Author, actor, director and geographer, Frédéric Ferrer created his first show in 1994, Liberté à Brême by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, then went on to conceive performances based on his own texts where he questions figures of madness (Apoplexification à l’aide de la râpe à noix de muscade (Apoplexy-working with the Nutmeg Grater) and Pour Wagner (For Wagner)) and the disorders of the world, through two creative cycles in particular.
In Les chroniques du réchauffement (The Chronicles of Global Warming), he invites the audience to explore human landscapes of climate change. He thus created Mauvais Temps (Bad Weather/BadTimes) (2005), Kyoto Forever (2008), Comment j’ai appris à ne plus m’en faire et à aimer le réchauffement climatique (“How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love Global Warming”, 2011), and recently Sunamik Pigialik ?(What to do? in Inuktitut), his first show for a young audience, which portrays the fate of the polar bear (2014).
In autumn of 2015, on the occasion of the COP 21 in Paris, he presented Kyoto Forever 2, the second part of his staging of the major conferences on climate change, with eight international actors embodying various UN experts.
Meanwhile, in 2010, he started creating an Atlas de l’anthropocène (“Atlas of the Anthropocene”), an artistic cycle of theatrical cartographies of the world, half lecture, half performance, where he talks about unexpected territories. After À la recherche des canards perdus (“In Search of the Lost Ducks”), Les Vikings et les satellites (“Vikings and Satellites”), Les déterritorialisations du vecteur (“The deterritorialization of the Vector”) and Pôle Nord (“North Pole”), that he presented in many theatres and festivals in France and abroad, he created, in January 2015, a fifth cartography, Wow!, around the possibilities of there being extra-terrestrial life. He created a sixth cartography in December 2018 About Cod. He is currently working on a seventh cartography, entitled Comme des lapins ? (to be created in 2021).
In 2018, he started a new creative cycle called Borderline(s) Investigations which questions the borders and limits of the world. In 2017, he created a performance Borderline(s) Investigation #0 (after having made parabolic flights in weightlessness), then the show Borderline(s) Investigation #1 which puts into play - and plays with - the signals of collapse. He is currently preparing the creation of Borderline(s) Investigation #2.
At the Avignon Festival in July 2015 he presented Allonger les toits, (“Lenghtening the roofs”), with the choreographer Simon Tanguy as part of the “Sujets à Vif” (Festival d’Avignon / Sacd), and is continuing this collaboration for the development of this project in 2017.
In his approach, alike the geographer – who was long regarded as the specialist of nothing –, he prefers the boundaries of the disciplines to their hearts. Not the synthesis rather the friction between them. Frédéric Ferrer writes the texts and dramaturgy of the shows after taking on some "fieldwork", which allows him to anchor his work starting from a documentary source and / or a real space. The space in his shows becomes the place where everything is possible.
From 2005 to 2015, he created and directed an art factory, located in the psychiatric hospital of Ville-Evrard (reception of artists in residence and initiatives with audiences coming from the hospital and from outside), and is now developing a new project in the Coubert Rehabilitation Centre.
He is a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters) and received a grant for dramatic creation from the Centre National du Théâtre (for Kyoto Forever in 2008) and from the Fonds SACD Théâtre (for Kyoto Forever 2 in 2015).