Conversation: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster - Yann Perreau

Since 2012, with her fragmented opera project, M.2062, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster has taken on the identity of various real and fictional characters, famous and unknown, of the 19th and 20th centuries. These “appearances” open up new artistic spaces. By losing herself in this game of multiple identities, the artist acquires a form of anonymity. Yann Perreau, in his latest book, Incognito, published in 2016, traces the “secret history” of anonymity – a counter culture that, from Odysseus to Anonymous via Arthur Rimbaud's "I is another", questions the illusion of a single, indivisible self.

The two speakers will examine a number of emblematic figures in this history and propose a concept of identity as being multiple and open.