Bed Fold Reading
Bed Fold Reading
Jeanne Eschert
Rumpled, creased, smoothed out, fluffed up – imprints as landscapes. A gorge here, a hair there, dust in the Plumeau Mountains. Everyone leaves their mark on the bed, but some connect their bodies with the horizontal surface. Together with her interviewees – many of whom are bedridden due to various illnesses – Jeanne Eschert, who is chronically ill herself, develops a practice that explores the traces of bedriddenness in the context of home visits or chats. The project attempts to read trails in bed folds, to understand sheets as canvases and to turn them into a choreography. A book of pictures and poems documents the collected works and will be presented at a public event.
Jury statement
The artist and performer Jeanne Eschert works on and with the question of how the movement vocabulary of chronically ill people can be translated onto the stage and thus find a public. In “Bed Fold Reading”, she visits the place that is most often relegated to the private sphere: the hospital bed. Using bed visits, chats and video calls, she performs a kind of divination and reads the folds of the bed in order to find an expression of the person’s body movements together with them. An online archive, a publication and a program of events make this process accessible to the public.
The jury was impressed by this amazing project, which helps people who are generally unable to participate in cultural life to become visible by means of affection and a kind of magic, thus making the absent present.
