Tangible Striptease in Nanosequences, Centre des Arts, Enghien-les-Bains, Paris-Diderot University, Paris, France, 2016
ORLAN performs ” Tangible striptease en nanoséquences” at the Centre des Arts d’Enghien-les-Bains and Université Paris Diderot on Thursday, June 02, 2016 as part of the Bains Numériques festival. She works with Mael Le Mée and Sup’Biotech.
This work is a self-portrait in the form of a biotechnological performance—a snapshot of a biological moment. In this digital and technological experiment, the ORLAN-BODY measures itself against the public’s gaze through the mediation of the bacteria that live in symbiosis within it—co-authors of all human identity. What is now known as the microbiota. The ORLAN-CORPS becomes a public space for the duration of a “nanoscale striptease.” ORLAN then cultivates her oral, vaginal, and intestinal flora.
ORLAN seeks to demonstrate that, for a woman, striptease is “impossible,” because they cannot strip us of all the images that clothe them, all the fantasies, all the beauty standards, and all the preconceptions that cover them up and prevent them from being seen. These are leaden garments that cling to the skin, acting as a screen.
Harlequin’s Coat, FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), 2008, Liverpool
This work in progress, created in 2007 and exhibited several times, combines video projections of ORLAN’s cells collected during the Biopsie performance and combined with those of other human and animal strains, petri dishes and a bioreactor enabling the in vitro culture of these cells. ORLAN created this work with Jens Hauser and a laboratory that kept cells alive.
ORLAN created a transparent bioreactor that simulates the Harlequin’s head, showing the red liquid feeding the cells and the three polymers to which they were attached. It was as if a moving face agitated the liquid.
Inside the fluorescent Plexiglas Harlequin coat, with one side fluorescing yellow and the other red, were Petri dishes designed to hold polymers and dead cells.
This installation questions the fragility of life by showing living, dead and dying cells, and projections representing cells in these different states. The cells raised in the bioreactor are defenseless, without immunity, and those that survive the longest are the youngest and strongest. We’re a long way from hybridization.
Biopsy, The Harlequin Cloak, School of Anatomy and Human Biology, SymbioticA Laboratory, University of Perth, Australia, 2007
In the preface to Tiers-instruit, entitled “Laïcité”, Michel Serres describes the Harlequin who, having gradually removed all his layers of patchwork clothing during a round-the-world tour, presents a skin that is also in patchwork form. ORLAN was greatly inspired by this book, which she will read during the Biopsie performance.
This performance in the form of a medical intervention was realized in 2007, when ORLAN was invited for a three-month residency at the University of Perth in Australia, where they created the SymbioticA laboratory through Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr in the Department of Human Anatomy and Biology, in collaboration with BioArt technician Jens Hauser.
The staging was minimal: around the hospital bed on which ORLAN lay, dressed in harlequin cloth, were two sheets of the same fabric, one velvet and the other satin.
A diamond-shaped incision was made in the groin crease by burn surgeon Fiona Wood.
Following this medical intervention, the installation “Le manteau d’Arlequin” was created.
