Le festival Les Urbaines, en entrée libre pour le public, est l’espace et le moment d’expression d’artistes qui expérimentent, initient, subvertissent des esthétiques dans les domaines sonores, visuels et performatifs, ainsi que tout ce qui se trouve entre-deux et au-delà. À travers cinquante propositions présentées dans différents lieux de Lausanne, Renens et Chavannes, le festival est une invitation à la mutation des sensibilités et à la dissidence des subjectivités.

L’Arsenic accueille les propositions suivantes programmées par Les Urbaines:

Gui B.B – I Have Such a Horrible Voice
Performance, Première européenne
6.DEC 20:55 – 22:25
7.DEC 20:00 – 21:30
8.DEC 18:15 – 20:45

In a protracted spectral and corporeal poem, Gui B.B explores her personal experience of indebtedness and the ways her body both combats and puts up with it on the inside. The artist creates a trans-symbolic space in which ambiguity, uncertainty, hyper-vulnerability, and chaos are reclaimed. Within this haunted space, she conjures up the precariousness intrinsic to her indebted life and exudes her own phantom as the offering of a body that fails to be just a system. Gui B.B is a Montreal-based artist working primarily in the field of experimental performance. She uses theatricality, irony as well as her voice to both unearth new constellations and potentially reorganize dominant narratives.

Kairaan Kika – Noli Me Tangere/Touch Me Not
Projection, Production originale
6.DEC 19:00 – 00:00
7.DEC 18:00 – 23:30
8.DEC 17:00 – 21:00

Reminiscent of a classic of softcore porn featuring sexy girls wrestling in the mud, Kairaan Kika’s video work features two wrestlers who epitomize both the ego and the object of desire, as the two face off in a never-ending sparring match. The mind-numbing, erotic spectacle is transformed into a meditation on mortality and the quest for eternal beauty. Kairaan Kika is a Geneva-based artist whose work—which lies at the interface between fiction and caricature—engages in a dialog with the icons and tales of hybrid cyberpop and Pan-American cultures.

Manu Garçia Mpasi – Le Monologue de l’Aube
Performance, Première suisse
6.DEC 20:15 – 20:45
7.DEC 19:15 – 19:45
8.DEC 20:15 – 20:45

Based on an in-depth self-examination inspired by Frantz Fanon’s book Black Skin, White Masks (1952), his mother and personal experiences, Manu Garçia Mpasi transforms his thoughts and questions into a monologue—the source material of his movements. Living through a double-consciousness as a diasporic European, he displays the mental burden intrinsic to (t)his duality, in a modern colonial context. Manu Garçia Mpasi is a dancer-performer based in Belgium, whose hip-hop dance practice is influenced by Congolese and West African cultures, as much as it is by contemporary dance, krump, capoeira, and ballet.

Naledi Majola – In flux
Performance, Première suisse
6.DEC 21:00 – 21:45
7.DEC 20:15 – 21:00
8.DEC 19:15 – 20:00

Bodies and costumes are at the heart of this black gender play in which movements, sounds and imagery touch on different black contexts with South African references, particularly from the second half of the 20th century, both at home and in exile. It is an attempt to escape the classifying and restrictive gazes placed on bodies in perpetual evolution; an expression of the desire to become uncapturable. Naledi Majola is a Berlin-based artist-researcher, actor and performer, working with movement, voice, sound, and writing. From academic discourse to pop culture, their artistic research practice is a form of transtemporal navigation between Black History and contemporary socio-political issues.

Sultan Çoban – unveiling for a play (act II, scene I)
Performance, Première romande
6.DEC 22:35 – 23:25
7.DEC 21:45 – 22:35

“Sultan, a famous singer and actress, is back in town for a film project.” By hiding and manipulating reality, blurring the notion of binarity between absence and presence, Sultan becomes a mysterious entity, a femme fatale allowing room for the projection of fantasies. She exposes the perpetual work of having to adjust or camouflage your identity when you’re nowhere free, and questions the concepts of originality and performance in this glamorous, dramatic, poetic, and meta piece. Sultan Çoban is a visual and performance artist based in Basel, Zurich, and Amsterdam. Her work addresses issues of translation and the transmission of emotions between various cultural and linguistic contexts.