A Tasting of Sweet Pleasures
Mon Ch3rix – A Tasting of Sweet Pleasures is a queer-feminist show: soirée and exhibition, between visual and performing arts. It will take place in different forms in multiple, international spaces – always finding a connection to the respective context through adaptations and involving local artists.
The professed purpose of the show is a tasting. Within a set created to remind us of and function as a bar, a number of drawings, objects, performances, audio- and video works are presented to be sampled by the audience and condense into a transmedial ode to sweetness. These elements form an atmospheric argument, deconstructing the “Myth of Mon Chéri” and with it repressive and patriarchal myths.
The proposed “Myth of Mon Chéri” prompts an investigation of the cherry-flavoured alcoholic bonbon of the same name and Ferrero’s fictional cherry-tester Claudia Bertani. This serves as a starting point to artistically question sweetness both as flavour and aesthetic category.
Alongside Sianne Ngai’s conception of cuteness as a gendered aestheticisation of powerlessness, the individual works ask: why are certain entities perceived or portrayed as cute/sweet? How can sweetness be re-appropriated as strategy? And which forms of trivialisation and disempowerment lurk beneath the sticky, candy-colored surface?
Throughout the project and its different elements, sweetness is proposed as a strategy to reclaim and make aesthetically valuable what has previously been perceived as weak or tasteless. Mon Chéri turns into Mon Ch3rix.
Part of our motivation for this travelling, adapting and expanding project is to connect (to) spaces, artists and activists to form an international network of “chéries”. It would be a main objective for us as artists to form sustainable alliances with other queer-feminist artistic actors around the globe (or so far: Europe).