Consommez la mariée Micha Derrider

performance, tulle dress, cotton candy

Consommez la mariée revisits the video performance *Noce de sucre* (1998), in which Micha Deridder constructed a wedding dress out of cotton candy on a metal frame.

For the opening of the exhibition Juste au corps, de la peau au vêtement at La Criée, and later on the Town Hall Square, she repeated her performance with a model wearing a tulle dress. Each visitor, equipped with a stick, was invited to taste the cotton candy, contributing to the gradual disappearance of the dress.

The garments designed by Micha Deridder assign only a relative degree of functionality to emotions and feelings. They reveal an imaginative world. The artist draws from this visual relationship to reality and to others, creating a vocabulary whose grammar is defined by material and form. Thus, the sugar in cotton candy—its fluffy, melt-in-your-mouth texture—reveals a childlike and magical vision of the wedding dress. But she is also that ambivalent, caustic element—the lure to consumption embodied by the bride, now unveiled, “laid bare by her bachelors.” The invitation to consume alludes to a virginity that is fading away.

Alexandra Gillet