Meeting with Laure Prouvost by Céline Kopp

Francis Alÿs The Silence of Ani Armenia, Turkey I 2015 13 minutes Filmed in an ancient Armenian town on the Turkish border, The Silence of Ani (2015) is set in the ruins of a city whose quietude is broken only by birdsong. In a landscape as strange as it is breathtaking, a group of children play the duduk (a traditional double-reed wooden flute) as a game of hide-and-seek unfolds. Their repeated calls become a ballad for the future – or an elegy for the past. Jonathas de Andrade O Peixe...
Elouan Le Bars PEAK PERFORMANCE France, 2024 28 minutes Drawing its narrative from corporate games, PEAK PERFORMANCE (2024) is a documentary fairy tale set in a space in perpetual motion, evoking both an exhibition space and a meeting room. The film features seven of the director’s friends playing versions of themselves as they participate in team-building activities and share stories from their professional lives, between authenticity and performance. Caroline Mesquita Noctambules United...
Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor Somniloquies France I 2016 1h15 Somniloquies is a descent into the dream world of our unconscious. A city of dwarfs for rent, an alien invasion, an exorcism séance, a far-fetched military maneuver, a wild, burlesque and fetishistic spectacle, a surgical procedure gone horribly wrong, an impromptu orgy, cold-blooded murder, mass drowning, a sex contest, sudden depressurization causing nail polish to fly off… these were the subjects of nocturnal...
Ben Russell River Rites United States, Surinam I 2011 11 minutes Filmed in sequence on a sacred river in Upper Suriname, the daily secrets of a Saramacan animist are revealed as time itself unravels. A swim, a fisherman pulls his net out of the water, a young girl washes clothes on a stone. This is the duration of a single take, a reel of Super 16 film. Carolee Schneemann Meat Joy United States I 1964 6 minutes Meat Joy is a performance conceived by Carolee Schneemann and presented for the...

In the instant before a firework explodes, eleven performers cobble together a final show as if they were lighting a fuse. They are stubborn, fragile and elated, as if caught in a storm of images, dances and abandoned objects.
Pyromaniac dancer-choreographer Némo Flouret sets the stage ablaze with flaying trumpets, cracked rhythms, bursts of light and clouds of smoke orchestrated by master fireworker Joseph Couturier. The set design, conceived with Philippe Quesne, erects fragments of bleachers, tarpaulins and metal carcasses that metamorphose with the wind. Costumes by Satoshi Kondo dress the bodies in chromatic surges, crackling and then scattering like textile sparks. In the fire of this suspended space-time,...
The performance on the 26th is followed by a DJ set by KUKII. KUKII’s music rises up like a rallying cry, a call to break boundaries, subvert perceptions, and survey new territories: an invitation to deep introspection, to self-exploration as a path to liberation. Imagine KUKII as the illegitimate child of an explosive fusion: MIA, Sherine and Siouxsie Sioux together in the back of a purple Chrysler LeBaron, whizzing through Cairo with Mahraganat blaring at full volume, while Pharrell...

CARNES by Esther Teillard, Éditions Pauvert, January 2025 Accepted at the Beaux-Arts in Cergy, the narrator of CARNES leaves her native Marseille for northeastern Paris. A new world holds out its arms to her, more sororal, less volcanic, where debates on inclusivity have replaced misogynist whistles. But where does violence nestle when it fears to speak its name? Cagoles, Chinese prostitutes, poisonous students and emotional muralists: CARNES draws up a searing inventory of bourgeois feminist...

Michèle Matyn is interested in how myths, folklore and beliefs are formed through our relationship with nature. Her work often takes the form of an invitation to travel to remote, symbolic spaces, likely to reinforce faith in the supernatural. For this performance, the artist is inspired by the historical myth of the “Jenny Haniver”: according to 16th-century sailors in Belgian ports, these dried stingray carcasses possessed numerous magical powers. Here embodied, Michele...

Reading in Spanish with French dubbing Alberto Cortés is a Spanish director, playwright and interpreter of his own drifts. His work develops through dance, performance and theater, and regularly takes Spanish folklore – particularly flamenco – and queer feelings as its subject. In 2022, he published Los montes tuyos, a collection of texts including El Ardor and One night at the golden bar. Melancholic delirium, vulnerable loves, angelic figures and eternal desires: this body of work...