Move 2023

Dedicated mainly to female creation, the festival takes as its starting point the 19th century figure of the "hysteric", which author Hélène Cixous described as a "wondrous demon". She appears as a force of resistance, underscoring the power of creation and revealing the rejection of categorisations, the loss of control, the unforeseeable as a potential space to explore. 

The 2020: Obscene installation by Alexandra Bachzetsis examines the presentation of the excessive body and its consumption by the desiring gaze. The question of the subversive is explored by placing excess, desire and sexual stereotypes in the foreground while maintaining a playful dimension. 

Lara Dâmaso is interested in the expressive, political and therapeutic potential of the voice. The artist establishes a powerful vibratory link with bodily capacities and attempts to transcend the power structures that ordinarily discipline the voice. Evoking unbridled femininity, she performs in a space made up of sections of evanescent coloured fabrics. 

Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė are inspired in their work by feminist theoretical and fictional writings. Their installation evokes a boudoir, a symbol of the enclosed, secret and withdrawn space of female intimacy, which they have deconstructed and reconfigured as a place marked by fantasies concerning female sexuality. 

Marijke De Roover presents a new film that takes the form of a horror musical comedy that subverts the codes of pornography. She plunges us into witchcraft trials and the brutality exercised against women who deviated from societal norms in early modern Europe. 

Natasza Gerlach, meanwhile, sees her work as a laboratory for empathy. She invites us to rethink the state of our relationships and to invent zones of reconciliation. 

Sophie Jung uses humour, the burlesque, the absurd and shame, but also rhythm and song in her performances. She proposes a specific singing style made up of several vocal frameworks while performing before works in the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art in a dialogue that is marked by humour and irreverence. 

Closing the festival, Gay Guerrilla by Gerard & Kelly explores the heritage of Julius Eastman, a queer Afro-American composer who died in 1990, with an installation and a performance, channelling this unique voice and highlighting sexual and political struggles. 

Caroline Ferreira 
Head of the Department for Events, Art and Society 
Department of Culture and Creation