In Corsica, a Biennale Finds Politics on the Dancefloor

“Nightlife culture has largely disappeared from our island over the past decade,” says Prisca Meslier of Corsica.

“The biennale offers a way to reflect on this by examining how festivity has historically shaped the social body.”

Meslier was born on the Mediterranean island, which, while an official region of France, is famed for its independent spirit. In 2020, she founded De Renava, the curatorial platform behind the Biennale Bonifacio arts festival, alongside fellow artist Dumè Marcellesi, in a shared attempt to develop the Mediterranean island’s contemporary art scene. This year’s Biennale Bonifacio, its third edition, is titled Nimu Dormi (“Nobody Sleeps”).

“The biennale explores the relationship between authority and freedom, passion and tension, law and customs,” Meslier says. “These are questions that have occupied Mediterranean thinkers since antiquity.”

The title references the Nessun Dorma aria from Turandot, the final opera written by the Italian composer Giacomo Puccini, and set in Imperial China. “The moment the aria evokes is one of suspended time, a night of waiting before a symbolic confrontation and an anticipated victory,” Meslier says. “The exhibition traces a gradual build-up of tension, capturing the sensation of waiting before entering the arena.”

Situated on Corsica’s southern tip, Bonifacio’s faded beauty is encapsulated by its citadel, a defiant reminder of the centuries of colonisation and conflict that have shaped the island.

Built on top of limestone cliffs above the marina in the twelfth century, the citadel now hosts the biennale across five venues tucked among its boutiques, alleyways and restaurants within the fortress walls.

Rather than treating nightlife as simple nostalgia, Nimu Dormi presents gathering, dancing and music as forms of shared defiance for a fiercely independent island that was occupied by both Nazi Germany and Italian fascists during the Second World War. Throughout the exhibition, abandoned clubs, civic buildings and military architecture become stages on which questions of freedom and antiauthoritarianism are repeatedly rehearsed. The operatic structure provides the exhibition’s framework, but its real subject is the political life of celebration itself.

Pussy Riot, Nadya Tolokonnikova, Putin’s Ashes, De Renava, 2026 (installation view). Courtesy De Renava

The organisers lean fully into the operatic concept by dividing the biennale into acts. The overture unfolds at L’Agora, once the sort of nightclub where caution was happily abandoned.

Today the building sits in elegant decline, embodying the exhibition’s meditation on the ways people used to come together to celebrate. 

Music echoes through it. Adel Abdessemed's Nervous plays on a battered television, the artist singing Diu vi Salvi Regina – the anthem of the 1735 Corsican Revolution – with his back turned to the camera. Around the corner, beside a bar that appears to have been attacked with a sledgehammer, Alex Foxton's untitled paintings depict wild figures pushing back against the established order.

The first act unfolds in the Cisterna, an ancient Roman basement beneath Bonifacio’s Sainte-Marie Majeure church. Here, Tony Regazzoni’s paintings Bande Organisée, assembled from remnants salvaged from derelict French nightclubs, glows in the darkness.

The second act moves into the Palazzu Publicu, Bonifacio’s former civic seat. Four Pussy Riot films – Free the Cobblestones, Punk Prayer, Kropotkin-Vodka and Putin Has Pissed Himself – play on chunky 1990s televisions beneath dusty brick arches and chipped terracotta tiles. At odds with the baking heat outside, the bunker-like atmosphere lends the works renewed urgency, becoming a reminder of authoritarian violence rather than simply historical dissent.

The juxtaposition reveals one of the exhibition’s strengths. Rather than forcing connections between artists from different generations and geographies, Nimu Dormi allows architecture to do much of the curating. The abandoned buildings are not neutral containers but inanimate collaborators, giving works concerned with protest and collective identity an unexpected resonance.

How did De Renava secure such an extraordinary collection of venues?

“We were lucky to be born in this small community. The city trusted us from the outset and provided spaces, financial support and a supportive team,” Meslier says.

“Thanks to childhood friends who are architects, engineers and construction workers, we managed to secure sites, meet conservation requirements and overcome the complexity of installing works in sensitive heritage environments. The community factor was decisive.”

