Élie Autin
Creative Crossroads Cycle One 2023–2024
Élie Autin is a multidisciplinary artist who works across several artistic media: choreography, modelling, performance and the visual arts. Her first solo, Présage, premiered at the Arsenic in autumn 2022. In it, her fluid identities play directly off the audience’s gaze. As a performer and dancer, Élie works with a number of artists, including Tamara Alegre, caner teker, Marvin Mtoumo, the Ouinch Ouinch collective and Natasza Gerlach.
As a model and photo model, she regularly performs and poses for various artists and brands, including Dior for DAZED. In parallel, the artist is also developing her visual work, with exhibitions at Circuit (Lausanne), Hamlet (Zurich) and La rada (Locarno), Like little disaster (Polignano a mare), La Becque (La Tour de Peilz) and other venues.
Creative Crossroads Residency 2024 at MDT in Stockholm
Experience Report
As part of the LLB network, my first residency was in Stockholm at MDT. During this residency, I devoted the first part of my time to the adaptation of my solo Présage, which will be performed this summer in Congo as part of the Kisangani Festival in Kinshasa.
The aim of these reflections was to think about how to address a piece that is usually presented to a predominantly Western audience, and which in a few months' time will be presented and confronted by a completely different audience. Other thoughts that came to mind during the residency were:
In what ways are racial and racist issues addressed through art outside the West?
What forms do they take?
Who are they aimed at? To whom? Etc...
Being a black and queer person, in a privileged and Western context, putting forward queer reflections and questionings in a context such as the Congo, will perhaps also allow me new reflections, thoughts, visions when it comes to queerness after the exchanges I'll have with the different people I'll meet during this meeting...
The second part of the residency was spent in the presence of my friend, artist and playwright Clara Delorme!
Together, we brainstormed on the next potential creation I could make. In a more detailed way, I began by outlining to Clara the various images, imaginings, visions and references I had for this piece, then Clara asked me several questions as a kind of interview to preview and refine my thoughts. Using various large sheets of paper, we also drew several scenographic options to create a sort of mental map on paper.
So it was very beneficial for me to be accompanied in pushing the thought process further, with specific points of view but coming from someone who knows my work in these details.
Clara Delorme
Clara Delorme (1997) is a dancer and choreographer based in Lausanne. In her work, she is interested in colours and how they can create a feeling. She likes to use them one by one and imagine a whole and a character for them. With each creation, she wants to give space to the things that human beings have and that don't need much space to shine and be beautiful. Like being strange, old-fashioned and disconnected, or deep sadness... In 2020, she won the PREMIO award for her work Malgrés, and in 2022, she was selected for the Swiss Dance Days with her piece L’albâtre. In 2023, she won the Label + Romand with Le repos. She co-founded Arts_sainement, an association fighting discrimination and abuse in the performing arts, and LIEU COMMUN, a research residency and meeting place in Lausanne. She is currently living in Rome for a ten-month residency at the Swiss Institute, where she will be working on the relationship between colour and space.
Clara Delorme is collaborating with Élie Autin and accompanying her at to the Creative Crossroads residency to ICI–CCN.
Network Meeting at Festival Programme Commun
This weekend Festival Programme Commun is kicking off in Lausanne! Apart from a vivid performance programme Arsenic invited to a Life Long Burning meeting, which includes a three days watch-and-talk programme for our Creative Crossroads artists, led by Ysaline Rochat.