Kintsugi
"Japanese art that consists of repairing and enhancing flaws with gold."
One Christmas Eve in a small French town. An emergency room waiting area. Three people are sitting there: Victor, Soledad, and Dalia. They don't know each other, and yet... Inspired by true stories, these are three lonely souls whom fate has decided to bring together.
Creation
In 2026, a new play was in progress: Kintsugi. Drawing inspiration, once again, from encounters and documentaries, this piece tells the story of a public hospital and highlights three interwoven life stories: those of caregivers, patients, and their companions. One Christmas Eve, in the same waiting room, a prostitute, a homeless person, and a mother whose underage son is between life and death cross paths.
It was during workshops and theater performances I created at the EPM in Marseille, a juvenile detention center, that I met some of the "characters" in this story. On my 34th birthday, after a performance, I was about to leave when, in the prison courtyard, behind the bars, still-childlike faces appeared. They began to sing. I watched them, my throat tight. No one dreams of being locked up at 14. They asked me to go to the sea and swim there “for them.”
It was by gathering the various accounts from the young people, as well as documentaries and community organizations, that I understood they all converged on a place of healing: the hospital. It would therefore be the foundation and the “roof” that sheltered these stories.
Then this question arose: How do we “repair” broken beings? Kintsugi is an ancient Japanese art that reassembles the fragments of a broken object with gold. I feel that Kintsugi makes the public hospital a living echo of this philosophy: caregivers and compassionate individuals repair humanity and its vulnerabilities. They invite us to contemplate, in the heart of suffering, what the brilliance of life can also be. This theatrical project thus celebrates resilience, weaving together voices sometimes forgotten into a poetic manifesto of reconstruction.
