Saturday 26th October
We're teaming up with F To Mix for a joyful alternation of live machines and DJ sets in the middle of the dancefloor.
The Seita hall will be transformed into our HQ, with :

Focon's lo-fi - poetic live solo

*F TO MIX is Radio Grenouille's programme that delves into the electronic musical universe of LGBTQI+ and feminist artists, co-hosted by artists Almevan and Oras Elone.

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Focon takes a number of backroads with uncertain poetic signposts.
The unfamiliar landscapes he criss-crosses nourish him with their sounds.
They intermingle, creating intimate and distant atmospheres.
As he launches his cries out to sea, he summons up the things that bind us together.
Link to listen to his album ‘Secrètefrech’
Link to listen to F To Mix on Radio Grenouille

Saturday 26th October
We're teaming up with F To Mix for a joyful alternation of live machines and DJ sets in the middle of the dancefloor.
The Seita hall will be transformed into our HQ, with :

Janis on the decks for a percussive and liberating party

*F TO MIX is Radio Grenouille's programme that delves into the electronic musical universe of LGBTQI+ and feminist artists, co-hosted by artists Almevan and Oras Elone.

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Janis is a DJ and multidisciplinary artist who shakes things up with her sets, which veer between house, deep house and 90s sounds, always tinged with queer influences. A key player on the alternative scene, her style is both hard-hitting and liberating, in keeping with her journey as a trans woman. Her performances create spaces of freedom where celebration and protest mingle, between intensity and audacity.

Janis is in Marseille this autumn to record her forthcoming debut album for Recue + Return Records, and will be reading extracts from ‘Révéler mes visages’ (co-written with Tal Madesta, published by Harper Collins in May 2024) at the festival's opening night, on 19.10 at l'Embobineuse.
Link to listen to her latest track ‘Pharmacoliberation’
Link to listen to F To Mix on Radio Grenouille

Saturday 26th October
We're teaming up with F To Mix for a joyful alternation of live machines and DJ sets in the middle of the dancefloor.
The Seita hall will be transformed into our HQ, with :

Oras Elone for a live machine between heat and darkness, in a continuous flux

*F TO MIX is Radio Grenouille's programme that delves into the electronic musical universe of LGBTQI+ and feminist artists, co-hosted by artists Almevan and Oras Elone.

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Oras Elone is a DJ and live musician, member of the queer collective Discordance. Her live machines, like her DJ sets, deliver sensual techno with bass lines oscillating between warmth and darkness in a continuous flow. Particularly live, she plays with her own samples to make them groove with her (Hard)Techno, Acid, Break and EBM influences. Addicted to hardwares and the magic of LFOs, she composed ‘Alarm’ on the VA MRS-BXL and more recently ‘Acid Knocks at my Door’ in collaboration with Slayzee, produced by Biologic Records.
His favourite game: getting techno sceptics moving.
Her aim: to make the audience feel like a queen for the duration of a set.
Her dream: that body-shaming never finds an echo on the dancefloor!
Link to her Soundcloud page
Link to listen to F To Mix on Radio Grenouille

Saturday 26th October
We're teaming up with F To Mix for a joyful alternation of live machines and DJ sets in the middle of the dancefloor.
The Seita hall will be transformed into our HQ, with :

Almevan, for a precise and powerful dj set

*F TO MIX is Radio Grenouille's programme that delves into the electronic musical universe of LGBTQI+ and feminist artists, co-hosted by artists Almevan and Oras Elone.

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DJ, producer and event organiser based in Marseille, Almevan co-founded the queer collective Discordance. She draws her inspiration from a wide range of electronic subcultures, from Detroit techno to Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The group's precise, powerful DJ sets move between techno, acid, tech house, break, rave and experimental sounds, creating an energetic, immersive atmosphere on the dancefloor and on Radio Grenouille, Lyl Radio, Fourculture and DubLab.
Link to his Soundcloud page
Link to listen to F To Mix on Radio Grenouille

Saturday 26th October

Witches' ointment - much cited in European witchcraft trials - was a plant preparation intended to be applied to the skin and mucous membranes of the rectum or vagina to generate altered states of consciousness. Like Ayaguasca in the Amazon, it was used to build the world with plants.

