This text is an adaptation of the curatorial text by Anya Harrison.

Soleil Triste is the second edition of SOL !, the regional biennale initiated by MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain. Departing from the first edition’s focus on decentralization and vernacular forms, this iteration takes as its point of departure a historical figure and a literary work: the Marquis de Sade and Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue.

Sade’s brief stay in Montpellier in 1776 functions less as an anecdote than as a narrative anchor. Written during his imprisonment and published anonymously in 1791, Justine continues to shape modern thought around power, morality, desire, and transgression. Soleil Triste mobilizes this legacy as a framework rather than a tribute, using it to interrogate the entanglement of body and language in contemporary practices.

Bringing together works by more than twenty artists across drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and video, the exhibition foregrounds the body as a site of tension: fragmented, exposed, excessive, resistant, sometimes desirable, sometimes repellent. Language operates alongside it, attempting to give form to what remains unstable, obscene, or unresolved.

Within this context, Vir Andres Hera presented a previously unseen version of the video installation Le Daftar, conceived specifically for Soleil Triste. The scenography draws on references to so-called “colonial” architectures in Latin America, creating a resonance between the exhibition space and the architectural logics present in the images themselves.

This presentation marked the first time that all six chapters of Le Daftar were shown together. Previous exhibitions, Les Langues de la Pythie and Seized by the Spirit, each presented only half of the work. At MO.CO., the full structure of the project became perceptible, allowing narrative, temporal, and spatial relationships between chapters to unfold in their entirety.

The installation also introduced new curatorial and installative explorations through variations in scale and display. Screens are miniaturized or enlarged, images are projected frontally or retro-projected, producing shifts in intimacy, distance, and attention. Rather than functioning as a fixed cinematic object, Le Daftar operates here as a spatial constellation.