Feel Good Cooperative is an artistic collective founded by Pauline Curnier Jardin with the researcher and urban planner Serena Olcuire, the photographer and sex worker Alexandra Lopez and a group of Columbian transgender sex workers in Rome during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Initially, Curnier Jardin bought the sex workers’ drawings for the price of a ‘trick’, i.e. a sexual service. What began as an initiative to offer sex workers work and an income has grown into a long-term artistic collective. Curnier Jardin sees the sex workers as artists who possess a specific expertise of their own in their use of the body, light, make-up and costumes. Feel Good Cooperative is developing its own artistic practice encompassing performances and films, graphic works, sculptures and installations. Since it was founded, the cooperative’s work has been exhibited in Rome, Berlin, Genoa, Bonn, Cologne and New York.

“The subject of my work is not minorities, but the process of coming together, becoming a collective and developing shared expertise,” Curnier Jardin says. 

Pauline Curnier Jardin:  Feel Good Cooperative