Tiziana
La Melia
Books + Selected Writing
Exhibitions
Fly Robin, Fly, Patrons of the South, Montpellier-Sete March 25 - June 6, 2021
a group show curated by Nils Alix-TabelingMelissa Airaudi
Nils Alix-Tabeling
Mark Barker
Vanessa Disler
Justin Fitzpatrick
Namio Harukawa
Tiziana La Melia
Marie Lassnig
Marie Legros
Laure Mathieu-Hanen
Tai Shani
Kengné Téguia
Alison Yip
Kletic Kink was first developed as a sound piece commissioned by Nils Alix-Tabeling for the exhibition Fly Robin Fly at Mécènes
du Sud and is situated within Alison Yip’s
'House of Sobbing Orchids' — a grotesque style wall painting made on-site, with one panel featuring vignettes translated into pigment by Yip. The room is furnished with pieces by Nils Alix-Tabeling that include aromatic herbal stuffed cushions, a drawing by Namio Harukawa and a sound piece by Tiziana La Melia.
Kletic Kink refers to the kletic hymn, a poetic song of praise, prayer or plea that appears in Greek Tragedies, addressed to either a deity or to “non-divine” beings, such as mortals, creatures from the animal kingdom or elements of the natural world. An example of such a hymn is Sappho’s devotional love poem “Hymn to Aphrodite,” an intimate plea and dialogue. “Kink” here refers to material ruin spiritual (bypassing) or “mend-narrative” kinks.
Curator's statement
The exhibition Fly, Robin, Fly takes as its starting point the figure of the castrato singer, here maintained as a floating presence, alternating between a ghost inhabiting the space and a protective spirit. The various works and interventions in the exhibition dissect, digest, and pay homage to the fluid and mutant semantic potential of the castrati.
The history of castrato singers is marked by a break, a section. Angus Heriot in his book "The Castrati In Opera", or Martha Feldman in "The Castrato; Reflections on Natures and Kinds" describe the way in which the violence of the emasculating gesture is mystified (horseback accident, injury due to a duel, etc.). Emasculation becomes an origin myth giving birth to a new body. The loss of an organ is presented as the starting point of a new voice. Voice in the sense of singing, but also of a new place in society. The history of castrato singers is also marked by intrigues, and amputation creates a new terrain of fertility in the sense of political and cultural fertility. The alien voice of the castrato singer, oscillating between different registers, and with fluid plasticity, is also that of the different artists of Fly, Robin, Fly , an exhibition where dissonant voices and queer desires impose themselves and take possession of the spaces of Mécènes du Sud Montpellier-Sète.
The historical relationships at work between the bodies of the castrati, as well as the falsettists who imitate them, or the singers who cross-dress to access the stage, are complex. And it is on this polysemy of bodies that the exhibition Fly, Robin, Fly lingers. The emasculating gesture can be read in different ways. First as violence against queer bodies, a marking or an imposition, since historically, emasculation has had a punitive role towards these communities often justified by the medical world. And approaching emasculation through the figure of the castrato therefore has a role of testimony of this violence. But emasculation taken in the metaphorical sense can also be seen as a resumption of power, a critique of toxic masculinity, a theoretical split to extract oneself from a patriarchal hegemony. Feminist movements and statements have often been experienced by patriarchal and heteronormative dominant societies as castrating, and by extension distressing, frightening.
Like the famous phrase of the activist Eva Kotchever: "Men are admitted but not welcomed", the exhibition Fly, Robin, Fly proposes to rethink this relationship, by inviting visitors to embrace this abandonment of toxic masculinity before entering the space of Mécènes du Sud. This in order to generate a new relationship with the body, as well as a new type of discourse. In the same way that castrato singers announced themselves as having been born from a rooster's egg, the exhibition pays homage to the most radical fringes of feminism as the precursors of a more just world. The rooster's egg thus becoming the breeding ground for a new ideological fertility.
Here, the notion of queer is to be understood as a marginalized body, including all bodies in resistance to an exclusive norm. This therefore refers to sexual practices historically judged as deviant (bodies traversed by sapphic and sodomite desires) or to a feminist or pro-feminist relationship to the world. The exhibition thus forms a group evoking the need for a convergence of transhistorical struggles.
In parallel with the work of the artists invited to the exhibition, Fly, Robin, Fly will also be the subject of a publication planned for 2022. This edition will include the images from the exhibition, to which will be added a body of texts exploring through essays and fiction the themes addressed in the exhibition.
Thank you to Marine Lang, Nils Alix-Tabeling and Mécènes du Sud and the B.C. Arts Council
photo documentation by Elise Ortiou-Campion