From 14/1/2022 to 23/1/2022, the artistic collective Eaux Fortes and its guest artists present a large-scale exhibition at POUSH. Titled Born Again, Raised By You, this exhibition is an artistic, sensory and political itinerary revolving around the imperative of resilience that is so characteristic of our time. In a scenography that vibrates to the rhythm of the changing weather, the time of day and the seasonal variations, the works on display question the dynamics of mutation, of filiation, of transmission, of power and resistance that are at work in the rebirth process that the body experiences in connection with its environment.

With: Myriam Mihindou, Cecilia Granara, Fabiana Ex-Souza, Mehdi Georges Lahlou, Anna Tje, Tabita Rézaire, Michel Jocaille, Juan Ferrari, Hannah Archambault, Andrea Jankovic & Oxanna Bertrand, Emmanuelle Ducrocq, Kenia Almaraz Murillo, Silina Syan, Chadi Meystre, Judith Deschamps, Chloé Sassi, Macha Pangilinan, Low Lov, Alain Polo Nzuzi, Beya Gille Gacha, Céline Fantino, Cléophée Moser, Hoàng Nguyên Lê and Marynet J.

On the scale of time, living beings are constantly subjected to disrupting events that compel them to change, transform, mutate, in order to ensure their survival; a degraded relation to their environment, the influence of a toxic relation on their system, a traumatic event, a polar reversal, a poisonous climate. A metamorphosis is then triggered in the organism, which requires an energetic effort and carries out an irreversible process. One must part with a house, an ego, an intimate or collective envelope, and leave behind the sloughs of the past.

However, in our time, the capacity for “resilience”, which makes it possible to recover from the shock, to survive it and engage in a transformation to find oneself back the in the world, seems to have become a political tool, a weapon of submission.

Against the imperative of always having to be strong, to be reborn after we’ve disappeared, to resist to the pressures that weigh on the body and on the environment, how does artistic imagination illuminate the tensions at stake and the sensitive resources that are possible in our present?

What strategies, urgent or developed in the long term, are carried out to accompany the mutation? Or, on the contrary, can we fight back, fleetingly or publicly?

Exploring the passages from the body to the breath, from the intimate to the social, from the institutional sphere to personal devotion, the event Born Again, Raised by You studies the relations of power and representation in the light of the resonances of the word “reborn” in the corpus of written works and the plurality of women’s voices that it presents.

Conducted in sorority, the exhibition and its program of performances pull a thread of thought from the introductory quote from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (“Can we rationally remove from the phoenix rising from its ashes the pain of having had to burn?”) toward the poet Rumi’s expression of joy (“I was raw, I became cooked, I was burnt”); to question the conditions in which being “born again” can be an emancipation, a sensitive and political liberation, and a quest for harmony with one’s environment.

Exploring the close relations between objects, bodies and environments from the perspective of relational ecology, the collective Eaux Fortes designed for this event a vibrant program and a large-scale scenography, which transform POUSH into an immersive experience, in order to lead the visitors into a journey of initiation in space and in time, made of ritualized passages, sensory experiences and uncanny encounters. From dawn to dusk, from the uterus to the deathbed, by way of a spring frozen in old age and a scorching desert of concrete, the itinerary and the highlights of Born Again, Raised by You are conceived as a series of ages and inhabited environments in which the works, the materials, the audience and the artists that are present come into friction, correlated, together in trials and wonders.