Bolzano Danza
Zoé Lakhnati
This is La Mort
22.7.2025
In collaboration with Bolzano Danza
Performance by Zoé Lakhnati
At 6.30 PM
Italian Premiere
Bolzano Danza
Zoé Lakhnati
This is La Mort
22.7.2025
In collaboration with Bolzano Danza
Performance by Zoé Lakhnati
At 6.30 PM
Italian Premiere
Bolzano Danza returns to the Antonio Dalle Nogare Foundation on Tuesday, July 22 at 6:30 PM with a new performance by artist and choreographer Zoé Lakhnati.
From classical painting to pop icons: a journey through our collective visual memory in its Italian premiere. Inspired by the unfinished Mnemosyne Atlas by art historian Aby Warburg, This is la mort explores recurring forms and themes that shape our visual culture. On stage, Zoé Lakhnati assembles figures from different times and places — conquerors, heroes, entertainers — seemingly unshakable presences who, in turn, reveal their failures, their downfall, and their potential end. Using visual techniques such as glitching and morphing, images are juxtaposed, extended and transformed, suggesting new ways of reading figures, symbols, and movements. This is la mort lingers on the irretrievable gesture of an ending, asking which images accompany us, consciously or not, and how they reverberate through our bodies. Dramatized, infused with fear or theatrical excess, these representations appear and dissolve on stage, shaping a living atlas of collective memory.
This is la mort
Zoé Lakhnati presents her first solo with This is la mort - inspired by the Mnemosyne Atlas by art historian Aby Warburg. In this monumental work, Warburg attempted to visualise the recurring imagery of Western culture: Over decades, he collected depictions from art history and organised them into a kind of visual memory - 971 images on 63 large, black panels. An unfinished map of collective memory that is now kept at the Warburg Institute in London.
Lakhnati embarks on a physical and visual search for traces. She brings together iconic representations of dying bodies - from classical art and pop culture: a dancer, a bodybuilder, Jesus, a spy, Ophelia, a knight. Using techniques such as glitching and morphing, she analyses how these images inscribe themselves into the body - what attitudes, clichés, fears and gestures they leave behind. A fleeting archive is created on stage, a living stream of allusions, transformations and fictitious appearances - an ‘embodied atlas’ of collective memory in which a thousand things appear and disappear again.
Ph. Duy Laurent
About the Artist
Zoé Lakhnati is a Brussels-based choreographic artist, graduated from the National Conservatory of Lyon in the classical dance programme in 2019 and from P.A.R.T.S in 2022. Always on the move between Brussels and her hometown, Sète, Zoé has organised several interdisciplinary research residencies in Sète at the École des Beaux-Arts and at the Théâtre Molière, Scène Nationale de Sète et du Bassin de Thau since 2017.
In 2022, she choreographed the duet Where the fuck am I? with the Latin-Norwegian dancer Per Anders Kraudy Solli. The piece was produced by Mécènes du Sud and included in the Crac OCCITANIE programme in August 2022. In 2023, he co-created Gush is great with five other artists and the show has been touring internationally ever since. This is la mort premiered in December 2024 at the Charleroi Danse in Brussels, and was presented in March 2025 in Paris at La Ménagerie de Verre, where Zoé Lakhnati is associate artist for the three-year period 2024/2026. She has collaborated as a performer with Mette Ingvartsen, Mathilde Monnier, Leïla Ka and Némo Flouret and as an artistic assistant with Robyn Orlin and Dimitri Chamblas. Since 2021 she has co-organised and co-curated with Dora Pentchev the annual festival De l'impertinence in Sète (France), her home town.
Ph. David Le Borgne
Free guided tour at 5:15 PM.
45 minutes duration
Tickets
€ 12
€ 10 Under 30
€ 10 Course participants
€ 5 Under 12
Tickets may be purchased online or at the box office of the Teatro Comunale of Bolzano from the 13th of May. +39 0471 053800 / info [at] ticket.bz.it
Credits
This is La Mort
Choreography
Zoé Lakhnati
Composer
Macarena Bielski Lopez
Music
Macarena Bielski
Dramaturgy
Antoine Dupuy Larbre
Costume Design
Constance Tabourga
Lighting Design
Alice Panziera
Choreographic Assistance
Philomène Jander
Choreography And Dancing
Zoé Lakhnati
Recorded Voices
Céleste Brunnquell, Suzanne de Baecque


