Wear. Costumes for The Nature by Marion Renier

Dressing up and undressing are these intimate moments when you are confronted with your own body. Surrounded by cultural codes, norms and gender stereotypes the actual nudity comes about as something embarrassing. The natural is confronted with culture as we are living in a civilization where the body has been medialized and morphed into a nod of cliches we have to dismount every time we look in the mirror.

The four works made by Marion Rénier during her residency at MeetFactory reflect on such norms and stereotypes. They stem from the analysis of gender standards rooted in patriarchy as well as in the reception of physical conditions and disabilities. One can wear them as a shield, costume, disguise, or a second skin to reinforce the notion of natural or to hide oneself from the world imposing charmful codes.   

Made out of natural materials and fully compostable, the four pieces will merge with the environment of the park at the back of the school campus during the performance directed by Marion and conceived by the students of the Intro to Curatorial Studies course.

Marion Rénier, performer and sculptor, lives and works near Lille, in the north of France. Her work revolves around the notion of the cocoon which can be a rejuvenating envelope or what prevents us from existing. Until now, she has worked on the female body as a cocoon dominated by patriarchy and capitalism, the earth as a cocoon of bodies and living things, but also on waste as a part of us that accumulates and that we no longer know what to do with. Through this theme, she creates compostable pieces and performances that question the relationship of the artist to the public and of the artist to storage.

Currently, she is carrying out research on performance as an object of study and an anthropological tool to design a relational analysis of our ways of uniting.