In Dark Habits #3, Simon Van Schuylenbergh - along with other performers from the Ne mosquito pas network - presents five short group performances about unspoken morality. By perverting conservative values a gray zone opens up, allowing us to rethink our own values.
For these performances, they delve into Simon's fascination with the “morally ambiguous,” or the impossibility of being pure in a moral sense. For this, they focus on the nun, as described in Pedro Almodovar's film Dark Habits (1983). Not the film's storyline, but especially the nuns' dark habits capture their imagination.
Another reference is The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of queer activists in the 1980s who held ceremonies in homemade nun costumes. Gay men infected with AIDS, whom no one dared touch, were declared sacred. The concept of purity within the Catholic faith was thus completely replaced by the opposite: these nuns preached an anti-normative form of canonization with “the dirty" or "filth".
