Emilie NotérisAlma Matériau

Bye Bye Binary’s selection for their storefront

In her book presenting a subjective genealogy of women artists from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, Émilie Notéris says that the median point is interesting because it is “a proposal that makes visible in the same movement fracture and repair”, and that “its presence is a constant reminder of the necessary prolongation of a struggle that is far from over”. In the book, the use of double inclusive signs in plurals, contrary to what is increasingly advocated to lighten the texts, has therefore been preferred. In order to catch the eye even more, the median points have been replaced by sparks or detonations according to the graphic designer, by a constellation according to the author.

After having experienced the virtues of a feminist and queer viewpoint on forms of popular cinema in her book La Fiction réparatrice, published in 2018, Emilie Notéris returns this time to present us with a subjective genealogy of women artists from the 19th to the 21st centuries, through the affinities and resonances that unite them, affirming the powers of a feminist and queer reading of artistic practices. She analyses works by women and the need for women to establish their own genealogy. They propose other tools and other reasons for creating, within a multitude of rhizomatic histories. In doing so, the author becomes aware that her feminist analysis remains incomplete if she does not take into consideration black women artists, their specific history and the relationships they maintain beyond the various diasporas. This work, at once literary and analytical, aesthetic and political, is also a reflection on the needs of art research today: the desire to denaturalise our fields of vision and our critical tools, to pay attention to what is made visible or kept invisible, and the need to consider the complexity of the intersections between race, class, sex and gender. To produce, finally, an analysis of art no longer to celebrate the past, but to open up interpretative potentialities to the present.