Conversation between Lucie Camous & No Anger (Ostensible)

In this conversation, the duo Ostensible (Lucie Camous and No Anger), continues the reflections addressed in the second programming cycle of BRUISE magazine, "Anti-Psychophobia and Anti-Validism: Creation, Fights, and Forms of Solidarity." Together, they revisit their meeting and their siblinghood, the birth of Ostensible, and the way they envision the collective as a capacity for fighting.

Lucie Camous & No Anger Ostensible

Ostensible is a duo of artists and researchers working in the field of disability and crip studies within the contemporary art scene. It has been co-founded by Lucie Camous (curator, artist, researcher) and No Anger (researcher, artist, author) in 2022.

Between April and May 2023, from Lyon to Paris, during train and subway journeys, they chatted via instant messaging, the transcript of which follows. A talk about Ostensible, their working relationship and their adelphity.

No Anger: I think that, as you and I work in the field of art, we are driven by the idea of transforming representations, images and the discourses around them. We encountered so rarely images of disabled bodies and experiences, and the few representations that did exist were so negative that we had to build ourselves around these discourses and iconographies. We were hostages to certain images, so we decided to hack the system.

Lucie Camous: For me, it was the total absence of images that struck me:I needed them, and I actively started looking for them. I became disabled in my early teens, and none of the images I came across were satisfying. The only badass disabled character I ever met was in Planet Terror. This B-movie directed by Tarantino is starring Cherry Darling, a below-the-knee amputee gogo dancer who uses a prosthetic machine gun to pulverize hordes of undeads.

During this period of self-construction, I was constantly frustrated by never being able to fit into the image of the good disabled person. Faced with recurrent and intrusive questions asking me to explain what had happened to my leg, I was helpless. I was a failed handicapped person, without a name for a pathology, without a simple answer to a complicated question. And yet, if I choose so, I can blend in with an able-bodied passing.

NA: Yeah, while me, being visibly handicapped, I've never had much of a coming-out problem, except on dating apps. But although I'm very visible, I don't fit into the image of a good disabled person either, since I'm not stuck to my wheelchair.

LC: There's a tiny fraction of us who fit into this archetype, a person in a wheelchair like on the PMR logo, or with a white cane and a soft-eyed Labrador dog.

As a teenager, I often went to the cinema next to my school. To get to the projection rooms, I had to cross a long corridor surrounded by mirrors. It was unbearable to see my reflection, my walk, my moving image. I learned to go along it with my eyes closed.

Mirrors are particularly hard to domesticate.

NA: Yes, for me too. I used to feel a sense of monstrosity whenever I saw myself in a mirror doing things with my feet, or if I saw the reflection of my left hand. It was like a hiatus, a short-circuit, between what I saw and whatI had inside me, the mental image of my body. It was only when I saw the film Margarita with a straw (well... the actress is able-bodied...) that I began to reconcile myself with my left hand, because its spastic movements were represented on the screen in a positive or at least neutral, not pejorative way. Slowly, my hand was no longer monstrous, but a survivor's hand.

LC: As a teenager, I was punk enough to overcome the fear of appearing in public, bare-legged, scars visible, but it was the discomfort of my reflection, of my projected image that persisted in the background.

NA: What was the turning point?

LC: It was when I joined the Modèle vivant-e collective and started using the tools of transfeminism :I began to reflect with a political lense about this projection and my desires for representation.

It coincided with our first meeting during the "Performance d'émancipation" exhibition. In 2020, we asked you to take part in a conversation entitled "Drawing and post-porn: representations of dissident bodies in the artistic field" with Isabelle Alfonsi, Rachele Borghi, Hélène Fromen and Linda DeMorrir.

NA: Yes, and it's quite significant, I think, that we met through the representations of the body, and the queer body in particular. Again - as in the early days of my journey as No Anger - queer and feminist issues preceded antiableism and the politicization of my disabled experience.

LC: How did you make the switch?

