On the 18 topsy-turvy little pieces of this Boulevard des Italiens, the characters, bright shadows of our daily lives, are upside down, lost, cloned or reversed, as if they were ex- iled from themselves and from their brothers and sisters of the street. Are they the Ital- ians on this Parisian boulevard, strangely integrated or disinte- grated, that haven’t been Ital- ian for a long time?

These peculiar miniature pic- tures, open for interpretation, are extremely modern. They connect the yesterday, today and tomorrow of the A-part Festival. They connect the Exile Pavilion with the festi- val’s theme of lost paradises, whose poster, designed by Gérard Fromanger like every year since 2010, was rejected by the mayor of Les Baux-de- Provence in 2017, as if he him- self was becoming one of the vibrating shadows of life, and so the painter was exiled from the medieval village. Or rather, this is his own lost paradise, an erotic dance of black on red, the colours of melancholy and of the most physical love, that was erased from the Prince Rainier Garden in Monaco, open to the four winds and to everyone. It’s impossible not to see in this sad form of censor- ship the symbol of a time that is now governed by fear. The fear of offending passers-by. The fear of facing the reality of bodies, our bodies during pleasure or those of migrants in makeshift camps. The fear of accepting our lapses in pleas- ure or violt_inilostent/plu imprlass="page_item page-item-219931"> r/layo- .et_pb_row -->