Mélodie Razaka.
mlo_mlo.project / めろめろ · “I shape, I draw, I colour my e-motions.”
Multidisciplinary artist · Ceramicist · Poet · Visual & social researcher
Clay bears the traces of the hands that shaped it, just as stories hold the traces of the people who tell them. I give shape to bowls, write poems and set tables, all in order to turn what hurts us into connections between us. Every piece, every line and every meal are ways to mend what was broken. A way to reconnect with our inner child. And a chance to invite another to our table. My table.
Earth & Matter
Ceramics and stained-glass research: the elements I shape by hand, where feeling is given over to matter and made to stay.
Ceramics
My ceramic pieces are anything but inert: in them I seek a sense of embodied divinity. I conceive them as sacred talismans that crystallise and set into clay the intense emotions of the present moment.
Because clay listens. Because it retains memory where words stumble. Shaping earth is my way of being fully present, an embodied conversation between past and present, where the hands remember what the mind tends to forget. As a neurodivergent person, it is the one medium that consistently and deeply brings me back to the present moment.
Inner Child series
Made at Ishoken, the Tajimi City Pottery Design and Technical Center, my first ceramic series was a quiet rebellion: letting my inner child lead the way through form, glaze and play, during an in-between season.
The term “inner child” names the wounds and silences of childhood that keep acting in our adult lives. With the Donut de Proust (a Proustian madeleine reimagined as a donut) and these comforting forms, clay lets me give tangible form to my emotions, so that my traumas are given the time to heal, gently.
On the level of form, the series turns to the psychology of form and the domestic archetype. The Donut de Proust is a deconstruction of the functional object: a vessel hollowed at its very centre, a container that refuses to serve: it keeps the comforting silhouette of an everyday thing while quietly relinquishing its use.
The palette? It is borrowed from the south of France, where I grew up: the blue of the Côte d’Azur, the scent of the sea at the window, the dazzling light and the vivid colours of old Nice.
脱皮ちゃん (Dappi-chan) series
脱皮 (dappi) means to moult, to shed one’s skin. These pieces were shaped in Berlin, carried by the sorority of @tenko_club. That city transformed me, revealing a version of myself a little more grunge and grey than my usual vivid colours.
2025 was the year of the snake. I shed so many skins, letting my citrus peels dry in the clay. The texture of orange peel on my cups becomes the symbol of this skin that moults and transforms, like a lizard changing its envelope to survive. This work bears witness to that state of transition: everything is extremely fragile, raw, deliberately unfinished. Just like life itself.
Stained glass (Vitrail)
Research in progress.
Research in progress around transparency, broken glass and filtered light: the same tenderness toward fragility and repair that runs through my ceramics, carried now into another material.
Tables & Care
The Empowered Plate and my photography: a visual study of community, of women, and of the quiet labour of care.
The Empowered Plate
Relational design & social gastronomy.
A community supper club I founded in Berlin. A space for BIWOC (Black, Indigenous and Women of Colour) where we share far more than meals: stories, talking circles, community mapping and care: a refuge to find ourselves again and to repair.
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Inspired by bell hooks’s ethics of love and Audre Lorde’s conviction that care is deeply political, The Empowered Plate turns gastronomy and conviviality into an act of resistance. Here, love is not a feeling we wait for but a practice we choose, together, at the table. I conceive the table itself as a critical spatial device for decolonising the meal: these are not dinners but performative installations, where women of colour gather to share dishes and trajectories, not for spectacle, but for nourishment that is at once communal, spiritual and political.
Each installation is conceived as a whole: the menu, the ceramic tableware from my own studio, the table setting and the arc of the conversation. We draw on culinary memory and oral history to turn silence into language and action. Guests are not a passive audience; they are the co-creators of the evening.
Photography
Since 2016 · ongoing visual research.
Photography was my very first artistic language. The series presented here was created for the JACES 2016 national photography competition, where I represented my university. You’ll find in it the pillars of my research: care, women and the power of colour.
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Photographed with model Wei Di among terracotta walls and living green, the series sets warm brick against foliage, with a quiet, watchful presence at its centre. Shot on a Sony NEX-5, this practice remains, to this day, a territory of freedom and immediate visual grounding.
Words & Voices
Poetry and podcast: the written word and the spoken, where the podcast becomes the oral laboratory for the poems.
Poetry · Douceur et Douleur
Collection in progress (in French), in close collaboration with a typographer.
Douceur et Douleur (Softness and Pain) is a journey at the crossroads of the intimate and the political, a weaving of memories, revolts and love. Through a poetry that is at times a caress, at times a tempest, I explore the pulses of the heart and the weather of the soul.
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This collection explores the textures of diasporic fractures, of intergenerational memory and of the politics of belonging. My language here is fragmented, tender and sharp: a refusal of colonial grammar, a way of writing from the wound without letting it define me. Here, each word is a crossing written wound for word, a fragment of life given without filter, for those who seek to recognise themselves, to breathe, to exist fully.
P.S. I’m (rather enthusiastically) on the lookout for a publisher to bring this collection into the world with me.
Podcast · Humbly Melody
Humbly Melody · ハンブリー・メロディ
A poetry and voice podcast (in French) exploring memory, identity and intimate spaces.
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Many of the poems now collected in Douceur et Douleur were first voiced aloud in this sound space. There they are tested, sculpted by breath, refined by listening and by the vibration of the voice before being committed to writing.
Visual Journal
A daily practice in coloured pencil: a saturated, almost phosphorescent journal kept in colour.
Since December 2025, a daily coloured-pencil drawing practice, a visual journal.
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Intimate in scale, my drawings are a way of thinking out loud, of giving form to symbols that have not yet found another language.
My palette is saturated, deliberately vivid, even phosphorescent. I claim a pop, high-contrast approach to translate, rawly, the whole of human emotion, from the densest anger to the most electric joy. My drawings stage women with powerful, intensely expressive eyes. Light does not fall on them from outside: it emanates from within. They expect nothing from the male gaze. They are their own muses, sovereign, and come like magnetic sirens to enchant you and pull you into their world.
Exhibitions
- Graduation Exhibition 2024 (Ishoken, Tajimi · 2024)
Featured work, Ceramics Lab, 21st cohort, Mélodie Razaka.
Influences
Visual arts
- Ayako Rokkaku
- Bibi Lei
- Takashi Murakami
- Delphine Diallo
Ceramics
Music & Performance
- Florence and the Machine
- Sheena Ringo (椎名林檎)
- Marina Diamandis
- Paris Paloma
- Kiki Rockwell
- Madelline
Thought & Literature
- bell hooks
- Audre Lorde
- Octavia Butler
- Malagasy oral traditions