Lucille Calmel offers a public talk on her practice and on her current research project. Calmel’s latest work explores the interplay of the animal and the digital within the contemporary paradigm, jointly post-human and post-internet. Extending these queries, she is developing an ASMR performance for the cats of Exarcheia, to be presented at Sub Rosa Space on Friday 10 January, where she is artist in residence.

—

About Lucille Calmel

Lucille Calmel is a French artist, based in Brussels. Her practice is dynamic, encompassing performance, writing, digital art, theatre direction, pedagogy, and curation. While living in Montpellier (FR) she initiated Les Trifides, a collective of women performers active from 1990 to 1995, at which time she regularly performed in ex-East Germany via the association Interkunst. During this period she met Mathias Beyler, with whom she established the experimental theatre company myrtille (1995-2005). Their first piece brought tighter artists of various disciplines and took place at CRAM, a squat located in a non-frontal space. Their works gained national recognition through such creations as Cravan and Vladimir Maiaovski, tragédie en deus actes, presented at the Centre Dramatqiue National Les Treize Vents de Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon. In 1997 Calmel encountered the net.art movement. This prompted a radical reorientation towards her towards daily life, writing, the relational, and the web itself as medium. She has approached the lattermost as a scenic space, ever since her early engagement with net.art in cybercafes. Since her arrival in Brussels in 2005, she has developed collaborations, research, and curatorial projects, whether live or online, that revolve around performance, sonore and visual poetry, experimental music, and digital scenes. Her current projects explore performance with or for animals and inter-species commination. In 2015 a retrospective of her work was exhibited at Centro Puertas de Castilla (Murcia, ES) 2019 saw the publication of her monograph ‘when i’m bad i’m better’, which covers her digital works and performances. As of 2019 Calmel teaches installation-performance at the École de recherche Graphique (ERG). She taught performance and scenic practice at the École Supérieure d’art in Avignon, FR, from 2013 to 2015 and also at La Cambre from 2011 to 2019. Beyond these engagements, Calmel’s pedagogic practice has been refined over many appointments and visiting professorships throughout Europe and the United Kingdom.