In this performance, we recreate this flight and tell a story about plants, trance, physiological, ecological, botanical and chemical knowledge. It's an old story of travelling plants, before the fateful 1492. We're going to pass through the obsidian mirror and, in the darkness, see the colours, pleasures and knowledge shining at the centre of our bodies: where people keep trying to destroy us.

The ‘Cream for Flying’ we've designed is a non-hallucinogenic update. It's a formulation for vaginal dryness, those forgotten mucous membranes, dried out by the menopause, chemotherapy, drugs and hormone treatments. It's also a cream for the neo-vaginas of trans women or for anuses in need of a cuddle. A cream to lift the silence that pathologises our pleasure, and to remind us that there can be no joy or knowledge without trans-species relationships.

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Choreographer, artist and researcher. Since 2014, aniara rodado has been conducting research-creation projects with plants, from a counter-colonial and transhackfeminist perspective, and in alliance with non-human beings. It's an artistic, theoretical and political approach designed to ward off epistemicides and ruptures in the knowledge created between humans and plants.

Sig Valax creates hybrid music using the Persephone and analogue and modular synthesizers. She composes organic pieces in which the whirring of machines is embodied in granular, sparkling, noisy sequences.

An applied arts teacher and media designer, Camille Olympie is developing a multi-disciplinary and transmedia practice. 2D 3D animation and video creation form an important part of her work.

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Discussion moderated by Aphélandra Siassia
A freelance journalist with a Master's degree in contemporary art history and a Master's in cultural journalism, Aphélandra Siassia is involved in intersectional feminist, social and artistic issues.
In her work as an editor, she seeks to make the voices of the unheard resonate, putting her commitment at the forefront.

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End of residency - creation 2024-2025
Music: Sigolène Valax
Video, live animation and general assistance: Camille Olympie
Lighting and fluid screens: Jean Marc Chomaz
Manufacture of glass objects: Jean-Michel Wierniezky
Video, installation, concept and choreography: aniara rodado
Cream for flying: aniara rodado, Société Genialis
In-residence support: transform! festival; l'AMI - aide aux musiques innovatrices.

Saturday 26th October

Ava Naba offers a ritual performance in which he explores the divinatory arts, represented here by a huge deck of hand-painted cards: L'Oracle.
He offers a solemn and compassionate reading, inviting those who wish to do so to connect with the spirits of the natural elements, to draw inspiration from the symbols presented to draw on their own experiences and thus allow themselves to listen to their inner guidance.
It is in this space-time that mysterious artefacts are revealed as both magical tools and receptacles for stories, designed to open a door to a more sensitive dimension of existence.

Through this constantly evolving performance, Ava seeks to reappropriate and recompose the animist vision of the world from which she has been torn.
This spiritual perspective, essential to her survival and that of many adelphs sharing the experience of cultural uprooting, becomes a means for her to bear witness to plural cosmogonies, and thus to counterbalance Western materialistic thinking, often presented as the only way to coexist with the world.

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For several years now, Ava's life has been punctuated by the exploration of three very distinct practices: art, fortune-telling and magnetism.
Distinct in appearance, because these three worlds never cease to overlap and collide, feeding his thoughts and research and giving rise to curious hybridisations and new forms of expression.
The mediums he uses to create these chimeras are painting, drawing, installation, salvaged objects and, more recently, performance art, to provide surfaces for the imagination and create atmospheres conducive to introspection.
Dreamlike memories, the arcanas of the Tarot de Marseille, rituals and astrological evocations become the supports he uses to activate these inner and subtle processes. His proposals are intended to be intimate, imbued with a desire to draw our attention to trivial details that he sincerely believes hold the promise of restorative contemplation.

IG : https://www.instagram.com/ava.nabaa

Saturday 26th October

The ‘Political Manicure’ performance, carried out since 2016 in various European countries and Brazil, is an artistic expression fusing installation, performance and manicure service provision. Creating an interactive and inclusive space, it offers free manicure sessions in artistic spaces, inviting the public to participate. As well as offering this service, the performance also provokes discussion about gender, violence and gender performance.

