The artist strikes emotive poses frame by frame against a black background, wearing shifting headdresses that reveal multiple roles. Her white bust streams horizontally and vertically as stop-motion gestures of ecstasy and agony erupt, accompanied by the unnerving repetition of the sound of a camera shutter.
Thoquenne’s performance is interwoven with history through text and archival facsimiles. A decorative hand mirror gradually overexposes to reveal a ghostly title frame: ‘Hysteria’. A red placard flashes: ‘France, 1878’, and text overlays an archival photograph: ‘Augustine’. The film draws from Georges Didi-Huberman’s Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (1982). It traces the case of Louise Augustine Gleizes — known as Augustine or ‘A’ — whose body and behaviour were relentlessly documented at the Salpêtrière hospital as evidence of hysteria. Hospital beds, tribunals of men, and the camera itself reveal a system that observed, classified, and publicly displayed women’s bodies. Through fragmentation and repetition, Hysteria confronts the violence of the medical gaze and reclaims performance as an act of feminist refusal.
