CIRCA proudly presents LIMBO, a contemporary still life by Michèle Lamy that marks the first time in history a female nude has appeared on the iconic Piccadilly Lights, broadcasting across screens in Berlin, Melbourne and Tokyo every evening throughout November at 20:22 local time.

Born in 1943, Michèle Lamy defies any categorisation: performer, defense lawyer, designer, producer, restaurateur, student of Deleuze and boxer. Her new film, LIMBO, created especially for CIRCA 2022, poses an un-retouched and tender meditation of female autonomy, love and vulnerability at a time when women’s bodies are being politicised across the globe.

Michèle Lamy comments:

Dark, disturbing, beautiful, Limbo is a word that best describes the world we are living in today, CIRCA 2022. It was scrawled in giant letters across a post it note my dear friend Hans Ulrich Obrist gifted me a few weeks ago, written by the late Etel Adnan who has inspired me endlessly. In the past I’ve questioned ‘What are we fighting for?’ but today this question has become a fight for our survival. Our right to express ourselves as women without consequence. Today, I bare all in the hope of inspiring truth, love and courage at this defining moment.

Featuring Lamy reclining on her bed for 2.5 minutes – the only movement being that of her body slowly breathing and eyes blinking, with her gaze fixed tenderly at the viewer – LIMBO inadvertently references the classical reclining nude in art history. From Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus through to Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus, Manet’s Olympia and even more recent contemporary expressions of female beauty in western advertising campaigns – Michèle Lamy challenges notions of the male gaze with her female led team, notably co-directors Amanda Demme and Mollie Mills.

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CIRCA SCREEN LOCATIONS

For three minutes every evening (at precisely 20:25 local time throughout the year 2025) CIRCA pauses the adverts across a global network of screens in London’s Piccadilly Circus and elsewhere to reflect and challenge the times we live in, circa now.

London, Piccadilly Lights

Experience LIMBO by Michèle Lamy every evening at 20:22 GMT (7-30 November 2022) on the iconic Piccadilly Lights screen.

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Berlin, Kurfürstendamm

Experience LIMBO by Michèle Lamy every evening at 20:22 CET (7-30 November 2022) on Berlin’s Limes Kurfürstendamm screen.

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Tokyo, NEO Shibuya TV

Experience LIMBO by Michèle Lamy every evening at 20:22 JPY (14-20 November 2022) on the NeoShibuya screens in Shibuya Crossing.

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Melbourne, FedSquare

Experience LIMBO by Michèle Lamy every evening at 20:22 AEDT (7-30 November 2022) on Melbourne’s FedSquare screen.

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Michèle Lamy: Suddenly, A Shoulder Movement…

Written by Élisabeth Lebovici

SUDDENLY, A SHOULDER MOVEMENT…
But wait! For something came before.

You have been observed now for a while whilst time is suspended by this stare – hers. For it is she who looks at you and you who notices her. Let me explain this nuance, which has to do with time-stopping and with you who are watching, as witnesses, this gaze gleaming from beneath her charcoal eyelids. So fixed, her stare does not express any recognisable emotion, and besides – the paradox is apparent – she does not see you since you have to be there for her to look at you.

She is lying on her stomach, leaning on a relatively soft bed covered with dark sheets, in an interior that I read as opulent, with these curtains filtering out the light and surrounding sounds from outside. It is silent. She is absolutely naked, her genitalia covered only by her pose but not her skin, exalted and multiplied tenfold by what constitutes the big screen. She is leaning on one elbow, holding her head with the other, whilst lounging on the bed. Contrary to the Orientalist genre of the Odalisque, where the undressed and horizontal posture of the models strongly expresses the ideal of domination (colonial, masculine) which presides over their portrayal. For she has nothing of the offered and submissive victim that each of the pictorial representations of the 19th century provides us, which in return appears all the more disjointed by the patriarchal gaze. Look at Google images; it is edifying. If she has a Belle de Jour (Luis Bunuel, 1967) look, naked on the bed, she is not at all Catherine Deneuve, bourgeois in the morning and a sex worker every afternoon. I see her more as Pierre Clémenti, entirely at ease in the role of the bad boy always on the verge of an unpredictable explosion. Pierre Clémenti, who arrived for the shooting in black leather, smiled wide open to show all of his gold teeth (Bunuel adored). Perhaps because she, Michèle Lamy, the one who is lying there on the bed, naked, is also covered in gold teeth and Berber tattoos, I imagine her at ease in this situation.

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Biography

Michèle Lamy

Michèle Lamy is an iconic figure who defies categorization: she studied law, and during the 60s and 70s, worked as a defense lawyer, while studying with the postmodern philosopher Gilles Deleuze and was involved in the May 1968 protests in Paris before working as a cabaret dancer.

A renaissance woman, Lamy has been a clothing designer, performer, film producer, and restaurateur alongside co-founding Owenscorp.

On a daily basis, Lamy functions as the producer of the RO furniture collection, working closely with the artisans in the construction process as well as directing the positioning and presentation of the works, including shows at The Musée D’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris and MOCA LA. In 2014 Lamy created ‘LAMYLAND’, an umbrella term for her independent creative projects and endeavours, bringing together all the key elements integral to her practice – experimentation, collaboration, storytelling and creation. In a sense it is a natural progression to her renowned Les Deux Cafe, the LA cabaret spot she founded, curated and ran for many years.