"Summoning the invisible as a powerful source of imagination"

The three of you co-direct the Venedig Meer company. What production methods are you developing together?

As co-directors, we operate with a system of distributed authority aimed at our individual and collective fulfilment. We each develop our own areas of expertise and responsibilities (acting, directing actors, writing, staging, administrative and financial management, coordination, dramaturgy...) and put them at the service of the projects and research that inspire us.
We try to develop production methods that adapt both to the realities of the projects we undertake, but above all to the human beings who make them happen. It is a challenge because the cultural sector and capitalist society in general generate a great deal of violence. We try to ensure, as best we can, that the messages conveyed on stage do not diverge from our production practices; we seek a certain consistency between the stage and the office.

L’invisible n’est pas inexistant is your sixth production; is there a common thread running through all the works in your repertoire?

Since its inception, the company has focused its work on fiction, autofiction and the filters of reality. Florence Minder’s writing blends a well-informed and documented perspective on our society with an approach that is both funny and tragic, intended to be accessible to as wide an audience as possible. We almost always work with multiple languages on stage.

Julien Jaillot’s direction of the actors results in a very ‘vibrant’ performance that aims to celebrate the unique qualities of each performer and to allow the language to resonate in its meaning and theatricality.
The common thread is a desire for theatre as a place of physical encounter deeply rooted in the present moment of the performance, but also a belief in the power of fiction and its necessity in a society prone to the appropriation of bodies and narratives by dominant ideologies. We wish to help keep the experience of life open and multifaceted.

You advocate for a more environmentally friendly way of working and, in particular, you calculated the carbon footprint of your previous show, *Faire quelque chose* (*It’s all about doing it, isn’t it?*). What were the results?

We advocate a vision of sustainability rather than a zero-carbon approach, which we currently lack the resources to implement. When we calculated the carbon footprint of the previous show, the first question was which measurement tools to use: electricity consumption (rehearsals + performances), materials, team travel, leveraging sectoral and regional expertise, adaptability of the set on tour, sourcing, sharing of resources, well-being at work, promotion of the local area, etc.
To speak of ecology is to speak of precariousness and power relations. Every initiative must be assessed in the light of the resources available to develop it. For example, one might have the means to use less polluting materials but adopt an artistic or production approach that undermines the human ecosystem in which it is rooted. Conversely, one might buy components online whilst developing and promoting local skills and making a region more resilient.

We must assess how each cultural actor can do their bit. We cannot ask artists in precarious situations to meet the same criteria as artists, institutions and administrations with substantial resources. There is a proportional responsibility.
The gravity-fed generators from L’invisible n’est pas inexistant will not equip every theatre in the future, but they are part of a process of re-examining our practices and contribute to the vision of sustainability. The cross-sectoral production that these generators have necessitated can in itself already be passed on by Manon Faure to productions looking to get started. Ecology is not just a matter of figures but of re-evaluating our priorities and the hierarchy of our perceptions.

On the scale of daily (over)consumption, our generators do not produce much electricity. But if we create using them, then it is our perceptions that shift. That is what interests us artistically and as human beings.

‘The Invisible Is Not Non-Existent’ is an anti-capitalist, environmentalist, feminist show that denounces abundance and the overconsumption of energy. Is this show your response to the world we live in?

We’re not comfortable with the notion of a ‘response’. No one has actually come to ask us that question! Rather than a series of answers, our work has always sought to pose questions, to spark reflection and discussion, and to open up the imagination so that we might think about our society and its future in a different way. Whilst technology features heavily in this project, it is also a sensitive work that modestly attempts to offer an imaginative perspective on ongoing reflections:

• What constitutes a resource for the future?
• Are there invisible resources working on our behalf?
• What connections do we need to forge in our daily lives to secure a future for the next generation? 

• What roles do adults play for children who are not ‘theirs’?

In terms of aesthetics, the encounter remains frontal; this is partly a matter of safety in this first attempt. However, the gravity lamps offer an alternative and rare perception of time and energy.