Puma Camillê, Manikongo, De Renava, 2026 (installation view). Courtesy De Renava

The third act takes place at the Impluvium, a terrace overlooking the bay below. Here, Corsican artists and activists Ghjuvan Petru Graziani and Rinatu Coti present Corsica Ribella, a mirrored chamber in which layered voices and soundscapes draw on the island's turbulent political history.

By this point, the exhibition’s central proposition has become increasingly clear. Dancing, gathering and music are never presented simply as leisure. They become ways of sustaining communities whose identities have repeatedly been tested by political power. It is a curatorial argument that feels particularly apt in Corsica, where questions of autonomy, language and cultural identity remain deeply woven into everyday life.

The biennale’s finale is a group exhibition at the Caserne Montlaur barracks. Abandoned since the early 1980s and normally inaccessible to the public, the vast complex has been transformed into the exhibition’s largest venue. Its peeling plaster, echoing corridors and collapsing interiors become active participants in the staging.

Here, Nimu Dormi is at its most convincing. Rather than presenting nightlife as escapism, the exhibition argues that gathering, dancing and music can become political acts of resistance and reclamation.

Pussy Riot’s Putin’s Ashes is projected onto one crumbling wall. Opposite, a recording of Vanessa Beecroft’s performance VB48 loops continuously beside the artist's instructions to her performers: STAY FOCUSED. DO NOT BE CASUAL. YOU ARE UNAPPROACHABLE.

Seen together, the works expose the choreography of power itself – discipline, conformity and resistance performed through both the body and the moving image.

Nearby, Puma Camillê’s Rhythm of Resistance and Xica Manicongo celebrate queer Brazilian nightlife as an expression of self-determination. Mark Leckey's Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), meanwhile, revisits Britain’s rave culture with equal measures of affection and melancholy, reminding viewers that dancefloors have long served as spaces where alternative lifestyles briefly become possible and accepted.

Elsewhere, Nkisi’s Maddening Insistence evokes musical traditions disrupted by colonial violence, its three drums recalling percussion instruments confiscated across Africa by imperial powers. Corsican DJ collective Valhalla resurrect the memory of an abandoned building’s illegal rave scene through Les Conditions Étranges du Larsen, an installation of abandoned sound systems, flashing strobes and distorted audio that transforms absence into presence.

Philippe Caamano’s Flicker (Under the Collapse) turns recycled lighting units into flickering Morse code, while his quietly affecting Lonely allows two sliding steel doors to glide repeatedly towards one another before drifting apart again like dance partners who never quite make contact. Throughout the barracks, movement and repetition become metaphors for memory itself: history replayed, rehearsed and never entirely resolved.

David Noonan’s balletic Mnemosyne, shot on 16mm film and named after the Greek goddess of memory, brings the exhibition to a quieter close. Accompanied by screenprints on unbleached linen drawn from his wider film practice, alongside The King II and a bronze owl, the installation shifts the exhibition away from spectacle towards a more reflective register. It is a fitting conclusion for a biennale that is preoccupied less with nostalgia than with the ways communities remember themselves.

Philippe Caamano, Lonely, 2024, De Renava, 2026 (installation view). Courtesy De Renava

That sense of continuity ultimately gives Nimu Dormi its coherence. Although the exhibition ranges widely across geography and artistic practice, it never feels like a conventional international group show parachuted into an historic setting. Instead, Bonifacio’s abandoned clubs, civic buildings and military architecture become the connective tissue between the works.

The result is one of the more distinctive biennales currently emerging beyond Europe’s established art capitals. Rather than competing through scale or spectacle, De Renava has built an exhibition that draws its strength from place. Corsica is not simply the backdrop but the exhibition's intellectual and emotional centre of gravity.

As for what comes next, Meslier is under no illusion about the scale of the task ahead.

“The real challenge begins now. It takes time and resources to build a new, long-lasting cultural dynamic,” she says. “This means developing our team and finding specific expertise on the island, engaging audiences and gradually establishing the biennale as a meaningful and sustainable event within the region and internationally.”

If Nimu Dormi is any indication, De Renava has already demonstrated what makes the project worth sustaining. Rather than importing a biennale model from elsewhere, it has created one that grows directly from Corsica’s own history, architecture and social life. In doing so, it suggests that dancing, gathering and celebration are never merely diversions. They are ways communities remember who they are, and who they might yet become.