In 1976, Roland Barthes delivered his first lecture series at the Collège de France. Through a reading of five literary texts representing different social topoi and their associated ways of life, Barthes explores his notion of “idiorrhythmy,” a form of sociality that mediates the dialectic between each individual’s personal rhythm and the structure of the group. Envisioning a monastic community gathering to brave the night, Barthes notes: “To be strangers to one another is inevitable, even necessary and desirable—except when night falls.”

With When Night Falls (2026), French artist Éric Baudelaire returns to Barthes’ concern. Taking nightfall as a metaphor for an intensified condition of alienation, Baudelaire’s film weaves together seven seemingly disparate sites into a testament to both the splendor and cruelty of social life: Europe’s largest flower farm in Soria, a trading school in La Défense, the National Laboratory of Metrology and Testing, a UNESCO general assembly, a sculpture storage facility in Ivry-sur-Seine, a polling station in Normandy, and the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris. At a time when one war after another floods our screens, the metaphor of nightfall points not just to the nightmarish conditions of the present. It also reiterates a familiar yet increasingly pressing question: What forms of the social can still be envisioned, experienced, and desired?

Expanding on the themes of Baudelaire’s film, the public program turns to the notion of infrastructure as a conceptual lens and political tool. If by infrastructure we mean the material conditions that enable and maintain social relations in a particular shape over time, what does it mean to bring these conditions and their contingency to light? Taking up Marina Vishmidt’s proposition of an infrastructural critique that treats these conditions as “amenable to re-arrangement through struggle and different forms of inhabitation and dispersal,” the public program presents four positions of thought that attend to the infrastructural through two intertwined questions: How do infrastructures operationalize forms of dispossession and neglect, and how can they be resignified and repurposed for other ends?

With contributions by Erika Balsom, Éric Baudelaire, Aria Dean, Jan Kunkel, and Isabel Millar

Curated by Jakob Grüner and Nan Xi