Feminine Futures: Valentine de Saint-Point -- the best kept secret over a 100 years

Over the last 100 years, the French poet, dancer, and thinker Valentine de Saint-Point has been a hidden secret that only a tiny minority of historians in the field have even been aware of. Now, for the first time, a treasure trove of material on her life and work has been unearthed.

When Performa Director RoseLee Goldberg met Adrien Sina, a scholar who has an extraordinary archive of rare letters, photographs, documents, and manifestos written by or relating to Valentine de Saint-Point, they decided to bring her work to New York to be presented in this exhibition.

Valentine de Saint-Point (1875-1953) was one of the few women who established themselves within the Futurist movement. She is the author of the Manifesto of the Futurist Woman (1912), a response to Marinetti’s vision of women in the Manifesto of Futurism, and the “Manifesto of Lust” (1913), a highly controversial text which states that lust is a catalyst for creative energy and explores questions related to gender, war, and art. A key figure in the intellectual life of her time, Saint-Point exiled herself in New York during World War I, where she developed la Metachorie, a new form of art mixing dance, theater, music, and poetry. She spent the last 20 years of her life in Egypt and the Middle East, where she converted to Islam and committed herself to defending the rights of women and fighting European colonialism.

Price: $free