The camera is rolling. On a table adorned in white cloths, dozens of white flowers and greenery, surgical tools and wine, a performer is caught in nylons filled with apples. She gnaws at one, drooling. A tape player plays fragments of quotations from french literature on desire—Gide, Duras, Cixous. The performer cuts herself out, stops the tape, pulls the magnetic tape out, cuts it. “La Fièvre” is a 30 minute theatrical reading of a letter. “La Fièvre” is a live performance of a cinematic recording.

The performer drinks wine, pulls herself out of the nylon, breaks vases, spills wine, and stains the white cloths. The letter unravels: from trying to locate generations of trauma in an ear to musings on the process of making and desiring our making and desiring. “La Fièvre” is a physical reaction to illness, a cue that the body is fighting an infection. Yet desire, also makes us feverish.

“How many acts of wounding were needed to finally be receptive to your affection?” she asks.

The performance ends when she nails the remains of her garment on the wall and a women dressed in black comes in the frame, placing a new tape in the tape player. Fragments of Debussy’s rendition of Verlaine’s La mer est plus belle que les cathedrale plays. The women in black warps the eyes of the other, delicately letting two drops of wine fall onto her masked eyes. The drops drip down her chin onto her neck.

“La Fièvre” is an ongoing research into the intersection of desire and trauma, into queer female lust and theater, while also being a decadent cinematic installation, floral arrangement, and ephemeral theatrical monologue.