Week 136_God, I don't even know your name

God, I don’t even know your name

By Camille Aleña

Curated by Lolita 

September 4th - December 25th 2018

Since September 4 th, Lolita releases in a special edition Camille Aleña’s* God, I don’t even know your name* on a weekly basis, to a digital audience. 

The artist reading a hot and clunky story novel in her against day classically furnished living room is a humorous way -and post-post normcore-  of advocating for normality, calling for serenity. 

She plays down the distress of ordinariness. 

With her video series, Aleña strives to make the summer season -and everything that goes with that- last.

The set is simple, Aleña herself seated in her Londoner living room, facing camera is reading the short erotic fiction « I would do anything for love » written by Al Bedell*.

 Idleness

The reading aloud by the artist operates a deviation from the original story, it raises a barrier to the original text. 

Erotic writing is usually to create deeper corporal images: words can be stronger, more able to infuse the senses than most of the seen and reviewed images created by the patriarcal pornography. 

The viewer is not in direct contact with the text but with the reader/ artist, her environment and a musical ponctuation.

The projection and identification capacity we usually have as readers is traded off against a pupil passive position. 

This dispositive creates impatience -we are not used anymore to be read a book- but as soon as we let go, it actually rocks us.

 Aleña obstructs by the reading, our capacity to enter the unscrupulous exaggerated and fantasized narrative.

She takes her time. She gives us to reconsider the usual duration an audience can allocate to a piece, to extend the time we have for lightheartedness. 

Bringing the deckchair in her living room until Christmas, she resurrects in her urbain house and in our screens the idleness of a lazy afternoon during summer breaks. 

Intimacy

She articulates the English words, does not try to hide her French -actually Swiss- accent, stumbles sometimes over a nominal group, she is home. 

She reads at her own pace, moves sits from one shot to another showing then her domestic habits… One time, her hair is wet, as she just got out of her shower. 

In short, we are in her simple, calm, languorously daily intimacy. 

A realistic homebody intimacy contrasting with the erotic « clunky », « sexy » and « happy »* magnificent purple covered book she is reading. 

In this double fiction, Aleña points the striking gap between her own supposedly antihero reality and the story read.

Through this contrast, a soft violence emanates from her series.

In the whole collection of this book series, New Lovers - even though they are all written by women- there is this editorial slant of depicting strong women as being able to act sexually, with nonchalance; there are these elements we all would love to live back again -or for the first time- the fantasized but nonetheless culturally very well described new generation of women, behaving wildly wacky, the promotion of an unrestraint, reckless, fulfilling passions behavior…

Aleña reassures the audience, staging herself as an ordinary reader, sharing her moment with us, she offers a hand, magically bringing back once a week until Christmas, the summer vibes of dream and quietude.

Flora Citroën for Curated By Lolita

*Camille Aleña is born in Switzerland. She lives and works in London.

*Edited by publishing house Badlands Unlimited. 

*From Paul Chan’s following ITW