NA: For me, it all started with my feminist, and then queer, turn. Because I was able, for the first time, to name and apprehend these sensations of the monstrous body. And then, there were my relationships with two friends who were beginning to transition. You know, I'm often thought to have only bookish knowledge (because I'm disabled, and therefore supposedly socially isolated). But I think it's more my emotional relationships, the long late-night discussions that have enabled me to process my experience of ableism and these sensations of monstrosity. It was with P., one of my two friends, that I learned to dance. It was then that the relationship between me and my body began to improve. I was able to watch myself dance on video (whereas before, it was unbearable). And then, everything went really fast. The blog, in 2015. It introduced me to CLHEE (Collectif Luttes et Handicaps pour l’Egalité et l’Emancipation), and as a result, to Elena Chamorro, with whom I quickly became very, very friendly, and to other disabled people. And so, while I already belonged to the feminist and queer community, I gradually felt I belonged toan embryonic disabled community (this was in 2016-2017). And so, yes, adelphity is essential, I think: you don't feel alone anymore, you don't feel (too) monstrous, because you discover that some people feel it too.

And five years later, you arrived... I never knew how.

LC: It was Rachele Borghi (of course) who introduced us. After the programmation with Modèle vivant.e, it was a succession of confinements and only in the spring of 2022, during my residency at Maison Artagon, I got back in touch with you. I was determined to make the most of my year's unemployment as an intermittent performer to work exclusively on personal, militant and thus unpaid projects. Most of all, I wanted to get out of the theoretical writings and, for all my love of bibliographies, get into action.

NA: And me, after a very dark period, I needed to throw myself into projects that I could hang onto. When you called me on visio, I was in my office at the ENS and had just closed the word document for my post-doc project, which included a colloquium project. So, when you told me you wanted to do an exhibition, I said, "Wouldn't you also like to do a colloquium?”

LC: And then, first and foremost, there was this mutual explosion of legitimate anger.

NA: Yes, I had waited four months for an answer for my post-doc, which I finally didn't get.

LC: And I had been offered a job as a programmer in an "Art and Disability" department, a position that was finally given to an able-bodied person.

NA: And so we said to ourselves: " If they won't give us jobs, let's create them ". Let's do research differently. Let's think differently about arts and disability programming.

LC: And we created a research and creation structure. That was in October. And since then, everything has moved so quickly, from the announcement of the creation of Ostensible at DCA's professional days at the end of November, to today's meteoric rise in projects.

Initiating a movement means taking risks, and we'd never have done it if we'd been on our own, but this duo form gives us somehow a security. There was a kind of fluidity between us right from the start.

NA: One of the very few times we talked about our relationship was about how we appeared in public, because with you standing and me sitting, people reproduce the "talk to the person who seems most valid" pattern, and it's only at these moments that I've felt a bit dispossessed of Ostensible (not because of you, but because of what people perceive and reflect). But as usual, in a ableist context, we discussed and found strategies to make these situations comfortable.

But it's true that we've never had to talk about any major problems in our relationship.

LC: What do you think works so well?

NA: We are superbly complementary.

LC: Yeah, you research, I curate. You Facebook, me insta.

NA: Yeah, me "baby boomer", you "in the game".

LC: MDR

NA: PTDRRRRRRRR

LC: Boomer!

NA: And it seems to me that we're also very close politically.

LC: We're politically connected, and very quickly we talked about the radical tenderness that's vital when you work collectively. We're also committed to the concept of Crip time and the uncompromising acceptance of our disordered temporalities.

NA: Don't program anything before 11am: one of Ostensible's golden rules... Seriously, our political understanding also enables us to communicate well on the dilemmas we face. I'm thinking in particular of the moment when we had to consider our positioning and attitude towards medical institutions. We wanted to radically distance ourselves from the system that confines our disabled peers and excludes them from the rest of the social world. But for one of our first projects, we quickly realized that refusing to work with these structures meant adding exclusion to exclusion...

LC: For me, it became clearer when I drew a parallel with the example of jails: if we're definitely anti-carceral, we refuse to cut ourselves off from the people who live there. One of our fight strategies is to negotiate an able-bodied/disabled community diversity.

