The Wandering Spectator

Join us on Wednesday, December 3 at 6pm for The Wandering Spectator, an evening of film, performance, and conversation with Giuliana Bruno, Sophia Giovannitti, and Leah Werier. Organized on the occasion of the exhibitions Women’s History Museum: Grisette à l’enfer and Mimosa Echard: Facial, the program explores two literary and cinematic archetypes of the French 19th-century city: the garment worker or “working girl,” embedded in the industrial and erotic economies of Paris, and the flâneuse, the urban wanderer of the city’s streets. The evening’s presentations will be followed by a conversation and Q&A moderated by Ariana Kalliga, Curatorial Assistant at Amant.

Giuliana Bruno, Emmet Blakeney Gleason Research Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, turns to the history of the flâneuse as an urban stroller, incorporating excerpts from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Mamma Roma (1962) and Agnès Varda’s Vagabond (1985) to examine modern ways of looking and traversals of space, ranging from city streets, arcades, department stores to cinemas. Professor Bruno will expand on the flâneuse and the notion of spectatorial “wandering” as a mode of environmental perception to look at how “inferential walks” produce an ecology of space, creating what she calls an “environmentality.”

Sophia Giovannitti, artist and author of Working Girl (Verso, 2023), offers the one-way mirror—commonly encountered as a “window film” installed in NYC storefronts; traditionally used for one-way observation in “execution chambers, experimental psychology research, interrogation rooms, market research, reality television”—as an analogue for the conditions of contemporary cultural production and consumption, concerning herself with increasing slippages among ethical posturing, necrophilic markets, dislocated desire, and total surveillance. Introducing audiences to her past work across performance, contracts, and installation, she cross-examines her own mediums and methods vis-a-vis our personal-political-economic moment, tracing ongoing shifts in her thought and practice.

Independent researcher Leah Werier draws on excerpts from the French silent films Les Résultats du féminisme (The Consequences of Feminism, 1906) by Alice Guy-Blaché and Au Bonheur des Dames (Ladies’ Paradise, 1930) by Julien Duvivier to explore the relationship between the architectures of commodity consumption and gender. Duvivier stages the department store as a site of seduction in Au Bonheur des Dames. “The department store, Ladies’ Paradise, Temple of Temptation,” reads a title card, before a sumptuous shot of a department store’s grand and bustling interior is shown. Both within Guy-Blaché and Duvivier’s films and in the broader historical context of the time, women appeared on both sides of the shop window—as consumers and as workers. In dialogue with Bruno and Giovannitti’s presentations, Werier reflects on the spatial dimensions of gender and urban erotics, positing the mannequin, the department store, and the shop window as sites of spectacle and surfaces for projection.