Conceived as a focused exploration of the fragility of one individual, The many lives and deaths of Louise Brunet starts with a search for a young silk weaver and revolutionary who went by the name of Louise Brunet and lived in Lyon in the early decades of the 19th century. It quickly turns into a fictional retelling of the story of several individuals, whose struggles like those of Brunet, have been undermined and forgotten. 

Blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, with an approach that is akin to that of an investigator, this part of manifesto of fragility is imagined more like an artistic installation, rather than a curated exhibition. A wide plethora of artworks and archives, spanning two millenia, come together as parts of an unfinished puzzle. Though originating from disparate times and places, they each embody in tangible form, the existence of a person seeking to liberate themselves from the circumstances into which they were born. Alongside the works on display are several short stories that have been conceived as a literary extension of the exhibition’s fictional narrative. They serve as clues from a larger body of evidence through which traces of several Louise Brunets begin to appear. From a black Senegalese woman fleeing the colonial exhibition of Lyon in 1894, to a gay artist dying of Aids at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York in 1992, the turbulent lives of these people hover between reality and imagination. They serve as gateways into distinct forms of fragility and resistance as experienced through the lens of the body, race, gender, labor, desire, or colonial struggle. The many lives and deaths of Louise Brunet begin to emerge.