Bones scores

Combining sculptural installations, performances, ceramics, film, dance, and anatomy, Cynthia Lefebvre explores a range of fields that share a sense of vulnerability and a taste for precarious equilibrium. Open-ended at times, with the body as her main tool of investigation, her works are part of a relationship with time that is stretched and slowed down. As instrument, filter, and receptacle, the body is a space of circulation, traversed by flows, links, and articulations.

Bones Scores is an installation designed as a stage that can host a series of performances. Halfway between the Natural History Museum, the anatomy conservatory, the artist’s studio, the osteotheque, and the evocation of historic pieces of design, Bones Scores conjures up as many universes as places that are marked differently by their relationship with the body. Made up of game boards, drawers, pedestals, shelves, and boxes, the installation presents some of the 206 bones in our skeleton – here modelled in clay – awaiting their activation. Bones Scores tells the story of their shapes, and the gestures associated with them. We plunge into this bone puzzle, which offers a multitude of anatomical possibilities and reminds us that bone is an apparatus of relationships. A story of balance, between solidity, lightness, flexibility, and suppleness. Both framework and reactive tissue, bone is a process that is part of a living continuum. In its version for two screens, the video Bones Scores is a story in eight chapters, a sum of strata that two performers carefully uncover with their fingertips. Between sleeping bones and rubbing ceramic, Bones Scores vibrates like a mirror.