Pour Yet, Light, you are blind, Loucka Fiagan s’inspire du travail de Denise Ferreira da Silva, Fred Moten et des mots de Cheikh Ath : “… all the things unimaginable in the light may be possible in the dark” et présente une performance qui explore l’archétype de l’ombre, son influence sur l’identité individuelle et collective mais aussi son potentiel de réinvention. Un projet qui nous invite à résister à l’essentialisation de l’identité en mettant plutôt l’accent sur son irrémédiable fugitivité et en soulignant l’association entre ombre et identité noire.

 

Seul sur scène mais accompagné d’une équipe multidisciplinaire, Loucka Fiagan rassemble, recouvre des parcelles d’ombres et utilise tout à la fois les figures du clown, de la créature, du fantôme ou de l’enfant et convoque au plateau les pratiques du slam, du stand-up, du rap…

 

Une performance comme une succession de mutations de formes et de styles et qui donne à voir un corps et ses ombres dans un cycle continu de construction et de destruction sans que jamais une forme définitive ne puisse advenir.

Prologue: Writer’s schlock

“I find writing painful,” I tell our writers’ group. Usually people are surprised when I say this, but there’s always someone who looks relieved, even liberated, that it’s been said. In this case, that someone is Arnaud, our group co-ordinator, who nods in weary recognition and asks: is there a way for us to find some joy in writing? Well, I think, I could just write my own name, Sanjoy, and there it literally is – although etymologically, it actually means “victory”. Still, work with what you’ve got, right? So I ask: will I be able to conquer this pain? Maybe even find some enjoyment?

 

Title sequence: Credit where it’s due

Yet, Light, You are Blind, directed by Loucka Fiagan, performed by Loucka Fiagan and live musician Luis Ramirez. Full credits and programme text here.

 

There, that wasn’t painful. But nor was it joyous. Next!

 

Scene: Creepy-crawlies

The Beast with Five Fingers is a 1946 movie of the “evil hand” subgenre, and tells of a household terrorised by the vengeful, disembodied hand of a dead pianist. “Your flesh will creep at the hand that crawls!” goes the tagline, a sentence I wish I had written myself. (Yes, I literally just wrote it, but it’s not mine.) I mention the film here because it was my first entry point into Fiagan’s show. In the opening scene, a disembodied hand sidles out from beneath the on-stage bed and starts playing an electric keyboard that is lying among the paraphernalia strewn around the floor. It later turns out to belong to two-handed, full-bodied musician Luis Ramirez, but its disembodied, single-handed entrance did (to misappropriate Marie Kondo) spark joy in me. An arpeggio of anticipation flickered across my chest and a voice in my head squeaked: It’s like The Beast with Five Fingers! It was not wrong.

 

Interlude: Bro

“Be a twin.”

 

The injunction comes up in the opening scene too, and the answer is easy: I am a twin. We are not identical, my brother and I, but we are always doubled. Even our names echo each other. Growing up, I felt like I lived in his shadow. On the other hand, he felt like he lived in mine. We are more alike than we think.

 

Scene: Chiaroscuro

Lamplight flares and fades intermittently, each bloom of illumination revealing a shadowed cadaver – Fiagan, now contorted backwards, now with arms hanging crooked, now with head slumped sideways. The gauzy curtain from which the body hangs catches the passing light like a cobweb catching a searchlight in a cellar. Is it animated or animate? Possessed, or in possession? We know only this: each time the apparition appears, it has moved.

 

Voice off: lyric

Every picture has its shadows
And it has some source of light
Blindness, blindness and sight
Joni Mitchell, Shadows and Light (1975)

 

Scene: Couvertures

“The cover of a book is different from its contents.”

 

Coverlet 1
Fiagan has slipped out of corpse-bride attire and gone to bed, under cover. But something now begins to stir within the bedclothes, something stretching and pushing. Something unknown, with protruberances that poke and press against the fabric of this placental duvet. Or could it be two embryos? More? Sound broods above and around, a miasma that heralds some sinister metamorphosis. And out it comes, out it comes: Fiagan, after all, now no longer a pallid somnambulist but brimful of vitality, and glistening like a phoenix.

 

Coverlet 2
Bedding again – here strewn across the floor in a rumpled mess. Turn up its edges to expose a mass of pulpy pillows, twisted sheets and rumpled blankets. These are its innards, its offal, its entrails.

