Equinoxes: ALIVE!

If there’s one thing we want right now, it’s to be ALIVE! And we will see Antananarivo…

Guest readers: Paul Ardenne, Dimitris Bampilis, Vincent Barras, Greta Bellamacina, Véronique Caye, Mélanie Chappuis, Marion Collé, Emmanuelle Destremau (akaa Ruppert Pupkin), Miranda Gold, Nathalie Guiot, Emeric Lhuisset, Olivier Liron, Naomi Melville, Robert Montgomery, Golnoosh Nour, Taïla Onraedt, Adrian Filip, Julien Serve, Jérémy Seydoux.

Curating: Barbara Polla

Reading list

1) Vincent Barras has a dual literary and medical background. He is also Professor of History of Medicine at the University of Lausanne and director of the University Institute of History of Medicine and Health, but he is also a poet, performer and great specialist in sound poetry. His long list of publications includes both scientific reference works and poetic antologies. He translates numerous works from Italian, English and German into French. In short, he is extraordinary. On the theme Alive, his text, written especially for us, is entitled V.

2) Marion Collé thinks and creates with her body. Former student of the Académie Fratellini, she completed her circus training at the Centre National des Arts du Cirque before becoming a circus artist. Poetry is the second thread in the life of this artist who gave birth to Autour du domaine, freely inspired by a collection by Guillevic, then published Être fil by Bruno Doucey. She created the collective Porte 27 and collaborated with Véronique Caye. She is alive. She will read Je vis et… je vis.

3) Véronique Caye is a director and video director and a faithful follower of the Fondation Thalie’s poetic and literary encounters. In February 2021, she will present her first artist’s exhibition, at Galerie Analix Forever in Geneva, with Paul Ardenne as co-curator. She is also working on her first book, dedicated to the image-scene. She confines herself in Belle-Île en Mer where she made the video she shows us tonight, Ad Hominem, inspired by a poem of Marion Collé.

4) Dimitris Bampilis is a director and theatre designer. He has created in Athens his own company ΑΠΑΡÄΜΙΛΛΟΝ, an open and committed cultural and social space. He collaborates both with the National Theatre of Athens and the Onassis Foundation and with the SHARING PERAMA association, a cultural association acting for art and culture in Perama which is a particularly neglected suburb of Athens. Dimitris Bampilis came to Paris on purpose to take part in the last Poetic Night, Athenian Night, in September 2019. He is going to read us a text that he wrote for one of his recent plays, entitled Οχι η Αθηνα – Not Athens.

5) Nathalie Guiot created the Fondation Thalie. Behind the Foundation, or in front of it, there is Nathalie Guiot who is been actively supporting artists, women, creation and ecology, books and poetry for many years… these Equinoxes evenings exist thanks to her. She is committed into ecology in all parts, in art as well as in business, and supports the SHARING PERAMA project like Dimitris Bampilis and Robert Montgomery, specifically in its links with ecology. Her reading is entitled Habiter poétiquement le monde.

6) Robert Montgomery is a post-situationalist poet for whom books are not enough. He sets his poems up all over the world, most recently on the heights of Bogota, MINE LOVE DISTRIBUTE HOPE, and in Perama THE BEGINNING OF HOPE. The beginning of hope. The very beginning. With Greta Bellamacina, Robert Montgomery is at the origin of New River Press and the POETRY AGAINST HOMELESSNESS project. This is the second time he has participated in Equinoxes and tonight he will read Points for Time in the Sky.

7) Greta Bellamacina is an actress, filmmaker, model, and first and foremost a poet, who graduated in English literature at King’s College London after attending the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She is also a publisher and the unifying icon of a community of poets that she discovers, supports and publishes. A leading international poetry figure and the editor of several feminist poetry books, she is as strong as morning, as fearless as water. Tonight she will read, like Robert Montgomery but in her own way, Points for Time in the Sky.

8) Naomi Melville is an artist. She moves around. She tries to give her stories a form, a spatial representation, to make them as places to be explored. Currently, she is working on a series of textual and visual projects exploring various points of view on the transformation of agricultural landscapes, for which she collaborates with researchers and farmers based in Armorique. Her poetic texts relate the interstices of these territories. In 2020, she publishes several poems on AOC. Tonight, she is going to read Percées.

9) Jérémy Seydoux is the youngest reader among us! And yet… I’m young, it’s true, but with a well-born soul… Jérémy Seydoux is deputy editor-in-chief of the private Swiss television Léman Bleu based in Geneva. He presents several news and interview programmes, including the Geneva Show, the news and the channel’s major political programmes. He will read us an extract from Gargantua, a tribute to his high school years and to all the young people who are suffering at the moment. Let’s live and eat! Gargantua is with us.

