Éric Baudelaire's 'When Night Falls' at CCA Berlin Explores Connection in Darkness

Éric Baudelaire's exhibition 'When Night Falls' at CCA Berlin, on view from 12 June to 29 August, features 12 carved cherrywood sculptures and a five-channel video installation. The sculptures, displayed on metal tables, are tactile and titled in Braille, based on works by students at Paris's National Institute for Blind Youth. The video 'Quand le soir tombe' (2026), shot in six French locations, explores themes of connection and darkness. It includes segments at a school in La Défense where students learn stock trading, at the French National Metrology and Testing Laboratory showing product safety tests, at the UNESCO General Assembly with delegates from 193 nations, at an Ivry-sur-Seine storage facility with restorers and statuary, and in a Normandy town during a national election vote between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. The exhibition is inspired by Roland Barthes's 1976–77 lecture series 'How to Live Together'. The show's guiding metaphor is operating and creating productively in darkness, suggesting that night has begun to fall on the world but that connection and interpretation can be redemptive.