By featuring a transgender/transsexual manicurist as the protagonist, it challenges traditional gender norms, encouraging a dialogue about trans-identity. This intentional approach underlines the importance of representation and inclusion of marginalised voices in the arts.

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Lyz Parayzo was born in 1994. She grew up in Rio de Janeiro and now lives in Paris. After studying at the Parque Lage School of Visual Arts and the Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO), she graduated from the master's programme at the École Beaux-Arts in Paris. Her work has been shown at the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), the Rio Museum of Art (MAR), the Pinacothèque de l'État de São Paulo, 100% L'EXPO La Villette (2024), the Jerk Off Festival (2024, Paris), the Palais des Beaux-Arts as part of the ‘Sur Le feu’ exhibition, and in the collection of the Société Générale bank at the invitation of curator Marie-Anne Yemsi. She is one of the artists invited by curator Alexia Fabre for the 17th Lyon Biennial, which opens in September this year. In 2023, she was awarded the Prix jeudi des Beaux-Arts - Comité Professionnel des Galeries d'Art. She is represented by the Casa Triângulo gallery in São Paulo.

interview sur RFI
IG : https://www.instagram.com/parayzo/

Workshop • dance and performance led by Luara Raio & Acauã Shereya

"We continue to invent and leverage intimacy, sharing and entropy from different perspectives to promote changes in the hegemonic perception. Being together through dissent, submerging in the matter of chaos, distortion, exploding a magical experience of reality. Spill dissonances, to spread freedoms. Incorporation, radical imagination, destruction of borders, softening of membranes, moistening of orifices, agitation of molecules, horniness, tremor, heat. Transform our processes, methodologies, society to be more. Performativity as a matter of collective life, with the smell of sweat and saliva, transversal, naughty and transgressive. Mutant.
We established as one of the gateways to this workshop our experiences in the transmission of our research as creators and interpreters of each other's work. What pedagogical exercise do we do to activate our research in the other's body, and how do we incorporate the other's research into our eyes, hands, viscera? We will unfold the transmission of our practices, to activate the contamination and the crossing of the practices of student-artists, people, entities, beings, friends, references, groups, collective, boyfriends, strangers to each other"

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A performer, dancer, dyke funk singer and choreographer, Luara Raio trained in the performing arts between Brazil, Portugal and France: at the University of Brasília, at Forum Dança in Lisbon and at Exerce at the CCN of Montpellier-Occitanie. She was singer and composer with the dyke funk group Sapabonde from 2010 to 2015, travelling around many Brazilian cities singing about the lesbian experience, from lesbian to lesbian.

(PT-EN-FR-ES) Acauã Shereya, elle é Brasileira, culrégraphe, professora, artiste visuelle, jardineira, artisane, escritora et pós-pornographic. Diplomada en Théâtre (2005) et en Danse (2012), she was a university professora from 2013 to 2015. Ela explore le between des interactions et utilise a "Gambiarra" para buscar as possíveis imagens of Democracy about the bodies de performatividade "Cuir" (Queer). Elle active l'euphorie, le délire, la dispersion et le juego dans ses processus pédagogiques et artistiques.

friday 25 october

Raphaël Khouri wants to heal the world with plants.
When his quest for a cure takes him to Greece and he discovers the radical, queer and intersectional origins of Western theatre, he is forced to wonder where it all went wrong. ‘Today, all theatres are talking about including transgender people. You can't include us in your theatre because you stole it from us. And you've stripped it of all its magic, its meaning, its function and its sanctity. It's time for us to take it back’.

Inspired by true events, Raphaël tells two intertwining stories: his own, as a trans Jordanian playwright, and his three-year investigation into the mystery of Dionysus, the trans god of theatre.
Combining autobiographical performance, live scenography and figurines, It Was Paradise, Unfortunately - here in a solo version - offers radical and inclusive new perspectives for theatre artists and audiences in the 21st century.

