Seeking Venus, Nuptial Revival, a performance and live drawing session by Aubane Berthommé Martinez

Aubane Berthommé Martinez performance and live drawing session Seeking Venus, Nuptial Revival unfolded like a luminous ritual.
The images shifted restlessly, at times a bride, at times a saint, at times a whore, drifting between medieval and Renaissance echoes while remaining sharply contemporary. What lingered most was how these figures revealed servitude hidden inside the beautiful satin wrapping of marriage, devotion disguised as ornament.
The session delivered a collective catharsis and beautiful drawings by Ariadna Shmandurova.

Seeking Venus, Nuptial Revival examines gendered care, domestic labor, and the weight of inherited roles. The work unfolds between ritual and rupture, beauty and exhaustion, intimacy and obligation.
Handcrafted costumes inspired by Mediterranean wedding aesthetics become sites of damage, touch, and repair. Through text fragments and audience participation, the performance exposes how care is learned, demanded, and endured.
The audience is invited to interact in different ways, becoming at the same time voyeur and part of the unfolding of the work.

Soundscapes created by Eve Bion.

Aubane Berthommé Martinez is a multidisciplinary artist, performer, and curator. Her practice uses self representation and intersectional analysis to work through class, gender, labor, and Mediterranean heritage. Working across performance, text, photography, painting, ceramics, and fashion, she reclaims working class and queer aesthetics often dismissed as excessive or improper. Her body frequently becomes both subject and medium, allowing lived experience to confront systems of visibility, desire, and exploitation. Through humor, sensuality, and care, her work holds beauty and discomfort together rather than resolving them.