Artists in residence

Abdallah Abozekry was born on 16 February 1995 in Cairo into a family of lovers of Arab classical music. At the age of twelve, he began his musical studies at the House of Arab Lute in Cairo, with a Syrian Kurdish teacher. At the age of fourteen, he joined the Oriental Orchestra conducted by Naseer Shamma. He has participated in renowned festivals, such as the Baalbek and Carthage festivals.

At the end of 2010, he graduated from the Maison du Luth Arabe in Cairo with a “prize of excellence”. At the age of fifteen, he became the youngest teacher of Saz in the Arab world.

In 2017, two years after his arrival in France, Abdallah Abozekry began working with his older brother Mohamed Abozekry. For their first collaboration, the two brothers team up with Nicolas Thé, a renowned drummer, and present Don’t replace me by a machine.

Naya Abrin is a performer and director born in Guadeloupe in the city of Pointe-à-Pitre, and more precisely in the Boissard neighborhood. Since 2015, his practice has been rooted in performance and installation. Since 2020, he started focusing on a documentary project with his first short film Dyab ka mayé fi’ay dèyè légliz, shot in Guadeloupe on the sidelines of municipal elections. This project deals with the evocative image of childhood and politics as a backdrop to island phenomena. It summons a contemplative imagery that intertwines with the breathless and frenetic movement of testimony, carnival procession and local political claim.

Naya Abrin’s residency project, Bigidi pa ka tombé means “to be off balance without ever really falling” in Creole. The collaboration with performer and dancer Patricia Badin is one of the main components of this project which is dedicated to taking advantage of the Cité internationale des arts as a privileged place for collective research based on bodily practices and theoretical questioning.

Through Afro-descendant dances such as twerk and Gwo Ka, this collaboration will generate performances and spaces of reflection around decolonialism and cultural appropriation. This project shows Afro-descendants’ and Afro-Caribbean people’s state of resistance towards the traumatic effects of post-colonialism. It contributes to highlighting racialized bodies dancing, working on the fall as a form of expression that can give rise to empathetic reflexes. These reflexes could allow the spectator to apprehend the systemic violence that is often invisibilized.

Naya Abrin is planning then to write a documentary on spontaneous housing and the evolution of precarious areas in Guadeloupe. This project will highlight the memory of populations from precarious neighborhoods, caught in the disappearance of this resilient territory which was painfully cleaned up since the building of the colonial suburb until today.