Rachel Bolle-Debessay
rachel.bolle-debessay@univie.ac.atMy approach is guided by a commitment to knowledge that is accessible, collaborative, and made with the people whose expression it engages.
Urban walk, on invitation from Théâtre de Poche | Geneva.
As part of Mars Pugnace, Théâtre de Poche's feminist season, the theatre celebrated La Grande Ourse, a powerful play by playwright Penda Diouf.
Cultural mediator Sarah Pedrizat invited representatives of the association Échappée, together with Pascale de Senarclens and me, to design an urban walk that would allow those who had not seen the play to immerse themselves in Penda Diouf’s world.
Over one weekend, braving the storm, we walked witches' paths, called on our ancestors, and brought to life texts we felt resonated with Penda Diouf's universe.
My contribution centred on the theme of madness in Afro-diasporic literature, drawing connections between La Grande Ourse and Jean “Binta” Breeze's celebrated poem “Madwoman Riddim Raving”.
Cultural mediator Sarah Pedrizat invited representatives of the association Échappée, together with Pascale de Senarclens and me, to design an urban walk that would allow those who had not seen the play to immerse themselves in Penda Diouf’s world.
Over one weekend, braving the storm, we walked witches' paths, called on our ancestors, and brought to life texts we felt resonated with Penda Diouf's universe.
My contribution centred on the theme of madness in Afro-diasporic literature, drawing connections between La Grande Ourse and Jean “Binta” Breeze's celebrated poem “Madwoman Riddim Raving”.
Lectures Alternatives | 2019-2021
Collaborative project: Association de Médiatrices Interculturelles (Rachel Bolle), Kasia Grabska & Marisa Cornejo | Geneva, Neuchâtel.
Collaborative project: Association de Médiatrices Interculturelles (Rachel Bolle), Kasia Grabska & Marisa Cornejo | Geneva, Neuchâtel.
Cultural participation programme for migrants with limited access to museum spaces.
Funded by the Fonds de la Commission Fédérale de la Migration / Migros Pour Cent culturel / Ernst Göhner Stiftung.
With the support of the Musée International de la Croix-Rouge et du Croissant-Rouge (Geneva) / Musée d’Ethnographie (Neuchâtel) / Musée Gruérien (Bulle).
With the support of the Musée International de la Croix-Rouge et du Croissant-Rouge (Geneva) / Musée d’Ethnographie (Neuchâtel) / Musée Gruérien (Bulle).
Lectures Alternatives began as a long-term research-creation project with migrant communities, which I conceived and coordinated within the AMIC association, in collaboration with social anthropologist Kasia Grabska and artist Marisa Cornejo. My role was to build the link between marginalised communities and cultural institutions, opening dialogue and shaping ways to share knowledge across them. Over three years, I developed the project with three museums: the Musée international de la Croix-Rouge et du Croissant-Rouge in Geneva, the Musée d'Ethnographie in Neuchâtel, and the Musée Gruérien in Bulle.
The project emerged from a central question: whose voices are heard in museum spaces, and whose remain underrepresented? Museums shape how people come to feel part of a city and its cultural landscape, so the initiative invited migrant communities to step into the curatorial process.
Groups of 15 to 20 participants from diverse diasporic histories took part in creative workshops led by artists Marisa Cornejo (dream-based practices), François Burland (collective drawing) and Giulia Cilla (cartographic mapping). They then engaged directly with museum collections, approaching objects as living carriers of memory and history. Through artistic practice, they developed alternative readings that expanded the interpretative frameworks of the collections. Audio recordings of the participants' voices by Clara Alloing and Marine Maye were placed next to each object's label, extending the museum experience beyond its walls.
This process generated narratives that broaden how museum objects can be understood: not only through expert discourse but also through situated, lived, and diasporic perspectives. Lectures Alternatives opened new possibilities for identification and self-representation. It fostered social cohesion and repositioned the museum as a space for dialogue.
The project emerged from a central question: whose voices are heard in museum spaces, and whose remain underrepresented? Museums shape how people come to feel part of a city and its cultural landscape, so the initiative invited migrant communities to step into the curatorial process.
