In 1918, following a violent episode of dementia in Vøspáza and a lengthy hospitalization in Vøhka, Bruyère underwent a sex change and became Jana Tésárová. Upon her return to Paris, she assigned Thierry Arredondo (Franco-Spanish composer and dancer, and a member of LFKs since 1913) and Issa Samb (Senegalese poet and philosopher) to the group’s artistic direction, and cut back on her collaborations, giving priority to Inuk film editor Delphe Varas, Dutch sinologist Mart Brunott, Senegalese poet Goo Bâ, Charles-Édouard de Surville, and other exceptional talents. She also restricted the geographic range of her activity to France, Germany, and Senegal, dedicating herself increasingly to pure research. Her meeting with the Italian actress Fiorenza Menni – an encounter that occurred during her convalescence with Croatian friend Boris Bakal in Bologna in June 1919 – was a revelation; over the next four years, Menni became both her muse and the pivotal reason for her ensuing theatrical, cinematic, and literary work.
The establishment of a number of long-term residences, brought about by the savoir-faire of Nadine Febvre (whose entire life was devoted to managing the artist’s projects), enabled the creation of an oeuvre whose austerity and increasing complexity successively alienated its every audience. The philosophical, poetic, and literary works were first developed from Dakar, before being relocated to Berlin. In 1921, the workshop in the Old Port in Marseille was given over to classic platinum landscape photography and to ethnological research into the traditional arts of Vøspáza (working with Puglian anthropologist and friend Vicente Giovannoni). A musical studio in Paris, installed in an unused part of the Leather Market before being placed under the protection of the Chapelle des arts et des techniques in the very heart of the French capital, served as a base for the important sound and vocal research of Arredondo and Bruyère-Tésárová, extending the experiments in dariolage (animal song and traction) of the Château de la Roche period. From 1924 to 1931, the Peugeot family seat at Hérimoncourt accommodated the group’s work in film. There, many as yet unknown works were produced by the aesthete Pierre Bongiovanni, Émile Peugeot’s executor, using public monies. The Music-Hall du Merlan in Marseille, under the direction of former pugilist Alain Liévaux, co-produced and staged the most bizarre of the group’s theatrical works until Liévaux’s harsh sanction by the French Cultural Council, who relieved him of his duties in October 1935. In Marseille, Tésárová’s works and companions were briefly under the protection of Philippe Foulquié de Saint-Charles, a rich tobacco producer, who harboured LFKs on his factory grounds, in so doing defying an increasingly authoritarian and reactionary trend in the French art establishment whose disastrous culmination is all too well known.
Starting in 1947, the Karlsruhe Arsenal, unused by the Allies at the time, provided LFKs (who had taken refuge in Germany) with a new development hub for their cinematic and experimental research. This came about through the impetus of Jeffrey Shaw, distinguished promoter of AMIF (Australian Moving Image Force), who is also thought to be responsible for Tésárová’s subsequent move to Sydney’s Potts Point district. In Australia, bitten by a dingo, she contracted rabies in late 1952 and was permanently interned at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Darlinghurst on January 4, 1953.
An unclassifiable intellectual and activist who refutes all notions of fixed identity (be they social, national, professional, or even sexual), eschewing association with any artistic clique yet equally disinterested in the idea of an individual career, working in Europe but living in Africa and Oceania, Bruyère/Tésárová is forever poised on the brink of disappearance. He/she has devoted his/her entire life to studying the tragedy of Actaeon and to creating a many-sided, chiefly incomprehensible oeuvre of hunting consisting of 3.501 parts.
Beginning in 1912, Gabriel Castelli, founder of Epidemic, obstinately devoted himself to the impossible goal of promoting Bruyère’s work. Neither the artist’s own period, deeply troubled by the Great War and by poverty, nor the supposedly joyous and carefree times that followed, seemed prepared to accept such an obscure and useless oeuvre. Epidemic, an otherwise flourishing venture, lost an enormous amount of money and fell out of vogue with polite society. Today, Richard Castelli, the current head of Epidemic and grandson of its founder, continues to fight for the artist’s rehabilitation and by the same token, for recognition of his grandfather’s exceptional visionary abilities.
