Reading Nights at the Abattoirs library

These open days will be an opportunity to discover the new layout of the rooms in the Abattoirs library, which now provides free access to thousands of works previously kept on reserve.

Programme for Thursday 23 January :

• 5.30pm Musical reading by Le chant de la baleine à bosse.
  Magali Germain and Véronique Barthe sing and play a selection of children's books. The bearded lady will cross paths with the worst of the feathered and glittery princesses and mermaids, accompanied by song and music.
• From 6.15pm, a meeting with the founders of Blast, a young publishing house based in Toulouse and set up in 2019, which promotes essay-based literature and political creation, centred on social struggles and resistance (anti-racist, feminist, queer, anarchist).
• At 7.00 pm, a reading-performance by Miel Pagès based on published and, above all, unpublished texts. Drawing a link between the Musée des Abattoirs library and her personal research, the artist will bring to life the questions that drive her around the shown body, the possibility or impossibility of expression and the relationship with the other. She will call on her closest mediums: poetry, the living and the visual arts. It will also be possible to discover the artist's video-poems in the video space.

Programme for Friday 24 January :

• From 2.30pm, presentation of the library's new open-access collections.

Focus on the library's new open-access collections

A room dedicated to artists' books

With more than 5,000 documents, this collection comprises artists‘ books in the strict sense of the term, as well as photographers’ books, artists' magazines and ephemera, and a substantial documentary collection on this “medium”. There is also a historical collection that spans the period from the 1960s to the 1980s, focusing on Fluxus and conceptual artists, as well as key players such as Christian Boltanski, Sophie Calle and Hans-Peter Feldmann. Today, in the wake of these avant-gardes, many artists continue to use the printed (and reproducible) medium to express themselves. If, in a self-reflexive approach, this collection is an invitation to question what the artist's book is, it also questions contemporary creation more broadly, while taking an amused and critical look at our world today.

A children's library

The children's library raises awareness of contemporary art through workshops offering a playful approach to art through books. Workshops for individuals are held once a month on Wednesdays and during the school holidays. Formats for schoolchildren are also offered throughout the year. The aim of these sessions is to gently guide young children as they take their first steps into the world of art, so that they are always searching, playing and inventing. On the programme: paper-based workshops using techniques as varied as drawing, colour, collage, origami, engraving, etc.

More details :

blast : blast effect, shock wave, radical attack.
blaste : that which germinates, takes root, grows, parasites, expands, engenders. Editions blast defends a literature of essays and political creation, a literature that thinks about the articulation of oppressions and struggles and opens up perspectives from the field of anti-racist, feminist, queer and anarchist resistance.

As readers who are committed, passionate and concerned about these issues, we are committed to literatures that look at a society, its representations, its mechanisms of domination and the revolts that are born of it; literatures that are voices, aware of the place from which they speak, that illuminate their context as much as they are illuminated by it. And then there are literatures of memory and openness, echoes of the past, attentive to what is happening now and sketches of what might happen in the future.Blast publishes novels, poetry, essays and hybrid forms that feed into engaged analysis while offering incisive writing that radically questions reflexes and norms as much as language itself.

Miel Pagès is a French poet and performer based in Toulouse, who regularly uses video poetry to broaden the ways in which traditional poetry is created and disseminated. Her aim is to make poetry popular, lively and political.
Her favourite themes are the body, queer love and a taste for limits.

The company Le Chant de la baleine à bosse

Since 2019, the association Le Chant de la baleine à bosse has been developing cultural projects based around music and the voice. By inviting different artists, it diversifies its offerings with storytelling, clowning, theatre, kamishibai and children's literature. Between music, singing, theatre and clowning, the company develops a language that involves the body, sounds and words, in projects that blend art and life, from early childhood to adulthood.

Magali Germain singer, musician
Magali was born to parents who were booksellers and lovers of the arts. She grew up surrounded by words, shapes and colours. In her teens, she sang in a jazz choir that took her to the Avignon Festival. As an adult, she opened up to new musical horizons with traditional singing and improvised music. With her D.U.M.I. (Diplôme universitaire de musicien intervenant) in hand, she discovered artistic proposals aimed at young audiences and trained with the Enfance et Musique association. Particularly sensitive to the development of very young children and their relationship with the arts, she is developing new projects with Le Chant de la baleine à bosse.

Website : https://mielpages.com/about