10) Emmanuelle Destremau/ Ruppert Pupkin – musical interlude
Emmanuelle Destremau is an actress, director, author, composer and singer. She realized creative documentaries and then founded the group RUPPERT PUPKIN. Navigating between theatre and movie sets, she is the author of about fifteen plays. She takes part in Fabrice Melquiot’s literary balls and it was at one of them that I first admired her. This very week she published Border Ghosts with Quartett. Tonight she is Ruppert Pupkin, she provides the musical interlude for Vivre and sings Dans ma Peau and Diving Slowly.

11) Paul Ardenne is an art historian, author of numerous reference works in the field of art, the latest, Un art écologique, a plastic and anthropocene creation, the first bible of ecological art, is already a worldwide reference in ecological art. But Paul Ardenne is also a novelist – a novelist published in Brussels by La Muette! – and he is going to read us an excerpt from Belly Le Ventre, a fantasy novel in keeping with Gargantua. Pantagruelian I tell you!

12) Mélanie Chappuis is a woman of letters. Journalist, columnist, novelist, with one novel a year, she also writes theatre plays. She has a lot to tell us about love, about life in love, men, women, and others, about subterfuge, protection, and more about crazy love – After the wave. Tonight she will read us an excerpt of a new novel she is ardently working on. Sans plus attendre.

13) Golnoosh Nour is an Iranian author and poet, like Miranda Gold, close to the New River Press group, Greta Bellamacina and Robert Montgomery and POETRY AGAINST HOMELESSNESS. She has recently published short stories by Muswell Press. It is said that “Golnoosh’s unflinching writing explores sex and religion, love and cruelty, rebellion and identity, with energy, precision and poise. ». Her reading is entitled Psychosis.

14) Miranda Gold lives in London. Like Golnoosh, she is close to New River Press group and plays a key role in POETRY AGAINST HOMELESSNESS, a poetic anthology of people who have experienced homelessness. Her second novel, A Small Dark Quiet, will be published in audio in early 2021. The author is interested in understanding how trauma, even unsaid, breaks down intergenerational barriers and those that separate the past from the present. She will read two of her poems in English: Two Rivers Run and November Rose.

15) Emeric Lhuisset has a breathtaking artist’s curriculum, but not only. He also has a degree in geopolitics from the ENS in Ulm. But not only. He is also a poet, historian, researcher and storyteller. So he combines art, geopolitics and poetry in a film and a book, both entitled Quand les nuages parleront, which brings together the stories of people he met there, the history of a multiple territory dear to him from which individuals, architectures, cultures and entire population disappear. Tonight Emeric Lhuisset will read what the clouds will tell.

16) Olivier Liron is published by Alma Éditeur. Alma affirms that “Literature is the art of not locking sentences into a communication mechanism.” By this yardstick, Dance of Golden Atoms, Einstein the Sex and Me, these books are literature and art. Olivier Liron is also the author of plays, screenplays for the cinema and sound fiction for the Centre Pompidou. And then, Olivier Liron listened to us on November 14th and he loved Équinoxes. And tonight he is reading us a text he wrote especially for us, La vie rêvée des mousses, a dialogue on life and living things… through botany.

17) Taïla Onraedt (in French) is a Belgian film, theatre and television actress, mastering cabaret, dance, documentaries, music… We had the privilege of hearing Taïla on November 14th and we all remained suspended on her lips… Her reading this evening is entitled C’est terriblement effrayant d’être vivant, an extract from a play she is writing.

18) Adrian Filip is also an actor, like Taïla. He considers himself a late boomer of the theatre of another time, coming from La Manufacture, a committed actor who feeds off the teaching and transmission, future father, in love, of this life that is coming. His partner, future mother, Carole Extermann, wrote for him the text he is going to read us, Sergio.

19) Julien Serve draws. Whatever happens, he keeps drawing. It’s been ten years that we’ve been working together, he has accompanied three of my books with his drawings. We’re working on the fourth one. And then, against all odds, at least ours, he is suddenly carried away by L’Oeil: one of the 50 artists who changed the face of France. Meanwhile, Julien Serve continues to draw. And teaching drawing. And then he writes and he sings, but he hasn’t yet decided what he’s going to read or sing to us because he’s drawing.

20) Barbara Polla has prepared this Reading List and loves LIVING.