Visit Tarbes with La Féline
La Féline is one of the treasures of French electro-rock. Musical project led by academic Agnès Gayraud, a leading thinker in pop music with her very sharp essay dialectic of pop (La Découverte editions, 2018), La Féline publishes Tarbes, his fourth album. The author/composer once again offers music that achieves the impossible: to make the connection between intellectual pleasure and the pure joy of listening. In this concept album, devoted, therefore, to Tarbes, the city where she grew up, La Féline addresses the question of nostalgia and memory. Driven by a gentle philosophy, it does not sing of a sublimated past, but fills its voids to project itself into the future. His beautiful and intriguing songs, such as “I was dancing lying down” and “Everything must disappear”, are pieces with a limpid structure, made of guitar and bass, transformed by the addition of electronic loops and choirs. Carried by the pure and distinguished timbre of Agnès Gayraud, Tarbes captivates and confuses the listener by systematically taking unexpected paths. The disc is accompanied by a magnificent tabloid, capturing the deliquescent charm of Tarbes with photos by Alexandre Guirkinger, which extends this sonic and memorial journey into a very real elsewhere.
At Kwaidan Records
READ ALSOThe Incredible Rise of Phoenix
Wriggle on starmania live
43 years after its first performance, starmania is still France’s most popular musical. From generation to generation, we still wriggle to “When we arrive in town”, we shout “I would have liked to be an artiiiiiiiste” in dark karaoke rooms, we hum (falsely) “SOS from an Earthling in distress” in the shower. Raphaël Hamburger, son of Michel Berger and France Gall, took the initiative to revive this show, the legacy of his father who died suddenly of a heart attack in 1992. With Thomas Jolly (who has been appointed artistic director of the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2024 Olympic Games) directing, the Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Nicolas Ghesquière (artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s women’s collections) at the costumes, and Victor Le Masne (collaborator of Juliette Armanet, Air, Phoenix, Philippe Katerine, Metronomy) in the musical direction, lcult rock opera returns in a clean and updated version.
READ ALSO“Starmania”: the story of a musical that has become cult
Take a trip to Paris Photo
For its 25th anniversary, Paris Photo brings together from November 10 to 13 more than 180 gallery owners from all over the world. The organizers of this major photography fair are offering a particularly rich program this fall. The guest of honor is the actress Rossy de Palma who presents 25 favourites, among which are the artists Marina Abramovic and Orlan, whose works challenge the clichés in terms of representation of the female body. The Spanish actress highlights the work of other talented women: such as Lola Alvarez Bravo, Anna Teresa Fernandez, Flore, Agnès Varda, Sandra Eleta or even Melissa Shook. Paris Photo also deals with the hottest news. The reporter Boris Mikhaïlov thus testifies to the situation in Ukraine. And freediver (also image maker) Nicolas Floc’h gives us an account of the state of the seabed in his native Brittany. So many reasons to stop by Paris Photo!
Grand Palais Éphémère, Champ-de-Mars.
Dreaming of Afghanistan at Guimet
READ ALSOWhen France unearthed the treasures of Afghanistan
In August 2021, Afghanistan, which had fallen back into the hands of the Taliban, closed in on itself. We then know what night the population will soon be plunged into and what regressive madness women in particular must prepare for. The world is worried for the Afghans, first of all, but also for their incredible archaeological heritage which is once again in danger. A year and a half after the victory of the Taliban, a poignant exhibition opens at the MNAAG – National Museum of Asian Arts Guimet –, celebrating one hundred years of archaeological collaboration between French scholars and the Afghan people, above all recounting a century of friendship, heritage discoveries and common enrichment of the collections, those of Guimet, unique in the world, and those of the Kabul museum, which mirror each other. We cry at not being able to discover the works that were to be lent by Kabul. But we are delighted that the heritage history of Afghanistan, now amputated there of its non-Muslim periods, can be told in Paris, in a museum with a universal vocation, in its entirety. Run there.
* Afghanistan, Shadows and Legendsfrom October 26, 2022 to February 6, 2023, at the National Museum of Asian Arts Guimet
As part of its “Afghan season”, the MNAAG also offers another exhibition, On the wire, textile creation by Afghan womenfeaturing the creations of fashion house Zarif Design and its founder Zolaykha Sherzad.
(Re)discover the work of Charlotte Salomon
Who was Charlotte Salomon, who died in Auschwitz at only 26 years old? A truly emergency artist, who knew how to put her talent at the service of art and whose fundamental work Leben? Oder Theater? (Life ? or theatre?) was completed in barely two years, from 1940 to 1942, in the haste imposed by the Nazis. In total, more than 700 gouaches with autobiographical connotations, considered by many to be the very first graphic novel. “I will put everything in me in this work. All that is beautiful and all that is hideous. It is this ambivalence, this constant oscillation that directors Éric Warin and Tahir Rana highlight in this very beautiful animated film that they devote to the young painter. Born in Berlin in 1917, the only child of a wealthy Jewish couple, the young Charlotte managed to be admitted to the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts despite the anti-Semitic laws just introduced in Germany. After Kristallnacht, she took refuge in the south of France, where her art truly flourished. Behind the light of the Côte d’Azur, there is of course the shadow of the war, but also the multiple suicides that mourn the artist’s family, the alleged incest committed against him by the grandfather, painful loves, the ultimate horror of the Shoah. Awarded the Renaudot Prize in 2014 for his novel simply titled Charlotte, David Foenkinos said he was “haunted by her”. This film, which is not an adaptation of the novel, pays, in the same way, a vibrant tribute to the young painter still unfairly unknown to the general public.
Indoors.