Don’t hurt me
Don’t hurt me
Don’t hurt me
Don’t hurt me


Gather up the lost and sold (don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me)
In your arms, in your arms (don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me)
Gather up the pitiful (don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me)
In your arms, in your arms (don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me)
In your arms, in your arms (don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me)


What seems impossible (…)
In your arms, in your arms (…)
I think I have had my fill (…)
In your arms, in your arms (…)


I think I should give up the ghost (…)
[…]


Give Up the Ghost, Radiohead, 2011.



“Give Up the Ghost” is the seventh track on the album King of the Limbs by British band Radiohead. Scheduled for release on February 19, 2011, the album was eventually published online — the eight MP3 tracks available to download for 7 euros — a day before, on the 18th. Yet, the thirty-seven minute record seemed to prove disappointing to their admirers after the critically acclaimed The Bands (1995) and OK Computer (1997). Was it because of this new mode of distribution, immaterial and therefore “more unobtrusive” ? Or because of a déjà vu (or already heard) feeling ? Indeed, the tracks did not feature any “rupture” nor any new aesthetic direction, but seemed to “recycle a formula that had already been explored many times before” 1 1 https://jack.canalplus.com/articles/ecouter/il-y-a-10-ans-radiohead-creait-la-discorde-avec-the-king-of-limbs . It is perhaps precisely this feeling of repetition, of being somehow stuck in a reactivated past, that was not understood.

These past few months, I have been listening to “Give Up the Ghost” a lot. How did this track land in my Spotify recommendations ? I have no clue (anymore). Was it linked to a film score I may have searched for or wanted to retrieve ? Again, no clear recollection. I interpret or understand the title “Give Up the Ghost” as “Let your ghosts go”, in an emancipatory sense. Let them live their own life. Let them pass by, and accept their presence so that in return they may leave you in peace. The band’s lead singer, Thom Yorke, reportedly composed this piece in a moment of personal fragility, caused by a separation with his former partner. Yet, are the ghosts he mentions not his own ? His “demons”, in the sense of internal haunting ? “I think I should Give up the ghost”, “Gather up the pitiful” — thus, his own pathetic, pitiful part ? Whether it evokes the remorses and state of mind of the artist or not, the song plays with a split musical line, like a faraway echo, that reflects the patterns of haunting. A nagging thing — which precisely reappears to us — springs forth, looming out from afar. This ethereal “Don’t hurt me” that hinders our understanding of the rest of the verses. Following the album’s release in 2011, an online fan perfectly analyses :

This song is the pinnacle of the message in this album. The entire span of the album, each song has a repeating rhythmic/harmonic figure that is consistent throughout the song, but evolves over time. This idea of repetition is “haunting” in itself, and relates to the idea of experiences and thoughts. What is “lost and sold” are the pieces of ourselves we have forgotten or chosen to forget, the “pitiful” our regrets, and the “impossible” our personal limits that define us. 2 2 https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/3530822107858860816/
A haunting storyline indeed, a matter of returns and re-emergences. In a more amusing or specific manner — resonating with the spectre’s own nested or hidden truth — another user comments “Is he alternating between ‘don’t haunt’ and ‘don’t hurt’ ?” 3 3 Idem . For what is haunting if not the idea of intempestivity; of a pattern, a thing, or an object, that surfaces again and, incessantly, reappears to us ? Something insists on manifesting itself and revealing a truth that we would have preferred to hush or forget. This recalling hurts. Haunting hurts because it touches on the intimate and affects a sensitive area. How can we aim for a reconciliation, or at least for some kind of relief ? Does halting this haunting process mean, precisely, welcoming it and reaching out for it ? If that is what Yorke is suggesting with his “In your arms”, it is at any rate the thread we will attempt to follow here : in order to appease (one’s) ghosts, we may have to reach out for them so that we can achieve a re–conciliation of our own.

Screenshot from the videoclip for “Give Up the Ghost” [From the Basement]. Recording of the album [2011].



