SANS RÉSERVE 2026 – KEY EVENT

KEY EVENT

On 4 and 5 December, two special days of encounters, performances, workshops and participatory experiences will kick off the fourth edition of Sans Réserve, dedicated to the theme of Night.

Over two days, Sans Réserve unfolds a generous, thought-provoking programme open to everyone, young and old alike. Roaming and participatory performances, live radio broadcasts, rituals and celebrations, lunar oracles, dream workshops, screenings and DJ sets invite visitors to experience the museum in a different way and embrace the unexpected. A series of sensory, festive and dreamlike experiences to celebrate all the colours of the night together!

Artists, researchers and audiences are also invited to exchange perspectives and share their imaginaries. As night gradually disappears under the effects of artificial lighting and the rhythms imposed by our societies, Sans Réserve opens up a space for reflection on the major issues surrounding the night today, bringing together the artists featured in the 2026 edition of the Prix COAL with scientists, thinkers and art theorists. What threats do nocturnal ecosystems face, and how can they be addressed? From living organisms to our collective imaginaries, what do we lose when the night disappears? How can we reinvent our relationship with darkness and transform it into a space of emancipation, resistance and utopia? These questions lie at the intersection of artistic creation and contemporary scientific and anthropological research, inviting us to consider the night as an inalienable common good.

This special programme also marks the opening of an exhibition featuring 13 artists nominated for the 2026 Prix COAL and Prix COAL Étudiant, whose works will take over the galleries of the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature for a month, bringing together a constellation of artworks and narratives.

Moving between sensory perceptions, speculative narratives and ecological realities, the works challenge our usual points of reference and sketch out new ways of approaching our relationship with this vast continent of shadow.

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE EXHIBITION!

Featuring
The artists: Elena Bajo; Amélie Bouvier; Marielle Chabal; G&K ; Lou Le Forban ; ámbar luna ; ámbar luna ; nomasmetaforas ; Dana Sherwood ; Chang-Ching Su ; Alexandre-Esteban Hernandez ; Épiphanie Martin ; Marli Simons.
Scientists, thinkers and art theorists: Jean Marie Gallais; Samuel Challéat; Christopher Yggdre; Yann Chateigné; Luc Gwiazdzinski; Elisabeth De Bézenac.

With Lou Le Forban, recipient of the Ateliers Médicis special mention; Marie-Luce Nadal, Prix COAL nominee; and nomasmetaforas, recipients of the Nuits des Forêts special mention, in conversation with Jean-Marie Gallais, art historian and curator.

At the blue hour, as daylight fades, other presences emerge: dreams, ghosts, hybrid creatures and metamorphoses… The invited artists explore what only reveals itself once the lights go out: wandering dreams, silhouettes slipping between the shadows, and forms that dissolve only to be reborn in another shape.
Night is where the unconscious rises to the surface, where the invisible takes shape, and where folk tales and popular traditions have long populated the darkness with imaginary creatures. In conversation with art historian Jean-Marie Gallais, this roundtable explores what the night reveals about our collective imaginaries.

Created specifically for Sans Réserve, this performance extends the artist’s NOCTURNA project through a participatory, roving experience unfolding after nightfall throughout the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature.
In a place dedicated to hunting and the observation of the living world, the collective experience conceived by the choreographer turns our perceptions upside down: night is no longer a space where we feel like prey, but a territory to inhabit together, at a slow pace.

From Earth’s orbit to the ocean depths, from private companies’ growing grip on orbital space to the disappearance of the Milky Way from our skies, and from the spread of light pollution to the exploitation of living systems, the night is increasingly caught up in extractivist dynamics.
This discussion explores what we stand to lose as darkness disappears. In conversation with geographer Samuel Challéat (CNRS) and the Prix COAL laureates, it will consider ways of protecting the night, and with it the environments and living beings that depend on it.

Elena Bajo activates her installation Artemisia Noctis, A Grammar of Darkness through an “anarchochoreographic” gathering, conceived as a performed archive of historical botanical knowledge. Guided by smell, echo and the positioning of the stars, the artist invites mugwort – a powerful-scented herb known as the mother of medicinal plants – to become her more-than-human collaborator, drawing inspiration from it to shape her movements.
An invitation to experience the gentle embrace of twilight.

For the courtyard of the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Marli Simons has conceived a visual performance in which projected images explore the night as a vessel for forgotten narratives and imaginaries. Photography becomes a way of capturing the invisible, while film serves as a medium attuned to fleeting apparitions.
The project seeks to reveal a more ancient memory, a silent echo resonating with deeper dimensions of our perception. Projected through a mobile apparatus inspired by the history of magic lantern showmen, the screening takes on an inherently narrative dimension.

For Sans Réserve, Marie-Luce Nadal invites Dorothée Barba to collect visitors’ dreams live. Transformed into sound, these dreams become waves, singular presences joining an invisible choir.
A collective experience that seeks to mend the world through sound, weaving connections between the intimate and the communal, the earth and the sky.

“Eighteenth card of the Tarot, The Moon, archetype of the great cosmic feminine, the Great Mother, the sea-mother, the wonder of the tides. Upon her grains, the Sun, her counterpart, will work its transformation, between shadow and light…”
Tarot reader Julie Ciglia invokes the goddess of the night, a mythological figure with a thousand faces, mistress of the tides and dreams. Blending divination and reverie, she offers short readings in which each card opens a passage into the unconscious.
A workshop-lecture on the Moon, its powers and its alchemical relationship with the Sun will also be offered, bringing to the surface what daylight cannot express.

Conceived by American artist Dana Sherwood, Moon Ceremony is a public ritual offered to the night. Songs, plants, ceremonial objects and ephemeral gathering spaces form a circle open to all.
A contemporary, participatory ceremony, it invites us to listen to the whispers of darkness, give thanks and weave connections with the living world and the more-than-human.

The party is a form of social biodiversity: a space and time where individuals meet, mingle and transform through the joy and richness of the night. Over the course of a DJ set and surprise performances, let’s celebrate this nocturnal alchemy and the diversity that makes it possible!

With Elena Bajo, recipient of the Fondation Carmignac Special Mention (Out of Competition); Alexandre-Esteban Hernandez, G&K, and Dana Sherwood, nominees for the 2026 Prix COAL Étudiant and Prix COAL; and Yann Chateigné, curator.
Moderated by Loïc Fel.

At dusk, an entire world awakens: night-blooming flowers open to attract nocturnal pollinators, fireflies flash their courtship signals, pipistrelle bats set out to hunt, while foxes, hedgehogs and badgers reclaim the city and its fringes.
Nearly two-thirds of invertebrates and one-third of vertebrates are nocturnal, yet artificial lighting disorients them and fragments their habitats. To protect this essential living world, a range of solutions is available: switching off lights at night, regulating light pollution, establishing dark ecological corridors and introducing labels that recognise and protect starry territories…