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This image, posted by Deborah De Robertis on her Facebook page, shows the Luxembourg performance artist being removed by a security guard from the entrance of the Lourdes grotto in August 2018 

De Robertis appeared naked at the entrance of the Sanctuary Our Lady of Lourdes in August 2018. The sanctuary filed a legal complaint alleging that she committed “an act of exhibitionism which shocked the faithful who were present,” according to the French newspaper Le Monde.

She said it was a performance commenting on the sexualisation of women. “It is not for me to debate how museum visitors or pilgrims looked, shocked or not, stunned, voyeurs or accomplices... I don’t care,” De Robertis wrote on her Facebook page following a court hearing on 25 June.

“What seems important to me is to lay bare the sexualised view of my ‘scandalous’ nudity because it reflects that which patriarchy imposes on us as the being the norm and from which I should therefore defend myself as not being an exhibitionist,” she said.

De Robertis has previously been acquitted of charges of sexual exhibition at the Louve and Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

The French court will issue its Lourdes ruling on 6 August.