Emma Bigé – dancer, choreographer and philosopher – and Gisèle Vienne – artist, choreographer and director – will discuss the question of the archive as a space of struggle and resistance.
From the theatrical repertoire to performance, the body, viewed as a living archive, records and transmits memories, narratives and battles. The event is conceived and moderated by Audrey Illouz and the Bapperf collective (Camille Pailloux, Salomé Daheron, Baptiste Agnero-Rigot and Raphaëlle Louise), an association founded by and for students in 2025 to support performance by archiving and disseminating the work of artists from Beaux-Arts de Paris.
The talk will be preceded at 6pm by the performance Depths from deep cuts, a reimagined version of Brian Campbell’s solo piece (in which song, dance, music and movement stir our imaginations regarding the erotic and ecosystems) featuring students from the Hyunh workshop.
Emma Bigé studies, writes, improvises and translates across the fields of the arts, transpedebigouin studies and environmental inhumanities. A qualified teacher and holder of a PhD in philosophy, she is notably the author of *Mouvementements. Écopolitiques de la danse (2023) and Écotransféminismes (with Clovis Maillet, 2025). As a dancer and curator, she develops installations and performance-workshops that incorporate the histories of ecological and neuro/queer soma-activism (et ce sera un endroit..., 2021; Temporary Landing Zones, 2024; Archive Fever, 2025). As part of the collectives dansmalangue and t4t, she translates books of poetry and queer theory (Sara Ahmed, River Barad, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Jack Halberstam, ...). A lecturer in movement studies at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon, she also teaches philosophy and queer studies at the Centre national de danse contemporaine in Angers and the Centre national des arts du cirque in Châlons. The rest of the time, she lives near a forest in the Périgord, and whenever she can, she takes a nap.
Gisèle Vienne is a Franco-Austrian artist, choreographer and director. After studying philosophy and music, she trained at the Ecole Supérieure Nationale des Arts de la Marionnette.
For the past 20 years, her productions and choreographies have toured Europe and are regularly performed in Asia and America, including: Showroomdummies #1, #2, #3, #4, (2001–2020), I Apologize (2004), Kindertotenlieder (2007), Jerk (2008), This is how you will disappear (2010), LAST SPRING: A Prequel (2011), The Pyre (2013), The Ventriloquists Convention (2015), Crowd (2017), L’Etang (2020) and EXTRA LIFE (2023). In 2021 she directed the film Jerk and in 2024 Kerstin Kraus.
Gisèle Vienne regularly exhibits her photographs and installations in museums including the Whitney Museum in New York, the Centre Pompidou, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, the Centre d’art Contemporain in Geneva and the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris. In 2024/2025, she will present two new exhibitions at the Haus am Waldsee contemporary art centre and the Georg Kolbe Museum, opening as part of Berlin Art Week 2024.
She has published several books, including *This Consciousness to Fracture*, a new book of photographs of her works created in collaboration with Estelle Hanania and Elsa Dorlin, published by Spector Books in autumn 2024. Her work has been the subject of several publications, and the original music for her pieces has featured on several albums.
Photo credits :
Visuel SOS © Création 2026 / Design : © DACM / Gisèle Vienne / Photographe : © Jean Louis Fernandez Affiche correspondant à une performance passée au Palais de Tokyo - Archive Fever, avec Emma Bigé, Hélène Giannecchini, Marcela Santander Corvalán © Photo Makoto Ôkubo / Collage Théo Storf