Haunting or the eternal return

Not unlike the haunted echoes of Thom Yorke, director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s latest film Memoria was released in 2021, almost a year after the onset of the Covid 19 pandemic 4 4 Although the film was shot before the pandemic, the editing took place during the lockdown periods. . The first of his feature films to be shot in Bogotá, far from his native Thailand, it opens with a sudden thud in the morning half-light of a hotel room. This “BANG!” wakes Jessica up — the protagonist portrayed by Tilda Swinton — and startles her out of her slumber. We later understand that the horticulturist, who is visiting her ailing sister, is somehow possessed and even chased by this noise, which regularly strikes her at random. Later in the film, she approaches a recording engineer in order to materialise this mysterious acoustic entity. She describes her “BANG” as “grounded”, “earthy”; as something heavy and cumbersome emanating from the depths, “like the rumble from the core of the Earth”. She attempts to depict it as “an enormous ball of concrete hitting a metal floor surrounded by seawater”. In an interview on the preparation of the film, we learn that the director himself previously suffered from a similar syndrome :

I was surprised by the sound of an explosion. It was that of a bomb, at dawn, originating not from elsewhere but from the inside of my head. I later learnt that it was called the exploding head syndrome. As though someone were snapping an elastic band inside of your skull. My skull seems to be made of metal. This big noise reverberates against the brain, but instead of waking you up completely, it puts you in a semi-conscious state of listening and anticipation. […] Very soon, I got used to its rhythm. This sonic companion would arrive, true to form, at sunrise and would prompt me to listen to the noises of the city. 5 5 https://medias.unifrance.org/medias/113/164/238705/presse/memoria-dossier-de-presse-francais.pdf
At the beginning of the interview, he outlines the film’s synopsis : “I imagine a scenario in which Jessica Holland […] wakes up. She finds herself in Bogotá, drawn by a dream or a trauma that she does not remember. She walks, sits down and listens.” 6 6 Ibidem It is exactly in this form of roaming — of searching, waiting, aimless mobility with no grip on reality — and amnesia resulting from a still unnameable trauma that the interest of the film resides for us. Jessica is submerged and cannot grasp the origin (nor the cause) of this noise. Unpredictable, it can surface anywhere, at any time, in a spectral mode — “It probably sounds differently in my head” 7 7 The sentence that she repeats to the engineer during their session. . Thus, in a restaurant scene, the noise erupts, way too loud, preventing her from eating and continuing the conversation.

Memoria exudes a heavy atmosphere that breaks from the somewhat more marvelous aspects of the director’s previous films 8 8 Among others, we can mention Oncle Boonmee, Tropical Malady or Cemetery of Splendor, as they all materialise the ghost in a more oniric manner (as a divine presence, a spectre in the jungle, or within Nature itself). . Just like Jessica, the spectator is listening and also anticipates the potential eruption of the noise in the present. Something in the landscape — unidentifiable — is watching us from a distance. This feeling of being watched by an external entity — presumably remote in time but which is nonetheless arriving — is symptomatic of the dynamics of haunting 9 9 Along the same lines, in his book Spectres of Marx, Jacques Derrida invokes the figure of the helm-wearing knight whose look we cannot see — obscured as it is by the helm’s visor — yet who still is looking at us. See Spectres de Marx, ed. Seuil, 1993, 2024 reedition. . The(se) ghost(s) from afar notably manifest themselves in the still landscape shots, often slightly off-center and which do not follow the characters’ progression 10 10 We can also underline the confusion or the adequation of the landscape with the main protagonist. When Jessica is driving through the mountains, the folds and sinuosities of the valleys that slide in the background of her car window seem to be flowing directly from her own head, to emanate from her psyche. . The forest, the city, the jungle — as though omniscient — seem to be calling on us.

