In her workshop ‘Performing the intimate’, director and performer Rébecca Chaillon proposed taking intimacies and bodies as a starting point for political fiction: ‘using our bodies as a map to be captioned’, and if possible, ‘writing ourselves live, with vulnerability and power’.

To extend their reflections, Cifas invited a former participant to make a contribution to the Cifasotheque.

Lou Lindenbaum took up the call and went back over one of the exercises that marked the group: choosing and reproducing a canon from the history of performance in a short space of time, without trying to invent but simply experimenting by doing. Within this repertoire, each member of the group demonstrates a personal reinvention by blending their own intimate history and sensibility (gender identity, sexual orientation, racial identity, etc.) with the existing performance.

Lou recontextualises her choice and how it shaped her experience:

‘Fascinated by Ana Mendieta for a long time, I set out to reproduce one of her performances, Death of a Chicken (Muerte de un pollo). Ana and I are different: she's a Cuban artist who immigrated to the United States in the 60s and I'm a 22-year-old Breton who came to Belgium to study. I was attracted by the inter-species relationship that this performance implied. For Ana, the chicken reflects a syncretic value from her native country, and the blood that flows from it, a relationship with her femininity. Killing a chicken on stage made no sense to me. Nevertheless, by trying to reproduce this performance I was able to unfold a whole universe with an animal that is just as sacred and intimate to me: the oyster. Through this mini-theatre piece, I'm trying to convey the personal exchanges and reflections that emerged from this exercise, which goes beyond simple reproduction and, through experimentation with the stage and the body, gives access to the intimate, political and sacred issues I have with the oyster that I have yet to open.’

An excerpt from the video archive of Ana Mendieta's performance Untitled (Chicken Piece Shot #2), 1972.