Cells and Salons

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How do secrets – that knowledge which must be “set apart, withdrawn, concealed”, as its etymology suggests – themselves split apart, dehisce, and allow their seed to propagate, to find fertile ears and minds?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? 

Conspiracy Open Mic

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. 

The salon is bound by secrecy and kinship. Guests will be offered an open-mic spot as an opportunity to share their closely-held beliefs and conspiracy theories with others. The evening will also feature guest lectures on the history of the conspiratorial salon and the aesthetic qualities of secrets.

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.