Celebrating the 20th anniversary of Parallèle means honouring a pioneering project in its support of emerging artistic practices. It also means opening up new horizons for artistic experimentation, driven by a cooperative ethos and grounded in social issues. From our base at Friche la Belle de Mai, we seek to devise modes of encounter between the artists we support, audiences and local residents. To do so, we privilege long-term engagement and the depth of experience.
This is the programme we set ourselves for 2026, and to which we warmly invite you: a rich and committed programme inaugurated by the Parallèle Festival.

The Festival is conceived as a conversation:
— A conversation with the trio of curators–programmers Flora Fettah, Assia Ugobor and Lamia Zanna, formed within the Futures directions programme and associated with the programming of Parallèle Festival 16;
— A conversation with the invited artists, many of whose projects explore intimacies inhabited by other presences, imagine genealogies or futures as gestures of composition and repair;
— A conversation with partners in Marseille and beyond, many of whom once again this year renew their trust in us and share their collective power to act;
— Conversations with audiences and professionals welcomed at the Festival HQ, a new space for meeting and conviviality inaugurated for this edition at La Compagnie, a creative venue. A place to pause, exchange around the performances, take part in a reading workshop or join a round-table discussion.

Parallèle Festival 16 is also a moment of convergence and visibility for the three programmes that make up the Professional Development Cycle for the Sustainability of the Cultural Sector, launched in autumn 2024. Alongside the work carried out by the Futures directions trio, the Festival showcases works exhibited or created for the occasion by the invited artists as part of La Relève 8, as well as performances or works-in-progress presented by the artists selected for the Jeunes chorégraphes du Sud programme.

In theatres, workshops, exhibition spaces, around a table or during a celebration, we very much look forward to sharing with you the momentum, the joy, but also the urgencies, the singular sensibilities that nourish the Festival’s programme and, beyond it, the Parallèle project.

Welcome
— Anne Kerzerho, General Director of Parallèle

What the World Needs Now

This sixteenth edition of Parallèle stands as a threshold — a threshold of first times, of a still-young collective celebrating barely its first anniversary, and of What the World Needs Now, a format that finds a second skin after its first outing at Maison des Métallos (Paris) in autumn 2025.

Borrowed from singer Dionne Warwick, the title speaks as much of desire as it does of urgency, accompanying us like a discreet bass line. Different contexts, yet a constant urgency: one born of the awareness that we are living through a moment of upheaval, where every gesture calls into question our responsibilities, our points of anchorage and our alliances. Everywhere, neoliberal fascisms are gaining ground, organising to weaken dissident voices and bodies. Faced with this rising tide, what can artistic creation do? What can a performance festival do? Probably nothing spectacular. But perhaps, simply, echo this reality and contribute to the construction of a shared, polyphonic narrative.

The programme, conceived collectively and shaped through dialogue with the Parallèle team, seeks to evade a monolithic heritage in order to venture into its grey areas, its silent debts, its suppressed memories and its organised acts of forgetting. This gesture — fragile, collective, sensitive — is not an end in itself, but rather an attempt.

Over the course of two weeks and across the Aix–Marseille metropolitan area, each venue that welcomes us helps create a space-time to be inhabited together. To these invitations addressed to us are added those extended jointly to the artists. Through their gestures, voices and presences, they pass on their tools — it is up to us to take hold of them. Their practices challenge what is taken for granted, dismantle dominant narratives, are written from the margins, and reaffirm the presence of bodies whose right to belong is continually under threat.

For this is, above all, a matter of transmission: between us, with them, and with you. There is no sovereign theme, therefore, but rather a constellation of movements and narratives through which to think together about what runs through us and what exceeds us. Gathered together, we form a cartography of undisciplined practices that avoid the obvious and displace representations: here, we collectively (re)learn in order to create choral narratives; there, rites and myths are reworked almost artisanally; elsewhere, silenced presences recover their own power.

Unable to extract ourselves from the world, we choose instead to inhabit it differently: by looking sideways, naming what weighs upon us, and finally leaving behind what is moribund in order to invent together what we still lack.

Welcome!
— Assia Ugobor, Flora Fettah and Lamia Zanna

Parallèle 16 was conceived by Flora Fettah, Assia Ugobor and Lamia Zanna, in collaboration with the direction and teams of Parallèle, as part of the Professional Development Cycle for the Sustainability of the Cultural Sector led by Parallèle.