Readings in the garden: Dans nos chairs

Reading

Sunday 20 September
12:15 - 13:15

Price: Gratuit - Gratis - Free Language: French Location: Garden of Maison des Arts

quatre lectures de 12 minutes

with

Mimi Haddam, Luce van den Bossche, Charlotte Francoeur & Cléa Chopard

Presentations

Our bodies pass through and are passed through. These four poets speak to us of illness, care, movement, and memory. Of our presences and our absences. What our bodies learn and relearn, what shifts within us, and what remains anchored in our flesh.

four authors read about bodies, our flesh, our homes, and what they go through.

L'insidieux soleil, pour toujours

Charlotte Francoeur, Ed du Noroît

A poetry of displacement, care, and family legacies, between roads, hospital rooms, silences, and relearning. A sensitive journey into the ways of inhabiting presence and transforming the legacies of absence.

Topolalie

Cléa Chopard, Ed. Héros-Limite

From the outset, Cléa Chopard's collection defies all classification: it is simultaneously a prose narrative, a long poem, and the clinical record of a young woman confronted with experiences that overwhelm her, what psychiatry calls "borderline states." Throughout the text, the narrator attempts, through the act of writing, to de-psychoanalyze herself.

Topolalie traces the impossible networks of meaning within a body marked by crisis, that of Della, a pathological mass without a biography, constantly failing to constitute itself as a fully realized character.

Without seeking to resolve or explain them, Topolalie instead attempts to give resonance to these borderline states of the body, of being, and of language, traversing obscure territories over which reason has little hold.

A language of rupture – always ready to be swallowed up – manages to crystallize in this unstable environment to give a provisional form to what is going through Della: her relationship to insomnia, the moments of crisis and those of annihilation, her link to speech and the absence of meaning with which she struggles.

Bleu désordre : une éthique des veilleuses

Mimi Haddam, Ed du Noroît

Traversed by a constellation of ambiguous presences, this book rejects the injunctions to resilience and imagines, from within fractures, sensitive and relational forms of justice.

A poetic essay on illegible bodies, the ruins of language, and the solidarities born from fragmentation.

Sangs

Luce van den Bossche, Angle Mort Editions

Desperate, yet never abandoning a certain faith in language and its capacity for constant reinvention, Luce van den Bossche's Sangs (Bloods) can thus be read as a manifesto of resilience, or, in the author's words, "an inexorable tide."

Luce van den Bossche is primarily a poet and currently resides in Luxembourg. She is a non-binary transgender woman whose pre-transition collection received the Servais Foundation's "Encouragement Prize" in 2016. Her texts have been published in journals and anthologies. Some have been translated into German, Spanish, and Greek.

Our speakers

Mimi Haddam

Mimi Haddam is a writer and artist of Franco-Algerian origin who lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. She works in various artistic, farming, and community contexts, where she engages with spaces that are uncertain and lack rigid boundaries. She is interested in turbulent, affective, and rebellious thoughts, as well as in experiential knowledge that has been dismissed by dominant systems. Her works and contributions to research-creation are published and presented in Quebec and internationally. *Bleu désordre* is her fourth book.

Charlotte Francœur

Charlotte Francœur is a poet and co-director of Éditions du Noroît in Montreal. She is the author of *Je reviendrai pour la saison des pluies* (Noroît, 2026), *Adieu les crevettes* (Noroît, 2023, shortlisted for the Prix des libraires du Québec for poetry), *Hier est une violence* (Omri, 2020), and is co-author of *Maison suivi d’Une pratique de l’instant* (Omri, 2020), in collaboration with Louise Warren and Éloïse Lamarre. Her poetic work explores the connections between lineage, bodily memory, and intimate speech.

Cléa Chopard

Cléa Chopard (1989) is a writer, translator, and performer living in Geneva. Her texts explore the concept of instability, employing writing techniques in which layout and typography highlight the issues at play in language. She produces literary objects (cards, booklets, etc.) that she distributes as she meets people, leaving no trace of them behind. The wallpaper samples and medication leaflets she collects are recurring elements in her writing. Drawing on diverse sources—ranging from philosophy to the history of decorative arts, and from poetry to botany books—she creates more or less fantastical interweavings and forms of variable geometry. As a member of the editorial board of the literary journal *L’Ours Blanc*, she has published several translations there. Her poetry has appeared in several journals (L’Ours Blanc, entwürfe, Papier/Machine, Loop...) and anthologies. Since 2020, she has translated several works by Erica van Horn for Héros-Limite, L’Ours Blanc, and EstepaEditions.

Luce van den Bossche

Luce van den Bossche is primarily a poet and currently lives in Luxembourg. She is a non-binary transgender woman whose poetry collections *Syzygies* and *Sangs* won first prize in the Youth category of the “National Literary Contest” in 2011 and the “Encouragement Prize” from the Servais Foundation in 2016. Her writings have been published in journals and anthologies. Some have been translated into German, Spanish, and Greek.