La tentative d’un geste - Mélodie BAJO

Mélodie Bajo is a visual artist and speaker. She was born in Paris in 1995, grew up in the Pyrenees and now lives and works in Toulouse (France). She works under the aegis of a character, addressing the question of our social roles and their impact on our identities, interactions and social relationships. Her artistic practice oscillates between performance and installation. In a work where theoretical research and intervention are in constant dialogue, the pieces she creates, made from recycled textiles then sewn and embroidered, can be seen as the results of performances and daily obsessions, combining physical and mental challenges. Her research, oriented towards interactionist sociology, gender studies, philosophy, science and psychology, leads her to question our relationship to language, social norms and the classification of our categories.

She graduated with a DNAP from the École Supérieure d’Art des Pyrénées in Tarbes in 2015, and in 2018 earned a DNSEP with honors from the Institut Supérieur des Arts in Toulouse. She also took part in 2020-2021, in the POST-BC post-graduate program, in partnership with the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté art school platform.

Her work most often flourishes within specific territories, notably during research and creation residencies, in France and internationally, such as at the library of the Musée des Abattoirs in 2019/2020, during the Création en cours and Transat residencies piloted by the Ateliers Médicis in 2022, at Pollen in Monflanquin in 2023, at the Darling Foundry in Montreal in 2023/2024, or at the BBB Centre d’Art in Toulouse in 2024. Her installations have been the subject of various solo exhibitions, at Pollen in 2023, at the BBB Centre d’Art in 2024/2025, at the Musée des Abattoirs - FRAC Occitanie in 2025 and at the Château de la Falgalarié in Aussillon in 2025/2026, as part of the Prix Mezzanine Sud, of which she was one of the winners in 2024.

Since 2024, she has been working in duo with curator and author Léa Besson through a shared practice of poetic and fictional writing around issues of scenography, bodies and norms, and she also maintains a regular collaboration with Quebec sociologist Lisandre Labrecque-Lebeau around issues of voice agreement, in order to address our relationships to belief, madness, truth, and therefore the real. This work gave rise to her current project on the question of miracles in relation to the notion of utopia, which has already undergone a first stage of research and creation, during a residency at the École des Beaux Arts de Châteauroux in 2025, presented in a solo exhibition at the Galerie Marcel Duchamp in 2026. The same year, she joins the Documents d’Artistes Occitanie (DDA) documentary collection, as well as the artists’ group G.A.R.R.A.G.E., based at La Bouillonnante in Toulouse.