Rose Frigière – +237-4C Para Salon, 2026

Rose Frigière’s Para-salon is a working archive that doubles as a hairdressing salon, social space and photographic set. It centres on Afrodites #2, a photo-novel developed with hairdressers, traders and residents of Lyon’s Guillotière and Moncey districts. During the Biennale, participants shape the photo-novel’s characters, dialogue and images through collaborative writing, casting and staged photography. The main character of the story escapes from a colonial photograph and opens a cosmetics and African hair-braiding shop, where advice, memories and knowledge circulate alongside goods and services. Contemporary testimony and collective image-making respond to the distortions and omissions of colonial representation, allowing those involved to determine how their neighbourhood and its histories are seen. The project continues Afrodites, created with Amélie Laval from Frigière’s research and conversations in Marseille’s Afro hair salons and reclaims the photo-novel as a popular form for carrying political histories and collective imagination.

Research, performance, artistic mediation and twinhood structure Rose Frigière’s practice, centred on sociability. She mobilises fiction to construct narratives that connect personal history and collective memory, often centring the voices of women of African descent. Her work engages with modes of transmission, enunciation and embodiment, treating narration as an embodied act rather than a fixed account. The artist constructs forms in which memory circulates, taking shape through relation and repetition

This work was created as part of Biennale en territoires. It was the subject of an extended creation project led with the artist Rose Frigière, involving residents of the Guillotière, Moncey and Voltaire neighbourhoods in Lyon.