Les Gueules cassées: disfigurement and its legacies – University of Exeter, 12th-14th march 2015

J’interviendrai dans le colloque « Les Gueules cassées: disfigurement and its legacies », University of Exeter, 12th-14th march 2015, sur le thème suivant : « Les cultures médicales face aux Gueules Cassées : place et fonction des croisements entre chirurgie et odontologie dans le soin des blessures de la face, à partir du cas d’Albéric Pont »

1914FACES2014 conference programme & abstracts

Argument du colloque :
The experience of the gueules cassées has given rise to a unique cultural history, and one which is now being rewritten in the centenary years of the First World War. This conference, arising from the INTERREG IV-funded project 1914FACES2014, led by the Institut Faire Faces and the University of Exeter, assesses the legacy of the gueules cassées.
The First World War saw facial injury on an unprecedented scale: new types of weaponry meant that facial injury became more common and greater numbers of wounded survived. As a result, WWI and its immediate aftermath saw very significant innovations in the surgical field, with surgeons such as Hippolyte Morestin and Harold Gillies pioneering techniques which would transform facial reconstructive surgery. Just as artistic practice fed into surgical practice (in the work of sculptors as mask-makers or epithesists), so the radically new forms of surgery developed at this time altered the context in which artists represented the face. At the same time, understandings and representations of the face have radically changed since the First World War, from segregation of facially injured veterans following the First World War to recognition of facial difference as a protected characteristic in the 2010 Equality Act. This conference will explore the disputed histories of the gueules cassées in the British and French contexts alongside a broad-based consideration of the face and facial difference. It will coincide with a major exhibition entitled Faces of Conflict: the Impact of the First World War on Art and Reconstructive Surgery at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery, Exeter.