8 February 2026
21 February 2026
Jérémie Niel
L’habitude des ruines
Theater
Public presentation: Friday 20 February 2026, 5:00 PM
DesPrés — 57 Principale Nord Street, Sutton, QC
Public presentation
Jérémie Niel’s residency at Espace DesPrés will be dedicated to the theatrical adaptation of Marie-Hélène Voyer’s magnificent essay, L’habitude des ruines (2023 Booksellers’ Prize). This text explores the relationship to built heritage, territory and memory, at the crossroads of documentary, fiction and poetry.
At the end of the residency, Jérémie Niel will present a festive and experiential event, featuring performers and music. Designed in direct contact with the audience, this moment will put into practice his attempts to adapt a poetic essay for the stage: an event that is both polemical and dreamlike, carried by a single breath, between cries and whispers.
Biography
Pétrus creates landscape-theater. He observes, from a distance, gauges the world but does not judge it, and attempts to draw from it an aesthetic meaning, for lack of being able to understand it. Pétrus shows no direction; he offers an artistic interpretation of the disarray faced with the multitude of possible paths. It seems to him that nothing is richer than the metaphysical vertigo of our finitude, despairing and yet beautiful because eternally mysterious. It is from this vertigo that he draws the themes that animate his experiential works and their troubled and immersive visual and sonic atmospheres, shrouded in strangeness, silence, sensuality and melancholy, which take the audience elsewhere, far from the noise.
Approach
Pétrus creates landscape-theater. He observes, from a distance, gauges the world but does not judge it, and attempts to draw from it an aesthetic meaning, for lack of being able to understand it. Pétrus shows no direction; he offers an artistic interpretation of the disarray faced with the multitude of possible paths. It seems to him that nothing is richer than the metaphysical vertigo of our finitude, despairing and yet beautiful because eternally mysterious. It is from this vertigo that he draws the themes that animate his experiential works and their troubled and immersive visual and sonic atmospheres, shrouded in strangeness, silence, sensuality and melancholy, which take the audience elsewhere, far from the noise.
Various projects are part of this approach, which unfold in two lines that intersect and feed one another: pieces of a more theatrical nature, which rely on strong and evocative texts, and more multidisciplinary or experimental creations. But, whatever the project, Pétrus approaches each new work as a blank page, as a material that is written through movement itself, through the time and space of creation, through words, breaths and bodies.