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Staged reading version

Raphaël Khouri is a Jordanian documentary playwright and director who lives between Berlin and Cairo. He is the author of several plays, including the first trans Arabic play, ‘She He Me’ (staged at Kosmos Theatre, Vienna 2019 and also performed online as part of the Criminal Queerness Festival 2020 in NYC), and ‘No Matter Where I Go’, a play about the lives of queer women and non-binary Lebanese people, staged in Beirut in 2014.

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Concept, writing & performance: Raphaël Khouri
French translation: Astrid Aïdolan-Ague
Produced by The Collective
Original commission by Outburst Arts, with the support of the Nebula Fund and the Goethe-Institut

Presented at transform! with the support of Onda - Office national de diffusion artistique.

friday 25 october

Apocalypso attempts to tear away the veils that cover the invisible mechanisms of world colonisation, in order to destroy them. By unfolding at the crossroads (‘encruzilhada’), the performance activates the body as a cartographic site where performativity, sexuality, spirituality, fiction and sorcery meet and blur their boundaries. Apocalypso invokes the opacity of certain underground images, masked by a racist, colonial and cis-heteronormed vision of the world.
Through the performance of their two racialised and queer bodies - guided by ancestral and animist invocations - the duo remind us that ‘we are crossroads’ and that we need to be together and share our histories.

‘Here, in the space we're in, the walls are softening. They are damp and begin to sweat a liquid full of pheromones that signal calm and pleasure. We also begin to sweat slightly, and our orifices are lubricated. I put my index finger in my mouth and, with the saliva I've collected, draw a crossroads on the floor. The wet trace begins to glow, while the inside of my mouth darkens. We're in the middle of the crossroads and the four directions around us are spiralling, sliding and exploding. We follow all the paths at the same time.’

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A performer, dancer, dyke funk singer and choreographer, Luara Raio trained in the performing arts between Brazil, Portugal and France: at the University of Brasília, at Forum Dança in Lisbon and at Exerce at the CCN of Montpellier-Occitanie. Iel was singer and composer with the dyke funk group Sapabonde from 2010 to 2015, travelling around many Brazilian cities singing about the lesbian experience, from lesbian to lesbian.

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(PT-EN-FR-ES) Acauã Shereya, elle é Brasileira, culrégraphe, professora, artiste visuelle, jardineira, artisane, escritora et pós-pornographic. Diplomada en Théâtre (2005) et en Danse (2012), she was a university professora from 2013 to 2015. Ela explore le between des interactions et utilise a "Gambiarra" para buscar as possíveis imagens of Democracy about the bodies de performatividade "Cuir" (Queer). Elle active l'euphorie, le délire, la dispersion et le juego dans ses processus pédagogiques et artistiques.

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Conceived and directed by Luara Raio
Performance: Luara Raio and Acauã El Bandide Sereia
Lighting: Lui L'Abbate
Set design and costumes: Luara Raio and Anat Bosak
Production, administration: OYA production
Coproduction Centro Cultural de Belém; O Espaço do Tempo & Rua das Gaivotas 6 (Lisbon); Teatro Praga (Lisbon); CND Centre national de
de la danse (Pantin)
Photos © Rachel Pimentel

friday 25 october

'Hiatus' takes us on a visual and audio journey to discover a lesser-known image of Marseille's northern neighbourhoods. Like ‘hiatuses’, these spaces are cuts between the cities, discontinuities between earth and concrete, interruptions in urbanisation in favour of nature.
This multi-sensory, immersive experience highlights the diversity and richness of the flora in Marseille's northern districts, despite the stress caused by human activity.
To demonstrate the resilience of these marginal species, Euphorbia peregrina, harvester and collector, and D. Jekyll, a rave-influenced DJ, create a herbarium on stage, accompanied by a flow of images and set to the rhythm of fast-paced electronic music.

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D. Jekyll, whose music is known as ‘club’ music, recalls in this project the origins of electronic music, a music conceived and disseminated by minorities as an outlet, offering vivid spaces for the gathering of demands.
Like plants - constrained but resilient - and northern neighbourhoods - stigmatised but rich in diversity - his music comes from the margins and speaks of their freedom and persistence. From techno to hardcore, these sounds are still more prevalent on the urban fringes, in free parties and warehouses.
listen to: https://soundcloud.com/d_jekyll

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Euphorbia peregrina uses the herbarium as a poetic medium for peregrination and contemplation. She explores suburban environments, extracting images, sounds and samples to build up a collection of elements that tell the story of the evolution of these plants in these outlying environments.

