Édouard Levé. Works. Self-Portrait. Suicide

Ten people speak in the past tense about a certain man without mentioning his name. Over the course of an hour, they discuss various topics concerning him. In the final edit, statements alternate between them, sometimes contradicting each other. These testimonies compose an ambiguous portrait. Despite the many stories told, his identity remains unclear, his name and face unknown. He could be anyone. The director filmed ten of his friends answering questions about him. The instruction was: 'Speak about me in the past tense, in the third person. Imagine I have been dead for ten years. You are answering an investigator.'

A catalogue of 533 unrealized, often unrealizable artworks. Brief affirmative statements in the first person. The author's final text, an account of the life of his friend who committed suicide - ten days after submitting the manuscript to the publisher, the author himself took his own life. These three essential books by French photographer, conceptual artist and writer Édouard Levé (1965-2007), along with his mysterious and unique personality, form the material for a new production by Viktorie Vášová, who previously presented an adaptation of Barnes' "The Noise of Time" at MeetFactory.

Levé's simple, suggestive, yet subversive and radical literary style poses questions that are strikingly theatrical and scenically inspiring: Does an artwork come into being through its physical realization, or at the moment it is mentally conceived? How does the artistic solitude in which a person absorbed in thought finds themselves contrast with theatrical work, which is by nature founded on collectivity and collaboration? In what way does the absurdity of language speak to the essence of life itself? How do chance, ignorance and perceptual accidents relate to precision, truth and creative freedom?

In other words: "An original and gripping production full of interwoven, unpredictable events in which the fates of characters connect in unexpected ways."