 

Coverlet 3
A necromantic cloth, dark but laced with bright points, like the night sky. It takes on the contours of a fantastical figure – soothsayer? acolyte? witch? – but the figure itself appears empty, a void for the cloak to drape itself upon. Is anyone, or anything, inside that hollow? Some wraith, some animus –  nothing, it seems, more substantial than that. The cloak levitates and begins to turn, spreading its sides like wings: a moth, silent, mysterious. The presence of something; the illusion of something else.

 

Voice off: nominal

“I have found a way to live to the side of my name. That has proven to be very helpful.”
Judith Butler (2021)

 

Scene: Degradation

The voice of reason is clear and consoling. The voice of reason helps us. Truly. We want the voice of reason, we need the voice of reason. Sometimes we imagine that we are the voice of reason – yet it does not come from us, it comes from elsewhere. From outside us – where else? The voice of reason is not ours. We are not ourselves.

 

The voice of unreason is obscure and unsettling. The voice of unreason undoes us. Truly. We fear the voice of unreason, we flee the voice of unreason. Sometimes we imagine that ours is not the voice of unreason – yet it comes from us, not elsewhere. From inside us – where else? The voice of unreason is ours. We are not ourselves.

 

The voice of reason is clear and consoling. The voice of reason helps us. Truly. We want the voice of reason, we need the voice of reason. Sometimes we imagine that we are the voice of reason – yet it does not come from us, it comes from elsewhere. From outside us – where else? The voice of reason is not ours. We are not ourselves.

 

The voice of reason is obscure and consouling. The voice. Unreason undo-si-does us. Truly we hear decoys in season. We needle choice of treason. Sum times, we image in hours, not trees. On yeti tomes, from us, fromm uussss. Out, inn, wear owt, whereinnnnnn – eeeth reeesssss ohhh nnn offf grhasss myyy preciousssss ahahaA sSstruthTHth UHhuh uhhuHHhh GRWAAAAH.

 

Interval: Ghost review

If I were to write a review for the newspaper I contribute to, it would go like this:

 

Title: Loucka Fiagan, Yet, Light, You are Blind
Star rating: 4 out of 5
Place: La Balsamine, Brussels
Standfirst: [the editor would write this]
Name: Sanjoy Roy
Publication date: [as appropriate]
Review: Generally 350–380 words, in which I write about/from/with (etc) the experience of the performance – my experience, of course, though I wouldn’t spell this out, since readers understand this well already, and are in any case more interested in the performance than in me. The text would weave description, evocation, suggestion, commentary, evidence and perspective, and would flex around two basic questions: what happened? and how did it work? Thus, I would suggest arguments to account for experiences. I would, in addition, labour over the writing to ensure that the reader wouldn’t have to – even though I know that “the reader” is an imaginary construct that I use to keep the text communicative and connective. I would refine the text with this phantom reader in mind, with one additional guideline for myself: try to ensure there is at least one word or phrase that I relish having written. No need for it to be as lipsmackingly good as your flesh will creep at the hand that crawls! Just something that sounds good to me, and to heck with anyone else.
Listings: If the show was going on tour, I would give forthcoming dates, places, and a link.
Disclaimer: If a stakeholder other than the newspaper had covered any expenses (other than the ticket), I would state this.

 

By the deadline (usually 10am on the morning after the show) I would email the text to the editor, who might make changes, and may or may not consult me about them. Then the review would be published. I would probably wait till the following day before I read it, because by then it would already feel like history. Done!

 

That is what would have happened if I were writing a review. But I’m not. So it didn’t.

 

I bet, though, you wondering what that review would have said. Reader, there is just one thing I can tell you with certainty: you’ll never know.

 

Scene: Fantasia Glorifica

“Are you stepping on my foot, you tiny thing?”

 

Do you not imagine, ignorant as you are, how I could crush you like an ant? Squelch you like a bloated worm? Have you not noticed the blood-red, medusa braids of my magnificent hair? The shining gauze that both clings to and caresses the marvellous ascension of my torso? I stoop, merely to conquer. Your own paltry presence, in the shadow of my glorious luminescence, merits no description. You are nothing, less than nothing. I could squeeze suffering from your corpus as effortlessly as I could wring out a dishrag, but why sully my own splendour? Why bother to bare the evidence of your abject inadequacies? Your insignificance is immaterial. You don’t even exist.

