Nico, Desertshore is a bold and hypnotic dance performance inspired by the haunting world of Christa Päffgen, known to many as Nico. Set to the evocative sounds of her cult album Desertshore (1970), the piece transforms music, lyrics, and archival echoes into a striking visual journey. Dancers embody a universe of shadow and intensity, where dark beauty, esoteric visions, and raw emotion collide. From macabre dances to inner storms and ghostly solitude, Nico, Desertshore invites audiences into a dreamlike, unsettling realm—both desolate and fiercely magnetic.

In a circular space, two bodies never reach each other and bear witness to the weight of existence and the impossibility of communication. In them, one glimpses a fracture with reality, an inner scar. Immersed in an elsewhere, they speak with their ghosts and dance in their solitude. Time expands into an atemporal dimension, further stretched by sounds, noises, music, and songs performed by Nico — taken from her album Desertshore.

Desertshore lives in a state of absolute austerity, of unbearable existential anguish. Its progression reflects a humanity incapable of remedying its own fate; its solemnity is that of a scream rising from the depths of the centuries. The front and back covers of the album feature images taken from Philippe Garrel’s (1971) film La cicatrice intérieure. A daring work that explains nothing and rejects all the possible rhetorics of a conventional linear narrative.