A place emerges, holding us as a whole and at the same time as many as intimate, social, political fragments.
An affective landscape envelops us in the skin of a futuristic fantasy awaiting a belated renaissance.
A place where we are not just political concepts, but emotional landscapes that slowly morphs those they look at. Where the skin is as thick as a body itself and as fragile as the liminal of two screams. Where our bodies of rage – our transformative power, create substance of tear, sweat and voices to quench the earth’s thirst.

For this performance that unfolds deep into the night, Sorour Darabi invites a number of artists to participate in an initial experiment of a wider group project in constant metamorphosis. As it was for Scheherazade, the night here becomes a space for resistance and for the invention of stories very different from those told in the daytime.

As day and night, life, for many, is a negotiation between extremes, what takes us to the dawn?

For this project Sorour invited these artists in collaboration :

Performance: Antonija Livingstone, Tiran Willemse, Calixto Neto, Li-Yun Hu, Ange Halliwell, Bella Baguena
Sound composition: Pablo Altar, Detente (Florian Le Prisé)
Scenography: Alicia Zaton
Lighting design: Shaly

Launched in fall 2017, La Manutention is a residency program dedicated to performing artists.

Sorour Darabi is invited in residence for one month. The artist meets the public once per week in the spaces of the Palais de Tokyo. These performative evenings allow the public to discover their world and those of their guests, while offering the opportunity to follow the evolution of their work.

When the eyes get used to the darkness, they manage to see a landscape that is not visible in the light. Like a third world, or a third reading of history. Somewhere between night and dawn. In “a thousand and one nights” hides a double meaning: the anguish of an endless night and the promise of an inevitable end.
When the stories are innumerable, normativity no longer settles in. The multitude and the complexity of the stories put in disorder the dominant order. For Scheherazade, inventing and telling stories is a question of survival. She lengthens the night by inventing new myths.