When Night Falls

Éric Baudelaire

CCA Berlin – Center for Contemporary Arts


Curator: Fabian Schöneich, invited to France by Trampoline in 2023, with Nan Xi


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Trampoline is pleased to support Éric Baudelaire’s solo exhibition, When Night Falls at the CCA Berlin – Center for Contemporary Arts. This support follows a series of artist encounters organised in 2022 for Fabian Schöneich, Executive & Artistic Director of CCA Berlin, through Trampoline’s curators invitation programme.

 

The show premieres an eponymous five-channel video installation in the basement of the exhibition space, accompanied by sculptural interventions on the ground floor. The central video work unfolds across five screens, tracing seven seemingly unrelated locations—from Europe’s largest flower farm to the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris. Baudelaire weaves these disparate sites into a meditation on the splendor and cruelty of coexistence : a testament to the beauty and absurdity of how we live, work, and organize our collective lives at a moment when the foundations of society feel increasingly fractured. The exhibition takes its title from Roland Barthes’ final lecture series, How to Live Together (1977), in which he observes : “To be strangers to one another is inevitable, even necessary and desirable—except when night falls.” Held against that threshold, the work opens a space to reflect upon the conditions we create for living together, ones that preserve difference and dignity, as darkness settles in all around us.

Éric Baudelaire, When Night Falls, 2026. Exhibition poster. Designed by Pierre-François Letué.