Readings : Déracinement (Uprooting)

Reading

Friday 18 September
17:00 - 17:45

Price: Gratuit - Gratis - Free Language: French Location: Piscine

with

Elya Verdal, Isabelle Cornaz & Elissa Kayal

Presentations

Three authors read on the theme of uprooting

Three readings on the theme of uprooting

Elya Verdal is a multidisciplinary artist whose extraordinary and richly eclectic journey has shaped a deeply unique artistic voice. After a career in industry, she made a bold career shift, exploring the intersection of psychotherapy, poetry, and storytelling. Committed and resolutely contemporary, her art draws on classical conventions, which she deconstructs through the lens of current themes such as consent, ageism, and uprooting.

Drawing on her family’s history and her own childhood memories, Isabelle Cornaz weaves together the story of Palamós, a sunny little port town north of Barcelona. Her mother grew up there before emigrating to Switzerland, and the narrator returns there every year for vacation. She wanders through this territory she knows intimately, maintaining an ambiguous relationship with this place—a place she comes from without ever having lived there.

Bahía, Isabelle Cornaz, published by La Baconnière

There is the mouth, and there is the world—the mouth trying to enter it, to carve out a place for itself, to force its way into it, this vast and brutal world, bursting at the seams with sharp and soft matter, a world where the question of homeland remains gaping, with no place to anchor one’s memory, one’s desire, one’s languages.

Histoire de ma gueule, Elissa Kayal, L’oie de Cravan

Our speakers

Elya Verdal

Elya Verdal is a poet, author, and cultural curator based in Brussels. She explores the body as a territory of desire, identity, and memory—a realm shaped by her Amazigh roots. Her first epic poem, *L’amour en creux* (Éditions Bleu d’Encre, 2024), explores what love leaves within us: seeds that sprout when we encounter another. She regularly contributes to publications by Éditions Edwarda (Amazuz 2025, *Palpitations urbaines* 2026), reflecting this precise evolution—in harmony with the publisher’s ethos—from the sensual toward the embodied. For her, poetry is not confined to the page: it inhabits space, the voice, sound creation, and curatorial practice. As the founder of *La Chair Poétique* and the *Matrimiel Festival*, she creates spaces where poetry exists outside academic frameworks—vibrant and present.

Elissa Kayal

Elissa Kayal is a poet. A Lebanese woman of Palestinian descent, she grew up in Beirut and has lived in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal since she was twelve. In 2026, she co-translated the poetry collection *On ne bombardera jamais ma voix* from Arabic (Palestine) and published her first book, *Histoire de ma gueule*, with L’Oie de Cravan. She is co-editor of the poetry journal *Estuaire*.

Isabelle Cornaz

Born in 1982 in Switzerland, Isabelle Cornaz is an author and journalist. She holds a bachelor’s degree in literature and has lived in Madrid, London, and Moscow. She has been working for Swiss Radio and Television (RTS) for about fifteen years, covering international news. She has also produced radio documentaries and has served as president of Reporters Without Borders Switzerland since 2024.