Cells and Salons

Verdurin
Event has ended
This event ended on Wednesday 30th of October 2024
Admission
£8
Location

Verdurin

Nearest Tube/Rail Stations
Hoxton 0.42 miles

Following in the footsteps of the Parisian socialite Léontine Lippmann who inspired the salon of Proust’s Mme Verdurin, Cells and Salons will build a conspiracy of its own out of secrecy and arcane understanding. You will be invited to share your best-kept secret ideas - even slanderous or sublime - with fertile co-conspiratorial ears and minds.

Lippmann, the muse of Anatole France, played host to an illustrious line-up of guests like Alexandre Dumas, Sarah Bernhardt, Marie and Pierre Curie, Henri Poincaré, and Baron and Baroness Rothschild. Her drawing-room cultivated artistic and scientific knowledge with an elite clientele. Other groupings, like that hosted by Lippmann’s salonnière rival Juliette Adam, took on explicitly political missions, dealing in rumours and falsehoods that wouldn’t pass in polite society today.

How do secrets - that knowledge which must be “set apart, withdrawn, concealed”, as its etymology suggests - themselves split apart, dehisce, and allow their seed to propagate, to find fertile ears and minds? How might the seed of our aesthetic desires plant themselves and form worlds? What wishes might we disseminate?

Cells and Salons plants the seed of aesthetic desires and watches them give rise to new worlds. It extends the invitation to conspire and theorise to both faithful and aspiring members of Verdurin’s petit clan.

Cells and Salons is part of a season of events examining the aesthetic dimension of conspiracy and conspiracy theories. The cycle responds to the increasingly seductive power of conspiratorial ideas over the populace at a time of a crisis of meaning.

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