Maison Chaos

Joëlle Sambi

“Rape is not the threshold of the house. It is the smell that lingers everywhere, from the cellar to the attic.”

In this performance, in dialogue with musician Sara Machine, Joëlle Sambi – a writer, spoken-word artist and Afrofeminist – commands the stage with magnetic intensity. Armed with her incisive writing, she addresses a long letter to “an old friend, a dear sister” – an intimate account that runs from childhood to the shattering violence of a rape. Her words surge forward with unflinching precision, never slipping into voyeurism, balancing restraint with the urgent need to speak of what violence does to both body and identity. For chaos seeps into everything: it scrapes at the skin, it crushes all resistance. Saved by writing, Joëlle Sambi dismantles the injunction to be resilient and upends our image of the victim. Speaking to destroy, speaking to rebuild…

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Performance in French, with English surtitles.

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