Séverine Ballon

Séverine Ballon (France, 1980) is a composer and cellist. These two activities feed into each other in her musical research. In her work as a performer, she favors collaborations with composers, in the intimacy of the musical factory. She has premiered solos and concertos by Rebecca Saunders, Chaya Czernowin, Mauro Lanza, Philippe Leroux and Francesca Verunelli, among others. She studied composition at the Musikhochschule in Freiburg with Johannes Schöllhorn and cello at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin and Lübeck with Joseph Schwab and Troels Svane. Winner of the Luc Ferrari competition in 2019, in 2021 she composed the literary show Je suis honorée d’être née dans ta tête, based on texts by Babouillec. Recent projects include a piece for cello and electronics for the Transit festival (Leuven, 2022), and a piece for cello and clarinet for musicians Åsa Åkerberg and Shizuyo Oka (Ensemble Recherche). She has composed two original scores for feature films by director João Pedro Rodrigues: L’Ornithologue (2016) and Où est cette rue? (2022) co-directed with João Rui Guerra da Mata. Her solo album Solitude was released on the Aeon/Outhere label, and her first album as a composer, Inconnaissance, on the All That Dust label.

At Villa Médicis, his project brings together two parallel lines of research that have been underway for several years: the first examines song as memory, material and state; the second focuses on encounters and sharing through music workshops organized in shelters for the underprivileged. The songs and stories collected during these workshops will give rise to a musical fresco that questions the difference between song and speech.