LES BALLASTIERES
Tiers-lieu en Ternois
They came to the residence
Artists
The Ballast Collective offers artist residencies where creative talents can find the space and support they need to develop their projects.
Our space is designed to inspire and foster artistic creation, providing an environment conducive to exploration and research.
Terrilssssss
Music Residency - 11-14/04/2025
The Terrilssssss project, created by Vince Cuny and Paul Regnier, is an immersive drone music work that revisits the industrial landscapes of slag heaps by capturing their raw essence through minimalist and captivating sound compositions. Presented at the end of a residency at Les Ballastières, this project uses heavy vibrations and stretched frequencies to evoke the silent power of these artificial hills, vestiges of old mines and symbols of workers' memory, transforming the music into an echo of these places steeped in history.
Bluetooth drone, 25% cooperative feedback, pipes with air and water, acousmonium rock, double cooking, mafia sauce, doom dub, construction atmosphere, Antoine Courtois Sound System, temperate climates and audio violence - potential.
Music Residency - 03/26-30/2025
Offbeat percussionist, niche composer, and off-the-beaten-path producer roscius releases his debut album "NO FALA B." After a decade spent between London and international tours, collecting rare and handmade percussion instruments, and recently focusing on composing for film, series, and documentaries, the artist returns with an instrumental album created around a chromatic balafon.
This musical journey begins with the melancholy of a tribal melody, an invitation to meditation and movement. Then the album evolves, in a rhythmic, cinematic and transcendent flight. A project that seeks to reconnect the acoustic and the human, far from the codes of current electronic music, a return to the roots and the very essence of the instruments, almost like a tribute to Brazil, where percussion becomes language and the breath of life.
Roscius was in residence at Les Ballastières, a suspended moment during which he refined his live performance, seeking to inscribe his percussion in a space where the echo of instruments and ideas meet. An exploration of sound and light, a quest for meaning in the simplicity of rhythms. A way for him to highlight this primitive and raw energy that he seeks to convey through his art.
Roscius
Nicolas Barry
Dance/Theater Residency - 03/23/2025
La demande d'asile
Nicolas Barry is a playwright and choreographer born in 1989 in Lille. After studying literature and theater in Paris, he joined the ENSATT in Lyon, in the playwriting department. He is the winner of the RCA 2018-2019 scholarship (ENSATT Lyon, ENSBA Lyon, CNSMD Lyon), which allowed him to create the show Les Obsèques du Grand Paon , then to participate in the Danse Élargie competition at the Théâtre de la Ville. His play La Paix dans le monde was a winner of the Jamais Lu festival and given as a reading at Théâtre-Ouvert in 2021, then selected by the Troisième Bureau Reading committee in Grenoble. His first creation, Grand Crié , was created in November 2022 at the SUBS, in Lyon, then presented among others at the Théâtre de la Ville in Abbesses, and at the CENTQUATRE (Impatience festival). The Dream of Flying was created in 2023, presented as part of the Lyon Dance Biennale. His latest creation, La Demande d'asile, was created in March 2025 at the Théâtre de Vanves (Ardanthé Festival).
During his residency at Les Ballastières on March 23, Nicolas Barry worked on the scenography for La Demande d'asile, a piece that questions the absurdity of a system based on suspicion and the testing of narratives. During this residency, he produced an explosive performance, literally setting the stage space ablaze, testing the visual and emotional intensity of his creation. This moment of live work allowed him to redefine the energy of the show while offering a fascinating insight into the creative process behind this unique piece.
Music Residency - 03/18-23/2025
Christophe Petchanatz, Denis Tagu, Emilie Siaut
Three solo projects, three artists who love playing together and crossing paths in real life. Christophe and Denis have known and been working together since the early 1990s. Émilie and Christophe met in 2007 and have been playing together ever since.
The cornerstone of the trio, the InPolysons label, created by Denis, publishes their music, offers collaborations, organizes concerts, supports their creations and has been sharing the stage with them for some time. They were not lacking the desire to find a moment to come together around a collective musical creation, but geographically separated (Lyon, Rennes, Brussels), it was necessary to find a welcoming place to do so.
