‘I Have a Para-Social Relationship with The Real Housewives’: Solomon Garçon on Online Performativity as Performance Art

The swiftest way to get to know Solomon Garçon’s practice is through his YouTube channel, @solomongarcon, or his publicly accessible Google drive “SUNSET BEACH”. There, you can find lo-fi recordings of late-night hookups, each labelled by their location: “St. Johns Hill, Earls Court, Telegraph Road”, and the opening credits for “Sunset Beach”, a fictional reality tv show made on facetime with the artist Josiane M.H. Pozi.

Garçon is currently in the process of uploading all of his work to the internet. Creating a digital dossier in this way is an expression of the artist’s interest in online performativity as a kind of performance art, which is also the primary subject in his installations, films and performances. 

This year, he showed Bravo (2026) at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf. For the exhibition, Garçon had an intern at the Kunstverein conduct episodic performances in the guise of an increasingly chaotic “housewife”, inspired in part by the American reality television franchise The Real Housewives. She wore ballet pumps, 2000s glasses and a trench-cape to wander around the space, “acting drunk as fuck, and drop[ping] her cigarette at different moments. Fussing with taking her gloves on and off,” says Garçon. “My direction to her was just: ‘act like a mess’”. For him, calling on the labour of the most junior person in the museum hierarchy, the intern, mirrored the despotic actions of reality television producers. 

Garçon was born in 1991 In London, and practiced as a performance artist for much of the 2010s, becoming part of a cohort of artists making mixed media work inspired by streaming culture (TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube), exploring ideas around intimacy and the dissolution of the self in the digital age. In recent years, he has been working on his contemporary art practice. For his solo show with Rose Easton, Snitch (2022), the entire gallery was painted a sickly hue of beige and filled with bestial sculptures made from machine parts, while in Arms (2023-4) at Studio Voltaire, he played with the idea of absent spectators, placing empty body bags in the space alongside rows and rows of miniature chairs. This year, he performed Gear at Liste Art Fair in Basel: two besuited men pretended to be body-guards, periodically crawling around on their knees while having an inane, four-hour long conversation played out of loudspeakers. As in many of his performances, it felt like he was waiting for something to break down. 

Lydia Eliza Trail: Talk to me about your obsession with the Bravo show, The Real Housewives?

Solomon Garçon: When I was working on the show, Arms, at Studio Voltaire, I had this fabricator in the space with me. She noticed that I constantly had The Real Housewives of Atlanta playing while we were working. She told me “Oh, these people are like your family members, you have them in the background, narrating and speaking, and sometimes you respond”.

At that point, I realised that I had developed a para-social relationship with The Real Housewives of Atlanta. What nobody realised was that I had a clip of Housewives playing in the space: I’d engineered it so it sounded as if it was coming from the street. It wasn’t even listed in the floorplan; the work was just for me.

LET: You’ve previously mentioned Paul B. Preciado’s 2014 book Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics as an influence on your work. How does your own interpretation of media, like the Housewives franchise, or images supplied through Grindr, manifest in your practice?

SG: It’s best if I show you. I made this new work recently, it’s called Sunset Beach, and it was shown at 243 Luz. It incorporates different fragments, mood boards really, for a TV show pilot. I wanted it to be unclear how the set pieces (a close crop of David Attenborough’s wax work hand from Madame Tussauds, sound works which were secret recordings from hookups, and an architectural intervention) all related.  

“A new idea for a show is to put people in a room wearing Meta glasses, and ask them to interact with each other”

LET: What was the architectural intervention?

SG: It was a glory hole, built into a previously boarded up wall in the gallery. It’s the perfect architectural symbol to represent both the duality and intimacy of hook-up encounters. Sunset Beach floated through immediacy and extreme intimacy through the extreme framework presented in TV shows like Housewives. 

LET: If you had another job that wasn’t being an artist, what would it be?

SG: Probably a producer on a reality TV show. It’s like this manipulative space in which you can tell people what to do, and then just watch it all unfold. I would get so much from that. A new idea for a show I have is to put a bunch of people in a room wearing Meta glasses, and ask them to interact with each other, but only through the interpretation of the glasses. 

LET: Which reminds me of your performance at Liste. At the time, you told me the only rule was that they had to be continuously in conversation. 

SG: That work, Gear, is part of a series of three. Gear saw these two boys pretending to be security guards, wearing fake Louboutins. The next in the series, which I will do at St. Gallen in Switzerland, will be a hired audience of Bears [a subculture of gay men] – they will just be in the space with a slight choreography, but it’s really really subtle. The last one in the trilogy will be in London, at a private collector’s space: two figures dressed in pseudo-military gear will move through the space, similarly to Gear, with mics. But their interactions will be of a couple in love, and as they move through the space, they will consider each room, their movements resembling the characters in Grand Theft Auto.

LET: You’re transposing gay porn and GTA into the highly private art world space. I think you’re already living your dream of being a manipulative producer. If you had to curate a dream show, who would you put in?

SG: I need tricksters, too, to be honest. So, I’d choose the performance artist William Pope.L and my friend Klein, who is the ultimate trickster. —[O]