Groups of 15 to 20 participants from diverse diasporic histories took part in creative workshops led by artists Marisa Cornejo (dream-based practices), François Burland (collective drawing) and Giulia Cilla (cartographic mapping). They then engaged directly with museum collections, approaching objects as living carriers of memory and history. Through artistic practice, they developed alternative readings that expanded the interpretative frameworks of the collections. Audio recordings of the participants' voices by Clara Alloing and Marine Maye were placed next to each object's label, extending the museum experience beyond its walls.
This process generated narratives that broaden how museum objects can be understood: not only through expert discourse but also through situated, lived, and diasporic perspectives. Lectures Alternatives opened new possibilities for identification and self-representation. It fostered social cohesion and repositioned the museum as a space for dialogue.
Short film by Virginie Alexa Andrey
Cohabitations Multiples & Nouveaux Imaginaires | 2024
Collaborative project: AMIC & Pascale de Senerclens, Festival Far° | Nyon, Sergy.
Collaborative project: AMIC & Pascale de Senerclens, Festival Far° | Nyon, Sergy.
Bi-national (France–Switzerland) project on intercultural urban cohabitation, engaging young migrants and public institutions.
Funded by the Fonds culturel du Grand Genève.
Cohabitations Multiples & Nouveaux Imaginaires is a collaborative project with artist Pascale de Senarclens. The project asks how people with different backgrounds and languages might live together, build trust, and create spaces of shared understanding.
Working with the train stations in Nyon and Sergy, we approached these transit spaces as liminal spaces that make possible unexpected forms of intimacy. Train stations are infrastructures of movement and encounter, public environments where strangers are brought into proximity and coexist across difference. The project investigated how such spaces might be activated as sites of collective imagination and dialogue.
Through participatory workshops and sound documentation, we invited communities to co-create visions of cohabitation—to imagine how unexpected encounters might generate new forms of shared understanding.
Working with the train stations in Nyon and Sergy, we approached these transit spaces as liminal spaces that make possible unexpected forms of intimacy. Train stations are infrastructures of movement and encounter, public environments where strangers are brought into proximity and coexist across difference. The project investigated how such spaces might be activated as sites of collective imagination and dialogue.
Through participatory workshops and sound documentation, we invited communities to co-create visions of cohabitation—to imagine how unexpected encounters might generate new forms of shared understanding.
They produced sound capsules by interviewing station passengers, creating a living audio map of each space and its users. In this process, participants became storytellers rather than objects of observation, and the knowledge produced was rooted in their own lives.
Collaborative project: Musée of Ethnography (MEG) & AMIC | Geneva.
Intercultural programme supporting the museum’s shift toward community, co-creation and decolonial exhibition practice.
Intercultural programme supporting the museum’s shift toward community, co-creation and decolonial exhibition practice.
The project began from a missing object: a jebena, a central element of Eritrean cultural heritage, absent from the exhibition but preserved in the MEG archives.
Pascale led three workshops with a group of six to seven participants, who brought personal stories spanning different ages and experiences in Switzerland. Working with comedian Safi Martin Yé, the group moved away from a documentary register to shape short, imaginative stories built from their testimonies.
The participants produced audio recordings and labels that added a new layer of knowledge to the permanent collection, shaping the museum experience themselves.
Jebena was one of the first instances in which a public-led intervention added an object to a MEG collection without the curatorial team initiating the process. It opened the museum to plural narratives and showed how participatory practice can reshape who speaks through a collection.
Exhibition Performance, on invitation from FIFDH (Festival du Film et Forum des Droits Humains) & RIVAGES | Geneva.
Kids Guernica took place during the Geneva International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights (FIFDH). I coordinated the participation of young migrants from the AMIC association in a collective mural initiated by artist François Burland, whose work drew on Picasso's Guernica.
Over several days, participants painted side by side, across generations, translating themes of war, displacement, and resilience into visual testimony. The mural became both an image and a process, a way of confronting violent histories while building trust between people who did not know each other. Exhibited within the festival, the work reached audiences who rarely share the same cultural space.
Kids Guernica explored collective artistic practice as a way to open cultural spaces to people who might otherwise be excluded or marginalized by institutional gatekeeping.