This publication follows a conference that took place on May 14th, 2018 at the Beaux-Arts de Paris. Entitled, “La performance : un espace de visibilité pour les femmes artistes ?” [Performance: a place of visibility for female artists?], the conference was part of the interdisciplinary research programme “Visibilité et invisibilité des savoirs des femmes : les créations, les savoirs et leur circulation, XVIe-XXIe siècles” [Visibility and Invisibility of Women’s Knowledge: Creations, Knowledge and Circulation, 16th-21st century]. Led by Caroline Trotot in the heart of the Littératures, Savoirs et Arts (LISAA) research lab at the Université Paris-Est – Marne-la- Vallée from 2017-2018, this programme benefited from the support and active collaboration with the association AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, for both the conference and the present publication. One of the objectives was to study how creative work or the use of the body can give way to strategies of diversion allowing to question mechanisms of visibility and invisibility that regulate women’s knowledge. As a result, performance has become a field interweaving these aspects of the body and of the work of art, particularly since it has been largely invested by women throughout its history.
This article considers the use of blood in the performances of artist Gina Pane as the survival of popular feminine rituals that the repressive economy of menstrual blood has largely obscured. By confronting the gestures and wounds produced by G. Pane with those elaborated by the bite of tarantulas in the Apulian ritual of tarantism, this article aims to reveal how G. Pane made an ancient history of knowledge and menstrual blood that has been woven around the symbolic figure of the spider visible through reactivation.
Lecturer at the Université de Strasbourg, Janig Bégoc holds a doctorate in art history and was a former fellow at the Académie de France in Rome. Her research is based on the aesthetic, historiographical and anthropological issues in performance art. She was co-editor of the publication La Performance: Entre archives et pratiques contemporaines (Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2011) and Le Texte au risque de la performance, la performance au risque du texte (Approches contemporaines de la création et de la réflexion artistiques, Université de Strasbourg, published in 2019).