Wed 25 June 2025
Grands Carmes — Main room — 19:00
Benny Nemer revives what history overlooked: the intimate, scattered postcard collection of Hervé Guibert. Through queer kinship and poetic protocol, he rebuilds a counter-archive—one letter, one gesture at a time. This illustrated performance-lecture traces the afterlives of lost objects, HIV bloodlines, and friendship networks spanning decades and geographies. With tenderness and resistance, Nemer invites us into a participatory ritual of remembrance, asking: what survives when memory is disavowed? What blooms when we write each other back into history?
Benny Nemer
Several Favourable Bodies — France — 30'
The chief material of my current practice-driven research is the postcard collection of French artist and writer Hervé Guibert, which was not officially archived but instead dispersed among his friends after his 1991 death from AIDS. Whereas every one of Guibert’s photographs, manuscripts, books, and letters have been preserved in various state archives, the postcards—which are amply referenced in his writing and appear in many of his photographs—were not deemed worthy of archival preservation by Guibert’s heterosexual, cisgendered executor.
The central gesture of my research is the material reconstitution of Guibert’s collection with the assistance of my queer kin: friends, lovers, and colleagues. A kind of parallel archive of replica postcards from museums across Europe is slowly being assembled with their assistance, along with a range of promiscuous, slanted methods. The process generates a community of participants and co-authors whose museum visits and epistolary writing make transhistorical contact with the ensemble of untraceable friends in whose stewardship Guibert’s collection is now dispersed. Furthermore, the action’s process and outcome are complicated by the many improvisations and elaborations carried out by participating friends, who often stray from, reinterpret, or resist my instructions, sending other materials alongside or in lieu of the requested postcards, augmenting the counter archival nature of the research.
I have developed a kind of illustrated performance lecture that traces the contours of this research and the artworks that issue from it, addressing questions of counterarchive, bloodlines based on HIV transmission, and the forging of queer kinship bonds in the fourth decade of the AIDS epidemic. The lecture ends with a participatory, community-generating gesture: I circulate postcards of my own design to the audience, inviting them to activate my research by sending the card out into the world following a poetic protocol.
