Éros & Thanatos, Last Sign
2025
Performance by Emmanuelle Michaux
In Éros & Thanatos, Last Sign, Emmanuelle Michaux stages a ritual of intimacy in which breath, voice, and memory become artistic material.
A bed covered with flowers, installed in the lobby of the hotel, serves as an open site for visitors to whisper a recollection: either a memory of a departed loved one or the evocation of an erotic moment, a point of heightened presence in the body.
By bringing together these two registers, the performance activates the oscillation that Sigmund Freud identified as Eros and Thanatos: the drives toward life and toward dissolution. Michaux transforms the bed into a threshold space, simultaneously public and private, where corporeal memory and the memory of the absent intersect.
Each encounter generates a material trace: a brief poetic text, a flower, and an instant photograph. These elements form a cumulative archive in which personal testimony is translated into visual and textual form, allowing the ephemeral to persist.
The work resonates with practices that address intimacy, loss, and presence: the durational corporeality of Marina Abramović, the narrative strategies of Sophie Calle, the memorial aesthetics of Christian Boltanski, and the elemental corporeality of Ana Mendieta.
Yet Michaux introduces a distinct softness and attentiveness, creating a space of hospitality where the whispered confession becomes an offering.
Echoing Georges Bataille’s conception of eroticism as “the approval of life up to the point of death,” and Maurice Blanchot’s reflections on speech at the edge of silence, the performance considers how desire, grief, and memory shape our relation to time and to one another.
Éros & Thanatos, Last Sign examines the fragile continuum between presence and absence, inviting participants to inscribe their own memories within a shared, living archive.