LECTURE - « Macaques », Hédi Tillette de Clermont-Tonnerre

Tiresias is transformation, boundary, contradiction. He is old man and adolescent, knowledge and wandering, light and darkness. He is what I do not know, and yet what resembles me.

I started writing a story: that of a cemetery keeper with eternal youth.

Not ageing comes at a price: living among the dead, accompanying them to the other side, fulfilling their last wishes for them by borrowing their appearance — gestures left undone before disappearing in peace.

A kind of shapeshifting ferryman, whose work diary is never empty, a benevolent presence to tame death. During my wanderings through history, searching for transformed bodies, I was struck by Kae Tempest's rewriting of the myth of Tiresias.

These words tore me away from the fixed image of a blind old sage to reveal a shifting figure, traversed by multiple identities. Tiresias is transformation, boundary, contradiction. He is old man and adolescent, knowledge and wandering, light and darkness.

He is what I do not know, and yet what resembles me. His voice opens up an intimate space. I see fragments of forests close to my childhood, both dirty and flowery. My adolescence reappears there, silent. Words tear through the fields, like arrows.

It's impossible to dissociate this poem from music: electric guitars, bodies in motion, shedding skin like a snake. This reinterpretation reveals a fluid, elusive identity. Change is not comfortable here, but necessary.

In this wandering, Tiresias touches upon buried truths: those of a fragile, unstable humanity that, despite everything, tries to hold on.