One of the inspirations for your show is the Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers. She notably advocates the idea that all our actions must be guided by the desire to build a better future for the generations that follow us. Is your show a proposal for this future?

It is, in the sense that we show characters who are building a space of solidarity for themselves. But the play is not a utopian vision of the future. What our characters are experiencing is something that people have already been living for a long time on this planet. For example, we highlight friendship as a resource for the future, or an adult-child relationship that is not parental. We also talk about death in a way that is neither tragic nor one-dimensional, but concrete, and where humour has its place. We do this based on our life experiences and what we observe around us. We simply say ‘it exists’ despite the prevailing narratives.

What are the characteristics of the three characters – Moira, Eva and Rinus? Why do they speak different languages?

At first glance, our characters aren’t in a good position! Rinus has an incurable illness. Eva is trying to survive mentally and financially in a normative world. Moira is a seven-year-old girl who has to grow up in a world that is destroying itself. And yet these three have managed to carve out a joyful space for themselves. Because they are clear-headed enough to know that their situation is nothing out of the ordinary on this earth: we live, we survive, we die. But it’s all about how you do it, and theirs is… electrifying!

On the subject of language: Lode Thiery, who plays Rinus, is a bilingual Flemish actor from Brussels. Florence Minder grew up in Switzerland with a mother who did not speak her language, Swiss German, to her because it was frowned upon to speak a dialect in a French-speaking region. From this formative experience, she retains a desire to let languages and accents live. All her plays feature the original languages of the performers who wish to speak them, with translations provided as surtitles for the audience. Moreover, every language and every accent conveys its own poetry; it would be a great shame to deprive ourselves of that.

Is *The Invisible Is Not Non-Existent* an ode to the imagination, to our knowledge, to everything we cannot see but which creates thought and beauty around us?

We live in a society where visibility is a political issue and almost an obligation at both a civic and personal level. It has also become very difficult to exist without visibility in the professional world. Visibility is ambiguous; it comes with its own demands and is also a privilege of the dominant, who uphold its codes and meet its validation criteria.

Like gravity, we believe there are resources invisible to our eyes today that will be obvious to our eyes tomorrow. This requires taking risks, opening our imaginations to explorations that may sometimes seem absurd, letting go of the notion of immediate success, and daring to trust the unknown, even if it provokes fear.

Do you think imagination is essential today?

We know that it is in the realm of the imagination that the great battles of the present and the future are being fought. The major military and tech powers are investing heavily in artificial intelligence. For now, they know they cannot lock entire populations away in dungeons. To dominate them, they must lock them up in other ways. And this is what we have been witnessing for years: the weapons of mass destruction of the imagination, which include, amongst other things, the attention economy and censorship through information overload.
What collective emancipation movements have highlighted is, first and foremost, that dissent comes at a very high price, but also that co-optation is immediate: pink-black-greenwashing, etc. We must devise ways of coming together that break this co-optation and protect our imaginative and neural capacities in the physical sense of the term.

For this production, you worked with engineers to develop a gravity lamp that illuminates certain scenes. What do you think the light generated by this universal force to which we are all subject represents?

It represents something fascinating. The sensation and materialisation of a mass of energy that will always be beyond us. We have developed a sort of ‘spark’ aesthetic: it is a small amount of light, yet at the same time, that small amount of light exists. On a universal scale we are nothing, and yet... we are here.
The events of life, however, remind us magnificently and harshly of this tension between life and death, between micro and macro. We try to sketch out the idea that it is in transmission—whether filial or not—that the essential may emerge. How can we understand what we are doing here? When the weight of our gravity generator hits the ground, the light goes out. It is very moving because it is over. The time allotted has come to an end. We were born. We will die. Our time is limited. It is perhaps to engage with this precariousness that we created this gravity-fed device.

• 19.09—05.10.2024
• THE INVISIBLE IS NOT NON-EXISTENT
• Florence Minder / Venedig Meer