 

Interlude: Bro (reprise)

Some years ago, I had a period of trying out different styles of writing from the texts I usually do, and wrote some short horror fiction. In performative style, I wanted to provoke feelings of anxiety, dread, ambivalence and irresolution in the reader. (Fiagan would, I think, understand the impulse.) The writing was hard work and I did not last long. Still, I managed a vampire story, a ghost story and an existential paranoia story. I showed them to my niece, and she said: are all your stories about being a twin?

 

OMG! How had I not seen that?

 

Voice off: additive

The difference between Terror and Horror is the difference between awful apprehension and sickening realization…
Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame (1966)

 

The difference between Terror and Horror is the difference between awful apprehension and sickening realization: between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse.
Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame (1966)

 

The difference between Terror and Horror is the difference between awful apprehension and sickening realization: between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse… Terror thus creates an intangible atmosphere of spiritual psychic dread, a certain superstitious shudder at the other world. Horror resorts to a cruder presentation of the macabre: by an exact portrayal of the physically horrible and revolting, against a far more terrible background of spiritual gloom and despair.
Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame (1966)

 

The difference between Terror and Horror is the difference between awful apprehension and sickening realization: between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse… Terror thus creates an intangible atmosphere of spiritual psychic dread, a certain superstitious shudder at the other world. Horror resorts to a cruder presentation of the macabre: by an exact portrayal of the physically horrible and revolting, against a far more terrible background of spiritual gloom and despair. Horror appeals to sheer dread and repulsion, by brooding upon the gloomy and the sinister, and lacerates the nerves by establishing actual cutaneous contact with the supernatural.
Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame (1966)

 

Dénouement: Yes, but why?

People are often puzzled about why I am intrigued by horror (“what’s a nice boy like you…?” etc). It puzzles me too. Sometimes I say just this: I think what are we afraid of? is an interesting question. And sometimes I would add: give me shivers (“awful apprehension”) over shocks (“sickening realisation”).

 

Fear, then, of the dark – of what the dark holds, and then withholds from revelation. A feeling for what is concealed, occluded, unknown; sensed but not seen. Yet, Light, You are Blind is not a horror show, but uses many of its tropes. Shadowplay abounds, and its scenes are full of obscurities, occlusions, deceptions and misdirections.

 

There’s another aspect to horror that fascinates me, and it too enters Yet, Light, You are Blind: the prising apart of the real and the normal. Horror often deals with the unreal, the supernatural – but unlike genres such as myth, fantasy or fairtyale, seems obsessed with treating it as abnormal, as deviant – as non-normative. Hence, horror can be not just a conservative, but a violently moralising, ultra-normative genre. Deviance is frightful, alterities are feared, anomalies become monstrosities, and The Beast Must Die in order that the real can reunite with the normal.

 

And yet. Horror fandoms are chock-full of non-normative people. Why? Maybe this: if there is fear of the dark, then there is also power in the darkness. Power that can be claimed, and wielded.

 

What do you think, Loucka Fiagan?

 

Epilogue: Q&A

So, did I find any enjoyment in the writing?

Reader, it matters not one jot. What matters is whether you did.

 

----

Sanjoy Roy’s trip to Brussels was supported by Bâtard and Springback. The text was paid for by La Bellone.

It’s often said, “you make your bed, you lie in it”, but less often that, if it’s unmade, you have to lie in it too — in your own rancid residues, discharges, remnants, crumbs and cuddly toys, all strewn as witness to your longings, your pain, your lassitude, your unrequited loves, dreams and demons. This is how Yet, Light, you are blind begins: with Fiagan buried under the flotsam of their past, their personal and ancestral history. It’s a shrine to time and all that weighs on Fiagan’s slim, sinewy body. And we feel it too, voyeuristically surveying all that they have been willing to put on display, relieved that it’s not our own precious relics laid out for the world to scrutinize, to pick over, to perhaps only see as debris. We are not Tracey Emin, nor Loucka Fiagan, but entertaining the very notion of what the world would make of us if they could behold our unmade bed — with us still prostrate in it — brings shudders.

