Haizebegi Festival – Art • Science • Society
Haizebegi was founded in 2014 in Bayonne by a team of socially conscious artists, researchers from the CNRS, passionate students, and humanists concerned about the state of the world. Together, they set out to tackle a twofold challenge: to use music to understand human societies and to turn it into a tool for social transformation.
Une démarche participative & transdisciplinaire
Le festival explore les pouvoirs de la musique et opère la rencontre inédite entre Art, Science et Société. Haizebegi développe des projets culturels et artistiques dédiés à l’innovation sociale en mobilisant le triptyque : chercheurs – artistes – publics empêchés.
Art
Haizebegi accueille des artistes et musiciens du monde entier pour qui la musique est un acte engagé. Orchestre Zohra de l’Institut National de Musique d’Afghanistan (en exil au Portugal), les musiciennes du musée Ivan Honchar de Kiev (Ukraine), David Krakauer (Klezmer New York), Kinan Azmeh (Syrie), Keyvan Chemirani (Iran), le percussionniste Aurélien Gignoux (Victoires de la Musique Classique), etc.
Science
Adossé au Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Haizebegi est :
– un laboratoire d’innovation sur la puissance transformatrice de la musique
– un espace de partage de connaissances et de débats pour les plus grands experts et scientifiques internationaux
– un réseau international avec Haizebegi Around the World (HAW) dont sont partenaires des universités et des structures artistiques basées à Santiago du Chili, à Belo Horizonte, Bogota, New York, Bayonne et Berlin.
Company
Haizebegi involves social and medical-social workers in the development of its cultural projects. Haizebegi involves its beneficiaries and fosters the creative abilities of people in vulnerable situations by experimenting with projects in which they play an active role in. Don Bosco Institute (Unaccompanied Minors), Atherbea, emergency shelters, at the CADA, the French Red Cross, and the ICRC in Geneva (70th anniversary of the Geneva Convention on the Rights of Refugees), etc.
Denis Laborde, Artistic Director
Music as Anthropology
“Haizebegi isn’t a music festival; it’s a festival about the worlds of music.” Wherever he has lived, Denis Laborde has sought to use music as a bridge between science and society. He views music as a testament to our shared humanity and uses it as a tool to transform social relations.
After studying at the Bayonne Conservatory and then at the Paris National Conservatory of Music, he discovered the anthropology of music and earned a Ph.D. in social anthropology from EHESS, focusing on the poetic-musical improvisations of the Basque bertsulari.
He was then accepted into the CNRS and went to Germany, first to the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen, then to the Marc Bloch Center in Berlin. In Bayonne, he founded the CNRS’s ARI Institute in 2017. He is a Research Director at the CNRS and a Director of Studies at EHESS (Paris). He currently leads the MusiMig project—“Of what is music capable in situations of forced migration”—which brings together 10 research teams from around the world to study the musical practices of people in situations of forced migration.
In 2020, the CNRS awarded him the Institution’s Silver Medal for the originality of his work and its international impact.