Guillaume Dustan

The films of Guillaume Dustan (2000-2004)

13 March – 6 June 2021

« This book will not have any success, that is more than clear, I get off on it bad, Hare Krishna ! Yes, because I’ve always had a weakness for the midpoint between creation and destruction, I protect. And now I want to be old and sick, even older and sicker, with my own Little Swiss, we’ll have chickens, donkeys, turkeys, lambs, piglets that we’ll sell, and little calves, and they’ll all have a strange name like “Gruyère”. And I’ll cry all the time as I know how to do so well when I’m sick. »

These are the last lines of the book Dernier Roman (2004) by Guillaume Dustan. It’s also where the exhibition begins, a place that reconnects his films to his writings.

Between 2000 and 2004, the French writer Guillaume Dustan made 19 films with a lightweight DV camera. These films make up a part of his oeuvre that is little-known to date. The exhibition on the films in Friart Kunsthalle will shed new light on a key figure in French literature and queer culture at the turn of the millennium. Texts and archives accompany the films and help to situate them in a constellation of concrete and imaginary historical affinities with friends, artists, theorists, musicians and other allies of Dustan’s artistic and political project.

TALK, READING, SURPRISE SCREENING
Saturday 15.05.2021, 15:00

3pm: Talk with Elliot Evans

Elliot Evans is the author of Queer Permeability: The Body in French Thought from Wittig to Preciado (2020) and a lecturer at Birmingham University. They co-organises the Critical Sexology seminar series and writes regularly for Paragraph and Sexualities. Their article ‘’Your HIV-positive sperm, my trans-dyke uterus’: anti/futurity and the politics of bareback sex between Guillaume Dustan and Paul B. Preciado in 2015, provides insight into the ways in which Preciado engages with Dustan in Testo Junkie.

Elliot will speak in a video conference about their work with Dustan and introduce the surprise film to be screened later in the day.

4.30 pm: Around the table Le Rayon: Philippe Joanny + Julien Laugier, Pascaline Morincôme, Olga Rozenblum

Philippe Joanny (*1968) is a writer. He published his first book in 1999, Le Dindon, in the collection Le Rayon created by Dustan, his best friend. In 2008, he founded the magazine Monstre (“Monstre is a magazine edited by Belleville fags, for the crazy people of the world”), with Tim Madesclaire, Gauthier Boche and Gilles Beaujard. In 2019, he published Comment tout a commencé (Grasset), a fictional autobiography in the third person awarded by the Prix du Roman gay in 2019.

There will be readings from books of Le Rayon, a discussion on Françoise Vigna’ views on the history of LGBTQ publishers in France and a screening of texts by other young authors.

7pm : Surprise screening