Towards Credos, starting from Messe pour un corps — Seminar

For his project Credos, the artist Michael Eddy is initiating a reflection with his peers on the complexity of the concept of belief, also approaching it in economic terms and as its intersectionality manifests itself within the specific practices of cultural communities. He aspires to the form of a performative example, stepping where value is unstable: the space of the public market.

The author Vincent Bonin is offering a contribution to Credos with a talk on the practice of the French artist Michel Journiac and his performance Messe pour un corps (1969). For him, the ambivalence of Journiac is relevant today for the discussion about the values we accord to models of identitarian artistic subjectivity, at a moment when, under the guise of a semblance of political discourse, symbolic cultural gestures are often at times conflated with an acting out, in the real.

The discussion will be interwoven with a projection of footage from a reperformance captured in 1975 by the feminist documentarian Carole Roussopoulos and will be followed by an open discussion moderated by Bonin and Michael Eddy.