Inside an immersive display inspired by Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, the reference points move and the tables are turning. Part carceral architecture, attraction park and mini festival, Jour de fête presents a space where the limits between observation, participation and direction are blurred.

Constructed as an architecture of surveillance, the panopticon allows the person in the centre to watch all those incarcerated without being seen. An emblematic image of self-controlling, here it questions contemporary mechanisms of surveilling, power and freedom. In this display, the audience remains unstable, fragile: who is looking at who? Who watches? Who performs? Who surveils?

Biography

A graduate of the École cantonale d’art de Lausanne, nomadic and without a fixed address, Anne Rochat is an artist whose preferred medium is performance. Her practice focuses on her own body, through which she explores endurance, resistance and physical limits in a wide range of contexts.

Jean Rochat, an economic historian and graduate of the universities of Paris-Sorbonne and Geneva, has been collaborating for many years on writing projects, including with other artists and collectives. Together, they initiated the performance and research series Histoire d’O, centred around the element of water.

They have performed underwater in SpO2 (2021) and inside a glacier crevasse in Hearing 0/917 (2024). They have also collaborated on exhibitions exploring questions of nature and landscape, at the Kunstmuseum Solothurn in 2025 and for Art Môtiers in 2026.