The work

After exploring the consciences of Jessica and Angela (presented at Berthier in 2023), Susanne Kennedy now probes the psyche of Xenia. The Work retraces the life and work of a visual artist through a final retrospective that she carefully prepares before our eyes, like a testament. Accompanied by various stand-ins who will play her part, Xenia stages a reconstruction of key moments in her own life. Through this mise en abyme, Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg invent an open world populated by avatars - with identical faces and pre-recorded voices - where the same traumatic memories are played out over and over again. As in her previous staging of Einstein on the Beach, presented in autumn 2023, the German director takes us straight into a world work, a virtual-simulation-like space that abolishes linear paths and renounces the frontality of theater. Locked in this infernal loop, the audience thus navigates among the dislocated fragments of Xenia's memory and, in so doing, auscultates with her the existential anxieties that cost her her life.