Mother's Milk

2020
Displace, 3bisF contemporary art centre, Aix-en-Provence, FR
Les Parallèles du Sud, Manifesta 13

Performance, 33 min  
13 x A4 paper script
stainless steel shredder (self-made machine) 80Lx  70w x 120h cm

Derived from psychomagic and psychogenealogy scenarios (a therapeutic approach exploring the transmission of trauma through genealogy and family constellation), a 13-parts script is carefully assigned to 13 persons of the audience; Marie Ilse Bourlanges asks one by one each part of the script back and reads to the audience a story composed as a narrative patchwork.
In a fragmented manner, the story of Ilse gets slowly constructed, becoming tangible in a printed document: this methodology of documentary poetry is based on gathering textual and narrative matter by series of interviews and correspondences with family members, psychiatrists, nurses, several archivists, a graphologist and an astrologist.
The culminating point and ending of the performance is achieved by a sincere cathartic gesture of shredding one page at a time the 13-parts script in a self-made (sculptural) hand shredder;  letting its content return physically and metaphorically to a more essential form of free particles – dust to dust.

performance registration film by Anaïs Baseilhac – duration 33min, preview 2min