Manger les riches – une décomposition
Sandra Lucbert
In 2023, Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels is supporting the Ménagerie de verre for the presentation of Manger les riches, une décomposition by Sandra Lucbert, as part of Les Inaccoutumés Festival 2023.
In February 2022 a police investigation sent shockwaves across France, revealing how Orpea, a private nursing home group, abused its residents. And its employees! Many residents put to bed with unchanged diapers; left for hours on the floor with broken limbs; agonizing in their own vomit. A so-called “business model” lauded for years by the financial press for its 15% annual returns.
Gombrowicz tells a similar story in his book Dinner at Countess Pavahoke’s. The narrator believes he is invited to the Countess’s exclusive Friday dinners, where the special guests are served simple vegetarian meals… until the menu turns out to be not so meatless. We learn that a local boy named Cauliflower has gone missing just before the cauliflower soup is served. The seated guests, undaunted by this sudden revelation, seem to be enjoying their meal without remorse. Thus, uncovering the sad truth about the underlying impulsion of today’s financialized capitalism.
Photo: © Philippe Lucchese
About the Artist
Sandra Lucbert
Sandra Lucbert is an author. Three of her latest books focus on financialized capitalism as an apparatus of discursive, normative and impulsive enrolment. La Toile (The Canvas), published by Gallimard, uses the codes of the epistolary novel to show how mass digitalization creates a political and economic organization by being directly connected to bodies. Personne ne sort les fusils (Don’t take out Your Guns) published by Le Seuil et Le Ministère des contes publics (The Ministry of Public Accounts) published by Le Seuil, can be described as works of literary intervention: the former based on the France Télécom trial and the latter based on a special edition of the French news program C dans l’air focused on the public debt. In their own way, these hybrid forms propose to dismantle the mechanisms by which the structures of deregulated finance destroy an entire social order via the acceptance of certain linguistic formulations.
Photo: © Sandra Lucbert
