Performance: Tout ce à quoi je dois m'attendre

"Born in Tunis and based in Marseille, Nelly Slim is an author, performer, and therapist. She adapts her novel *Entre ici et avant il y a la mer* (published by Hystériques & Associées, winner of the 2025 Gouincourt Prize for Francophone Lesbian Literature) into a polyphonic performance exploring ghorba (exile), loneliness, and longing—the consequences of being uprooted—as well as… whales. The novel navigates between two shores: on one side, childhood in Tunis; on the other, the beginning of an intense adult life in France amid college, racism, activism, and the gaze of men. The narrator, a diver, immerses herself among marine creatures—some threatening, others reassuring—to find her bearings and build her identity “between here and before.” Alone on stage, with Elsa Cecchini as her dramaturg, she blends reading, sound, movement, and ritual practice to bring to life queer bodies—those who migrate and arrive in France, then seek, from one shore to the other, to rebuild themselves. A work that gives form to exiles and identities, at the intersections of feminism, the queer movement, and decolonial thought. Imbued with the shared emotions of those whose lives have been upended by exile, the performance poetically becomes a collective memory."

Text: Isaure Do Nascimento