Delicate People
H19:00
H19:00
Free Entrance, Registration here
Duration 40′
Ruth Childs and Cécile Bouffard started the project Delicate People in 2021 aiming to combine their respective disciplines, dance and sculpture. Delicate People is a series of vignettes dealing with figures and motifs of disturbing identities and fine-tuned movements. Both artists cultivate intuition and indeterminancy, fostering suspension of judgment and disruption in form. During their first work session at La Becque, in partnership with L’Arsenic, five initial forms were created to fit Ruth’s body.
Cécile’s work is an invitation to self-projection: an outline incites a grip, a curve a gesture. Her sculptures, arranged with folkloric motifs, call for the recognition of a certainty that can tip over into fragility as soon as the viewpoint is shifted. In a digressive logic, Childs works with the sculptures to create rhythmic patterns, traversing movements, figures and affects suggesting stories nourished by references common to both artists.
Together they seek to design a wandering object, to create a space of emancipation as much in the narrative structure as in the production method.
Ruth Childs, born in 1984 in London, is a British-American dancer and performer. She grew up in the United States where she studied dance and music. In 2003 she moved to Geneva to finish her dance training with the Ballet Junior de Genève. Following this, she started working with many internationally known choreographers and directors including Foofwa d’Imobilité, La Ribot, Gilles Jobin, Massimo Furlan, Marco Berrettini and Yasmine Hugonnet. Since 2015, she is also working on a re-creation and revival project of the early works of her the aunt, the American choreographer Lucinda Childs. In 2014 she founded her company Scarlett’s in order to develop her own work through dance, performance, and music. Scarlett’s favors intimate and collaborative artistic processes, cultivating intuition and the indefinable. In 2016 the state of Geneva awarded her a scholarship and research residency in Berlin of 6 months to develop her own work. Her first stage piece in collaboration with Stéphane Vecchione, The Goldfish and the Inner Tube, premiered in April 2018. She premiered fantasia, her first solo at the ADC, Geneva in October 2019 and then Blast! in 2022 at the Festival de la Bâtie in Geneva and Fun Times in 2024 at Arsenic in Lausanne. From 2023-2024 Ruth was the associated artist at the CCN2 Grenoble.
Cécile Bouffard, born in 1987, lives and works in Paris. A graduate of the National School of Fine Arts in Lyon in 2014, she has since co-founded the artist-run-space Pauline Perplexe in Arcueil. In 2015 and then in 2021, she was in residence at the Cité internationale des arts, and in 2020 at Villa Belleville. The artist benefited from personal exhibitions at the Centre d’art contemporain Les Capucins in Embrun in 2019, at the Guadalajara 90210 gallery in Mexico City, at Rond Point Projects in Marseille and at La Salle de Bains in Lyon in 2022. She participated in group exhibitions, including: “La fugitive” at Crédac in 2022, “Ricochette” at Berceau in 2021, “Your friends and neighbours” at High Art and “Sâr Dubnotal” at CAC Brétigny in 2020. Since 2021 she has been collaborating with dancer and choreographer Ruth Childs as part of the Delicate people project, and since 2018 has led several lesbian collective projects such as VNOUJE with Clara Pacotte and Roxanne Maillet and La Gousse with Barberin Quintin and Roxanne Maillet. Her works have been included in the collections of the Cnap, the Contemporary Art Fund – Paris Collections, the art libraries of the City of Strasbourg.
Courtesy Ruth Childs and Cécile Bouffard
Courtesy Ruth Childs and Cécile Bouffard
Photo by Emilien Itim, Courtesy Ruth Childs and Cécile Bouffard
Photo by Sébastien Verdon, Courtesy Ruth Childs and Cécile Bouffard