 

Fiagan begins to speak, to growl, to sing of a twin, of a double identity, of a buried other. They begin to perform. What a comfort — we are now in known, familiar territory. There’s been a musician, a dramaturge, a costume designer and a coach, all helping mould Fiagan’s material so that it becomes something we can digest, cope with — a form that contains and restrains their anger so that we can take it in our hands, turn it about, examine it, all without scalding ourselves too badly. We can admire the swishing braids, the taut torso, the prowling, proud, stacked-heel stance. The address to the front, the anecdotes, the repartee all come off as cool, smooth and suave. But I’m sitting in the first row, just in front of Fiagan’s family, to whom they call out directly with the jocular tones of a seasoned stand-up. They laugh, we laugh, and we all breathe out. Fiagan is in command: the lights, the drapes, the up-to-the-minute, curated, queer costumes.

 

But the power of Fiagan’s punch, for me, is in the barely perceptible chinks in the façade: the slightly shabby and makeshift, the hackneyed, the minute tremble when they grip the mic for the stand-up-cum-stand-off with the audience,  with their family, with me.

 

In this space Fiagan is strong, assured, using their art-school tools to make us sense, by proxy, the screaming, terrifying abyss of the moments of realisation that you are “other”, and are bewilderingly, ineluctably seen as such, and that there is nowhere to hide, nowhere to be, except on a stage.

It was decided 

that on this night of change

speech would cede to voices 

that images would fade

into force and figures

that a teenage mutant consciousness

would outplay old dramas

gain sincerity by adding mask

upon mask

raising a fortress of forms

arouse flamboyance

forever lost to whiteness

offering a pulsating naked throat

gushing in the candor of beads, curtains, pinkish neon

that songs themselves would serve 

as warnings of falls to come

of coughs to endure

that the promise of threading among stars

would require the price 

of madvillainy

of crawling through trash cans

and the harassment of flies

of crowning residuals

of shouldering desire fear forfeiture fire 

and the tears 

of children 

 

Yes light you are blind

to shadows on walls, dark twins, tender bruises,

to exploding punchlines, untold wounds, uncontrolled laughter

 

Yes gloom you care

for rest 

the breath of brothers

for the freshness of wells

imminent and pure

for the dance

of vision

I

Conte cruel

 

They didn’t appreciate bedtime rituals. As a child, they felt that the suspension of their consciousness, or what they believed it to be at the time, would expose them to mortal danger. The fear of risk, even though their family had taught them to accept its inevitability (a risk present from the moment they began to explore the world beyond their clan’s boundaries – they were far from realising that the risk still lurked within…) the fear of risk drove them to prefer order, to seek out what seemed immutable and fixed: to hell with impermanence.

 

Thus the night seemed to them a trial rather than a refuge. Fatigue dogged them throughout the day, so great were these terrors that seized them in the evening, whilst they went about their life in a cottonwool cocoon, never alert enough to respond to the assaults of their surroundings. Soon, they dreaded finding themself in the absence of light, but to tell the truth, it was not the night that terrified them. It was that shadow taking shape before their eyes, a shapeless creature or a shape-shifting apparition, a dark allusion.

 

A prey to the emptiness of their room, they had paid no heed to what had emerged from the depths. Shrouded in an opaque mist, hands began to crawl across the floor, their angular fingers playing a ghostly piano, a melody that was nothing like a lullaby. A persistent rustling heralded this strange intrusion. And they couldn't bear to listen to that metallic sound marking the passing of time, the ebbing of memory; it would be a macabre sound to those who could not recognise its distant origin, to those who are unaware that the ages slip away thus, accompanied by the spirits of the ancestors.
Something was passing through the veil of night. Its form, at first indistinct, took shape like a silhouette without ever settling: draped in a white dress that was too long, a panel of fabric falling carelessly in front of their body. They moved through the darkness of the room in such a manner, seeping into the blackness, step by step. With every movement, they paused. Slowly, carefully, they grasped the fabric and pulled it up, as if to mend a tiny flaw, then walked forward again. They raised their head and bowed with a slender right hand, a smile pulling their face into an expression far too eager. They had passed before them like this a first time, which seemed to them to be the thousandth, so that it perhaps reminded them of an exhausting ceremony, or a disturbing nuptial march, something just as mysteriously regimented.

