Un Jour sans heure

Between August 2024 and March 2025, I visited the Maison de Nicodème, a palliative care center in Nantes, on several occasions, each time accompanied by one of my friends and fellow artists from the theater and song project L’Enveillée: Sylvain Manet, Carole Verhaeghe, Victor Parente, and Roxane Palazzotto. We met with patients and their families, sang for them, and recited poetry to them, weaving song and verse together. We experienced moments of life and shared connection of rare intensity, richness, and tenderness.

Often, a poem would emerge from an encounter with a person. It would come in the moment, through spoken word. That evening, I would write it down on paper and give it to them the next day—or to their family if the person had passed away in the meantime.

From these encounters—the images and states of presence that inhabited them, along with my reflections on the passage of death and on grief—other texts were born. Together with the texts that sprang forth in the moment at the Maison de Nicodème, they make up the collection titled Un jour sans heure.

It is presented here in the form of a unique exhibition, where the written word meets the living texture of handmade paper.

I experience poetry as speech, and I invite you to read it—or to speak it—within your inner chamber, within your own day.

Juliette Kempf