At CCC OD in Tours, Laura Bottereau & Marine Fiquet recast the wax anatomical Venus as a “catastrophic body” for Where the Organs Storm, where meteorological violence seeps into pillows, mattresses and skin.
Laura Bottereau and Marine Fiquet are a couple and a duo, working together since 2013. Born in 1989 and 1990 and based in Nantes, they build exhibitions out of long research into the history of anatomy. Là où les organes oragent, their commission for CCC OD in Tours, takes the wax anatomical Venus as its recurring figure and, after Paul B. Preciado, treats the body as a living political archive. From there comes a term of their own: the catastrophic body, reading distress through the language of weather.
The anatomical Venuses are the way in. Modelled in wax in the eighteenth century, always young, white and fertile, these teaching figures “make all their organs visible, yet are paradoxically deprived of vulvas,” the artists note; the sex was ceded to the pathology of venereal disease. One sculpture answers in its title alone: Vénus, vénérienne, vénère slides from the goddess to the clinical adjective to French slang for furious, giving the wax body a shell and a fringe of hair where anatomy left a blank.
The show opens with a small handmade box. Variation pour Moniques sets a circular cut into grey card beside a 1972 teaching slide of Cyclone Monique seen from a satellite, so the exhibition opens as an eye is forced awake. In the wake of Monique Wittig, the box “writes a collective body in the third person of the feminine plural, and prefigures a storm in the making.” The title turns literal: organs that thunder, weather that keeps a woman’s name.
Much of the work grew from visits to anatomy collections across Europe, where personal effects go into lockers before the wax bodies can be seen under glass. Avertissement rebuilds that threshold as transparent lockers on castors, each cell holding suspect evidence: bottles of coloured liquid, silicone hands folded into a sweater. The research reaches back to the first anatomy theatres, among them one at Padua built in the shape of an eye, and to the poor and condemned bodies from which early dissection drew its knowledge.
That violence arrives by capillarity, seeping from work to work. In Comme un orage a pillow cast in epoxy resin turns rigid as stone, a knife rising from a puddle at its centre. In Nuit nuit a mattress buckles against the wall and spills shattered safety glass from which translucent, spined cactus pads push up like defensive organs. Wax and silicone, memory foam and coloured resin, glass shards and swizzle sticks bent into a drowning Venus recur, so that comfort and threat keep trading places.
Elsewhere the body tries to verify itself: two wax forearms pinch their own skin in Mains oculaires, hollow sleeves packed with broken glass. On memory foam under a bell of frosted glass, Sous les rayons carries a poem laser-incised into silicone skin, closing on “an anger that organ-ises.” With an exhibition text by curator Marine Rochard, the show offers not a cure but a sharpened way of looking at a long history of oppression, at CCC OD until 1 November 2026.
