La Fleur

Dancers, performers, and DJs move through Hamburg and Paris carrying out artistic fieldwork. At the centre are the places where many of the performers live and work: St Georg in Hamburg, which remains a highly politicised area, and the precarious Chateau Rouge district of Paris’s 18th arrondisement. The latter is also the backdrop for Emile Zola’s »L’Assommoir« (1877) and »Nana« (1880), two of his novels dealing with the impossibility of the poorest of the poor ever escaping their permanent downwards social spiral. In LA FLEUR, the novels and their characters are the entry points for discussing these issues but above all for developing strategies to counteract such fates.