In Toulouse, the Girls Don’t Cry festival combines joy and reflection
4 days at the Metronum where live performances, DJ sets, and time for feminist and activist reflection follow one another.
The project Girls don’t cry was launched in 2018 by the organization The little. Thought of as a sort of response to programmers and party bookers justifying the lack of parity in their events by a lower number of female or non-binary artists, the idea was at the beginning to highlight profiles of artists on social networks, before evolving empirically towards the production of events.
“The project emerged from a Facebook page, with two posts a week, then three, before becoming more regular” says Camille Mathon, festival programmer. “The team then had the opportunity to present a film in a cinema, Girl Power, a Czech documentary about graffiti artists. This is what made us want to set up a project that went well beyond a web page.
La Petite has therefore launched a series of events where the artists represented are women, non-binary people, or transgender people. After a few successful meetings, which included film screenings, dances and debates, the idea of setting up a festival came naturally.
The programming is divided into two parts, a musical axis, composed by Camille Mathon where the goal is to include at the same time popular and unifying proposals, where everyone will be able to recognize themselves. Over the 4 days of the event, more identified names Aisha Devi, Clara3000, Lyzza, Authentically Plastic, cohabit with more confidential but equally exciting proposals.
The second part of the event, that is the activities proposed in the space invested by the festival, were thought out by a team made up of former participants and other people close to the project, the but being that the festival really resembles its audience.
The gathering includes a screening, a poetry workshop, album listening sessions, live concerts, dj sets but also a whole range of activities that allow you to reflect on questions of feminism and activism in the broad sense. .
Clearly, Girls don’t cry is not just a festive time, but also wishes to be a space of reflection for the people who participate in it. It’s a program “which speaks to our feminist and queer public, which does not come just for the music, but for all other forms of art and activism”.
For the event’s graphic identity, the La Petite organization team called on the talent of creative Natalia Podgorska, whose visuals regularly accompany the performances of producer Object Blue. Usually inspired by the living, the flora and its expansion, the artist followed a simple directive here: the event must evoke the joy, the emotion that the participants of the previous editions felt at the end of Girls Don do not Cry. Given the program, we can bet that the next theme may be euphoria.
Girls Don’t Cry, it’s until Sunday (November 27) at the Metronum in Toulouse, and all the info is here.
A text from C’est Bola vie, the weekly column (Monday to Friday, 8:45 a.m.) by David Bola in Un Nova jour se lève.