Myriam Laplante gave a fantastic performance during the City of Women festival (well, that’s what everybody says cuz i stupidly missed it, i arrived too late and just saw the video of the event this afternoon).

The inspiration is Brothers Grimm’s tale The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids. A mother goat warns her kids to be wary of the wolf and leaves the house. Enters the wolf who claims to be their mother. The kids let him in, wolf tears apart the house, finds them and eats them all except the youngest, who was hiding in the clock.

The mother returns, sees the crime scene, looks for nasty wolf and finds him sleeping. Something is struggling inside his stomach. Mother and the son cut him open, and the other six emerge alive.

Myriam’s performance Lupus in Fabula turns the image of mother the saviour into mother the destroyer of the world she herself creates. There’s no woolf but three big and lovely bears sleeping on the floor. She cuts them open, disembowels them and little robot bunnies emerge from the stomach (giving a new sense of purpose to all those Chinese toys banned from the European and US market) which is really cute and endearing… Until she grabs a big hammer, goes after the bunnies in the gallery and smashes them one after the other. When i went to the gallery today, everything was neat and peaceful, all traces of the massacre had disappeared apart from a small carpet that the artist had crafted using what was left of the bear fur.

Video and more images. The remains of the tragedy are on view until October 13 at the Moderna galerija/Mala galerija in Ljubljana.