NA: Basically, the question that was raised - and still is today, and will be for a long time to come - was how to deal with the pre-existing French disability landscape, which often dehumanizes disabled people, while we want to break away from these practices and conceptions. And I think it was a tricky situation for both of us, emotionally and pragmatically...

LC: Having lived briefly in a so-called specialized institution, this question is difficult for me to untangle, because it's rooted in a radical desire to get rid of this type of structure. If I came out of it safely, it's because I found friends and loved ones there, but I have witnessed tremendous structural violence there.

NA: That really sounds like a dream! I've never lived in an institution (apart from one day when I was 10, to get my wheelchair driving licence, and a few other times, but that was pretty anecdotic). But I still have this latent fear of one day being caught up in this system of confinement, I constantly have this sword of Damocles hanging over me. But I think that, as we both know what it really means in our intimate experiences, we were able to talk about it together and find a compromise...

LC: A compromise without dishonourable behaviour.

NA: That goes with the idea of adelphity, as a political power that reinforces the individual weakened by the oppressions suffered on a daily basis.

LC: Being a duo also makes you stronger, against institutions (of all kinds).

NA: ..., because it erased any doubts we might have had if we'd been on our own.

LC: Yes, one can smash the other's impostor syndrome when it pops up.

NA: It's Ostensible and our relationship that enable us to fight back.

LC: ... and to develop forms of counter-power.

Learn more about Ostensible: ostensible_collectif

No Anger (researcher, artist, writer)

In 2019, No Anger got their Ph. D. in political science. Their thesis, entitled Defying the sexualization of the gaze. Analysis of the FEMEN and post-porn protest movements, deals with the relation between the artistic work on bodies and political protestation. More particularly centered on the effects of the hegemonical imaginary on the practices and subjectivities, No Anger's research focuses on the ways in which artists and artivists transform the structures of the dominant imaginary. They is also an artist and writer, and runs the blog A mon geste défendant, highlighting the social oppressions they experiences on a daily basis in order to take part in anti-ableist struggles. In their artistic work, No Anger creates a new skin for themself through dance and writing. They writes texts that accompany and complement their choreographies. They believes in the possibility of artistically reinventing their disabled body. v First appearing in 2015 in the film My

Body My Rules directed by Emilie Jouvet, No Anger's work includes the creation of choreographic pieces and performed lectures, such as Quasimodo aux miroirs (first performed at the MAC-VAL in 2018 as part of the festival Attention, fragile festival) and through their participation in collective creations, such as the performance

created in 2021, with Helena Bosch Vidal, Bera Romarione and Mathilde Forget, for the Spielact festival in Geneva, as well as the choreographic piece, P/\RC, mounted by Eric Minh Cuong Castaing and his company Shonen and performed in 2022 at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. No Anger also works for the media, including Arte, Arte Radio and France Culture.

Lucie Camous (curator, artist, researcher)

In curatorial and artistic practice, Lucie Camous adopts a political point of view, situating theirself at the crossroads of artistic, theoretical and militant forms. approach, rooted in intimate narratives, deploys around norms, their boundaries and the sensorial impacts of their crossing. Based on his experience as a person with disabilities, and armed with the tools of transfeminism, their works currently involve multi-disciplinary work alongside artists who identify themselves as disabled, invalid or ill.

Their intention is to explore practices of self-representation, social struggle and pair-emulation, in order to collectively bring about the emergence of new paradigms. After a period at the Villa Arson and studies in art history in Nice, Montpellier and Paris, they devoted themselves to the management of an alternative space, the accompaniment of performing artists and curatorial research. In 2019, Lucie Camous co-founds Modèle vivant.e, a transfeminist collective for drawing and dissident representations, alongside Hélène Fromen and Linda DeMorrir. Lucie is member of the Réseau d'Etudes Handi-Féministe (REHF) and work with the Laboratoire des Arts de la Performance (LAP) and is currently in residence at Artagon Pantin.