Part of Summer 1992
Exquisite Corpse is a collaborative project mapping the parts of the body through film. Over twenty-five local and international filmmakers have responded to Pleasure Dome’s call to create a diverse image of the contemporary body. Using regular 8, super-8 & 16mm as well as live performance, each filmmaker has contributed a celluloid body ‘part’ to the communal corpse, which will then be unveiled from head to toe, presenting an ecstatic re-definition of our multilingual, poly-sexual physicality.
Le Cadavre Exquis began as a children’s parlour game during the French Revolution, in which each person drew a part of the body without seeing the other parts drawn by fellow players; the paper was then unfolded to reveal the finished ‘corpse’. The game was popularized in the 20th century by the Surrealists and later re-claimed by the Situationists, who, following Marxist theory, described a body contorted by labour.
The contemporary production/consumption of the body as commodity in mainstream images continues to homogenize our physical (and cultural) identities into a series of manicured close-ups. Pleasure Dome’s Exquisite Corpse restores our multifarious and myriad bodies, giving us back the anatomy of our representations.