 

After the relentless battles of the day, they still didn't welcome the bedtime rituals, knowing full well that this would be the moment when they came to visit. Their form was ever-changing, but they knew it was the same entity. And they were one. And they were two. They were one and two, singular and multiple, and they were we. Then they were you and they were I, and I was them, who would never be the same, shifting and fleeting. They reappeared clad in rags almost identical to the previous ones, so they expected the gestures to resume, but it was a different ritual. They had taken on the mannerisms of a strange monster. A ghoulish voice emanating from their slender form. By turns, they chanted a skit straight out of a macabre circus, and by turns they made their shadow dance before them like a disjointed puppet, without them ever able to decide whether to laugh or be frightened, until they realised that their features resembled one another, to the point of being indistinguishable from them. They looked like twins whose reflection had been cast from a shattered mirror. And just like twins, they continued to play with them, varying their ghostly visits night after night.

 

And so they would never come to appreciate the rituals of bedtime. Struggling with the fixed identities that were imposed at daybreak, they stubbornly preferred the apparent clarity of daylight. For they believed that light offered more serene company. They assumed a more stable integrity, and that the world would hold its place once it was illuminated. They deliberately ignored the fact that rays always emanate from a point of darkness, and that the night would always be gentle if only they accepted that the silence they had been taught would not suffice to contain what persisted, to contain what populated their darkest depths. They clung firmly to the realm of transparency, believing that only what shines would allow them to preserve their integrity.
Soon, what they had clung to as their worldly shell would no longer offer them refuge. That cloak, draped like a garment of light to shield them from their much rich abyss, would be nothing more than an illusion. Once darkness fell, they would slip it on in their place. In a frantic dance, they would seek to express themselves through them, whilst they were unable to hear them. And as they would stretch the opacity, they would try to flee from it. They would still seek to trap what lives within a morbid stillness. The voices of others, their greetings and the whole charm of the world would offer them little alternative but to conform to a sad pallor, a diaphanous individuality. Yet they had struggled to show them that the shadow visiting them had not come from the night, but had risen from their own core. Even so, they would have clung irretrievably to that which condemned them to the blank voices, the white noise, the white void.

 

And come morning or night, no matter, light would prefer darkness. Whilst the desperate would mistake laughter for laughter and terror for terror, for them, terrors were laughter and voices were songs. And in the light that fixes beings in its gaze, they would not be able to see any more clearly. Their perceptions would no longer serve to stabilize anything. Darkness would instead compel them to remain within vital instability. And it would be there, precisely there, that something would be reconciled within them. If only they had known to hear what they were saying when they were telling them: "Yet, Light, You are blind."

 

II

Intruder Accomplice

 

There is something about Loucka Fiagan’s Yet, Light, You Are Blind that baffles me. I left the performance with the impression that any attempt to pin down what I have glimpsed there (que ce soit in images, narratives or categories) comes too late: la forme s’était déjà déplacée ailleurs au moment même où je croyais la saisir.

Presences, bodies or voices that transform, oscillating between recognisable states (the child and the bride, the clown and the ghost, the creature and the monster and the ancestor…) without ever allowing themselves to be permanently assigned to any one of them. Très vite, my description falls short because it is inadequate: it assumes that these forms are identities, whereas they function rather as unstable regimes of appearance. Rien ne reste en place assez longtemps pour devenir une figure. A single sign can be perceived as unsettling, then comical, then tender, then frightening or slightly violent, through transitions that are plus ou moins distinct. This constant shifting produces a kind of cognitive disorientation within me, and I experience not confusion, but an inability to prioritise affects. Fear and laughter coexist without correcting or neutralising one another. Gestures appear, sometimes extremely precise in their delicacy, almost attentive, but they always seem to me to be légèrement misplaced in their delivery. As if the care were there, but never quite reached its recipient exactement. This creates a kind of friction (friction?) where I feel that the gesture is received by a system that does not share its codes. The gesture then becomes something else, generating a drift. Ça dérive.

