If absence fans the flames of desire, and desire drives action, we don’t need to dig deep to understand Serge Jongué’s intense creative energy. Born in France to a Guyanese father and a Polish mother in 1951, Jongué’s story is riddled with holes and mysteries. A half-brother he never met, murdered by Nazis while trying to photograph them during the occupation of Paris. A journalist mother who escaped a concentration camp with papers from a Polish friend. A father with a double life who lied about his origins and left behind a hollow story full of half-truths, told through film negatives.

Hamstrung by doubts, torments and the feeling of never being able to say it, to settle, to be present with others, Jongué explores his “personal mythic triangle” between France, North America and the Caribbean, searching for signs to allay his quest. His life story—accumulations of fragments, sparse morsels of reality, of talismans, of objects—is laid out here with brio by Ferrand, who, rather than trying to solve the mysteries, simply presents them, like an acknowledgement of our collective helplessness faced with the chimeras of our own existence. Jongué, A Nomad’s Journey is a celebration of the immaculate power of absence and mystery.

Naomie Décarie-Daigneault
Tënk's Artistic Director

Presented in collaboration with