The haunting thread only starts to unravel three-quarters of the way through the film, once Jessica ventures into the forest on her own. In search of flowers, she has a chance encounter with Hernán, a fisherman who dwells in the hills. Their interactions swiftly take a surprising, confusing turn as the latter voices inconsistent sentences. He intertwines times — “I remember that… in space… We had been looking for… and then… I was born” — and seems to have a singular connection with nature when he asserts that “in a few minutes, the sun will be shining on the mountain”. A few moments later, not directly inside but outside the frame, we can perceive the reverberation of a light. The all-knowing fisherman seems to belong to another time or some intangible regions. Thus, when Jessica asks if she can watch him sleep — as a proof of his humanity —, he lies down and keeps his eyes wide open, silent, as though he were elsewhere. Who is she looking at ? Is she dealing with a ghost ? Jessica attempts a “How was death ?” — “Not bad”, he answers.

Screenshot from the film Memoria [2021] by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Hernán sleeping.


Only when she enters the fisherman’s house is the symbolic relationship reversed. What we thought so far to be the ghost — this sound originating from the horticulturist’s head — is upturned or becomes embodied when Jessica, as she walks around the room touching objects, takes possession of Hernán’s memory — or rather becomes its spokesperson. All of the sudden, she turns (back) into a child and, frightened, describes a night of violence or abduction that we cannot accurately situate. “That time, I was hiding under the bed, with the others. We could hear everything. They were searching for us. They looked for us all night long. I am here [under the bed]. My mother […] she touched and uncurled my fingers one by one. I laid my head on the pillow.” At the end of this chilling recollection, Hernán concludes, talking to Jessica : “Why are you crying ? They are not your memories”. Could the kind of haunting so dear to Memoria be linked to the stakes of previously unformulated narratives ? Is an individual memory — obstructed because of its political and systemic implications — being turned into collective memory ? Jessica acts here [in Hernán’s words] as an antenna, in charge of picking up and broadcasting hushed voices. Through her, the narrative becomes embodied, reactivated, and she therefore enables a first liberation of memories. This mode of being, through permeation by lived experiences beyond her understanding, could explain how she was first overwhelmed. Because of too many unexplained silences, her skull implodes.

Screenshot from the film Memoria [2021] by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Scene inside the fisherman’s house.


When interviewed about the film’s preliminary research and preparation, Apichatpong Weerasetakhul explains : “When we talk about Colombia, the political memory is obvious. However, I did not feel that I was capable of going into this direction because I don’t have any roots there. I simply listened to the stories of various people : psychologists, archeologists, engineers, activists, miscellanea collectors, etc. I see this film as a tribute to a country from the perspective of a stranger. But perhaps one can feel the political rumble under the surface.” 11 11 https://medias.unifrance.org/medias/113/164/238705/presse/memoria-dossier-de-presse-francais.pdf . He may have experienced this “political rumble”, although through a distinct lens, in Thailand, which has been in the throes of repeated coups for decades 12 12 This is also one of the reasons why he was drawn to shooting in a foreign country. .

Avery Gordon, in a chapter of her book Ghostly Matters 13 13 Chapter 4, “The other door” in Avery Gordon, Matières Spectrales, B42, 2023 (or. ed. 1976). This is one of the first books from the spectral studies field to reflect on the epistemological implications of the ghost. , focuses on enforced disappearances during the military repression in 1970s Argentina. Taking as her starting point the role of psychoanalysis in the country and literary narratives from the magic realism genre, the sociologist reconsiders how these losses affected those who stayed behind. For the researcher, the disappearance caused by abduction is even more violent than death, since it does not allow for any definite fixation or contemplation alongside the deceased. The family — or those who remain — “are stuck in the present”. She develops : “Death is conjugated in the past tense, has been pronounced. The disappearance, on the other hand, is an ongoing process, still operating in the present. We do not know what became of those people : ‘Help the disappeared, do something for them because they are somewhere.’” 14 14 Ibidem, p. 120. . It is this impossibility to localise nor anchor — bodies, memories — which haunts and traps the ghost in an eternal past that keeps reoccurring in the present. The ghost insists on finding a place for itself and, finally, a home.



