écrire les silences, tisser les mémoires

Alphonse Eklou Uwantege invites artist leïla alice for a dialogic performance.

How can we transmit a culture of origin when we no longer understand the people who look like us, when stories have been lost to silence?

Language structures thought.
Without words,
without language,
without history,
only empty vessels remain, ready to be filled with anything and everything.

To cut off a language
is to cut off a culture.
It is to sever parenthood,
to destroy the bridges between generations.

Being cut off from one's roots
also means being cut off from one's emotions,
from the ability to fully express what one feels.

Losing one's language
is losing one's psychic territory.
While some fight to preserve their linguistic and cultural heritage,
we,
sometimes,
let these territories fade away.
And when nothing remains, who will rewrite history?

My grandmother and I share no words,
so it is in silence that we meet—fragile yet connected.
The languages in my family are multiple:
Russian,
Kinyarwanda,
Ewe,
French.
They intertwine, overlap, and sometimes fade, creating silent spaces rich with buried memories.

These silences are not empty:
they carry stories, wounds, forgotten fragments of a past that is still present.

It is within these in-between spaces that I invite you,
“into this third territory,”
where the foreigner in Belgium meets the muzungu in Rwanda.
There,
between silences and fragments,
I try to shape a hybrid language—
a speech unfinished yet alive.

• Alphonse Eklou Uwantege is a 28-year-old queer Sagittarius, born in Minsk to a Rwandan mother and a Togolese father. Alphonse is a model, performer, and director based in Brussels. Their work uses the body as a tool, writing as a weapon of resurrection, and performance as a political urgency. Their approach is driven by a desire to subvert the norms of representation and the relationship between spectators and performers by disrupting scenic spaces.

In the first part of their triptych, restes, Alphonse explores artistic research on transgenerational trauma, invisible memory, and colonial transmissions in a solo performance paying tribute to their uncle, Alphonse Kanimba, who was killed during the genocide against the Tutsis in April 1994.

Currently, Alphonse is continuing this exploration in the second part of the triptych, questioning migratory inheritances and the silences imposed on diasporic identities. Through traditional and contemporary movements, the languages of their family, and documents as witnesses to erasure and resistance, they examine the fractures and reinventions linked to displacement.

• leïla alice is a transdisciplinary artist based in brussels who explores the tensions between light and shadow, trust and doubt, grandeur and intimacy. through their alter ego lilo soleil, they shape a space where colour, voice, sound, and body engage in dialogue to tell stories imbued with metaphors and mysticism.

a graduate in tapestry from the royal academy of fine arts in brussels, leïla alice deepens their understanding of textures and patterns. through artisanal techniques, they also learn to find magic in patience. as an artist, leïla alice discovers a passion for performance, a form of expression that touches their heart because it offers the opportunity to merge all the art forms surrounding them to create moments that transcend the boundaries of the everyday.

their performance PARADE by leïla alice is a creation carried by 22 bodies, a first exploration of human duality through the prism of the sun and the moon — of the sky. like a tightrope walker, they oscillate between certainties and uncertainties, drawing inspiration from tales, mythology, and tarot to compose a ritual between clairvoyance and collapse, resilience and surrender.

throughout their explorations, they have invested spaces such as zinnema, decoratelier, recyclart, MORPHO, la mercerie, horst festival, pianofabriek, BRONKS, and other hybrid venues, affirming an immersive and introspective approach to performance. with la maison de lilo, first initiated at kaaitheater before coming to life at kiosk radio, they imagine a sonic refuge where emotions take shape, inviting the audience into an introspection guided by sound and vocal textures.

their research revolves around commitment to the self, the internal face-to-face, and giving form to what unsettles, sketching an open diary where sound design meets song, where experimentation becomes a terrain of truth. always in search of new territories of expression, leïla alice aspires to deepen this sensory approach, to push the limits of their first intuitions, and to find spaces ready to embrace their boldest desires for exploration.