Burning

Burning
(Je ne mourus pas et pourtant nulle vie ne demeura)

A man piles up some cardboard boxes, jumps onto a treadmill and gets dressed as he rushes away. He tries to make sense of an environment that keeps changing, forcing him, little by little with one repetitive chore after another, to no other choice but this rat race going full speed ahead.

Julien Fournier has used the life stories gathered by Laurence Vielle to examine a work world the requirements of which confine one to absurdity. The email received at 1am that one feels obligated to respond to. The obligation to learn a new trade in just a few months. The brutality of the pressure to rise up the corporate ladder. All these professional situations that feed the slow combustion towards a burn out. Using his acrobat’s body as a revealing example, Julien Fournier exposes the suffering provoked by this insidious system, pathological in its quest for more and more productivity. Crossing documentary circus with choreographic poetry, Burning depicts a man radically changing by progressively freeing himself of these productivity injunctions.

Author and performance: Julien Fournier
Text author: Laurence Vielle
Interpretation of the voice-over: Caroline Daish
Video design: Yannick Jacquet
Sound design: Raphaël Dodemont
Lighting design: Arié Van Egmond
Model design and set design: Julien Fournier
Set design: Atelier Rododb
Video and lighting operator: Emma Laroche
Sound operator: Raphaël Dodemont, Antoine Delagoutte, Brice Agnès Photography: Jeremy Javierre
Photography and trailer: Hubert Amiel
Tour: Fanny Mayné (MoDul)
Production: L’Habeas Corpus Compagnie