Listening to our ghosts

The motif of the antenna or radar which channels the voices — and the memories — of the past is also at play in the film DAW by French-Algerian director Samir Ramdani. Its title harks back to the first workstations dedicated to the treatment of computerised audio tracks : “Digital Audio Workstations”. These stations, now miniaturised and integrated to computers as softwares, make it possible to optimise mixing and play with sound digitally. We are once again dealing with waves being captured and potentially broadcast. Samir Ramdani, just like Apichatpong Weerasethakul, resorts to science fiction and magical realism so as to summon past entities. At the beginning of the plot, a barefoot man clad in a suit appears in the middle of a football field and meets a group of teenagers hanging out after their boxing class. Out of nowhere, he exhorts them :

“Get up, we’re going to be late for the demo. —What demo, sir ? —The curfew for Arabs… we won’t let this happen to us [talking to the boy in front of him]. 15 15 Spoken in Arabic in the film. —Drop it sir, Ali doesn’t speak Arabic.”
This manifestation — Who could this man be ? Where is he coming from ? Why is he speaking to them ? And, above all, what is he talking about ? — opens a rift in the mechanics of time and triggers a paranormal phenomenon. A few moments later, night falls and a blinding blue light sweeps the four children away into an elsewhere. The neighbourhood’s residents then retrospectively recount in the local news : “—Everything stopped. The car’s dashboard. The cars around me. The street lights. Everything, it all stopped. It was as big as this [talking about the size of the comet with their hands]”. Or, questioned again by a policewoman about the teenagers’ disappearance : “There was this kind of big light, very large. —And what was this light doing ? —It was dancing.”

Screenshot from the film DAW by Samir Ramdani [2023]. A blue light appears in the sky.


DAW pictures a twofold investigation whose threads interconnect : a supernatural one — the sudden arrival of an extraterrestrial will-o’-the-wisp — with a more human one — the disappearance of four teenagers. Where were they taken to ? To which temporal faultline ? In order to solve the enigma and track down the victims, the police call on Leyla, a boxing instructor whose psychic talents may be the only way to contend with the intangible. “The light, I saw it. The children, I think I know where they are. Follow me.” she tells policewoman Samira as she exits the ring.

Through an incantation above a magic basin, witchy Leyla opens up a passage that transports the two women to an underground car park. This unknown labyrinth leads them to an electromagnetic tree, a kind of central entity to which the teenagers are connected. “What are they up to ?” Samira asks Leyla, “—They are speaking with ghosts.” The latter then adds, about the ghosts that reemerge in the memory of the children :

“They manifest themselves in our world because they are suffering. Their pain is ancient. I think they suffer from something that has not been repaired. They are lost. They won’t rest until they get what they want.”
Enabling ghosts to obtain redress could be a way for them to retire and (at last) leave us in peace. This form of intempestivity or exhortation that reoccurs in the present brings the words of Vinciane Despret to mind, as she describes in her book Our Grateful Dead “a past that will not pass”. According to her, “we can recognise the symptom [of this past]”, this breach into the event, “by its particular modes of resistance to erasure.” “It intempestively resurfaces and does so in an eruptive mode that ruptures the continuity of the real.” 16 16 Vinciane Despret, Les morts à l’œuvre, ed. Les empêcheurs de tourner en rond, 2023. In order to stop this time hiccup, the essayist proposes that we try :

“to understand what they are asking for, or rather what they are claiming for, the object of their sadness, the grounds for their resentment or their anger, what was not done for them — a missing burial site ; rituals that were not performed ; an unrepaired injustice ; something or someone that was not honoured.”
In Samir Ramdani’s film, this injustice is tied to the absence of recognition — and in a wider sense to the silencing — of the victims of the French government’s repression following the demonstrations of October 17, 1961 17 17 “In October 1961, in the midst of the Algerian War of Independence, the French police killed hundreds of civilians who were peacefully demonstrating on the streets of Paris to protest against the curfew imposed on all Arab citizens. Many were thrown into the Seine. This story unfolds 60 years later.” Samir Ramdani, in the synopsis of the film DAW. . It is only when this memory is addressed and perpetuated by the current generations that the ghosts will be able to find rest.

