Réponses Bavardes
Projet de résidence de la fondation Fiminco
“Photographer seeks male model” – Lila Neutre’s proverbial message in a bottle, plastered on the walls of Seine-Saint-Denis with her silk-screened posters last Spring, was intercepted by 44 men. Of varying ages, classes, and professions, they agreed to play along with the photographer’s requests. Far from acting as a sociological study that would have risked acting as a caricatural sketch of the metropolitan area’s masculine sample, Neutre sought to meet and converse with these men in order to examine their identity and its expression in the post-MeToo era. Over the course of four workshops, participants were asked to question their relation to appearance, gender, and the socio-biographical constraints linked to them. From these exchanges, a diverse series of works developed. In them, we bear witness to these subjects as they let their guards down, question themselves, indulge their frustrations, get embarrassed, and speak of who they are and who they are taken to be. In granting participants full liberty in their testimonies, Lila Neutre creates a non-exhaustive but richly-textured portrait of the manner in which male residents of Seine-Saint-Denis face the constraints linked to their genre, to heteronormative relationships, to stereotypes and the limits that result from them. No less powerful for all its modesty, Réponses bavardes is a work that leaves us with a sketch of society as it approaches a reckoning.” Camille Bardin
The project Réponses bavardes explores the stakes of male domination within the group of men and tries to circumscribe what we call “hegemonic masculinity”. For two months (from March to April 2021) I proposed to men – of all ages and without restriction – to come and visit me at the Fiminco foundation to exchange and create around the male condition. The consultation, MD10, the Pink Project and Mirror-Mirror are four experimental moments questioning men’s relationship to appearance, gender and related biographical or societal constraints. The participants create still or animated images as well as sound, and the self-narratives reveal what it is like to be a man, here and now.
Réponses Bavardes
Projet de résidence de la fondation Fiminco
“Photographer seeks male model” – Lila Neutre’s proverbial message in a bottle, plastered on the walls of Seine-Saint-Denis with her silk-screened posters last Spring, was intercepted by 44 men. Of varying ages, classes, and professions, they agreed to play along with the photographer’s requests. Far from acting as a sociological study that would have risked acting as a caricatural sketch of the metropolitan area’s masculine sample, Neutre sought to meet and converse with these men in order to examine their identity and its expression in the post-MeToo era. Over the course of four workshops, participants were asked to question their relation to appearance, gender, and the socio-biographical constraints linked to them. From these exchanges, a diverse series of works developed. In them, we bear witness to these subjects as they let their guards down, question themselves, indulge their frustrations, get embarrassed, and speak of who they are and who they are taken to be. In granting participants full liberty in their testimonies, Lila Neutre creates a non-exhaustive but richly-textured portrait of the manner in which male residents of Seine-Saint-Denis face the constraints linked to their genre, to heteronormative relationships, to stereotypes and the limits that result from them. No less powerful for all its modesty, Réponses bavardes is a work that leaves us with a sketch of society as it approaches a reckoning.” Camille Bardin
The project Réponses bavardes explores the stakes of male domination within the group of men and tries to circumscribe what we call “hegemonic masculinity”. For two months (from March to April 2021) I proposed to men – of all ages and without restriction – to come and visit me at the Fiminco foundation to exchange and create around the male condition. The consultation, MD10, the Pink Project and Mirror-Mirror are four experimental moments questioning men’s relationship to appearance, gender and related biographical or societal constraints. The participants create still or animated images as well as sound, and the self-narratives reveal what it is like to be a man, here and now.