In Lessons of Darkness , four bodies become the mouthpieces of stories that have been forgotten or wiped out. They are straddled by forces that bind them together and shake their chests. They inflate and deflate, give blows, endure the impacts.

These people dig with their bodies curved, bent over until the invisible emerges. They transform and metamorphose themselves sometimes until they disappear. In turn, they challenge, testify, help, protect, support and make visions appear.

They have fears to share, images to blur, masks to assemble, fires to summon...

Lessons of Darkness is a liturgical musical genre of the XVIIth century that puts to music extracts of “the Lamentations of Jeremiah” text on the destruction of Jerusalem. It is also the title of a film directed by Werner Herzog in 1992 about the burning of 732 oil wells by Iraqi forces withdrawing from Kuwait. In it, the director presents a vision of apocalypse as a long poem about the end of the Earth.

Betty Tchomanga's Lessons of Darkness summon missing persons, ancestors, ghosts. They speak of Darkness and from Darkness, to explore the obscure, our hidden and buried stories.