AsfixiA‘s theme is enough to discourage the most sensitive of audiences, and the “explicit content” statement that accompanies its presentation, even more so. Yet it would be a pity to stop at the threshold and not dare to see Guillaume Marie’s proposal, which gives a thorny subject its complexity and political dimension.
Taking as his starting point the photographs that emerged from the Abu Ghraib camps in 2003, which shocked as much for their violence as for the unprecedented nature of the tortures made visible, Guillaume Marie has worked on the tightrope of the unrepresentable. AsfixiA opens with the voice of Marlon Brando, Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now, as if it were necessary to first enunciate the subject before giving it any form: horror.
From then on, the choreographer summons all the registers of excess to gradually refine the image, roughen up the subject matter, work to purify the form and, in so doing, sharpen our gaze to make it incisive, only then able to perceive beyond as well as within what appears in these representations. This begins with a remarkable absence: there are no bodies, only this sound extract resonating in a perfectly cinematic setting. A crime scene from which the corpse(s) have been removed, and onto which the entrance of the three performers is grafted, like so many extensions.
Moving in slow motion, the distorted effect of their movements is amplified by an oppressive horror-movie soundtrack.And from this vivid adaptation of a filmic aesthetic immediately springs a profound sense of unease. The make-up, which swells the lips and retracts the eyebrows, combined with the military uniforms and postures, contrasts with the exclusive femininity of the bodies, which are immediately sexualized, almost instantly sexual.Wrapped in camouflage, Ray-Ban glasses and “manly” gestures, the performers are paradoxically reduced to their gender, as if this feminine presence were inappropriate, fake, of the same order as the crude yet skilful tricks that make up this gory aesthetic. Something is wrong, and reduced to her gender, the woman immediately becomes a fetish, a sexual object, an adjuvant or an instrument of a political use of sex.In this case, it’s torture.
Staging women torturing invisible victims, whose roles they take in turn, lending themselves to abuse that blends physical violence and lasciviousness, eroticism and arousal, allows us to think in this way: to make patent what in the corresponding masculine universe is silent.The part of violence and domination within sexual relations, as much as the sexual part within relations of violence and domination.Here, military coercion is reduced to its most anecdotal, but also most revealing, fetish.
It’s only after an hour of bodily confrontations, the exposure of mistreatment as well as gestures of victory – those eloquent signs that immediately evoke power – that the series of identical repeats of the Abu Ghraib shots slowly emerges.The introduction of the camera has been prepared as if it were a weapon.A slow reconstitution, a game of cluedo (on the linoleum, with the chair, the Mummy or the Whore?) that nevertheless continues to omit the main iconographic element that seems to give the piece its title: the hoods that evoke those of Catholic penitents or Ku Klux Klan members, and which fail to muffle the screams that we mentally reconstitute.
AsfixiA ends with a climax, the build-up to a female orgasm that we imagine erupting in the dark.Gael Depauw masturbates in blood as she stares down at us, a goddess of death inviting us to look it all in the face, if we have the strength rather than the inclination.

Par Sophie Grappin-Schmitt pour Paris-art.com