failles (obligation de quitter le territoire)

One day, there is the father’s journey: Togo left for the USSR, the dream of a Western life, the fantasy of building himself alone, elsewhere, of acquiring new knowledge in another place.

Then the meeting with a loved one and the arrival of a cherished child. Belarus, 1996: a dream fulfilled. But...
1998. Belgium. Three bodies become undocumented.

Ten years of waiting. Silence. Strategies. Fear.

2003, a letter arrives: “Obligation de quitter le territoire.”
Two names: a forty-year-old father, a five-year-old child.

A document that, without knowing it, triggers a crack.

Twenty years later, it is done: the father is officially named a Belgian citizen.
The child refuses.

And the crack becomes a fault line.

With failles (OQT), Alphonse Eklou Uwantege explores these fractures as they deepen within bodies, families, and narratives. They reveal severed languages, silenced histories, and intimate contradictions born from exile and assimilation.

The second chapter of a diptych initiated with restes (offrande au million) — a ritual solo dedicated to their uncle Alphonse Kanimba, murdered during the Genocide against the Tutsi — failles shifts from mourning toward resistance and reinvention.

In a duet with their father, whose path of exile shaped the silences and contours of their story, they examine how borders, documents, and intimate wounds inscribe themselves onto bodies and travel across diasporic generations, shaping fragmented identities.

Blending documentary theatre, choreographic ritual, and sensory performance, failles invents a third territory: an immaterial space where documents become living archives, where silence becomes something we can touch, and where gestures shape a collective memory unfolding in real time with the audience.