Mélodie Razaka.
Artist, ceramicist, cultural producer and intercultural mediator.
Core obsessions, the Japan chapter, and beyond
Born and based on the Côte d’Azur (for now), practising internationally between Europe and Japan. From ceramics to the written word, from cultural engineering to hospitality, my practice explores how objects, narratives and experiences forge connection across boundaries and cultures.
For me, ceramics, drawing, poetry, photography and cuisine are not sealed compartments but the rhizomatic shoots of a single, selfsame urgency: to give form to the invisible, and to repair what wounds us.
Core Obsessions
My practice is animated by three obsessions:
I suffuse my world with a saturated, high-contrast, phosphorescent palette, inherited from the luminous, blinding light of the Côte d’Azur where I grew up. Colour, here, is never decorative; it has fashioned the very way I perceive.
My ceramics are anything but inert. I conceive them as embodied deities, sacred ritual objects that retain intense emotions, memory, and successive moults where words stumble.
Nourished by the legacy of Malagasy oral traditions and shaped since childhood by Japanese culture, I conceive each project as a space of collective care (omotenashi / おもてなし) and transmission. I work slowly, with intention, believing in the power of collective joy and rituals as a philosophy of soft revolt.
The Journey · the Japan chapter & beyond
My story with Japan began when I was six, looking for the roots of Pokémon and Magical Doremi. That childhood dream of “making a home of my own in Japan” shaped my path. After studying Japanese in Nice and a first exchange in Kobe (2011), I captured my first artistic visions through photography at Osaka University in 2016.
From 2020 to 2022, I shifted to cultural strategy, managing communication and orchestrating international-scale events (like Parisai and Nuit Blanche) for the Institut français du Japon in Kyoto, building bridges between 35+ major institutions, luxury maisons, and artists.
In 2023, impelled by a visceral need to return to the body and to matter, I entered Ishoken (the Tajimi City Pottery Design and Technical Center). This total immersion in the high craft of Japanese ceramics transformed my relationship to making, and now allows me to conceive rigorous studio projects and curatorial perspectives between Asia and Europe.
Today, I navigate between my artistic creation and my intercultural consulting work, anchoring my practice in the permanent translation between cultural memory and raw matter.
Beyond · what I want to explore
Looking for an art residency · open to international residencies and studio collaborations, 2026–2027.
I am looking for an art residency where my practice might grow into large-scale spatial installations, in which the poetic and the political come quietly together. The chapter ahead turns on the constant translation between cultural memory and raw matter.
- The Living Archive: research into the poetry of transience (mono no aware): working with raw clay, slip and luminescent overglazes to hold the emotional residue left behind when collective fires grow dim.
- Social Architectures: performative curatorial projects gathered around the ritual of conviviality, drawing critical conversations between European domestic histories and traditional Japanese makers, to reimagine the politics of care.