It only took a fourth thief, David Chazam, and an aborted festival (Ballast YEAH) for this project to come to fruition.
Denis, Christophe and Emilie were therefore welcomed in residence at “Les Ballastières” for a week of exploration, collective experimentation with their respective orchestras of small objects, percussion, toys, various and varied sound objects underpinned by the desire to create together the architecture of a new repertoire, a sound performance mixing spontaneous acoustic improvisations and previously recorded field recordings.
Klimperei, Tagubu, Madame Potato
Camille Arcache & Eliott Khosla
Young Audience Music Residency - 02/2025
A whimsical tale and world music for ages 3 and up, 35 minutes.
Claude Ponti's The Endless Tree (L'Ecole des Loisirs) is adapted for the stage in this new family creation. The whimsical and poetic book is told with world percussion, songs, and the album's animated illustrations in a kamishibai.
For Hipollène, every day is a great day! When she goes out to greet the dawn, Eliott starts playing the music of his endless tree as it awakens. Camille stretches, opens the shutters of her little traveling theater, giving voice and life to the illustrations that scroll before our eyes.
Camille Arcache : actress, singer | Eliott Khosla percussionist, multi-instrumentalist | Composition: Camille Arcache & Eliott Khosla | Staging: Audrey Bonnefoy | Construction/scenography: Aela Royer | Production of animations on illustrations: Louis Moreau
Co-production: Gommette Production & Compagnie Escarbille – With the support of Point Fort d'Aubervilliers, the Collectif Musiques et Danses du Monde, the Annexe de Romainville and Sacem
Music Residency - 02/2025
From the arteries of Mexico City's Distrito Federal to the cellars of the Parisian suburbs, Dééfait explores trance through hypnotic rhythms and noisy textures.
Incantations, hammered percussion, layers of white noise: Ric Lara's haunting voice crosses this shock wave, drawing the listener into a feverish ascent, between vertigo and abandonment.
Formed in 2023, the Dééfait project was born from a collision: That of the Valero brothers (guitar/drums, ex-Pays P.), Enir Da (bass, Dali Muru & The Polyphonic Swarm/Temir Alcy), Ric Lara (vocals) and Grégoire Couvert (guitar). Since March
2024, the machine started up on stage (La Mécanique Ondulatoire, Le Cirque Électrique, Nouveaux Sauvages...), a noisy surge where the reference points become blurred and where noise becomes language.
Carried by a sonic spectrum where the shadows of krautrock, noise, proto-punk and dilapidated psychedelia intersect, Dééfait recalls a Birthday Party-era Nick Cave.
under helium, a distant echo of Damo Suzuki's CAN played through a wall of amps. A first EP is in the making, planned for September 2025 on the Ici, d'ailleurs label (Zëro,
Mad Hatter, Mendelson...).
Defeated
Eylul Nazlier
Music Residency - 10/28-12/01/2024
as part of the TamArt program of the French Institute in Turkey, in partnership with the association Villes des Musiques du Monde.
At 19, Eylul Nazlier has established herself as a committed voice for the recognition of minority cultures. A member of the female group JinMa , acclaimed throughout Turkey, she explores and reinvents popular traditions inspired by her heritage. During her residency at Les Ballastières, Eylul collaborates with artists who share this quest for identity and cultural mixing, such as Caroline Sasal and Bashar Mourad.
Caroline Sasal: Musician and composer, Caroline draws on world music to create modern harmonies, integrating her Occitan heritage with contemporary electroacoustic influences. Her project Aàgut embodies this dialogue between tradition and innovation.
Bashar Mourad: Palestinian pop artist and filmmaker Bashar develops a musical universe that blends pop, electronic, and modal music, addressing profound societal themes. He boldly challenges stereotypes and explores the diversity of cultural and gender identities.
Music Residence
27-29/09/2024
The association and musical and dance ensemble I Carbonari is dedicated to promoting the tarantella and the musical traditions of southern Italy in Paris.
Since its foundation, it has brought together enthusiasts and curious people around this vibrant and energetic dance, a true symbol of Italian folklore.
