“Artists at Work: Patrick Bernier and Olive Martin” on Afterall Online
November 3rd, 2009
Sébastien Canevet and Sylvia Preuss-Laussinotte in X and Y v. France: The Case for a Legal Precedent at the Amphithéâtre de morphologie de l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France, 7 December 2007. Performance by Patrick Bernier and Olive Martin. Photograph: Marc Domage
Artists Patrick Bernier and Olive Martin’s ongoing performance project X. c/ Préfet de…, Plaidoirie pour une jurisprudence (X and Y v. France: The Case for a Legal Precedent, 2007-ongoing), juxtaposes the legal status of an author versus that of an undocumented immigrant (sans papiers) facing deportation in France. As artists concerned with issues of migration, they recognised an irony in the rapid expansion of copyright and intellectual property law in the digital era, on the one hand, and the diminishing rights of immigrants and freedom of movement under French and EU law, on the other. ‘X’ is a character invented by the artists, a stand-in for individuals facing deportation orders in French and European courts. In the performance staged by Bernier and Martin, he or she is not only an illegal immigrant but also an author of a site-specific immaterial work, a shift in status that would accord X different rights and possibly allow them to stay in the country. The legal plea to allow X to stay within France is argued by practicing lawyers (Sylvia Preuss-Laussinotte and Sébastien Canevet) to an imaginary judge, in whose place the audience sits. This transposition implicates the audience in the routine process of entry and expulsion that takes place everyday at the borders of today’s increasingly migrant societies. The project was originally developed under the title Projet pour une jurisprudence during the artists’ residence at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers in 2007. Since that time, iterations of the project have been presented in different art venues in France, Belgium, and Austria.
Read the interview, “Artists at Work: Patrick Bernier and Olive Martin”, by Audrey Chan at: http://www.afterall.org/online/bernier-martin.essay
