Holistic dissection of corpses – on “De sang chaud et de terre” by Eglé Budvytyté in Plateau
In “Of Warm Blood and Earth” (Warm Blooded and Earthbound), the Lithuanian performer and video artist choreographs cyborg youth in love with “care” and peaceful equality. She caresses the skin of the Earth under the auspices of her archaeologist compatriot Marija Gimbutas, author of Language of the Goddess.
In Of warm blood and earth (Warm Blooded and Earthbound), the Lithuanian performer and video artist choreographs cyborg youth in love with “care” and peaceful equality. She caresses the skin of the Earth under the auspices of her fellow archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, author of Language of the Goddess (Women’s editions).
While we see, at the bottom of a neck of hangings, on a projection screen, young and non-gendered people touching, bathing, perhaps consoling, pieces of human skeletons in muddy waters, we remember some sentences from Olivier Cadiot’s latest book, For Mahler (POL): “Green and white porcelain pavilion. Chanting of memory. Sailing, sailing – lake. Life goes by. In the middle of the little house. In the cottage. Hunched over, dejected, so much so. Idea of the broken marvelous. Bone, broken fragment. Here again to get a grip on life. »
The Frac Île-de-France, for which “De sang chaud et de terre” was produced, acquired from the same artist Songs from the compost: mutating bodies, imploding stars (Songs of compost: Changing bodies, imploding stars), which was presented at the Venice Biennale two years ago and which constitutes in some ways its prelude. At the very beginning of For Mahlera tree speaks: “I am the tree transplanted into the water gardens. I am fluid. (…) / I compose myself. I’m breaking down. »
It is never very polite to link two works, especially if they treat the same thing in an opposite way, especially if we quote a man to talk about a woman, etc. But it turns out that “ Warm Blooded and Earthbound » also includes a long poem recited by the transformed, degendered voice of the Lithuanian artist: first a sort of coat of arms of the human body (“are your kidneys becoming bitter?”, “human heart in my hands”) which takes the consistency of a baroque physiognomy “passing through the digestive tracts of maggots”; the text then comes to considerations of the hoarding of wealth and the poisoning of the earth, the resulting deaths (“numbers on my phone that will never ring again”) before moving on to a form of resurrection: “when you die / the fluids / will ooze out of / your ass / your mouth / sweat / cum / vomit / diarrhea / these are nothing but / ways to connect / to the divine.”
In For MahlerOlivier Cadiot took up the texts of the six lieder of the Songs of the Earth (1908) and mixed them with elements of his translation of Psalms as well as with For a tomb of Anatole by Mallarmé (dedicated to the memory of his deceased son): a happy idea, since Mahler had just lost his daughter when he composed The Song of the Earth. But these lieder have a detailed genealogy, as David Christoffel recalls in his afterword: they are all, except the last, the German version of French texts translated or inspired from Chinese.
Two of them are due to Judith Gautier (1845-1917) in her Book of Jade. We cannot resist the pleasure of comparing the cantilena of Eglé Budvytyté with “Autumn Evening” by this poet: “The flowers already no longer have perfume; the north wind will blow them away, and soon the water lilies will sail the river. / My lamp went out by itself, the evening is over, I’m going to go to bed. / Autumn is very long in my heart, and the tears that I wipe from my face will always be renewed. / When will the wedding sun come to dry the tears? » Same liquid metaphor of loss, same languid fatality (Budvytyté uses the lexicon of “gentle” and “tenderness”). And the same final opening to love: domestic love of “marriage” in 1867, fluidity of anarchy “wet and juicy like a pussy” in 2024: “I am in love with / anarchy / is it in the process of brood? / does she play? Is she voluntary? what is his name? » pronounces Budvytyté at the end of his video.
We will not use the words “fertile” or “fertile”, which are decidedly sexist. To talk about what results from encounters or (pro)creation, the artist prefers the term “mothering”, understood as “care”, to that of maternity. She declares this in the dialogue that she has with Céline Poulin, director of the Frac Île-de-France and curator of the exhibition: “Mothering definitely seems lighter and more meaningful to me when it is practiced outside the nuclear family unit and in the context of a larger community. The term care covers so many aspects, it is connected to social issues and larger realities. » On an ancient structure (the perspective of death and separation, humans seeking themselves in nature, resurrection) is therefore superimposed an adequately contemporary discourse.
