Residency project :

Only God and fools-
"In the age of digital intimacy, made-to-order relationships, instant communication and connected sociality, our new generation is no longer interested in the tumultuous history that forged its past. In one of these hand-made hells, Haiti, a topless woman draped in ivy, humans wade and live without archives. Without this omniscient rear-view mirror, all civilisation is condemned to going backwards and to everything that the word retrograde means.
What is the place of the artist in this unstable universe where everything is lived from day to day? Where our choices are influenced by algorithms? Gushing forth is the solution.
Only God and Fools is a two-headed monster. The first part is supposed to recount part of the life of Pierre-Nicolas Mallet, the only French soldier to sign the Haitian independence act. No history books recount this event, but they are more comfortable calling Jean-Jacques Dessalines a racist. What is the playwright's place in the face of this scorned reality? This first part sets out to meet that challenge. Like Aimé Césaire's La Tragédie du roi Christophe, we want to shed light on this little-known hero. And what better way to do this than to have access to the archives of a city that is open to the world?
The second part of the project is set to tell the story of the end of the reign of the Haitian king Faustin II. For those who don't know, in 1926 an American soldier - since Haiti was occupied by the USA from 1915 to 1934 - was recognised by the inhabitants of the island of Gonâve as the reincarnation of King Faustin Soulouque, known as Faustin I. Edmond Wirkus Faustin, blond-haired and blue-eyed, the avatar of Soulouque, black-haired and frizzy. To push the unusual to the limit, Edmond teamed up with the most powerful voodoo priestess on the island and together they ran the show until he returned to the United States. Back home, he wrote The White King of La Gonâve, which became a bestseller.
With my interests in literature, painting, music, film and history, to name but a few, I'd love to get to work on this project, which has a dual scope: artistic and historiographical. It's going to be a tough job, but it's worth the effort. Once again we come back to the place of the artist, even from a distance: what impact will his work have on his community? Why do we write? And above all, for whom?"