ORBIT

“There were no walls there, but hedges of laurel and rows of flowers; […] We were the victims of an apparently harmless foliage which, at the slightest daring movement on our part, could turn into an electric thicket, charged with such tension that it would penetrate deep into our souls.”
(from Miracle of the Rose, p. 172, Merlin Verlag)

“Mettray suddenly takes the place – not of the prison in which I sit – but of myself; and just as once on my plank bed, I embark upon the wreckage of the barge that lies, without masts and almost completely destroyed, among the flowers of the great quadrangle at Mettray.”
(from Miracle of the Rose, p. 109, Merlin Verlag)

Jean Genet (1910–1986) – repeatedly labelled a vagabond, outsider, homosexual, convict, thief, and rebel – is one of the most well-known and perhaps also most controversial writers in France. While imprisoned, Genet began writing from within his prison cell, and his literary imagination repeatedly circles around the time he spent as a teenager in the notorious penal colony of Mettray – a prison without walls.

In eight tableaux morts, motifs from Genet’s writing are explored like a landscape. Instead of a linear narrative, physical, spatial, and psychological states intertwine to form a dense dramaturgy of music, electronics, text, bodies, and video. The work engages with Genet’s aesthetics of unreliability, homelessness, and subversion: the oppressive shadows of Mettray, the existential feeling of being imprisoned and excluded, the constant interplay between reality and fiction, the inversion of values, an eroticism suspended between violence and tenderness, and the strange relationship between an incredibly rich language and a profound sense of emptiness.