“All my life I have wanted to come home but my journey has never ended. I immediately understood what an Algerian was worth in France. I was working hard all week in a country that tortured my own. I was a syndicalist when the war began. I was collecting information. I was recruiting. I was finding weapons and I would take part in every strike. Every demonstration. We were on the bridge. We wanted to be free. The French police were a pack of enraged dogs. It was Prefect Papon who ordered the massacre. I have been crying ever since that day. Ever since, I am falling from that bridge, I keep falling. This story, I must pass it down to you. Finally I can leave. This story is ours.”
Memoria and DAW offer a similar reflection on haunting, which they situate at the articulation between personal narratives and a vaster collective memory. They both invite us to preserve, heal and perpetuate past narratives, to maintain our vigilance so that they do not slip into the “monster of oblivion”.



Learning to live at last

Fabien Vallos, in one of his conferences on the question of haunting at the École Photographique d’Arles (CRAI ENSP) 18 18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79Jskkrcekk , describes an over-saturation of presences in our present. According to him, there would be an inadequacy between these countless presences — this heap, much too substantial — and our capacity to receive and digest them. How can we finally manage to live — in our time — if we are submerged and almost asphyxiated by these spectres of the past ? This process of learning to be involves the (re)appropriation or the reconsideration of our spaces. In order to secure our own fulfilled unfolding in the present, we have to negotiate with these surrounding entities. In other words, cohabitate, “remain together” and deal with them, in the same home. Accepting to share space with these co-presences eventually allows for a better life and a re–conciliation with oneself. We must hold space for them and unlock their narratives in order to be. For the philosopher, there is haunting when violence occurred — defined as the overuse of power on the other, as a result of an imbalance in the relationship. This ethic of hospitality and the welcoming of the other may pave the way for a first form of reparation.

In the same vein, artist and researcher Euridice Zaituna Kala designed an installation for the “Tactical Specters” exhibition at La Ferme du Buisson 19 19 Conceived in partnership with the Viva Villa programme and held from March to July 2025, the exhibition gathered sixteen artists. Using the text Our Grateful Dead by essayist and philosopher Vinciane Despret as a starting point, the exhibition focused on contemporary notions of haunting and the demands our deceased ones may formulate. Euridice produced her Rendition piece within that framework. See : Vinciane Despret, Les morts à l’œuvre, les empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2023. . Revisiting the codes of 19th century industrial architecture, a wrought-iron structure hosts the projection of her film Rendition. A Moment in Between 33 Years of Protest., shot in Mozambique between 2023 and 2024. The artist zooms in on the story of a group of locals sent as workforce to East-Germany (formerly known as the GDR) by the FRELIMO 20 20 The Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) is a communist party founded in 1962 to fight for the independence of the country, which was then under Portuguese colonial rule. Until 1990, it remained the sole party in power in the People’s Republic of Mozambique. Samora Machel headed the party for sixteen years. government at the end of the 1970s. Back in their country ten years later, part of the salaries promised by the young Mozambican state were never paid. For almost thirty years now, from the date of their return, these workers and their descendants have been demonstrating to claim their due. They gather every week on a plaza in Maputo to dance and reactivate the struggle of their disappeared kin. The artist spent her childhood in front of that park, observing from her window their weekly protests. Beyond a performative exercise, this revivification or active updating of past struggles significantly involves certain manners of taking care of the memory of the deceased.

By re-incarnating these bodies, their memory and their repressed voices, the Maputo protesters demand justice and keep the unsatisfied grievances of the deceased alive. The video installation — through its wrought-iron structure — draws a bridge between distinct memories : the Mozambican memory and the paternalistic memory of the French factories in XIXth century Noisiel, which also exerted their own form of stranglehold and retention over their employees. Euridice Zaituna Kala gives a voice to the archive of French manufactures by way of the reactivated Mozambican struggles. It is specifically this form of cleft that Fabien Vallos alludes to, when he describes our relationship with time. According to him, violence — caused by a dissymmetrical overuse of power — produces a trauma that engenders a trace, a hole, which protests, hampers, and collides with our present time.

