Four people take refuge in a vast valley covered in heather. Out of breath, they carry a small wooden desk and a number of objects: books by Rilke and St Augustine, a Russian grammar book and a Bible, as well as vases containing tea roses and geraniums, notepads, various pencils, photographs, a typewriter and carbon paper.
Inspired by the diaries of Etty Hillesum, a Jewish writer who died during the Holocaust, they will recreate the desk from which the artist ceaselessly sought the words to come to terms with the fate that awaited her. In this final outpost against silence and brutality, they seek to create a manual of instructions for surviving dark times, experimenting, in this unusual laboratory, with the work of artists who today face new holocausts, drawing on writing, food, dance and poetry. But inner ghosts move swiftly, and this valley is not so far removed from the world where the oppressed become the oppressors. What seemed a safe space for all questions threatens to turn into a nightmare—metaphors become reality, objects contaminate bodies—and what was once experience turns into a threat, making destruction more palpable than ever.

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