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Out of residency - creation 2024
Design and performance: Euphorbia Peregrina (visuals) & D. Jekyll (sound)
Set design support: Sève Saby & Marion Abeille
Video technical support: Jonathan Dahan
Support and production: festival transform!
Festival transform!; l'AMI - aide aux musiques innovatrices; Centre LGBTQIA+ Marseille

Thursday 24 October at SOMA
DJ set - experimental, rave downtempo, acid south archives

Bunny Dakota is one half of performance and visual arts duo Industria Indipendente, creator and resident DJ at happening Merende, one of Italy's liveliest and biggest queer nights.
In her sets, she experiments with languorous sonic journeys, shaking up the dancefloor like a superorganism in motion, creating fictional worlds blending the South, electricity, romance, high tides and unbridled sensuality.

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Her approach to music is akin to writing: known for her long sets mixing sound archives and high-intensity rhythms, she collaborates with several vocal and sound artists.
In 2020, with a group of artists from the Italian performance scene, she founded Radio India, for which she designs various literary and musical programmes.
With Steve Pepe and Yva & Toy George, she produced the album Klub Taiga, published in 2021 by NERO.

"The flying lesbians are back"

A poetic manifesto, the idea of a transcorporeal, tactile, sensitive ‘me-us’.
How do you say ‘us’? Imagine ‘us’ but in a space-time of the future. The water rises, and fragments of archives arrive diffracted from the trans/feminist manifestos of the past, in waves. The archives are mobile and unstable, haunted by spectres, like our memory. The ‘lesbian smell’ is our revolutionary infrastructure. Water is full of toxic substances and living micro-organisms. There are no borders between our bodies.

"Getting wet is our job, / and we know how to do it very well."

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Ilenia Caleo is a performer and researcher in queer studies and feminist epistemologies at Venice's IUAV university. She is one of the co-founders of Campo Innocente, a network set up after the pandemic to defend the rights of art workers.

Martina Ruggeri, aka Bunny Dakota, is one half of the performance and visual arts duo Industria Indipendente. She is the creator and resident DJ at happening Merende, one of Italy's liveliest and most important queer parties.

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Concept, original text ‘Lesbos | Λέσβος 2174’ and voice: Ilenia Caleo
Sound design: Martina Ruggeri
Translation: Alessio Bonaccorsi, Alexandre Roccoli, Étienne Letérrier
Production: Ménagerie de verre

Memoires : Lynn Margulis | Beatrice Busi | Carla Lonzi Women's Revolt Manifesto | Saffo | VNS Matrix Bitch Mutant Manifesto | Anna Tsing | Macau | Helen Hester | Xenopheminism | Astrida Neimanis Hydrofeminism | Karl Marx + Friedrich Engels Communist Party Manifesto | Valerie Solanas SCUM Manifesto | Monique Wittig | Redstockings Manifesto | Gilbert, Sapp, Tauber A Symbiotic Vision of Life | Joreen The Bitch Manifesto | Paul Preciado | Rote Zora | Marcus Redike

Wednesday 23 October

‘This three-part performance deals with the spaces of rupture and dissociation (physical or social) as places of encounter with the Self. The journey towards adulthood and overcoming trauma: when systemic injury inexorably intertwines with family roots.
I worked from ghostly video archives linked to Nature and my childhood, poetic texts written in the midst of heartbreak, accompanied by an experimental soundscape, and finally I wrote a song. The floating moment between the realisation that a situation is painful and the courageous decision to leave it for a happier future is captured by a saturated, electronic rock production.’

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Creation 2024
Concept, performance and video: George Félicité
Soundscape: Victor Donati
Music production: Js Donny & Anotyne
Support and production: festival transform!
Festival transform!; l'AMI - aide aux musiques innovatrices; Montévidéo; Le Mois Multi (Québec).
Photo © Jehane Mahmoud

october 23 to 26

'Sweet Dreams/Harsh Realities' is a textile exhibition made up of several series of paintings using the free-motion quilting technique.
Some of the images come from my dreams (which I've been writing faithfully every morning since 1998, and less faithfully for longer), and others from my everyday life - what I live, what I see. They are slices of life from day to night.

