J-1 : L'écho de nos pas suspendus - Tales Frey

Tales Frey is a transdisciplinary artist living between Portugal and Brazil. His works, whether performances, videos, drawings or photographs, combine the performing arts and body movement.

All of them feature bodies, particularly his own. He makes it the focal point of his artistic creations by dressing and undressing it in everyday, gendered clothing and accessories. It is these feminine or masculine attributions of clothing that Tales questions. He turns this questioning of norms into a social and political critique of our clothed social bodies.

Clothing, as a form of textile, carries historical and social meaning, but also fantasies. It hides the body of the unknown and speaks for it before the mouth can express itself. It is the primary tool of fantasy.

By creating surreal garments and accessories that he makes play like actors – a double pair of shoes connected at the toes or a triple jumper – Tales Frey transforms the encounter with the unknown body into an experience. While the first contact is likely to be tense and fraught with preconceptions that could lead to conflict, the artist's accessories impose the encounter through postures reminiscent of choreographed dance. For Tales Frey, the aesthetic exercise is playful, sensual and even erotic.

Convinced that we live and work in a cis-heteronormative and colonised world, Tales Frey posits that our bodies and the ways we cover them with textiles are merely the product of unconscious repetitions of aesthetic and behavioural norms.

For him, these patterns are implicitly dictated by heterosexual white men, as are the oppressive political systems that emerged from the colonial enterprise of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and continue to exist in the twenty-first century. The artist has a duty to expose these patterns through subversive, performative and playful actions.

His performances are subversive acts that aim to destabilise the dominant ideas attached to the body and clothing. Between insolence, playfulness and eroticism, Tales Frey produces harmonious works imbued with a gentle unease.