In the summer of 2025, I had the opportunity to be invited by the artist Anouk Verviers to participate in her artwork THE WORLD WAS ALWAYS FULL OF US [Le monde a toujours été empreint de nous]. The description below is drawn from the artist’s official website.
Featured image of the article: Excerpt from THE WORLD WAS ALWAYS FULL OF US, Anouk Verviers, 2025, 4K video with 5.1 ambisonic sound, 29 min.
Project Overview
A headless cyborgian narrator introduces us to a community from the future that, every century, journeys through distant mountain ranges to meet with ‘the Apparatus’ and ask for guidance about their bodily pains. Each time, the Apparatus – rather than bringing them relief – sets in motion new myths that are passed down to ‘the Convincings’ to instigate and justify violent treatments.
The film The world was always full of us draws on dystopian feminist science fiction to explore the chronic womb-related pain experienced by women and non-binary people.
In a collage tracing four thousand years of dismissive medicine, the narrator takes us through three historical misdiagnoses of endometriosis: the ‘wandering womb’, ‘hysteria’, and the ‘working woman disease’ – describing treatments and recommendations through the borrowing of words pulled from medical archives from the Middle Ages to the 1950s. The dance sequences, collaboratively choreographed, are inspired by representations of sick, ill, and disabled women in art historical paintings and in optical illusion sideshows touring fairs in Europe. All seven dancers performing in the film live with such pain, and the making of this work allowed them to find a shared sense of community.
Throughout the film, rockslides act as metaphors for endometriosis, revealing how womb-holders’ bodies are treated as a resource to be extracted and controlled. Symbols associated with fertility and psychiatry are tied, cut open, and turned inside out. In Verviers’s work, those dealing with pain have transformed themselves into feminist cyborgs – hybrid figures that have the power to act not only on their pain but, more importantly, with it.
Artist Presentation
In her interdisciplinary practice, Anouk Verviers investigates systems of power, asking how they affect bodies and shape entanglements between us, others, and the matter around us. She lives and works in London UK and Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal. Her work has been shown at Kupfer (London), Galerie UQO (Gatineau), OPTICA (Montréal), and Dogo (Switzerland). She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Université du Québec à Montréal (Montréal) and a Master of Fine Arts from Goldsmiths (London), where she was awarded the Acme Award for her thesis exhibition, as well as the Chelsea Arts Club Award. In 2024, she was awarded the Pauline-Desautels Prize. She is a member and the initiator of the Exhausted Feminist Hybrid Species reading group.
Performance and Choreography: Hsiao-Chien Chiu, Laurence Éthier, Juliette Gaillard, Leia Le Maistre, Sylvia McCaughey, Riley Tu, Anouk Verviers
Direction, Screenplay, and Editing: Anouk Verviers
Voice: Anouk Verviers avec la participation de Hsiao-Chien Chiu, Laurence Éthier, Juliette Gaillard, Yueh-Ning Lee, Leia Le Maistre, Sylvia McCaughey, Fran Painter-Fleming, Jessica Ragazzini Castello, Myriam Sévigny, Riley Tu
Cinematography: Hsiao-Chien Chiu, Ollie Inglis, Riley Tu, Casper Wolski
Sound Recording: Antonin Bourgault
Foley and Sound Mixing: Émilie Blaise
Music: Antonin Bourgault, Anouk Verviers
Color Grading: Marianne Lévesque
Production Management: Mehdi Moussaoui, Marika Verviers
Special thanks: 7 à nous – Bâtiment 7, Avalon Cafe, Charlotte Baker, Carrières Saint-Dominique, Alexia Holt, Ellen King, Philippe Le Siège, Maxim Rheault, the Smith Family