With the piece Col­ors and Num­bers, Ant­o­nia Baehr and Latifa Laâbissi reflect on the vari­ous strategies for queer struggle against het­ero­norm­at­ive rep­res­ent­a­tions, in a per­form­ance they con­ceived as a series of liv­ing paint­ings com­bin­ing sev­er­al artist­ic idioms. 

How can norm­ativ­ity be decon­struc­ted in the arts? The first and most wide­spread option is to fight for the vis­ib­il­ity of mar­gin­al­ized com­munit­ies – queer, fem­in­ist, migrant, BIPOC com­munit­ies whose rep­res­ent­a­tion coun­ter­acts the exclu­sion­ary tac­tics of a white, main­stream, het­ero­norm­at­ive artist­ic estab­lish­ment. A second option, named queer abstrac­tion, con­sists in blur­ring the lines: these are artist­ic strategies of opa­city and cam­ou­flage, where vis­ib­il­ity and legib­il­ity are sub­ver­ted by dis­guises, infilt­ra­tion or phys­ic­al frag­ment­a­tion, to evade being assigned a par­tic­u­lar gender, col­or, etc… Can both options be com­bined? This is the ques­tion which informs the work of Ant­o­nia Baehr and Latifa Laâbissi. Their answer is neces­sar­ily a com­pos­ite one, and takes the form of a het­ero­gen­eous mont­age of scenes which bor­row from cab­aret, magic, stand-up or strip-tease. The two artists con­sider this per­form­ance as a suc­ces­sion of liv­ing paint­ings which are heav­ily inspired by the cinema. The sta­ging of the pieces draws inspir­a­tion from the first movies by Georges Méliès, where theatre and pho­to­graphy both have an import­ant role.