Author Description

Catalog in 2 volumes accompanying an exhibition at the MAC VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine, from February 7 to March 15, 2015. Commérages ('Gossip') is the name given to a group activity carried out by Mary Preston starting in May 2013 and which has brought together, for nearly two years, a group of eight women (commères, or 'tattletales' but also 'co-mothers'): Stephanie Airaud, Frances Alexander, Arminda Alves, Aisha Akremi, Carine Faribol, Alejandra Montalvo, Marie Preston and Nelly Zeitlin. The project opens with a quote taken from John Berger's 1979 text on gossip (La Cocadrille, translated from Pig earth) and gossip's ability to provide a living portrait of a village that turns every villager into an author. It also provides what is called, in ethnography, the stories of lives intertwined, thus giving shape to various characters intersecting and also to ways of thinking about the nature of gossip as a type of feminine speech proclaimed in the public arena.