Euridice Zaituna Kala, Le peuple au pouvoir, le pouvoir est dans la rue, 2025, production by Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Ferme du Buisson with the support of ¡Viva Villa!, courtesy of galerie Anne Barrault, view from the “Tactical Specters” exhibition, © l’artiste et Adagp – Paris, 2025 I © photo Émile Ouroumov

Euridice Zaituna Kala, screenshot from the film Rendition, featured in her installation at La Ferme du Buisson [2025].


A land of deeper shade

From the second half of the 1990s, with the emergence of spectral studies (some even refer to a spectral turn in humanities), the spectre comes into play as a new method for acquiring knowledge. A figure positioned on the edge between worlds 21 21 In a nod to the title of the book by Mohamed Amer Mezian, Au bord des mondes, Vers une anthropologie métaphysique, ed. Vues de l’esprit, 2023. and occupying different temporalities — past, present and upcoming —, the spectre is able to teach us and to shift the way we envision the world. Here, we understand the world as located at the junction of reality and the real. We make a distinction between reality — which we shape and have a hold on — and the pre-existing real — which occurs (to us) externally and which we have to negotiate with. Intangible, impalpable, present albeit physically absent, the spectre invites us to open the frontiers of our apprehension of the real. It alerts and orients us, underlining because of its state the unnameable areas of holes and clefts across history. This is precisely how it relocates us — personally as well as collectively.

At the end of her book Ghostly Matters, Avery Gordon mentions writer Raymond Williams’s concept of “feeling”. She quotes his beautifully wrought phrase which perfectly explicits the action exerted by the spectre on time : “A structure of feeling articulates presence; it is an exchange entangled with loud silences and seething absences” 22 22 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford University Press, 1997, p.128. . She then develops this idea of mobilising absent-presence :

A structure of feeling accurately matches the conception, or sensitive knowledge, that is characterised by the entangling of the subjective and the objective, of experience and belief, of feeling and thought, of the immediate and the general, of the personal and the social. 23 23 Ibidem
The spectre lodges itself specifically at the articulation between all these collective, political, yet all the more intimate notions. Since they affect us all, death and the practice of mourning are tethered to a common — though often unreflected — experience. Publik Universal Frxnd’s piece A land of deeper shade, unpierced by human thought features 23 resin-moulded crows — in shades ranging from translucent white to carmine red —, which seek to evoke the eminently personal and sometimes distressing practice of mourning. The crows — ominous symbols in Western culture since the Middle-Ages — alternatively croak at random in the exhibition space.Some of them, equipped with MP3 players, broadcast extracts from the Idumea, a meditative anthem on death and the afterlife 24 24 Also registered under number 47b in the 1991 edition, the Idumea is part of the Sacred Harp repertoire, a tradition of religious song that solely uses a cappella human voices. And am I born to die ? To lay this body down ! And must my trembling spirit fly into a world unknown? A land of deepest shade ; Unpierced by human thought ; The dreary regions of the dead, Where all things are forgot ! . They whine, sing and talk to us, as a reminder that this upcoming entity — death — is never too far away. “A land of deeper shade, Unpierced by human thought ; The dreary regions of the dead, Where all things are forgot !”. Latent and diffuse, it lurks about, keeping an eye on us and our loved ones. Publik’s last crow, tinged in deep purple and placed at a slight distance from the others, is meant as a tribute to one of their closest friends who passed away too young.

Publik Universal Frxnd, A land of deeper shade, unpierced by human thought, 2024, courtesy of the artist, view from the “Tactical Specters” exhibition, Ferme du Buisson, 2025, © photo Émile Ouroumov


Akin to a sentinel, it keeps watch, perched on the interstice between worlds in order to keep us awake. It alerts us and, by its presence, prevents our collective memory from sinking into slumber.



