Ballades infidèles — B Side — KADIST — Performance — Slash Paris

Past: Saturday, June 15, 2024

Convened by
Simon Asencio

Artists
Clara Amaral, soto labor et sabrina soyer

Ballades Infidèles is a research around the Ballades en jargon, eleven poems composed by 15th century poet Françoys Villon and written in the secret tongue of the Coquillardxes, a posse of French rogues* or more precisely, a community of wanderers, victims of land dispossession and who had found in vagabondage the means to cope. The Coquillardxes were bending language to communicate with each other without arousing suspicion.

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These ballads repurpose medieval language to narrate social underworlds in code. They invite a reflection on the possibility of otherness and estrangement within a ’same’ language. Using the ballads as a map and a method for research, Ballades Infidèles has gathered since 2022 a collective of wordsmiths to develop different forms of study of these ballads in perspective of their re-writing.

At KADIST, B Side activates the re-writings of the four last ballads with Clara Amaral, sabrina soyer, and soto labor through a live open recording session and conversation that will form the basis of the B side of a tape.

Using research methodologies specific to performance, the queer archive and critical pedagogy, the work of Simon Asencio (il/lui, 1988, Toulouse, France) takes the form of performances, publications, exhibitions, collective study situations, and co-creation projects. His current research focuses on the forms of sociability generated by textual practices, particularly in their relationship between poetic practice and political engagement. Since 2021, he has been developing a performative translation of Anon, Virginia Woolf’s unfinished essay on the ethics of anonymity and the survival of rhapsodes. In 2022, he was a research associate at a-pass / advanced performance and scenography studies in Brussels with his Quire Whids research. He is currently working on transcriptions of the political and literary conference Left/Write! (1981, San Francisco) with the aim of developing a performative re-enactment.

Clara Amaral is an artist working with writing, performance, printed matter and publishing. Her interdisciplinary practice questions what it means to be a reader, to be a writer, aiming to expand existing modes of reading, writing and publishing. Central to her practice is the investigation of publishing modalities and the performative aspect of language. Her works have been presented in The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, Sweden, Austria, France, Norway and Switzerland etc. Since 2022, Clara Amaral has been teaching at the Image and Language Department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. Clara Amaral is currently represented by Ellen de Bruijne PROJECTS.

soto labor is a poet, visual artist and performer. Strongly influenced by hip-hop as a means of empowerment, they explores different forms of narratives and performances, while examining the conditions under which discourse is exercised. They produces short stories, fables, poems, scripts and rap lyrics as critical tools. In duo with the artist nadjim bigou-fathi, they co-produced the project Frsh(blind search for an object) (2021-24) and are currently working on their next project, Leaving Vegas.

sabrina soyer, known as sabiche, is one of Clamart’s greatest poem finders and lovers. She’s been living there for 6 months, in a house where cats roam and to whom she throws mackerel. With a small group she prints Sapphic lyrical pamphlets advocating all possible forms of eroticism, and the superiority of knowledge transmitted by physical contact. Sabiche has written many poems and songs for her lovers; poems intended to be shouted on stage, rather than read in a book. One day recently, she fell in love with a beautiful, techno-savvy raver whose walkman was melting under a twisted beech tree. And she began to write gay things to please her and tell her so, which belies her reputation as a big Île de France drama queen.