Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977) by the French philosopher Roland Barthes is part of what one might call a discontinuous and flickering narrative. This book is made up of fragments of life that go round in the head of the enamoured, passionate subject, and these episodes are abruptly interrupted because of some circumstance, some jealousy, some missed appointment, some unbearable expectation, which intervene, so these bits of monologue break up into several pieces and we quickly move on to what Barthes calls another “figure”.

Here, Absence.

For the choreographer and visual artist Elisabeth Bakambamba Tambwe this essential book is an inexhaustible source of inspiration.

Not knowing how to wait is to confuse night with darkness. In the night, one does not perceive anything. But, unlike darkness, night promises the dawn. Would waiting for the absent one prevent one from disappearing?

On the stage, stripped of all artifice, a network is created. The 5 performers, ropes ready to lift bodies, a screen and a camera coexist in the same space. A space where emotions are raw, a space where passion and despair fight with howls of laughter or pain.

But in the perspective of a ‘solution’ to absence, what are the answers to be imagined? What safeguards can be invented?