Deal with it

Esthétiques de la réparation

Research project

Ongoing

support programme by

CARE et photographie: Que peut une image ? Esthétique de la réparation
Monday 21 november 2022
lecture, La Cambre, Bruxelles (BE)

CARE et photographie: workshop with Anna Püschel
Monday 21 and Tuesday 22 november 2022
workshop, La Cambre, Bruxelles (BE)

Photographic Practices as Care-Taking:The Pharmakon Image
Thursday 24 and Friday 25 november 2022
paper presentation, UiT Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø (NO)

Itinéraires de réparation: moss in conversation with Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza
Wednesday 14 december 2022
lecture, Beaux-Arts de Paris (FR)

Workshop with Hideyuki Ishibashi
Tuesday 24 january 2023
workshop, Lycée Professionnel Louise de Bettignies, Cambrai (FR)

moss collective and Livia Melzi in conversation with Béatrice Josse
Thursday 25 may 2023
lecture, Institut pour la photographie, Lille (FR)

Considering images both as bearers of different forms of real or symbolic violence and as interfaces for individual or collective repair, Deal with it – Esthétique de la réparation examines the curative aspect inherent in certain visual arts gestures in artistic practices, which act as tools of resistance. Erasure, covering, repetition, cropping, glitch, collection, imprint, collage, and even reconstitution, the multiple actions carried out by the artists on the body of images resemble attempts at conjuration and appropriation.

Physical or dematerialised, images can be personal, found, from archives, or amateur images circulating online. These distinct gestures then act as micro-actions of individual resistance to events and general media overload. Also participating in a recovery/showcasing of parallel images or narratives, they contribute to repairing a form of cultural forgetting and erasure, in order to change dominant narratives and representations.

As Legacy Russell points out in her book Glitch Feminism, ‘remixing (…) is a technology of survival’. Through close dialogue with a selection of artists who consider and heal images, this research project studies these different processes of resistance via images, within which the latter act as a pharmakon, both remedy and poison.