 

Who are they speaking to? Who is included in the ‘we’ (and the ‘you’) that is constantly being questioned? The dispositif seems to constantly blur the line between the position of the spectator and that of the participant. I am not simply faced with fragments of fiction: I am thrust into an unstable grammar where the pronouns themselves become zones of transition. I am no longer quite sure whether I am watching as an intruder, whether I am being watched as a witness, or even whether I was already a variation of what is currently unfolding. The motifs of monsters under the bed, childlike incarnations, or anxious and alienated inner voices then appear to me as agents of destabilisation : they render impossible any clear separation between inside and outside, between identity and variation, between security and menace. The bed itself ceases to be a reassuring domestic space and becomes an unstable threshold, a tipping point from where what is supposed to be contained begins to circulate. The performance thus employs some grilles de lecture without ever allowing them to function as explanatory frameworks. They are present, but constantly displaced, as if their very use produced unexpected side effects. On croit reconnaître des archétypes, mais ils se désorganisent immédiatement. This instability gives me a strange feeling, as if the performance never really began, nor ever ended. It makes me feel as though I am in an interval, something that could be ‘before’ or ‘after’ a resolution, mais sans jamais me laisser l’atteindre.

 

Somewhere in this instability, I begin to have the unsettling impression that, despite entering as an intruder, I have somehow become accomplice in the performance’s own destabilising logic. What persists in me is a very physical experience of misalignment between what I believe I perceive and what insists otherwise, ce qui me hante ; what I wish to understand and what refuses to be fully understood, ce qui me fuit. Yet, Light, You Are Blind does not offer an interpretation of the disturbance, it produces a disturbance in the act of interpreting, in this way of displacing not what is shown/assigned, but the very position from which I believe I can look at/define it. And I don’t perceive this misalignment as an effect to be resolved, but as a condition of perception.

 

III

 

coffee grinds in a kitchen sink

 

In the fairy tale of trauma

we have no choice

but to play all the roles

 

we are the bedroom

and the sheets and the girl

we are the metal that clanks

 

the rhythms of fright, of the future

the hand under the bed playing ghostly

tunes on the keyboard

 

we are the clown and laugh

we are the heinous one

roaming the streets at night

 

we are the childhood that dies

all at once

 

we are the adult that makes it

and performs spells and music

a disheveled bride, a boy

 

then stops abruptly. salutes.

we are the audience that gets it and shivers

and wants more

I’m in my bedroom in Cape Town. I just moved in and already my old bed’s rusted metal frame is flaking black paint chips onto the sad carpet, off-white and warped from years of use. Soft, purple light fills the room as the sun rises over the mountain. I’m not sad. There’s nothing under the bed.

 

I’m in bed in Berlin. I just moved in and already my second-hand bed’s worn, wooden frame is splintering onto the faded vinyl flooring, too colourful and too kitsch for my taste. It is just after midday but already the sky is dark. I turn on the fairy lights draped over the headboard. That feels better, though I am sad. Under the bed is a chaos of discarded belongings, left there by my ex-sibling-in-law whose shitty studio apartment I’m renting after the breakup.

 

I’m in Brussels. Loucka is sitting on their bed, in their make-believe bedroom. From where I’m sitting, the bed appears to be floating, tethered only by the scattered relics spilling out, from somewhere, from everywhere. I am watching Loucka closely. Stage lights flash on and off, though the fairy lights draped over the headboard continue to shimmer. Loucka in the light is alive, shiny, dynamic. Their torso twists and strains, every inhale screaming in their chest. Under their bed is a melancholy world of soundscapes and memories, chaos and nothing and vapour and poems. Billows of fog cascade out from under the bed, then a singular hand reaches through to play the keyboard. I didn’t even know it was there until I heard the first dissonant note. Another hand, another note. A chord. A melody screaming in my chest. Loucka is sad. Sad, but funny. Sad, but gorgeous. Sad, but surrounded by people like me, rooting for their success. The hands retreat. The fog clears. What’s under the bed no longer matters (mattress?). (Sorry.) I applaud. I’m not sad. But tomorrow I’ll return to my shitty studio apartment in Berlin with its under-bed chaos, switch on the fairy lights, unlock my phone, check how many likes my last post got, hate myself for being chronically online, take myself for a walk, complain about the weather, make up queer pop songs that I’ll sing in front of the mirror, because I still do this even though I’m 44 years old and aching for body euphoria. And I’ll think of Loucka, sad and sexy. Sad and funny. Sad and surrounded by people like me, raging against what’s under the bed.

