LEAVING VEGAS | Soto Labor & Nadjim Bigou Fathi

Within the framework of Nouveau Grand Tour – a project by Institut français Italia (IFI) and the French Embassy in Italy
With the support of Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, Académie de France in Rome – Villa Medici and La Bellone

Leaving Vegas is a docu-fiction and a speculative investigation that sets out in search of the anonymous performers of the dance scene in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Uccellacci e uccellini (1966). Using methods that are sometimes academic and sometimes speculative, a variety of materials – archives, interviews, and voices – are collected and considered as multiple points of access for telling the story of an invisibility. In the form of a performance, Leaving Vegas becomes a public making-of in which to question the relationships between authorship, authority, and posterity. Who produces knowledge? For whom is it produced? At what cost? And who benefits from it?

Nadjim Bigou Fathi is a designer, visual artist, and performer. He is interested in the emergence of boundaries – from walls to words – and the normative dynamics that underpin them. Through curatorial, sculptural, and performative projects, he creates situations in which audiences are involved in questioning the power relations that bind them.

Soto Labor is an author, visual artist, and performer. Influenced by hip-hop as a means of emancipation, he explores different forms of storytelling and performance, examining the conditions under which discourse is produced and exercised. He creates narratives, tales, poems, and rap texts as critical tools.