With Maldoror, Julien Gosselin returns to the work of Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño—whose novel 2666 he adapted ten years ago—placing it in dialogue with the work of Comte de Lautréamont, who, at the age of twenty-two, wrote the savage, violent and hallucinatory visions of Les Chants de Maldoror.

Drawing on these two writers, seemingly worlds apart, yet united by the same lucidity in the face of crime and violence, Maldoror plunges us into hell through a triptych on a scale equal to the magnitude of the evil confronted by the texts that inspire it. From the Chilean dictatorship to the fictional biographies of writers pledging allegiance to Nazism, this journey leads us to the point where literature ceases merely to bear witness and risks becoming complicit.

Having previously adapted—in epic productions infused with video and electronic music—works by Don DeLillo, Thomas Bernhard, Michel Houellebecq and Marguerite Duras, Julien Gosselin, theatre director and artistic director of the Odéon – Théâtre de l’Europe, comes to Comédie de Genève for the first time with this production, created in the Cour d’Honneur of the Palais des Papes for the Festival d’Avignon 2026.