Kubra Khademi, Caroline Gillet

One’s own room inside Kabul

Archive 2025

Installation

Théâtre de la Concorde
novembernov 14 – 19

1/3

Creation 2025

1h

Prices €8 to €15
Subscribers €8 and €15

Text and sounds Sumaia Sediqi (Raha). Direction Caroline Gillet and Kubra Khademi. Audio storytelling Caroline Gillet with Anna Buy. Set design Kubra Khademi. Video design anonymous artists and technicians in Kabul. Lighting design Juliette Delfosse. Spatialized sound design Frédéric Changenet – Radio France. Additional sounds from Kabul Benazer. Technical direction François Lewyllie. Production Maria-Carmela Mini.

Produced by Latitudes Prod
Coproduced by Festival d’Avignon; Théâtre de la Ville–Paris; Festival d’Automne à Paris; Les Halles de Schaerbeek (Brussels); euro-scene Leipzig Festival; Théâtre Molière Sète – Scène nationale Archipel de Thau; Radio France
With the support of the DRAC Hauts-de-France – French Ministry of Culture and Open Society Foundations through the Afghanistan Cultural Fund
An immersive experience adapted from the original France Inter podcasts Inside Kaboul and Outside Kaboul by Caroline Gillet
Residency support from Le Fresnoy – National Studio of Contemporary Arts and La Ménagerie de verre
With the support of the City of Lille as part of an artist residency
Special thanks to Behishta Rahmaty, Juliette Prouteau, Anne Fontanesi, Thierry Cabrera, Florence Sarfati, Matthieu Beauval and the teams at France Inter, the Beauvaisis School of Art, and ceramicists Amandine Brunet and Valérie Dubuisson

Théâtre de la Ville–Paris and Festival d’Automne à Paris are co-producers of this performance and present it as a co-presentation.

One's own room inside Kabul is a visual and sound-based work by Caroline Gillet and Kubra Khademi, offering a sensory immersion in an Afghan living room. The audience follows the thoughts of Raha, a young woman cut off from the world in the wake of the Taliban takeover.

Initially designed as a podcast, Inside Kabul was created by journalist Caroline Gillet and is based on the voice messages of two young Afghan women she collected over the course of several years. The project was then turned into an animated film before becoming a performance piece, conceived in collaboration with visual artist Kubra Khademi and a team of anonymous videographers from Kabul. It brings to the forefront the complexity of the emotions felt by Raha during her forced isolation. The set evolves over the course of her testimony, by means of a video installation and lighting design which reflects the gradual restriction of freedoms. The scenography pays tribute to Rabia Balkhi, a tenth-century Persian poet who was murdered for freely expressing her love and poetry. Echoing the violence of the order to stay at home imposed on Afghan women by the Taliban, One's own room inside Kabul looks into resilience in the face of oppression and prompts each of us to reflect upon the fragility of freedoms around the world.