Roman Parties, 2023-2024

Prague City Gallery, Prague (CZ), November 2023 – February 2024

The exhibition at the House of Photography features three films and related drawings, and for each section a spatial and installation environment is created that resonates with the theme and atmosphere of the particular work.

The first video is a recording of a performance on 12 October 2023, when Christopher Columbus Day is celebrated in Italy and other countries around the world. The iconic position of this famous navigator and historically celebrated discoverer of the “New World” has been increasingly shaken in recent years by critical reflection on the epoch of European colonialism. The performance by members of the Feel Good Cooperative was intended to subvert the traditional motive for Columbus Day celebrations through physical movement, sculptural intervention, and collective singing, a polyphony of yearning bodies, so as to change the meaning of sites in the public space that symbolise exploitation and power. 

The second film in the exhibition is also documentary in nature. It depicts a January 2023 trip to the Vatican when members of the Feel Good Cooperative – as well as a total of 195,000 Christians from around the world – went to bid farewell to the late Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI during the funeral display of his body in St. Peter’s Basilica. The half-hour film The Day We Saw Him Dead follows members of the collective in their everyday clothes and make-up walking through the breathtaking interiors of one of Catholicism’s holiest sites. 

After watching the film, viewers are allowed to enter an imaginary sacristy, but instead of the devotional objects and vestments, there is an installation of prints from The Death of the Pope series – the result of another creative workshop in collaboration between Curnier Jardin and the Feel Good Cooperative. In a uniquely apt, humorous, and narrative way, the drawings capture scenes and impressions from the visit to the Vatican, blending the worlds of religiosity, mass tourism, female sexuality, and carnality.The last part of the exhibition features a 2021 film, the first ever produced by Pauline Curnier Jardin and the Feel Good Cooperative. The mysterious video, entitled Fireflies, features the now familiar figures at night, in a flicker of shadows and lights along the roadside on the outskirts of Rome where they usually work. Once upon a time, there were indeed fireflies here, but they have disappeared along with the changing suburban landscape around them. Today the car headlights of potential clients in search of a one-off pleasure illuminate like searchlights faces and bodies – the faces and bodies we already know from the previous two film encounters. A metaphor in which the fireflies are the women and trans people who appear at night but are invisible during the day, lacking social recognition and support. But the Feel Good Cooperative’s artworks and projects show them in an emancipatory light, as strong, beautiful, and remarkable.

Views of the exhibition Roman Parties, Prague (CZ), 2023
Curated by Jitka Hlaváčková and the curatorial collective of the Jindřich Chalupecký Society: Barbora Ciprová, Veronika Čechová, Tereza Jindrová, Karina Kottová
Photos: Jan Kolský