Only the fusion, the symbiosis of a hand with grass, of a keratinized filament with air, the occupation of a space, holds our attention. If there is activity, it is strictly sacred, a rite rather than an existence.
We are no longer in romantic solitude, obviously: it is the group, the community which are at stake here. We can possibly “become a family” (there are two children in ” Warm Blooded and Earthbound »there was none in Songs from the Compost) but it is above all a question of being post-human, “on the border of stone and animal” in line with the Gaia hypothesis developed by Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock. The choice of filmed performance fully realizes this aspiration: the artist uses dancers and performers whose moving bodies capture all the attention of viewers. This is a known characteristic: the overpresence of the body in the image abolishes the face. There is no longer any way to stare at or even consider humanity in this spectacle by assigning it through our gaze. Only the fusion, the symbiosis of a hand with grass, of a keratinized filament with air, the occupation of a space, holds our attention. If there is activity, it is strictly sacred, a rite rather than an existence.
The bodies of Songs from the Compost like those of “ Warm Blooded and Earthbound » are dressed in neo-medieval fashion: postapocalyptic Zadists who drag their non-differentiation, their feet and biodegradable basins on the sand or in streams. Those of “ Warm Blooded » pick simple ones, delouse themselves, make energetic passes, wash bones, bury themselves in a quarry, raise their arms. They let the clay flow from their hands, between impossible sculpture and non-violent excavations.
It is in fact the work of the Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (1921-1994) on “egalitarian and essentially peaceful societies honoring nature” which informs the visual and theoretical research carried out to “ Warm Blooded » : at one point we will even find statuettes from Gimbutas’ work The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974). “I was interested in returning the figurines to the Earth, to the bed of the river,” declares the artist. Today, they live mainly in museums to which they clearly do not belong. (…) I like the idea that by dissolving at the bottom of the river, they infuse the water with ideas from a distant past. »
A Cartesian mind might believe that it is easier to infuse ideas by presenting oneself (including in a museum) in front of a human, in a sort of communion where the human of the 21st century would do again mentally the path, the creative gesture having led another human thousands of years ago to this form, rather than being hidden away. But we must understand, and this is the whole point of Budvytyté’s anti-Anthropocene performance, that these are ideas for Gaia, not for humans: they “infuse the water » and besides nothing “belongs” (translation of “to belong”) anywhere.
The bodies in his videos have also definitively ceased to inhabit (that is to say, to degrade) the world, even as a poet: they survey it like the dung beetle of the Chants of Maldoror (“But what was the bodily substance towards which I was advancing?”) or, in Songs from the Compost, like Plato’s androgyne once cut in two. If there is “care” between these bodies, it only appears to be mediated by the environment: to caress the stone is to be attentive to what was once conceptually, among the humanist patriarchs, “you “.
In the same dialogue cited above with Céline Poulin, Eglé Budvytyté evokes the “holistic dissection of corpses”. We don’t know what it is, but we could see a joyful and shamanic analogy with the artist’s work in ” Of warm blood and earth ». Budvytyté indeed sees the Earth as a sort of sponge for all the wars, suffering, and deaths, which then sink into our “body-minds”.
Let’s return to the opposite and symmetrical of Budvytyté, that is to say Cadiot at the very end of For Mahler (commentary on the intaglio by the cameo): “What is at the bottom of the earth is moved. Visible silk threads serve as binding. The right path – in thought. Only knowledge, darkness. Forever, forever. Heavy, almost black earth. Late stylethe last way. Farewell with love – and not with bitterness. Nothing but wind. The Song of the Earth – the song of the earth. »
Eglé Budvytyté, « Of warm blood and earth », the Plateau, Paris. Until February 23, 2025.
Eric Loret
Critic, Journalist