The action takes place in a bedroom. It’s dark, but soft yellow lights illuminate the big bed and the figure in dreadlocks and a pinkish nightgown sitting at its side. They get on the bed, make themself comfortable and fold a veil with care. To the left, at the foot of the bed, are photos of the person as a little boy, a mirror, a smiley soft jellyfish and other cuddly toys: a domestic altar of silent companions. Waves of thick white smoke propagate from the edges of the bed like an impalpable horizontal cascade. Maybe a vampire will soon turn up and righteously fit into this mysterious, slightly gothic setting… Oh! There they are! A hand appears from under the bed, emerging from the smoke, wiggling its fingers and then…disappears. Am I hallucinating? No, the hand returns, accompanied by another. The smoke dissipates, revealing the hands are on a keyboard, and start playing an eerie music.

Meanwhile, the person in the gown starts reading from a sheet of paper existential questions and honest statements. They complain about being chronically attached to things. They wonder how many likes their latest post received. They claim that pain is a commodity. And they tiredly state that they are getting tired of abusing technology. I can’t help laughing: they are funny, frank, ironic, absurd… But they also make me think of my anxiety related to my online/social media life, the silly habits I haven’t quit and the things I am chronically attached to.

 

With my thoughts racing, overlapping and trying to keep up with the lines delivered, I realise I am nearing the end of this weird witty waggish comedy horror film.

 

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

“You know standup comedy is not my cup of tea, but this show was real fun. And the best part came after the jokes, when you said: ‘I am here to perform a new song’! Gosh, it was such a pleasure to see you singing, letting go, your shadow reverberating your energetic swaying moves… You totally got me! It doesn’t matter that you were not singing for real.”

 

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

9th April 2026

Today's lesson was different than usual, as the teacher spoke in French and did not use any map. They introduced us to Togo, a tiny narrow country in North-Western Africa, their home country. They asked us the name of its president, but nobody in the classroom knew it. They said that Togo had the record for the second longest authoritarian government in Africa and referred to it as a “Démocratie héréditaire”.

 

When I got home, I checked its exact location on google maps and read a little bit more about it. Here is what I found out:

 

    •  Togo is indeed very narrow, stretching between Ghana and Benin towards the Gulf of Guinea;
    •  it’s considered the heartland of Voodoo;
    •  around 40 languages ​​are spoken, but only French is official, along with two other national languages;
    •  it gained independence from France in 1960;
    •  it’s one of the world's largest phosphate producers (!?);
    •  about 30% of the population is animist.

 

However, I am not sure I will pass the Geography test. The teacher seemed very chill and aware of our eurocentric education, but I still feel guilty for knowing so little about Togo and Africa.

 

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Reporting from “La Balsamine Fashion Week 2026”.

Loucka Fiagan presented their first runway show for Blindlight on April 9th, launching their multifaceted vision on the archetype of the shadow, elegantly reflected in the golden-glossy and black-laced outfits. A fashion designer and a model themself, they enchanted (or puzzled) the audience on the catwalk with fragmented movements, syncopated steps and micro head-twists on the live music of their collaborator Louis Ramirez.

 

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Once upon a time, in the deep deep ocean, there was a solitary anglerfish who lived in an old creepy house. She did not need electricity to illuminate her home, nor a lamp to navigate the abyss, as the lantern attached to her head provided enough light. The other fish and sea creatures living nearby would usually avoid her, following the motto: “Don't be afraid of the dark: be afraid of the light!”. They were partially scared of being eaten by her, partially annoyed by her constant complaints.

 

The anglerfish had in fact developed an extreme aversion to social interactions, and was particularly bothered by flies. “Filthy nasty noisy insects!” she used to say, with her distorted, disturbing voice. She often claimed a fly had entered her glass and used this excuse to hate the whole world. Resentment and alienation were her only companions. To be fair, who likes having flies in their glass? It doesn’t really make a difference that in the deep ocean there were none.  

 

One evening, not being able to sleep, eat, or fuck, she decided to go out for a walk. But as soon as she set fin out of her place, she immediately grumbled about the excessive waterishness of the ocean, and drowned in her own irrational obsession.

 

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I had a dream last night. I was taking part in an initiation rite. A white dressed minister silently placed on the floor of the temple a dark tunic, a cloak and golden jewels. I took them one by one and slowly put them on, then began to move in a circle, solemnly. I had become a regal moth, a creature of the night: able to navigate darkness and shadows, yet attracted to the light; a symbol of rebirth and guardian of the ancestors; a messenger of obscure inner desires.

