Program

Sergio has decided to die. But the writer is not driven by despair; he has made the calm, lucid decision for the end of his life to be a thing of beauty. He spends the last days of his life commuting between Geneva and London to plan his final chapter with the two men he has chosen to seal his fate: a doctor and specialist in euthanasia and a young necrophiliac. One will end his life, while the other will have the body sent to him on the psychiatric ward. From the dialogue between the men it soon becomes apparent that death here is an endeavour, a plan, a project with a future.
The French-Uruguayan writer Sergio Blanco has attracted worldwide attention in recent years with his autofictional plays. He tends to create male characters as his alter ego, and subtly explores subjects that challenge fundamental elements of our social self-perception. In Cuando pases ..., a meticulously planned suicide and organised necrophilia become two sides to the same (ultimately romantic?) desire. The dominant forces in man — Eros, the sustaining life instinct, and Thanatos, the destructive death instinct — merge inextricably. With his mixture of brilliant dialogue, guitar music and video, Blanco succeeds in creating a darkly ironic essay on a superfluous life in which death’s only rival is beauty.