Justine Fabre’s performative narrative activates and completes Chloé Arrouy’s scenographic installation, created within the framework of the exhibition Cruel Choreographies, which examines the ambivalence of torture as a phenomenon. In the Middle Ages, basement spaces and public pillories served as sites of inflicted physical suffering, functioning as instruments of punishment. Today—within an era of systematised penal frameworks and regulated crime control—a contemporary narrative of unexpected modes of inflicting pain returns to the underground.

Inspired by film scenography, Chloé Arrouy’s work reconstructs the semblance of a bourgeois interior in which materials, objects, and gestures regain their symbolic force, transforming a décor shaped by hierarchy, ownership, and inheritance into a scene of quiet necessity for survival under conditions of oppression. In dialogue with quasi-utilitarian objects, the performance farfalina farfalina unfolds as a narrative permeated by an atmosphere of tension—characteristic of the feeling that there is something about to happen or just happened. 

The domestic interior (or perhaps a “demo” space borrowed from a furniture showroom?) oscillates between the domestic, the psychoanalytic, and the authoritarian. Activated through Justine Fabre’s performative gesture, it opens a space for reflection on contemporary systemic models—such as modernism, patriarchy, and social hierarchies—of which this work becomes a symbolic embodiment.

Justine’s performance is accompanied by a dramaturgy text that reconstructs the architecture of an evening from childhood: the glow of the television, a mother’s voice, the cigarette smoke of a stepfather—transforming a domestic ritual into a quiet scene of memory. This monologue slips between inner and outer worlds, employing objects, absence, and restrained scenography to evoke the moment of leaving a room without moving, retreating into an inner landscape shaped by stories, history, and the small acts of violence embedded in everyday life.

When: Friday, 30 January 2026, 5:00 PM
Where: Krupa Art Foundation, Rynek 27/28
Duration: app. 1h
Tickets: 35 PLN / 25 PLN | buy your ticket now