The Illiterate

A woman sits at her worker’s table in a watch factory in Switzerland. She is Agota Kristof. In her drawer Agota has a sheet of paper and a pencil. When a thought takes shape, she writes it down. The woman does not know the local language, but she writes and thinks in that unknown language, which is hostile to her. In the factory, anyway, it is difficult to speak to one another in any way: the machines make too much noise. You can only talk in the toilets, smoking a cigarette at great speed. The woman tells her story; it is a story of exile, uprooting, of atrocities. She would like to say something about herself, but to do so she must invent masks. And so, unexpectedly, we find ourselves inside her novels. The woman becomes, in turn, Lucas, Claus, Sandor, Line… But only for a moment. We find ourselves in the middle of a dream or at the center of a memory dense with her childhood; only in this way can the writer tell us what she knows. But then we always return to that room, with the ticking of the clocks and the sound of the present. The language in which the woman speaks to us was not chosen by her. It was imposed on her by chance, by circumstances. She will do as best she can. It is a challenge. The challenge of an illiterate. Dates: - Saturday 28 November at 8:30 pm - Sunday 29 November at 4:30 pm