Marie Canet with Brice Dellsperger, “Body Doubles”, talk and Hedwig Houben, “Borborygmus”, performance

“Borborygmus” performance by Hedwig Houben

In the performance Borborygmus, first presented in 2017 and repeated for the exhibition “My Tongue Does This to Me”, Houben talks about borborygmi (“tummy rumblings”) as a manifestation of IT within herself. Seated at a table strewn with clay-coloured internal organs, she explains that IT is this multifaceted, undefined and evolving thing, stressing that “It’s a thing that wants to be made.” The intestines are thus an embodiment of the IT as it awaits The Other, which it will inevitably – but only temporarily – alter. The other is I, that is to say the creator or artist, the mediator, the IT’s Alter (as in “alter ego”). Houben relates that while kneading the plasticine on the table, she felt the presence of a thing inside her: “In fact it was my stomach, or more precisely my lower abdomen, that first expressed this sensation of a presence,” a presence she describes as “a tingling bar you could see under the skin [mouth noises].” It is as if something had succeeded in entering her body. But how? And who? And what? ”

Alter-it (extract)

Hedwig Houben’s Work According to Marie Canet

“Body Doubles”

a talk by Marie Canet, curator and art critic, with the artists Jean-Charles de Quillacq and Brice Dellsperger.

Between them, they articulate the question of the double corporals in the work of the two artists Jean-Charles de Quillacq and Brice Dellsperger and their echoes in cinematographic sources which accompany them. The double in the representation also raises the question of repetition and similarity as places of looping and familiarity.