Je cherche mes clés je trouve des loukoums (I look for my keys and find Turkish delight)

For three weeks, Michèle Pralong followed the work of Cindy Van Acker, who gathered her creative accomplices and all kinds of materials produced over the years with one sentence in mind: “What if we stopped rushing from one creation to the next, without ever taking a breather or examining what has developed over time and research?” It all started with an invitation in 2022 for the company Greffe, led by Cindy Van Acker, to take up residence at the ADC Pavilion for three weeks to recycle existing choreographic elements rather than create something new. This moment was titled Occupation / Frayage topologique. The residency was regularly open to the public and offered new, transdisciplinary, performative proposals as well as meals prepared and offered by the company. The pavilion thus became a place of intense life, creation, exchange, choreographic and political research, reflection on the conditions of artistic production and encounters with the audience. Dramaturge and author Michèle Pralong, who was also a guest, decided to record as much as possible of what she heard during this residency. She then edited all these oral snippets and arranged them into a montage that became a book: Je cherche mes clés je trouve des loukoums.

→ Éditions Héros-Limite, 2025. In French.

Dance First Think Later. Encounter between dance and visual art

This publication is a follow-up to the festival exhibition Dance First Think Later – Encounter between dance and visual art, which took place in Geneva in the summer of 2020. The book documents the exhibition with a wealth of iconography and enriches it with a critical, theoretical and historical perspective on the works and the project. Twenty-two artists are featured in unpublished texts by authors working in museums, festivals, art schools, as independent critics or artists, under the direction of Olivier Kaeser. The biennial event Dance First Think Later explores the intersections between dance, performance, visual arts and the moving image. Arta Sperto, which organizes and produces the exhibition-festival and publishes the book, develops a transdisciplinary orientation that connects the operating mechanisms of the visual and performing arts and, beyond that, the respective characteristics of museums/art centers and theaters/festivals. This orientation is motivated by the support of artists whose transversal practices collide with the way culture works, which is still mainly organized by sector, whether at the level of cultural policy, institutions, financing or the media. Based on the works, the book offers numerous thought-provoking impulses for a transversal approach in contemporary art.

→ Édition Arta Sperto, 2025. Bilingual French/English.

Tanzen fallen fliegen

This debut novel by Jochen Heckmann tells the story of Julian, who wants to become a dancer. Far from home, he rediscovers himself in Paris. There he immerses himself in the world of ballet schools, dance studios, the stage and, above all, the local nightlife. At the same time, his father is struggling to find his way back into normal life at home on the edge of the southern Black Forest. Set in the events surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Jochen Heckmann's debut novel poetically and sensually plays with characters, times, perspectives, and events that span the 20th century in Germany and focus on the fateful year of 1989.

→ Querverlag, 2024. In German.