 

But my wings gradually grew heavier, they began to embrace and lull me… Before falling asleep (or perhaps metamorphosing into something else), I recalled a glimpse of what had happened before. A succession of different settings and situations, some amusing, some nightmarish; a certain dose of anxiety; the ever lasting search for identity; the thrill of experiencing impossible adventures in a comedy club or in the deep ocean; the epiphanic feeling of knowing that all this was part of me. Not just in the dream.

 

 

I often feel a distance between myself and my body, and during the show I experience it more vividly. I have frequently felt this discrepancy - as something that doesn’t quite fall into place. I can live with it without fully understanding it yet it resembles the distance or distortion they say trauma creates: it fragments memory, sense of self, and experience of others. But is this trauma or just heightened sensitivity? According to theorist Catherine Liu, trauma - and recovery - have become an obsession for the Anglo-American art industry as a function of a liberal displacement of attention from class war to personal suffering. I learned that from an interview that pops up in my feed the night after the show. Ayo, I’m tired of using technology. And sensitivity? Sensitivity kills the host, says a friend, also on instagram, speaking from experience, no theory behind it.

 

It is the bed where the body takes over the self, where we merge into someone else or where, in sleep, we rehearse other possible selves, which is why I guess Loucka invites us to what looks like an installation of their bedroom, or a palimpsest of all their previous bedrooms. It’s a bed that also looks like an altar to a former self - arranged with portraits, drawings, flowers, dolls, toys, glasses, clothes and fabrics. Once someone told me, in their culture it’s acceptable to discuss extremely intimate details of one’s sexual life, but the line is drawn at actually allowing one’s bedroom to be seen - it’s the ultimate private space and the door to it remains closed. So Loucka’s scenography feels like an invitation into the most intimate space of one’s self, that comes with certain risks of becoming self-indulgent or confessional, but that eventually turns out to be a trick.

 

Instead of confession or self-expression some sort of haunting takes place in this intimate bedroom setting. The performance is constructed as a series of switches that function as unexpected triggers - from personal trauma to political violence, from mental health issues to glass ceilings in the art world, from technology fatigue to the promises of self-expression, from the need to be seen to the social pressure to perform oneself, from autobiography to fiction, and from poetry to dance, from text to embodiment. By shining the light on different parts that often remain in the shadows, Loucka makes us face issues we are all dealing with and living through in the privacy of our inner life. These switches, presenting numerous facets of the same shadow-self (where the part contains the whole), refuse to reduce the person or the fragment to a single accessible and identifiable thing and through their arrangement speculate on the intersections of these different experiences that shape a sense of self today.

 

In the beginning a pair of hands crawls out from under the bed and starts playing a synth - it reminds me of Tim Burton’s gothic horror comedies - haunting, while remaining funny, it receives an additional meaning as the written text develops and soon makes me think of Mark Fisher’s hauntology of failed futures that keep us stuck in capitalist realism with severe consequences on our mental health. And later on I also think of ghosting - a phenomenon exacerbated by online dating, because it feels the performance ghosts us numerous times - as the fragments it is built upon don’t allow us to enter and fully comprehend it, but rather disorient us and send us back to ourselves. And then once it’s over, it continues to haunt us - and maybe that’s exactly the point.

 

On a rational level, the performance functions as a mirror where we face and interrogate our own experiences with these topics. But this carefully crafted dramaturgy of fragments also does something viscerally - it repeatedly takes us in and out of our own fragility (in the precise words of Zee with whom I try to unpack the experience immediately after the show by virtue of shared heightened sensitivity) - hence my sense of distortion throughout the performance.

 

So then I close my eyes and allow fragments to come and re-distort me

Loucka is reading a long narrative poem at rile bookstore,

books are arranged on the grass and Loucka picks up one,

I recognise the person sitting opposite me in the metro,

their eyes in their phone, not seeing me,

there’s power in invisibility, there’s fragility in being seen,

Loucka facing the audience, his eyes stopping on me,

I am seeing you seeing me,

you are seeing me seeing you seeing me,

I am seeing you seeing me seeing you seeing me.