Festival Love Asia in Saint-Jean » The economic and political newsletter of PACA
Aliénor Hebles is the winner of Initi’active jeunesse, a Departmental Council scheme to support social projects for young people in Haute-Garonne.
Passionate about Asian cultures, she imagined the Love Asia festival in Saint-Jean, free and open to all, to introduce Asia to Haut-Garonne residents and share her devouring passion with them. Portrait.
The least we can say about Aliénor Hebles is that she is hyper active and tenacious. Between her Japanese lessons at the University of Toulouse – Jean Jaurès and her many hats as president of an association with Hanabi Events and as a youtuber with her Choniji channel, the young 21-year-old Saint-Jeannaise is teeming with projects. Against the backdrop of his lifelong passion for Asia, its culture and its cinema. A devouring passion that led her to win the Department’s Initi’active Youth Scholarship last July. Thanks to this aid of 3,500 euros, Aliénor Hebles was able to set up Love Asia, an Asian cultural festival (Japan, Korea, Vietnam, China, Thailand) which brought together 2,000 people on October 23 in Saint-Jean.
She set up her first association at 14
“I was interested in Asian culture at a very young age through my family background. We practice aikido, a traditional Japanese martial art, on my father’s side, while on my mother’s side, we are defined by Chinese culture. I grew up with this attraction, which was reinforced by Asian literature and cinema, Takeshi Kitano’s films and anime like Miyazaki’s, of course. And I started wanting to learn Japanese at the age of 10 on my own. I fell in love with other Asian cultures (Korea, Thailand, etc.), and the traditions of these countries,” she recalls. This enthusiasm pushes her, from the age of 14, to set up her first association dedicated to Asian cultures, to make friends and share her passion.
Intercultural and intergenerational message
Having never traveled to Asia before, she will never stop bringing Asia to her, in order to dream and make people dream. Last example to date: the Love Asia festival that this woman orchestra sets up by mobilizing around her the galaxy of associations dedicated to Asia present on the territory (the Franco-Korean association of Toulouse, the Wakaba association of Castelginest… ). His project was also born from his experience during the Covid-19 crisis. “For the student that I am, the situation of isolation due to the pandemic has been difficult to live with. I missed the meetings and the debates of ideas. Love in Asia was for me the pretext, beyond the dissemination of Far Eastern cultures, to break this isolation, to meet and discover new cultures, whether you are young or not so young, initiated or not. . I wanted it to be as unifying as possible in a very benevolent atmosphere, whether you were a young K-Pop, manga or cosplay fan or a senior origami fan,” she summarizes. A beautiful intergenerational and intercultural promotion message that the Departmental Council wanted to salute as well as its other supporters, the MJC and the town hall of Saint-Jean.