Simon McBurney Annabel Arden

Thirty years after it was first performed, the South African visual artist William Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company breathe new life into their Faustus in Africa! Behind its nostalgia-inspired aesthetic, this irreverent reinterpretation of Goethe is as relevant as ever.

In November 2023, the Festival d'Automne hosted an audience encounter with Angela Davis in which reflections on current events in the arts intersected with global political issues. From out of this meeting came the idea of an École du soir “evening school”, in conjunction with the Centre Pompidou and in collaboration with the Senegalese intellectual and economist Felwine Sarr, The different events focus on a central question, that of a “A life in common”.

Bouchra Khalili is the visual arts guest at the 2025 edition of the Festival d'Automne. Born in 1975 in Casablanca, she lives in Vienna, Austria and works in an itinerant manner. For more than twenty years, she has been producing rigorously conceived works that function as visual and discursive hypotheses, and which take into account the contemporary issues of art and the world. Her work seeks to overturn geographies, narratives and official histories in order to restore depth and precision to reality and its protagonists. Bringing together recent works and new productions, her project entitled Astérismes (Fig. 1 à 3) takes to three theatre stages its exploration of the links between the representation of long-lost stories, performance art and moving images.

Pascal Rambert, a major author and director of his generation, finds himself once again in the company of his faithful companions in an ambitious fresco dealing with the passage of time and family ties. Intended as a trilogy spanning five years, it explores what is left behind by our commitments and ruptures.

Following on from Romances inciertos, another Orlando, Nina Laisné and François Chaignaud extend their utopic fusion of dance and music based on South American repertoires. In the company of the Argentinian singer Nadia Larcher, they compose a cosmogonic universe in which voices resonate with the breathy sound of the sackbut and zapateo rhythms.