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"I'm Jackie Hamilton. I was born in another century in Scotland, but I've been in France for a long time, living in Marseille for 13 years. I'm self-taught and passionate about textile work, with a penchant for free-motion embroidery. My work falls into two main categories:

• 1/ costumes and masks
• 2/ narrative drawings in free-motion embroidery, based on my dreams, my everyday life or what's going on in the world."

October 23, 25 and 26

Workshop - “Let's embroider a banner together!

Banners have long been used in social struggles. An object of power, order and disorder, it can be made in many different ways. Come and take part in making a sewn banner that will be displayed at the end of the festival:

• everyone will leave their mark in stitches
• to tell our individual and collective stories
• our hands sew, our mouths don't!
• a time for sharing and creative discussion

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“I'm Jackie Hamilton. I was born in another century in Scotland, but I've been in France for a long time, living in Marseille for 13 years. I'm self-taught and passionate about textile work, with a penchant for free-motion embroidery. My work falls into two main categories:

• 1/ costumes and masks
• 2/ narrative drawings in free-motion embroidery, based on my dreams, my everyday life or what's going on in the world.”

wednesday, october 23

Workshop - Make your own broom of power!

Originally, brooms were made from dried plant stems tied into a bundle, sometimes attached to a wooden handle of varying length.
Across all cultures, this simple everyday tool carries powerful symbolism: sacred or cursed, ceremonial, meditative, purifying the visible and the invisible. A pendulum and a cadence, it soils itself to reveal purity. This paradox has made the broom a tool of power since the dawn of time.
Make your own!

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Euphorbia peregrina uses the herbarium as a poetic support for peregrination and contemplation; a support for exploring urban, peri-urban and rural environments, and also a support for investing a territory as a subsistence resource.
Initiated by a dog's daily walks, this compulsive, ritualized and evolving practice is based on a grid of actions to be performed in order to collect plant testimonials.
Insatiable, E. p. captures images and specimens in collections of objects and data that are constantly enriched and renewed according to cycles and places.
E. p. is a member of the artist support and production company transform!

From October 22nd to 24th

The waiting rooms at Versailles, also known as 'antechambers', were often highly ornate and richly decorated with elaborate tapestries, paintings and sculptures. They were designed to impress visitors and convey the wealth and power of the French monarchy.
Élie Autin's 'Antichambre' is both past and prologue. As a sanctuary, his installation-performance commemorates past bacchanals and re-enacts a new ritual of power and seduction.
In the “waiting room”, eyes hover and glide before a seductive yet inaccessible figure; then, the unapproachable is approached.
Priestess of “Bacchus”, wife of an emperor or herself, Élie Autin flirts with, attacks and devours fantasies of power and subjugation.

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A multi-disciplinary artist, Élie Autin develops several artistic mediums: choreography, modeling, performance and visual arts. His first solo, Présage, premiered at the Arsenic in autumn 2022. Her fluid identities play head-on with the spectator's gaze. As a performer and dancer, Élie works with artists such as Tamara Alegre, caner teker, Marvin Mtoumo, the Ouinch Ouinch collective, Nagi Gianni and Natasza Gerlach. As a model and photo model, she regularly performs and poses for various artists and brands, including Dior for DAZED. At the same time, the artist is developing her visual work, with exhibitions at Circuit (Lausanne), Hamlet (Zurich), La rada (Locarno) and other venues.
en savoir +
Photo © Alice Speller

Aphélandra Siassia
A freelance journalist with a Master's degree in contemporary art history and a Master's in cultural journalism, Aphélandra Siassia is committed to the intersectional feminist, social and artistic fields.
In her work as an editor, she seeks to make the voices of the unheard resonate, putting her commitment at the forefront.

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In partnership with SOMA and with the support of Pro Helvetia, Fondation suisse pour la culture.

