The paralleling of these actions gestures towards a central line of investigation for Léger between the highly visible performances of these women, their suffering exhibited openly, and the inaction of her mother, whose suffering is shouldered in silence. Léger places Becca’s failure alongside a history of performances which her mother could have equally given: her mother would scrub the grass in front of the courthouse in her wedding dress she’d pull a block of ice along the seafront until it melted she’d let the paint trickle out of a pierced can as she walked through the city she’d make a scene she’d be seen. Instead, Léger lingers with the performance artist’s desire to mend something that was out of proportion in the world - and her ultimate failure to do so.

And yet, The White Dress is not interested in idling on Becca’s intentions or the grandeur of her project. The purpose of Becca’s project was at once idealistic, rooted in a desire to spread goodness, seeking to repair the world by showing up in a white dress, a symbol, for Léger, of both naiveté and undisturbed innocence. “Let us admit for a moment that forgetting was invented for killers,” writes Léger in The White Dress, the last book in her triptych, which takes as its subject the Italian performance artist Pippa Becca, who was raped and murdered in 2008 while hiking across Europe in a wedding dress.

All of her figures - the female director, the performance artist, the most photographed - themselves become vehicles through which Léger tells a more local story of her mother and, most significantly, a story of forgetting. While these women, infamous and maligned, anchor each book, Léger’s triptych reveals a project less concerned with individual stories than with the larger context by which we recognize them. For Léger, the work of “rescuing words” is, in part, a project of plunging into the archive to unearth the forgotten, castigated, yet noted women of history, waylaid by both time and the men who controlled their narratives. When asked about her triptych, now translated in full from the French and published by Dorothy Project, Nathalie Léger suggested that her intention was to “try to rescue the words of a woman who couldn’t utter them herself.” Indeed, Léger’s three books give voice to many women: The Italian aristocrat Countess of Castiglione in Exposition, American film actor and director Barbara Loden in Suite for Barbara Loden, and Italian artist Pippa Bacca in The White Dress.

Exposition nathalie leger