In the context of the Bourses de la Ville de Genève 2023 exhibition, the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève is offering a workshop with the artist Helena Bosch Vidal, laureate of la Bourse de la Ville de Genève in applied arts

Primarily addressed to art students, but open to all, this workshop draws on Helena Bosch Vidal’s piece presented in the exhibition, to reflect on and reconfigure our conditioned relationships to certain everyday objects. It explores the way in which 3 ordinary objects – the train, the sewing machine and the bicycle – were considered to trigger nervous diseases such as hysteria, onanism and homosexuality, among others, by sexually arousing their users.

In modern times, the medical community had deemed that certain objects, technologies or practices could activate nervous diseases and should therefore be banned or discouraged for certain people considered more vulnerable. For example, women and young boys were discouraged from riding bicycles because of their fragile nervous systems. Some doctors believed that the vibrations caused by cycling could lead subjects to “practice obsessive masturbation”.

In this workshop, we’ll explore the power of language and discourse on our perception of ordinary objects. Using a variety of artistic techniques, participants will be invited to reconstruct their perceptions of contemporary objects and practices related to the human body and create an alternative narrative around this object in relation to the human body. The form of the final result is free (short video, graphic design, drawing…)