Les Urbaines
Programmation à l'Arsenic
Performance - gratuit
Taking place in various locations in Lausanne, Renens and Chavannes, Les Urbaines festival creates a vibrant time-space dedicated to emerging arts: a place that seeks to capture the moment when singular practices take shape and prefigure the aesthetics of tomorrow. The festival is entirely free of charge and brings together over forty projects (visual works, live shows, DJ sets, performances, workshops).
At Arsenic:
Alexandra Sheherazade Salem – my hair woke up horny as fuck
Performance
2.DEC. 21:40–22:10
3.DEC. 22:40–23:10
4.DEC. 17:15–17:45
Alexandra Sheherazade Salem is an artist and performer based in Geneva.
By performing an encounter between poetry and choreography, Alexandra Sheherazade Salem shows the vulnerability of bodies in a context of intimacy and emancipation. Weaving the sensitivity of an “emotional embodiment”, languages and gestures are in turn challenged: mixing intensity and repetition, tradition and pop culture, actions are transformed into rituals, projected into other possible futures.
In a desire for affirmations and an affirmation of desires, Alexandra Sheherazade Salem proclaims a blossoming: “Spring is my favorite season.”
Axel Kolb
Performance sonore, Première
3.DEC. 22:40–23:20
Axel Kolb is a musician and an electronic sound artist based in Zurich.
Within the intimate distance separating the sounds from their origins, the imaginary of an acousmatic concert is conceived: materials and textures are assembled and distorted in the fantasy of their sources.
Axel Kolb places his audience in a reinvented environment: the transmission of various recordings tricks their past and projects them into a space of futurity – their spatialization makes fiction a possibility.
Cammisa Buerhaus – Veteratrix
Performance, Première suisse
2.DEC. 20:45–21:15
3.DEC. 21:30–22:00
Cammisa Buerhaus is a performance artist currently living in Lisbon.
In a polyphonic prose incorporating the performers’ own experiences as sex worker, Veteratrix is a work inspired by Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, written in the second century. Stories are intertwined with recollections in a reworking of the Latin term veteratrix, meaning “experienced woman” and “old witch”. Exploring the contradictions modeled on their fate, Cammisa Buerhaus affirms the expression of herfantasies: “I speak and I tell.”
In the confessional of a psychodrama, the narratives projected on the bodies are shattered, and desires and pleasures flow in the streams of blood.
Edwin Ramirez – Queer Crip Becoming
Performance, Première
2.DEC. 23:00–23:45
3.DEC. 18:45–19:30
4.DEC. 16:15–17:00
Edwin Ramirez is a performance artist and stand-up comedian from Zurich.
Queer Crip Becoming is an autobiographical standup of self-discovery. Culminating in a dance solo, Edwin Ramirez recounts their first acid trip.
In the imaginary of a near and accessible future, Edwin Ramirez projects their publics between sensual experiences and hoarse humor, in the mutations of bodies outside of the cis-hetero and able-bodied norms – “Follow me through many deaths and rebirths.”
Harald Beharie – Batty Bwoy
Performance, Première suisse
2.DEC. 23:00–00:20
3.DEC. 20:00–21:20
4.DEC. 17:15–18:35
Through a reappropriation of the Jamaican term “Batty Bwoy” (literally, butt-boy), slang for gay or effeminate men, Harald Beharie twists and turns the myths to invoke demonic sensitivities and charming cruelties, unfolding vulnerable possibilities in an interplay of consciousness and naivety. The horror of “Batty Bwoy”, inherent to queer blackness, is unmasked.
Scrutinizing the absurdity of a queer monstrosity, Batty Bwoy articulates through dance the porosity of bodies and languages, their mouths swallowing and regurgitating the fictions projected onto their skins.
Jeanne Gilbert & Oélia Gouret – FAN 2
Performance, Première
Français/anglais, transcription en français/anglais
2.DEC. 19:35–20:30
3.DEC. 20:00–20:55
4.DEC. 15:00–15:55
Jeanne Gilbert, based in Brussels, and Oélia Gouret, based between Geneva and Paris, build their collective practice across distances, like a shared diary.
Jeanne Gilbert and Oélia Gouret exchange and write a shared history: from forgotten memories and living archives on their SD cards, scenes from their teens punctuated by doubts, wanderings and discoveries are replayed.
FAN 2 is the performed reading of this shared intimacy, where private experiences overlap with the public sphere, in a porosity between real and virtual, art and activism, uncertain origins and unpredictable futures.
Ruhail Qaisar – HYMNS OF CRUELTY
Live, Première
2.DEC. 20:40–21:30
Ruhail Qaisar est un artiste autodidacte du Ladakh.
Issus des contours ferreux du death metal, les sons de Ruhail Qaisar s’assemblent en gestes poétiques vernaculaires et expérimentations improvisées : dans les trous d’une mémoire vibrent les résonances hantées des traumas intergénérationnels.
En nuances troublantes et exorcismes solennels s’annonce une musique de procession : d’obscurs chants votifs et hymnes de l’Himalaya sont dépouillés et transportés aux confins de leurs tonalités.
SYANIDE (atelier/workshop)
Transmolecularization: An Improvisation Workshop using the Auto-Physio-Psychic approach to sound building
Workshop, BIPOC exclusive (black, indigenous, and people of color) no experience needed, registration recommended (limited places): mediation@urbaines.ch
3.DEC. 16:00–17:30
Using sound as the material evidence of an existence, SYANIDE invites the participants of their workshop to develop a physical and sensory experience, to explore with voices and instruments an ancestral and diasporic memory inscribed in the lacunae of their bones.
Between the theory of “transmolecularization” of the sound journey (Sun Ra), and the “autophysiopsychic” method of music composition (Yusaf Lateefs), improvisation is imagined as a subconscious understanding of reality.
BIPOC participants are invited to bring their own instruments, acoustic or electronic; non-BIPOC people are invited to lend and ideally donate any under-used instruments they may have to the workshop participants.
XENOMETOK – 49 days
Performance, Première romande
2.DEC. 21:40–22:40
3.DEC. 21:30–22:30
XENOMETOK is a transdisciplinary collaboration between singer Yesh, artist Valentina Demicheli and Tibet actvist Paelden Tamnyen.
In a piece that combines dance, electronic music, vocal experimentation and moving images, XENOMETOK celebrates the present where communal experiences create the fiction of a parallel world.
Bridging the individual and collective pasts of three sisters, 49 days is the tumult of four characters caught in tension between longing for a world and an apparent afterlife, where memories of heritage and Tibetan rituals alternate: between transmissions, perceptions and reflections of the self, a space out of time is created.