Emmanuelle Bentz
Born in 1972
Lives and works in Marseilles
Emmanuelle Bentz’s practice continuously refers to the body and movement, mocking their clichés, tracking down affected words in each and every attitude, and twisting everyday life to better ridicule it. This joyous attack also fills banality with imaginary mines… The artist uses a healthy dose of irony to dissect our speech patterns, and invites us to put stereotypes into perspective…
Emmanuelle Bentz is both a visual artist and a poet. She writes texts that she then adapts into different proposals. Most of these proposals constitute the teaching corpus of the PP SCHOOL (Poet Performer School), a fictional school where the body is taught to communicate what is incommunicable, “where each action or non-action is considered a theoretical action”. In addition to the School, of which she is both the general contractor and owner, Emmanuelle Bentz takes part in public readings during which her body and elocution play a major part.
(Eric Mangion, excerpt from Do not play with dead things, Villa Arson, 2008)