Rachel Echenberg explores the performative potentialities of the home, the intimate, and the family. In her performances and video works, she places herself in relation to aspects of domestic life and the social body. Over time, her interest in closeness has been transposed into an active process that, today, involves a continuing collaboration with her husband, S\u00e9bastien Worsnip, and their children, Clara and Zoe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After two decades of appearing in her works, Echenberg\u2019s immediate family joined her in 2012 for a first group performance during which each member made a paper house, put it over his or her head, and transformed it in various ways. This performance, Chez nous <\/em>(2012), was the stepping-off point for a series of experiments that reveal the complexity of emotional connections imbued with love, vulnerability, and tension\u200a\u2014\u200aexperiments that feature, among other things, bodies piled on each other, shared screams, and faces covered with honey and gold leaf. In Conversations with my Family<\/em> (2020-22), Echenberg measured the scope, strength, and weight of these connections outside the domestic space, against different landscapes. Interactions between mother and child, child and mother, and within a couple were represented through symbolic performative actions. These relational portraits revealed family links deployed on the land and through the generations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In parallel with the collaborative work carried out in an expansive creative space shared with her relatives, Echenberg entered relationships with five families who welcomed her into their homes. Over a two-year period, the creative approach initiated with Chez vous. Portraits domestiques<\/em> (2017-19) gave rise to a body of work evoking the specific traits of each home. Through these encounters, she explored other intimate realities, introducing actions that it was no longer possible to experience in the Echenberg-Worsnip family now that the children were adults. Mirroring the evolution of her own household over time, she moves away from portraiture in her recent work, Comment tenir le vide<\/em> (2022), to concentrate on the continuous transformation of the familial body, vacillating between holding on and letting go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Translated from the French by K\u00e4the Roth<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\n