ARTHUR CANDI0
Empathic Boot-Camp to Disgust: Piss Soap
The Empathic Boot-Camp to Disgust is a collection of online encounters aiming to reinvent the western vision of Disgust; tools as part of new flows of redefinition of our social constructions. This emotion has been constructed to fit the patriarchal standards of a capitalistic society and reinforce the normalisation of emotions and identities. Disgust is a bodily reaction, a mental contagion that pushes us away from the unknown, the dirty, and the strange. The Empathic Boot-Camp to disgust: Piss Soap is a video tutorial that will teach you how to produce, using human urine, a usable and deviant soap. Throughout, you will learn to use your socially stigmatised bio-fluid, decolonise your western vision of disgust, as well as create amazing gifts for your loved ones. After the training, make sure to enjoy a luscious and moisturising cleansing with piss soap by the fountain. Rub, lather, cleanse and take a dive into eco-deviance!
"Queer Utopia for me has to be ecodeviant. A world and a society that wouldn't be constrained by social stigmas and could freely embrace the natural world that surrounds us and its abundance, but also the luscious pleasure and deviancies that we are free to imagine. When I talk about abundance I don’t mean profit related or power, I mean the abundance we can show for each other and for the planet, the one that already surrounds us. In my work, I try to propose deviant possibilities, outside of hegemonic discourses of our society. I see these dissident proposals as possible milestones for this future utopia: a sort of a personal and affective challenge for the audience. Last but not least, a queer utopia should be a place for everybody to be free to think outside of the box, to not be afraid to fuckup, to embrace change and to mobilise oneself to work within the change that’s coming."
Arthur Guilleminot (1992) is an artist with an ‘ecodeviant’ practice, living in Amsterdam. He was born in France in a family who disregards imposed norms of being and listens emphatically to the desire of other ways of living. This context stimulated him to always be critical towards the sociological ‘common sense’, proposing new personal and queered approaches.
Arthur’s practice is a strategy to facilitate the blossoming of different identities, unapologetic and non-normative. Addressing gender and sexuality, and playing with arousing shapes, his art calls for your hand, your body and your mind to merge into an experience.
After his art studies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, his work is currently researching tools for decolonizing disgust, through “Camp” aestheticism and buffoonery. These tools can be used to explore and harvest the subtleties of disgust to make us kinder in trusting our visceral impulses.
His work has been shown in the Netherlands, France, Belgium, United Kingdom, Germany, Greece and Switzerland.