« "The people" as a unity, identity, totality or generality, this simply does not exist ... because there are finally only coexistent peoples. » George Didi-Huberman - What is a People ?

Fundamental and devoid of meaning, this people has imposed itself on us as a vain unity but that is always sought after.

We are choreographers, and for this project we have gathered a team with different practices, because the subject requires it. Opium is thought of as a geography of the desert (see Hannah Arendt "The Promise of Politics") and this desert is not sterile, it produces forms, words.

So we have chosen accumulation* as a figure of speech.

This sensation is the driving force of OPIUM.

Associated with the Théâtre de Nîmes for the 2014/2015 and 2015/2016 seasons, we were able to articulate this project in different stages.

* Accumulation : Materials of the same nature, of the same type that are juxtaposed without any other link. Accumulation reflects an impression of disorder, chaos, profusion (it allows neither progression nor construction of meaning).

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A photographic and journalistic approach

First step with the reporter Julien Cernobori and the photographers Anya Tikhomirova and Soraya Hocine around the notions Oasis and Desert borrowed from Hannah Arendt :

«(..) The increasing loss of the world, the disappearance of the in between. This is the extension of the desert, and the desert is the world under which conditions we move (...). The danger is that we become true desert dwellers and feel at home there. »

Hannah Arendt - The Promise of Politics

The challenge was to gather an alphabet of materials (interviews and photos), a snapshot of these worlds, always halfway between aridity and strange remission.

We went to meet different worlds and different bodies : The Lumière et Vie Family Pension (Nîmes), Quartier Libre (Nîmes), the Collège Condorcet (Nîmes), the French Bullfighting Center (Nîmes), the Foreign Legion ( Aubagne), the François Tosquelles Hospital Center (Saint Alban sur Limagnole), but also the highlands of Lozère, Paris, Rouen, etc.

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