Julien Gosselin | Maldoror

A few years ago, Julien Gosselin was drawn to a book by Roberto Bolaño, “Distant Star”. It follows a narrator looking back on his youth in Chile and his fascination with a poet whose brilliance gradually reveals something much darker. This figure – artist, pilot, murderer – embodied a disturbing idea: that artistic talent and extreme cruelty might coexist, even nourish one another. At the time, Gosselin wanted to bring this story to the stage but couldn’t. He wasn’t ready to confront the proximity between creation and evil.

Later, as he returned to these questions, he encountered Joris-Karl Huysmans’ “Là-Bas”. In it, Huysmans challenges the limits of naturalism, arguing that reality cannot be reduced to what is visible or material. There is something else – an obscurity, a spiritual dimension, a hidden layer of evil – that cannot be explained, only faced. This idea stayed with Gosselin, especially as he read Bolaño’s “By Night in Chile”, where literary gatherings unfold above hidden torture chambers. Culture, intellect, poetry – everything seems to hover just above an abyss.

At that moment, he returned to Lautréamont’s “The Songs of Maldoror”, which he had first read as a teenager. He rediscovered a text of overwhelming violence and intensity, structured around a demonic figure who moves through acts of barbarity and excess. It is a text that doesn’t describe evil from a distance but generates it, forcing us to look at it directly. In a way, it belongs to that same lineage as Bolaño and Huysmans: a literature that searches, relentlessly, for what lies beneath the surface.

Gradually, these works began to speak to one another. Bolaño’s fictional writers entangled with dictatorships, Huysmans’ search for a spiritual realism, Lautréamont’s furious descent into darkness – all seemed to circle around the same question: where does evil reside, and how can art approach it without dissolving into it?

Then, in 2025, during a visit to the Cour d’honneur at the Palais des Papes, Gosselin was shown something unexpected: beneath the stage, a vast, abandoned pit, plunging some twenty metres into darkness, filled with mud. No one had entered it for years. Standing above it, he immediately thought of those hidden spaces he had been reading about – the cellars in Bolaño’s Chile, the unseen layers beneath appearances. Under the stage, there was this void, silent and material, like the unconscious of the theatre itself.

As part of his Fellowship at Onassis AiR in 2026, Gosselin will spend dedicated time in Athens to conduct further research and write parts of the play.

Maldoror will premiere at the Festival d’Avignon in July 2026.