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

Event

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.

Discover more

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

CAT. C

€ 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

Purchase

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

In collaboration with

Main sponsors

Technical sponsor