As director, I, accompanied by actress Edith Scob and harpist Hélène Breschand, draw the texts of Antonio Gamoneda’s Book of Poisons with bare hands.

Gamoneda’s text is troubling and fascinating, the sound of the words remaining on the skin once the spectator’s gaze is lost beyond the black-and-white images on the wan moon of a projector. The staging is intentionally rudimentary and the props-a lamp and retro-projector, on the margins of modernity-serve the text, creating a fusion of image-instants, shadow pantomimes and inexpressible experiences. The singularity comes of the fact that this primitive approach is itself what carries the story, without needing any other artifice than a source of light, bare hands and imagination, in order to model forms, to create a texture and visual outpourings, sprung from a text which suddenly becomes a dreamlike or infernal magma.