Through workshops, shows and cultural meetings, I Carbonari brings the authenticity of the tarantella back to life while creating links between cultures.
The association is committed to sharing the richness of this heritage and making it a vector of conviviality and discovery at the heart of French life.
The Carbonari
Camille Husson
& David Chazam
Jessica Lumière is tired
Theater Residence
21-25/10/2024
This evening is the great annual ceremony of Reconciliation that she, the Spiritual Guide of the “Jessica Lumière Quantum Center,” this very modern, and therefore very technological, new-age sect, is to officiate.
But Jessica has literally wrecked the studio where the big mass, scheduled to be broadcast live on her YouTube channel, is being filmed. Her life no longer has meaning; her kingdom, her power, her self-centered spirituality no longer fulfill her; she wants to stop everything, turn off the light. Is this a midlife crisis, an existential crisis?
A man appears. It's Régis, her uncle, her accomplice, and her greatest defender. Shocked by the carnage in the "virtual sacristy" studio, but especially by Jessica's physical and mental state, he tries to rectify the situation.
Show in pre-production.
Music Residence
22-26/10/2024
Aware of the tragically fleeting nature not only of their own existence but also of that of their entire species, two humans have taken it into their heads, certainly also to occupy their rainy days, to document the joys, doubts and absurdity specific to the human condition, with the certainly illusory but nevertheless flamboyant aim of perpetuating the imperishable in the frozen night of the cosmos.
Smooth psychedelic pop duo with funk, dub and soul influences
or hip-hop, crossed by many colors
Indian, Arab, Japanese, African or Caribbean.
Pan Galactic Garden
Terrilssssss
Music Residence
12-15/08/2024
The Terrilssssss project, created by Vince Cuny and Paul Regnier, is an immersive drone music work that revisits the industrial landscapes of slag heaps by capturing their raw essence through minimalist and captivating sound compositions. Presented at the end of a residency at Les Ballastières, this project uses heavy vibrations and stretched frequencies to evoke the silent power of these artificial hills, vestiges of old mines and symbols of workers' memory, transforming the music into an echo of these places steeped in history.
Bluetooth drone, 25% cooperative feedback, pipes with air and water, acousmonium rock, double cooking, mafia sauce, doom dub, construction atmosphere, Antoine Courtois Sound System, temperate climates and audio violence - potential.
Music Residence
08-12/07/2024
Christiane Prince : professional musician, drummer, backing vocalist and composer. She accompanies artists on tour and in the studio (Philippe Katerine, Winston McAnuff & The Bazbaz Orchestra, Melissa Laveau…), and composed the music and performed in the plays “Love Is In The Hair” and “Les Batteurs” by Adrien Beal and the Théâtre Déplié Company. Viryane Say : Viryane Say is a professional musician, bassist and composer. She has accompanied artists on tour and in the studio for 25 years (Camille Bazbaz…) and is also part of the Cabanes Company with which, in collaboration with Fanny Charmont, she writes and composes the music for shows for young audiences.
Krx Visual Drums is preparing its new show: " Pulpita or the Flight of Memories." We came to initiate an artistic project around the different interests that have been close to our hearts since we met almost 20 years ago now. It's about memories, energies, groove, bass drums, our influences, what drives us as artists, women, and human beings in today's world.
Christiane Prince & Viryane Say
Krx visual drums
Theo Carrère/
Thibaut Tavernier (DOC)
Writing Residency
10-15/02/2024
Théo and Thibaut met during their audiovisual studies, and they co-directed a documentary in 2012.
In 2015, along with ten other friends, they founded DOC, an artistic squat based in the 19th arrondissement of Paris. There, they participated in numerous projects centered around film and music. In 2023, they co-directed COLLISIONS, a short film produced by GREC, which was selected for several festivals.
Théo Carrère and Thibaut Tavernier are working on their new short film project.
Juliette, who has just broken up, comes to visit her older brother, Alex, who lives in a squat. The building is buzzing; it's the last day of the occupation. A final concert is in full swing, some are packing their bags, and others are taking stock... As the evening progresses, Juliette's mood shifts.