L’opéra d’or
Rémi HermosoIn a fluorescent-orange liturgical rock opera, a soprano and her artist-mutant companions are consumed by desire and rivalry in a contemporary art world whose collapse will prove salvatory. Devotees of pizza, the Borja Christ, and their delivery couriers, the heroine and her wild-haired entourage worship destruction, snacks, and icons of the eternal. Amid the sumptuous ruins of plastered palaces, they annihilate malevolent forces and surrender to their carnal desires, professional tensions, and soaring lyrical flights.
Originally created in 2017, the project returns like a phoenix. After Matthieu’s passing in February 2025, Geneviève continues the project Geneviève Matthieu; the team of the living and the dead. L’Opéra d’or is revisited as a manifesto of radical freedom. Bursting with unprecedented and jubilant romanticism, the work grants a vast permission: to be exuberant, to unleash a tsunami of beauty that both shatters and caresses.
Geneviève Matthieu’s practice explores the encounter between body, space, and narrative. Through performances, installations, videos, and sound devices, she crafts environments where performers, objects, and spectators interact and transform each other. Her works examine the coexistence of temporalities, hybrid figures, and parallel worlds, turning the stage into a living space where fiction, imagination, and reality resonate with one another.
Her work seeks to make perceptible the very substance of collective and individual experience, through choral and polyphonic forms that weave together narrative, movement, and image. Each project is an exploration of the forces flowing through bodies and spaces, an attempt to reveal the invisible dynamics of desire, tension, and creation that inhabit our lives.
Creation
Geneviève Matthieu
Guest performers
Antoine Charbonneau-Demers
John Deneuve
Basile Herrmann Philippe
Special thanks to
The creation of this work was made possible thanks to financial support from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Kinga Michalska 
Sandra Lynn Bélanger