©Luiz Alves

Between August 2025 and March 2026, a multitude of initiatives were and will be offered by the France-Brazil Season 2025, organized by the governments of both countries, the Ministries of Culture, the Institut Français, and the Instituto Guimarães Rosa (Itamaraty). Present at several events were the Brazilian Minister of Culture, Margareth Menezes, and the Presidents of France, Emmanuel Macron, and Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, as well as countless Brazilians from different regions of Brazil, bringing the experiences of young Brazilians, French, Africans, Martinicans, and Guianese from French Guiana, organized into discussion groups, roundtables, seminars, exhibitions, music and theater events from their respective geographical and cultural regions.

Organized by governmental and non-governmental groups, the meeting between young people and the Brazilian public undoubtedly laid the foundation for an excellent multicultural relationship.

Several exhibitions have opened in different Brazilian states. In São Paulo, a partnership with SESC Pompéia allowed the season to open with the exhibition "The Power of My Hands," on display until January 18th, curated by Odile Burluraux, Suzana Sousa, and Aline Albuquerque. The work was conceived at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris in 2021, within the context of the Africa 2020 Season, coordinated by Odile and Suzana, and here in Brazil, Aline Albuquerque joins them. The exhibition comprises a panorama of daily life, visualized by women and experiences that are sometimes made invisible. With the participation of Brazilian, African, and French artists, "The Power of My Hands" expresses a mixture of tradition, politics, spirituality, living conditions, and spirituality. In three areas—Personal Stories, Stories and Fictions, and The Private and the Political—the works reflect personal stories that become collective and universal. For more than ten years, contemporary history has been going through an identity crisis that, in the words of Odile Burluraux, "still suffers from not having committed itself sufficiently to a questioning compatible with post-colonial and decolonial studies."

Also in São Paulo, a more than significant presence of the season occurred in partnership with the Tomie Ohtake Institute, where for over 7 months Brazilians were able to attend the exhibition and seminar "The Earth, the Fire, the Water and the Winds – Towards a Museum of Wandering" with Édouard Glissant. In an international effort in partnership with the Institut du Tout-Monde (ITM), founded in 2006, the Édouard Glissant Art Fund; the Memorial ACTEe and the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), the exhibition presents a "museum in motion: not founded on the fixation of an origin, but on the relationships between histories, geographies and languages ​​that touch and transform each other". The Institute is a place of exchange, where people accompany each other. A platform for actions that give concrete expression to otherness. According to Glissant: "to change, changing with the other, without losing myself, however, nor becoming denatured". In addition to the collection, the exhibition included Glissant's writings, such as the Notebook of a Journey Along the Nile, from 1988, in the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, edited by the Brazilian curators and translated by Sebastião Nascimento.

The exhibition in Brazil marks an important moment in the trajectory of the ITM, with the presence of Sylvie Séma Glissant, director of the Institut, with a very diverse collection of works that, according to her, embodies Glissant's dream of an "artistic archipelago: a space between voices and territories and imaginaries that meet and transform through Relationship."
Artists from the Americas, the Caribbean and Brazil, France, Africa and Asia. Two Brazilian artists, Zé di Cabeça from Acervo da Laje and Rayana Rayo, who have completed residencies in Curitiba and Martinique, are also present. Unique and worthy collaborations for a museum in motion.

As part of the program, a multi-day seminar, "Earth, Fire, Water and Winds," was organized by curators Ana Roman and Paulo Miyada, along with Sylvie Sema Glissant, bringing together several specialists on the discourse of the Martinican thinker. Several colleagues from his life were present to honor the poet of diversity, including Patrick Chamoiseau, Manthia Diawara, Nadia Yala Kisukidi, and Anne Lafont, among others. During the seminar, in partnership with the publisher Bazar do Tempo, the book "The Antillean Discourse," a key work of Édouard Glissant's post-colonial thought, was presented.

According to professor and translator Ligia Fonseca Ferreira, a participant in the seminar, “the arrival of *The Antillean Discourse*, a fundamental work by the Martinican Édouard Glissant, 45 years after its publication, is a landmark. Glissant is one of the leading contemporary thinkers in the French language. In this dense and poetic work, he dissects the fractured identity of a place born from African deportation and enslavement, seeking the “primordial discourse.” It is in this work that we find the key concepts of his ethics and aesthetics: Creolization, Relation, Opacity, and Diversity. How will the book be received here? I only know that the reading will be challenging, it will force us to navigate conceptual currents that are very new in Brazil. It will be a fertile dialogue, but not without friction.” The professor also commented, “The long friendship between Édouard Glissant and Diva Damato (1931-2019), a pioneer in studies on Glissant and Antillean literature in Brazil. She was one of the writer's first interlocutors and author of Édouard Glissant: Poetics and Politics, from 1996. At Glissant's invitation, she was the first Brazilian to be part of the jury of the Carbet Prize of the Caribbean, created in 1990 and an important bridge between Brazil and a “Black France, on this side of the Americas”.
The France-Brazil Season, which set up exhibition centers in several Brazilian cities, had very important moments in Salvador, in the state of Bahia, where several exhibitions were presented and in the first week of November the Forum of the Our Future Festival took place, where young people from different Brazilian states, as well as young French people from French Guiana and Benin, in Africa, debated in research groups on “Common Memories: culture, heritage and territoriality”, “What do our cities have in common?”, “Presents and futures in sharing and dispute” (as was already debated in the Seminar, Urbanism in Bahia, organized by Lugar Comum, Research Group on Urbanism and the Right to the City of FAUFBA).