Tuesday 22nd October

Reading - slam poetry + meeting hosted by Aphélandra Siassia

Nourished by the struggles of Kinshasa and Brussels, Joëlle Sambi's slam poetry is a firm flow that goes beyond the violence of all systems of domination. It's a flow that grips and scratches until it reveals the contours of a world that would place justice and joy at the centre of our lives.

‘Crush the pain, torture it, crush the passions Dissect your soul
Explode, expose!
Expose what's left of your humanity
Your remnants of pride
Take out the heart and its shreds
Take a look!
Look
It makes brilliant reflections on the grey walls of the city’.

‘Et vos corps seront caillasses’, Joëlle Sambi (L'Arche, 2024)

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Joëlle Sambi
‘I can't conceive of art as anything other than politically anchored, so I always practice it and accompany it with a process of reflection that leads me to doubt everything, to constantly deconstruct, to explore new ideals and to seek a place of peace. Peace is a luxury, there is no lull. Peace is a luxury, there is no lull’, says Joëlle Sambi of her artistic practice, at the crossroads of forms and struggles.
Born with her arse on a linguistic border between Brussels and Kinshasa, Joëlle Sambi speaks out, shouts out, writes short stories, novels, slams, poems, documentaries, shows, radio programmes and activist spaces. This non-exhaustive list of the trails she travels is a labyrinth of struggles-desires-necessities. A nomadic mule who lifts, lifts, removes layers from the boxes of normative identity by sanding down text, oiling images and lathering up the stage. From post-colonial soil to lands of origin, Joëlle mixes languages, penetrates the world with fervour and rigorous work. Viscera and reaction. Her migrant, lesbian, Afrofeminist, permanently exiled voice writes not to make a living from it, but to abuse it, to the point where she can hear herself living. Colères, Fusion(s) et Créations.

Aphélandra Siassia
A freelance journalist with a Master's degree in contemporary art history and a Master's in cultural journalism, Aphélandra Siassia is committed to the intersectional feminist, social and artistic fields.
In her work as an editor, she seeks to make the voices of the unheard resonate, putting her commitment at the forefront.

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In co-production with Friche la Belle de Mai and in partnership with L'Arche, Éditeur & Agence théâtrale.
Photo © Margot Briand

Saturday 19 October at L'Embobineuse

stelios.exe will be presenting a brand new live show for transform! featuring works by medieval composers Hildegarde von Bingen and Kassiani.
With flute augmented by electronic effects, distorted voices and apocalyptic productions, the live show will alternate between moments of contemplation and storms, reflecting the most extreme human emotions.
The melodic lines are sometimes pure and soothing, sometimes deconstructed, struggling to make their way through a raging sea of illusions and mirages.

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stelios.exe is a musician/producer based in Marseille. He builds bridges between Renaissance music and hyperpop, two genres born three centuries apart, but both based on heightened melodic expressivity.
Renaissance counterpoint, a compositional technique that develops several simultaneous melodies, is integrated here with a maximalist approach to pop, where codes and effects are exaggerated and pushed to the limit.
The Renaissance flute and voice emerge from a radical electronic sound design, like a ray of light through a distorting stained-glass window, where familiar elements are distorted and altered...
The musician's approach is part of the deconstructive movement, seeking to break down the barriers between genres and fuse popular influences with so-called ‘learned’ concepts.

IG : https://www.instagram.com/stelios.exe/
SC : https://soundcloud.com/steliosexe
BC : https://steliosexe.bandcamp.com/album/de-ave-phoenice
photo © George Kondylis

Saturday 19 October at L'Embobineuse

DJ set • sonic trip with a smile

Conceiving her mixes as spiritual, kaleidoscopic trips, Nadou le rdv digs into the repertoires of hard and acid trance, hard dance, oldschool acid techno and tribe. Her motorways of kicks alternate with long instrumental layers sprinkled with psychedelic, mystical and organic noises, rolling along at high energy bpm between 130 and 160. The idea behind selecta is that it takes you into an ecstatic dance that always ends with a smile.

