I will recall the classical relationship between representations of the fundamental group and existence of symmetric differential forms on a smooth projective variety. This is a well-known result due to D. Arapura and is a consequence of the non-Abelian Hodge correspondence (Donaldson, Uhlenbeck, Yau, Simpson...). This was generalized to the compact K\"ahler setting by B. Klingler and applied to quotients of bounded symmetric domains to obtain results about rigidity of representations of \pi_1.I will explain how these results can be strengthened to the normal projective setting. Consequently I will derive some simple results about rigidity of the topological fundamental groups of singular quotients of bounded symmetric domains, and of their smooth loci.
