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

On the occasion of the exhibition opening of When Night Falls, artist Éric Baudelaire will be in conversation with London-based film scholar and critic Erika Balsom on 13 June 2026 at 3 pm, in the Chapel of Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.

The two have been in an ongoing conversation over many years. Their thinking first crossed paths in Balsom's 2017 essay "The Reality-Based Community," which took Baudelaire's film Also Known as Jihadi (2017) as an example to reassert the political stakes of observational documentary and its relation to the real. Taking the five-channel video installation When Night Falls (2026) as a starting point, the conversation returns to these questions at a moment when AI-generated imagery has given them renewed urgency—asking, as Balsom once wrote, what it would mean to "affirm the facticity of reality with care, and thereby temper the epistemological anxieties of today in lieu of reproducing them," and, how a film might take up "a reparative relation to an embattled real."

Temps mort, or "dead time," has long named a particular disposition in cinema: an attention to non-event and duration that opens a distinct relationship between image and reality. In her lecture, Aria Dean sketches out another manifestation of temps mort, which refers not only to the use of real time and non-action, but to the overall endeavor of presenting cinema produced from within real-time simulation. An increasing number of artists and filmmakers employ game engines, 3D modelling, and real-time simulation tools toward non-fantastical images that attend to the histories of both cinematic realism and experimental materialist cinema. Approaching the temporality of these images brings into focus the relationship between subject and world within them that in turn gives shape to what might be called a cinema of “unrealism.”
 

In 1976 Roland Barthes delivers his lecture series "How to Live Together" for the Collège de France. He examines, via various literary examples, different communal structures and the means by which the individual maintains their freedom, independence and idiosyncratic existence: an idiorrhythmy of everyday life. The apartment block, the sanatorium, the confinement cell, the desert island, and the ascetic community become sites for exploring the boundaries between self and other. Using novelistic fragments, Barthes allows us to glimpse how distinct fantasies of domestic and communal life underpin our visions of political subjectivity. 

Taking up this challenge today in an era of both peak alienation and over-proximity, we may explore how various strange social bonds are forged. Modes of individuation and modes of community building are attempted via the most extreme methods, by turns sadistic and masochistic. Relations to the other, the body and the law are framed via differing forms of abjection and absorption. What they all have in common is the orbit around a certain sexual non-rapport: a regime that we could call “patipolitical”—a politics of suffering. How has this libidinal infrastructure been built and how can we formulate an ethics in its wake?