Fifty years ago, a bunch of screenwriters from the entertainment industry invented a new way to die - as if there weren’t already enough ways to die - and it was called skin suffocation. With that iconic image of a gold-painted body dead woman, the ‘industry of desire’ created some sort of a symbol for patriarchy: the ultimate male trophy.
But there is really no such thing as skin suffocation because humans don’t breathe through the pores of their skin, we all know that but for some reason we believed it was a thing. Or maybe did we believe in the metaphor that image embodied that a woman could suffocate from one’s own shining ability?
No, you can’t kill someone by painting her body with gold is a hybrid performance, an attempt to redefine our relationship to shininess as symbol. It is an emotional expertise on how to regain access to one’s own body, or how to regain some sort of self-trust after the ego was damaged, demystified.
BIO
Céline Gillain (°1979) is a Belgian artist based in Brussels. She is interested in experimenting performance as a tool to overcome mental limits and self-limitation instincts. Rejecting any kind of hierarchies by exploring the meeting points and the porosity of various fields, her work (video and performance) questions the ways stories are told and how our sense of fiction can be perpetually challenged.