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Nadou le rdv discovered electronic music in the 2010s, sanding the linoleum of Parisian clubs such as chez moon, la rotonde, la machine du moulin rouge and le rex club.
She attended her first teknival in 2015: it was a musical and political revelation, as it was at the free party, in front of thousands of kilos of sound, that she began to compose her repertoire. She went on to work for a hardcore music label, helping to organise parties and festivals all over France. Then she left the offices for the control room to get closer and closer to the sound. At the same time, she was a fixture on the billboards of festivals (Vizions, Sacho, Musique Magique...) and queer parties in Paris and the surrounding area (Mouillettes, Jeudi OK, Bizarre, Kindergaten, Coucou...).
For her, partying is about asserting your right to be yourself. But above all, it's about being part of a family, apart from patriarchy, racism and homophobia.

SC : https://soundcloud.com/nadou-le-rdv

Saturday 19 October at L'Embobineuse

DJ set • high-speed party remixes

With fast kicks and explosive remixes, D. Jekyll alternates between club, free party and village party music. Featuring a range of electronic genres, it's all set to get the foot tapping in a good mood.

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D. Jekyll has made a name for himself on the turntables at parties organized by and for queers, alongside the collective Error.tpg. Then (and among other things) he joined Pride Marseille for the 2022 and 2023 closings, and is now one of the artists supported by the transform! festival, where he will present the immersive and audiovisual Hiatus project, imagined as a duo with Euphorbia Peregrina. To discover Hiatus, come to the Labobox at Friche la Belle de Mai on Friday, October 25.

SC : https://soundcloud.com/d_jekyll
IG : https://www.instagram.com/d._jekyll/

Saturday 19 October
To mark the opening of the festival, we're opening up the mechanical garden at l'Embobineuse, with a little conviviality and readings!

A reading of several fiction-poems by Chams Barkaoui

These milky stories are shaped by fatigue but also by determination. The characters escape from a world that violates them while at the same time becoming one with it, and they ask themselves, how can they bury themselves? How do they huddle in the gaps? How do they find their peers on the run and in their hiding places? And finally, how do we become the earth and the earth becomes us, in its deleterious states, its ways of fighting, its limited resources and its eternal pollution?

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The fiction-poems read are taken from ‘Mourir dans la terre’, a micro/self-published collection by Chams Barkaoui in 2024.

Chams Barkaoui is a writer and transmedia artist. Informed by queer and decolonial ecologies, he sees his work as a tool for shaping and nurturing inter-species and inter-dimensional relationships. He is the bearer of a counter-humanity that seeks total liberation, using narrative processes to make animal, vegetable, mineral, spiritual and technological categories porous. Committed to collective practices, he regularly works with other authors, researchers and artists. At the same time, his writing takes the form of cartographies, essays (‘Manifester la magie’, self-published, 2020) and fictions published in magazines and collections, or performed in public in various art venues.

Photo © Mourir dans la terre by Chams Barkaoui, 2024.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

Saturday 19 October
To kick off the festival, we're opening up the Embobineuse's mechanical garden for a little get-together and readings!

Reading by Janis Sahraoui: her life story co-written with Tal Madesta (Harper Collins, May 2024)

Years before she revealed her trans-identity, Janis was a little boy in the eyes of everyone. The other children bully her, calling her ‘the tomboy’, and she is a victim of domestic violence when her mother dies. To survive, there's only one solution: create a mask for herself. Janis shared her musical compositions on Myspace and played the role of Sliimy, a character as sparkling as her life was dark. Her songs went viral. Soon signed to a major label, Sliimy composed her first album, Paint your face, a success that propelled the artist onto stages the world over. Despite this mask of glitter and fame, the harassment started up again, multiplied tenfold by the celebrity. Sliimy sank. Her resilience will take the form of a radical realisation: for the world to see her as the woman she has always been, she must reveal her true face and transform her body.

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Janis Sahraoui is a multidisciplinary artist and singer-songwriter. Through music, performance and poetry, she explores themes such as identity, gender and the freedom to be oneself. Her music, combining electro, pop and experimental influences, is characterised by introspective and poetic lyrics about transformation, resilience and emancipation.

Janis is in Marseille this autumn to record her forthcoming debut album for our friends at Recue + Return Records.