Mélodie Bajo

Mélodie Bajo's artistic practice oscillates between performance, involving voice and humor, and installation using sounds and materials, often reclaimed. Everything usually starts with writing, whether in words, lyrics, signs, voices, diagrams, sounds, diagrams, fragments or images. In an intersectional feminist logic, she employs codes frequently attached to dominant characters in order to appropriate them, but also to put them in the presence of languages associated with conditions of minorization, with a view to questioning our systemic biases, and thus the established social order. She uses a variety of prisms drawn from different scientific disciplines to understand the workings and expression of our self-staging, our social façades and thus our extimities.

How do plant species adapt to survive? How do humans adapt to evolve in society? What forms of protection do plant species put in place? What protective systems do we use in our social interactions and relationships?

During this residency, Mélodie Bajo is conducting research into our social roles and the facades that exist within our everyday interactions. She is interested in their impact on our identities, by linking them to research into plant biodiversity and the evolution of ecosystems, particularly with regard to species adaptation mechanisms and their protection systems. In this sense, this work also seeks to question the processes of essentialization and their relations with the classification of categories present in various scientific fields.

Biography

Born in 1995, Mélodie Bajo lives and works in Toulouse. She discovered writing at the École Supérieure d'Art des Pyrénées in Tarbes, and it was at the Institut Supérieur des Arts de Toulouse, from which she graduated in 2018, that she developed this practice, notably in the staging of performances. During a residency at the library of the Musée des Abattoirs in Toulouse in 2019/2020, she adds the use of scientific languages to her work. She continues this in 2020/2021, as part of a post-graduate sound project conducted with art schools in Burgundy-Franche-Comté. In 2021/2022, she is one of the winners of the Création en cours and Transat residencies run by Ateliers Médicis, marking the start of a collaborative artistic project. Following a residency at the Pollen arts center in Monflanquin, in 2023, she presents her first solo exhibition, entitled Chaordre.

Recent exhibitions

2023	Chaordre, Pollen, Monflanquin, FR
2021	Aérosols, group exhibition, Grande Galerie de l’ISBA, Besançon, FR Le sol est en lave, group exhibition, FRAC Franche-Comté, Besançon, FR Néons, group exhibition, Lieu commun - Artist Run Space, Toulouse, FR Sous le fil, , Musée des Abattoirs - FRAC Occitanie, Toulouse, FR