Deborah Schamoni

This performance on its first & only happening used to be called Un Chant. Grotto Giganta: stalactite/stalagmite in 2010, & it was made for an exhibition by Susanne M. Winterling at GAK in Bremen called …dreaming is nursed in darkness, a quote from Jean Genet. The performance’s rudimentary, task oriented activities; in spite of their being disturbed & reordered, I thought tempered the title’s admittedly elaborate shape, assuming at the time the floral naming was appropriate when honoring Genet. I continue in that vein here.

In a time of much travel for both the sustenance of my personal economy & my art making alongside adoringly attending my then love in NYC, the work took one motif from Genet’s only film Un chant d’Amour. I’d taken others from it before.

Quite some time earlier as an unsuspecting teen I was ceremonially given a beautiful copy of Genet’s Our Lady of The Flowers (Notre Damme de Fleur, 1943). I’ve not been the same since. The taken motif from the film involved a small bouquet of flowers swung on a string by a muscular arm through a barred prison window, to another arm extending from another barred window expectantly awaiting, grasping for, this gesture of affection – the gesture also appears abstracted on a black background, sans prison landscape.

There are of course many forms of containment & coercion & attempts at escape therefrom, but thankfully incarceration like Genet’s is not the variety of power’s exertions we’ve been dealt to date. Pélassy, also a fan of Genet, & this exhibition at Haus am Waldsee give me the opportunity to re-figure the performance’s attempts to appeal for affection, with a host of companions, in spite of bureaucratic & other strictures.

We hope you will join us.

Text: Gerry Bibby