We spoke with Lylly Houngnihin, born in Benin, Africa, one of the three curators of the Festival, about her involvement in organizing the event:

Lylly – I am from Benin, I am an art curator, and my specialty is Vodou aesthetics, which is characterized by a multifaceted sensory approach involving taste, touch, and extrasensory perceptions. I, a young African woman, began to ask “questions” about diplomacy with France, a country that colonized us, Benin, in West Africa. And then President Macron, who is also here with us, who gave the opening address last night, invited young people from all over the African continent to join him in debating all these issues. It was in 2021, in Montpellier, at the Africa-France meeting to share how we can transform this relationship and give more space to this civil society. We held meetings in South Africa, Tunisia, Cameroon, and Ivory Coast.

Last year, in June 2024, we invited young people from Salvador da Bahia, and from Cotonou, the largest city in Benin, to talk about the French language. Based on my connection to the city of Salvador—I was here last year with a team—we decided that we should hold the meeting in Salvador in November, during Black Awareness Month. And discuss how we can build an agenda with Black men and women in common dialogue with colleagues from Europe, France, and around the world to heal our future.
"So, for a year now we have been working together, we are three co-curators, three women: myself, from Benin, Africa; my colleague, Zara Fournier, a geographer, she is from France and works at the Institut Français de Paris; and Glória Santos, who is a professor at UFBA. From December 2024 until now, we have been working on each section of this forum to see which themes we could highlight in order to, from now on, in Salvador, build a common agenda on the memory of slavery and colonization along the Black Atlantic."
We spoke with Glória Santos, one of the organizers of the event, a professor at the Federal University of Bahia, in the Faculty of Architecture, and an urban planner by training.

Gloria Santos – I teach and research urban and regional planning. Then, through a grant, I took on the role of curator for the Our Future Forum. I believe that Afro-Brazilian culture is at the heart of our social formation. I believe that this meeting allows for debate, exchange of experiences, strategies and initiatives in the face of contemporary crises, climate emergencies, economic crises, global crises that suggest that the production of knowledge is outdated, and we need to open ourselves to other possibilities. Our aim, then, was to see the initiatives that are already being built in civil society and put them up for debate in this Forum. Initiatives that are often fragmented, so our aim is to enable them to connect on a transatlantic and diasporic scale. For example, if we consider the issue of housing in Brazil and the issue of infrastructure in collective spaces, we see the difficulties faced by the racialized population in Brazil, which is not protected in terms of land tenure because it lacks formal ownership. This is linked to how our abolition occurred, where enslaved people became free without guarantees of their land or access to labor, and this also applied to indigenous populations. In contrast, many European immigrants had this ownership, which created a huge divide. So we have to confront issues from the past that are still present. But we can do things about it. In meetings like this, we can strengthen experiences and create connections that have the capacity for real and practical cultural impact. The discussion workshops are fundamental for this.

A significant presence at the Our Future Festival was that of essayist, playwright, and professor Leda Maria Martins, PhD in Literature from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), who highlighted the importance of the meeting of three continents. In her words, “this type of initiative opposes the extractivism of capital. It's about how to build democracies that don't create scarcity. How to guarantee the planet's breathing.” Leda quoted the thinker Ailton Krenak and David Kopenahue, who states, “I don't say I discovered it, it (the earth) has always existed, it has always been there.” For Leda, these are the questions that must guide young people through these debates.
She proposed rethinking the way we inhabit the earth, "not as an addendum to the colonial arm, a continuation of dehumanization, but rather returning to the ecology of the environment, researching reparation."

More than eighty researchers from universities, museums, and cultural and technological organizations participated in the panels and debates. Among the writers and thinkers were Malcolm Ferdinand, a researcher at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), one of the largest research centers in France; Djamila Delannon, co-curator of the Regarde créole project at the WOW Festival (Women of the World Festival); Christiane Taubira; David Fontcuberta-Rubio, from the University of the Antilles; and Karina Tavares, founder of CUFA France, the French branch of the Central Union of Slums (CUFA).
This festival placed Bahia and Brazil at the center of major debates about the future of cities and their communities.