_

A graduate of both the “exhibiting contemporary art” MA and the research MA on experimental photography at La Sorbonne University, Eva Foucault is an independent curator. She previously worked on the last two editions of Salon de Montrouge : first as a curatorial assistant to the Work Method duo on the 67th edition, then as a curating programme officer on the 68th edition, under the curation of Andrea Ponsini. In 2024, she helped Thomas Conchou with the documentary preparation of the “Tactical Specters” exhibition. In parallel, she has been developing various writing and exhibition projects, including “Semblable à un petit os de seiche” (Bétonsalon, 2023) and “Bleu pétrole” (Non-Etoile, 2023). She recently joined the collective office La Païva, and is a member of the c-e-a and pôle emploi fictif associations.

  1. https://jack.canalplus.com/articles/ecouter/il-y-a-10-ans-radiohead-creait-la-discorde-avec-the-king-of-limbs  []
  2. https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/3530822107858860816/  []
  3. Idem  []
  4. Although the film was shot before the pandemic, the editing took place during the lockdown periods.  []
  5. https://medias.unifrance.org/medias/113/164/238705/presse/memoria-dossier-de-presse-francais.pdf  []
  6. Ibidem  []
  7. The sentence that she repeats to the engineer during their session.  []
  8. Among others, we can mention Oncle Boonmee, Tropical Malady or Cemetery of Splendor, as they all materialise the ghost in a more oniric manner (as a divine presence, a spectre in the jungle, or within Nature itself).  []
  9. Along the same lines, in his book Spectres of Marx, Jacques Derrida invokes the figure of the helm-wearing knight whose look we cannot see — obscured as it is by the helm’s visor — yet who still is looking at us. See Spectres de Marx, ed. Seuil, 1993, 2024 reedition.  []
  10. We can also underline the confusion or the adequation of the landscape with the main protagonist. When Jessica is driving through the mountains, the folds and sinuosities of the valleys that slide in the background of her car window seem to be flowing directly from her own head, to emanate from her psyche.  []
  11. https://medias.unifrance.org/medias/113/164/238705/presse/memoria-dossier-de-presse-francais.pdf  []
  12. This is also one of the reasons why he was drawn to shooting in a foreign country.  []
  13. Chapter 4, “The other door” in Avery Gordon, Matières Spectrales, B42, 2023 (or. ed. 1976). This is one of the first books from the spectral studies field to reflect on the epistemological implications of the ghost.  []
  14. Ibidem, p. 120.  []
  15. Spoken in Arabic in the film.  []
  16. Vinciane Despret, Les morts à l’œuvre, ed. Les empêcheurs de tourner en rond, 2023.  []
  17. “In October 1961, in the midst of the Algerian War of Independence, the French police killed hundreds of civilians who were peacefully demonstrating on the streets of Paris to protest against the curfew imposed on all Arab citizens. Many were thrown into the Seine. This story unfolds 60 years later.” Samir Ramdani, in the synopsis of the film DAW.  []
  18. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79Jskkrcekk  []
  19. Conceived in partnership with the Viva Villa programme and held from March to July 2025, the exhibition gathered sixteen artists. Using the text Our Grateful Dead by essayist and philosopher Vinciane Despret as a starting point, the exhibition focused on contemporary notions of haunting and the demands our deceased ones may formulate. Euridice produced her Rendition piece within that framework. See : Vinciane Despret, Les morts à l’œuvre, les empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2023.  []
  20. The Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) is a communist party founded in 1962 to fight for the independence of the country, which was then under Portuguese colonial rule. Until 1990, it remained the sole party in power in the People’s Republic of Mozambique. Samora Machel headed the party for sixteen years.  []
  21. In a nod to the title of the book by Mohamed Amer Mezian, Au bord des mondes, Vers une anthropologie métaphysique, ed. Vues de l’esprit, 2023.  []
  22. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford University Press, 1997, p.128.  []
  23. Ibidem  []
  24. Also registered under number 47b in the 1991 edition, the Idumea is part of the Sacred Harp repertoire, a tradition of religious song that solely uses a cappella human voices. And am I born to die ? To lay this body down ! And must my trembling spirit fly into a world unknown? A land of deepest shade ; Unpierced by human thought ; The dreary regions of the dead, Where all things are forgot !  []