Occupations

What are the new politics of love? How much transgression and politics does the act of love engage? After Absalon, Absalon!, Séverine Chavrier turns her attention to intimacy and female desire in Occupations.

Based on a vast corpus - from Duras to Ernaux, via Jelinek and Debré - the director continues her exploration of the tensions between visible and hidden, through a set-up that questions the relationship between ancient and contemporary, digital and bookish, museification and ordinary everyday life. She draws a singular cartography, where feminist resistance doesn't always take the form of productive empowerment, but sometimes a dangerous abandonment, a temporary anomie. Who today can give in to passion to the point of becoming its morbid plaything? At what cost, in terms of danger and underlying activism? Séverine Chavrier sees writing and theater as a performative act of bodily reappropriation, capable of reconfiguring contemporary modes of love and desire, outside Western normative frameworks. For her first collaboration with the Festival d'Automne, the artist returns to a more intimate, pared-down - but no less powerful - form.