In parallel, two major exhibitions accompanied the debates. At MUNCAB, the National Museum of Afro-Brazilian Culture, the exhibition "Memory, Accounts of Another History," curated by Nadine Hounkpatin and Jamile Coelho, was on display.

The exhibition "The Reverse of Time" by Roméo Mivekannin at the Museum of Modern Art (MAM) in Salvador showcased the powerful Beninese painter who revisits the tradition of historical painting and reinterprets it through Black and gender narratives. The exhibition invites a rethinking of the past and the future in other bodies. Roméo inserts his self-portrait into his reinterpretation of masterpieces, as a forgotten Black figure, in a gesture of homage to the original paintings and intrusion.

MixBrasil

The Stop Homophobia Conference was present at the 33rd MixBrasil.

Also in São Paulo, from November 12th to 23rd, the France-Brazil Season 2025 joined the MixBrasil Festival of Diversity Culture, incorporating its strength and participation in four unprecedented projects that brought together art, activism, and sensitive listening.
The MixBrasil Festival of Diversity Culture is one of the largest and oldest events celebrating the plurality and power of the LGBTQIA+ community in Latin America. Created in 1993, this edition presented 142 films from 33 countries, shows, literature, exhibitions, and immersive XR (extended reality) experiences.

Long Play, a creation of French choreographer and artist Alexandre Roccoli, in partnership with CAPS (Psychosocial Care Center) and MixBrasil. The project proposes bodily and somatic practices to address physical and psychological survival as an act of resistance.

"The Stop Homophobia Conference was present at the 33rd MixBrasil, within the France-Brazil 2025 Season, bringing together voices that span activism, research, and public policy to rethink the direction of LGBT+ struggles in the present, and concluded its program with an essential conversation about how organizations, community leaders, and public institutions build lasting responses to LGBTphobia."
At the Mário de Andrade Library, the panel "Associations and Institutions: How to Fight LGBTphobia in a Sustainable Way" brought together trajectories that combine care, politics, and mobilization on various fronts.
Participants included Sabine Chyl and Brice Armien-Boudre, co-presidents of Kap Caraïbe; Terrence Khatchadourian, secretary-general of Stop Homophobie; Mickaël Bucheron, French police officer and the country's first LGBT+ liaison officer and co-founder of FLAG!; Léo Áquilla, journalist, politician and coordinator of LGBT+ policies for the City of São Paulo; and Cláudia Garcia, a historical activist in the Black, feminist and LGBT+ movements, former president and current vice-president of APOLGBT-SP.
A table that reminded us of the strength that exists when the struggle is born from constant and collective commitment.”
Source: @festivalmixbrasil

Since 2020, Raya Martigny and Édouard Richard have been documenting LGBT+ youth on Réunion Island, a French territory in East Africa, to create a series of portraits and a short film rooted in the territory. Through images of self-affirmation and acceptance, the artist couple unites “kwir” and Creole experiences and addresses the construction of LGBT+ identities in the face of colonial legacies.
Kwir Nou Éxist was first presented in Paris, in the Louvre Gardens, in July of this year, as part of the Paris l'Été festival. The exhibition has been given a special edition designed specifically for the Mix Brasil Festival.” Source: mixbrasil.org.br

Kwir Nou Éxist, first presented this year in Paris in the Louvre gardens, is a multimedia creation featuring videos and archives that reveal the power and engagement of the local LGBTQIA+ community.

“Kancícà is an immersive 360° dome experience created by Laeïla Adjovi and Joséphine Derobe with an original soundtrack by Tiganá Santana. Alongside, the work reconstructs, in poetic and sensory language, the mythical journey of Dotou, a young cartographer and Vodun priestess who crosses the Atlantic in search of the banished Queen Na Agontimé, a historical figure from the kingdom of Danxomè (present-day Benin) deported to Brazil in the 18th century. Source: mixbrasil.org.br”

The Stop Homophobia Conference, an urgent debate against gender violence and in defense of civil rights, bringing together voices from Brazil and France.
Kancícà was an experience inside a dome, an immersion in African-based spirituality, connecting ancestry, art, and technology.

As always, a personality is honored. In this edition, the artist Marisa Orth was chosen for the Mix2025 Icon Award, a long-time partner of MIXBrasil and presenter of the iconic Show do Gongo since 1999, celebrating a career that combines humor, intelligence, and courage.

The program was spread across various cultural spaces such as CineSesc, CCSP, MIS, IMS Paulista, Teatro Sérgio Cardoso, and the Museum of Sexual Diversity, as part of the activities also broadcast online. It was a festival open to the public, where most events were free or cost an average of R$20.


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