivages’ project, Céleste Rogosin employs a special camera allowing for 3D snapshots, in order to recreate the volumetry of bodies by capturing a cloud of points in space. She photographs b-boys from the Calais breakdancing community, inscribing their figures in Channel landscapes between Calais and Boulogne-sur-Mer, where persons in exile attempt to cross over into England. The granularity of the photogrammetry blurs with the sandy dunes, lending the bodies a ghostliness to evoke the paradox between the omnipresence of contemporary photographic tools and the invisibility of bodies occupying this borderland. 

Zooming in on faces and bodies in movement, Assaf Shoshan observes up-close the emotions experienced by athletes in action. By using a long-focus lens and a fast shutter speed, he captures in the fraction of a second that which escapes the naked eye during a match. With movements thus frozen, the image focuses on the athletes’ expressions, on the epidermis and the eyes, to reveal their absorbed concentration in seeking to best apply their bodies to the goal at hand. Prior to and post effort, in the suspended instance of the decisive movement, in the calm and concentration, in the deception of defeat or the joy of victory, the enigma of sport’s innervating beauty is thus revealed.

The photojournalist and skater Robin Tutenges travelled to Ukraine to spend time with its skateboarders. Discovering a closeknit community, he demonstrates how young Ukrainian skaters reclaim war-marked spaces, taking hold of their lives in this chaotic context. Skating becomes a vital space, a veritable psychological crutch, an essential link in the lives of these youth in wartime. The values of this sport, which has only recently entered the Olympics, are strengthened in helping the youth to hold on; values such as inclusion, respect, solidarity, courage and determination, while also providing an escape from the ambient tumult.