Please, open the curtains

Our approach to pain has never been neutral. Sadness and loss were romanticised, melancholy elevated to an aesthetic. The real pain of those who were labelled ‘melancholy’ was denied and denounced. In Please, Open the Curtains, Ferenc Balcaen questions this classical view of melancholy. The scenography becomes a living body, a symbolic landscape that evokes, distorts and reconstructs the past. This creation is an attempt to reorder the deep grooves of the past and the future, so that melancholy is no longer a judgement, but becomes a space to truly feel.