SHAPE ARTISTS PRESENTED:
Founded in 1986 by Ferdinand Richard (Etron Fou Leloublan / Rock in Opposition), the MIMI festival had, from the beginning, the ambition to spread innovative & experimental music to new audiences and to create places conducive to the discovery of these aesthetic adventures. To carry the festival, Ferdinand Richard created the association A.M.I. (Aide aux Musiques Innovatrices).
The MIMI Festival (International Movement of Innovative Music) is still the high point of these actions carried out throughout the year. But since then, AMI’s activities have diversified considerably, placing at the heart of its project the defence of diversity and cultural rights as well as local cultural development through support for creation, artistic practices and cultural entrepreneurs.
After three editions in Saint-Rémy de Provence (Arènes Coinon), seven in Saint-Martin de Crau (Etang des Aulnes), and five in Arles (Théâtre Antique), fifteen years in the extraordinary setting of the Caroline Hospital on the Frioul Islands (Parc National des Calanques), the MIMI festival is now taking over several places in Marseille, notably La Friche la Belle de mai and La Cité des arts de la rue in the northern districts, as a symbol of still being there where it was not expected…
Having become an international reference through the network it has developed during its thirty-three years of existence, the MIMI festival presents artists from all horizons, musical or geographical. A pioneer, he also always invited emerging artists (now emblematic) alongside internationally renowned innovators.
From the outset, MIMI has chosen an innovative and highly trans-aesthetic programmatic approach favouring risk-taking and creativity in all directions, which perhaps explains its exceptional longevity.
Today, directed by Elodie LE BREUT, the festival MIMI is still a UFO, viscerally attached to unclassifiable artists from all over the world.
Since 2004, Laurent Gérard also known as Èlg, has drawn concentric sound spirals made of musical pipes and entrails. He uses an arsenal of instruments and methods, constantly renewed and builds improbable bridges between concrete music and french song debris, between cryptic electronic tribal incantations and Russian doll dancing in Plutonia. When not in French, language is reduced to an alien babble of an old man, a child, a dusty revenant, an epileptic bard, a peaceful messenger…
The motifs and the contours of the sound reinvent themselves constantly like a living organism. Its a coil of prayers, an earth rocket, a parade we are following on a grand avenue..
Èlg appears in collaboration with RIAM Festival.
More info here.
