„on reading #foucault’s #lusagedesplaisirs feat. a very slow #bohemianrhapsodyremix [aka The Rules of Attraction, opéra concrète]“, 2021 (commissioned by Volksbühne Berlin as part of the series Next Waves Theater, hosted by Armen Avanessian & Enemies)

This opéra concrète grants you entry to a slippery audiovisual territory. Here a group of friends is invited to squat Richard Wagner's monument erected out of vibrations and words. Freely navigating the open field of a house party, each guest captures a fragment of shared experience through the lens of their smartphones that is short-circuited in real-time with Wagner’s music and libretto in a 15-hour live stream. Building a disorientating infra-world of queer joy, desire and excess within a sonic-dramatic construction, this experience constitutes a non-narrative, group-determined, self-making opera with its own collective agency. Cruising alongside Wagner’s compositional technique of the ‘endless melody’, it exhausts pre-sculpted attentional forms and expands the horizon on energetic expressions. By flooding unforeseeable, corporeal, real life pleasures over a vast opera with immense range and complexity, it liquifies Wagner’s rigid and stable monolith into a stream of forms, inferences and informations flowing without hierarchy; making room for you to jump in and float along. (Selin Davasse)

This event is organised by Alexander Fahima, as part of the Associate Artists Programme.