Pauline Curnier Jardin & Feel Good Cooperative. Triviale

Triviale presents the work of French artist Pauline Curnier Jardin (1980) with and within the Feel Good Cooperative collective, founded in Rome in 2020 by the artist herself with architect and researcher Serena Olcuire and a group of Colombian trans sex workers. The core of the Cooperative is composed of photographer and sex worker Alexandra Lopez, Giuliana Mira, Gilda Star, Barby de Martinez, Diana Veruzca Martinez, Serena Olcuire and Pauline Curnier Jardin. This is the first time the Cooperative presents its work, in exhibition form, in the same city in which it has been conceiving and creating a collective practice.

Triviale, Italian for trivial is understood as something vulgar and pedestrian, banal. Trivia, on the other hand is the Roman divinity of spells and specters; she is the protector of three-way junctions (trivi), watching over all those who travel on foot. Her triple gaze is reflected throughout the exhibition both spatially and conceptually, overlooking the overlapping monumental power structures that characterize the city of Rome—the Roman Empire, the Church, the legacy of Fascism—and revealing them from the perspective of a group of sex workers.
 
The exhibition will consist of a theatrical set in which the public and the domestic nature of sex work are enacted and humorously elaborates on themes of gender identity, migration and the legacy of colonialism.
 
In addition to three filmic installations realized by Feel Good Cooperative Fireflies/Lucciole (2021), The Death of the Pope(2023), Le Colonne della Colombo (2023) that divide the exhibition into chapters and the space into islands, the exhibition space is scattered with sculptural elements conceived by individual members of the Cooperative. Altogether, the works in the exhibition present the layered experience of the Cooperative with unashamed playfulness. They explore the art of joy and of feeling good through performance, role play, entertainment and beauty, revealing the fundamental presence of these elements in both sex and artistic practice.
 
The exhibition has been conceived within the backdrop of an ongoing workshop, dubbed the Feel Good Accademia di Belle Arti, which began at the start of 2023. It has consisted of a series of meetings, film screenings, lectures and practical sessions with artisans, as well as conversations around the meanings behind making art work. Self-representation and self-determination, but also the seldom discussed theme of economic renumeration. Triviale as a result seeks not only to expand the languages of art and authorship, but also to reveal voices and visions narrating the city of Rome with and from its margins. Concealed by the overt power of the monuments they attempt to deconstruct, the members of the Cooperative present their own liminal history of Rome.

PAULINE CURNIER JARDIN (b. 1980, Marseille, France) is a Berlin-Rome based artist working across installation, performance, film, and drawing. Her cinematic installations create unorthodox universes and tell stories which propose alternative narratives. She is the winner of the 2019 German Preis der Nationalgalerie, the 2021 Villa Romana Prize in Firenze, and recipient of the 2019-2020 Villa Medici fellowship in Rome. In recent years, her work has been exhibited in or commissioned by: Centraal Museum, Utrecht (2023), Kunsthaus Pasquart, Bienne (2023), CRAC Occitanie, Sète (2022); FRAC Corsica (2022); Fondazione Memmo, Rome (2022); Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin (2022); LIAF, Venice and Kabelvåg (2022); Hamburger Bahnhof-Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2021); INDEX – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm (2021); Steirischer Herbst Festival, Graz (2020); Manifesta 13, Marseille (2020); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2020 and 2013); the Bergen Assembly, Bergen Biennial (2019); International Film Festival, Rotterdam (2018); the 57th Venice Biennale (2017); Tate Modern, London (2017); Performa 15, New York (2015).
THE FEEL GOOD COOPERATIVE is an art collective of Colombian transgender sex workers and their allies, born in Rome during the lockdown of Spring 2020. The Cooperative was born thanks to the initiative of artist Pauline Curnier Jardin, photographer and sex worker Alexandra Lopez and architect and researcher Serena Olcuire. The collective understands art as a space of expression and economic compensation for subjectivities that are traditionally marginalised, stigmatised and excluded from the possibility of self-representation. The works of the Feel Good Cooperative have been exhibited in several cities, including Rome, Berlin, Genoa, Bonn and Cologne.

   

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