Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz

Two silhouettes speak together hidden behind a black curtain in the surreal setting of an abandoned public swimming pool. Then the curtain is removed and the figures appear, surrounded by swirls of pink smoke in a glittery and glamorous decor. Are they men? Women? It’s hard to tell. A leather jacket, a diamond necklace, a moustache and painted nails… A voice over reads a text by Jean Genet dealing with the notions of war and resistance… But who or what is the enemy? Is it war, capitalism, patriarchy? The enemy is invisible and undefined and this is the essential message of Genet’s text. With their ten-minute film entitled Opaque (2014), the two young Swiss artists continue their transgender interrogations with a form of performative cinema that has as much in common with cabaret as socially-engaged literature. On the stand, the film is projected behind a sequinned curtain, a device frequently used by the duo to proclaim the “right to opacity” as evoked by the writer, poet and essayist, Édouard Glissant.