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
I am a French-Malagasy artist, neurodivergent and a woman of colour, born in the south of France and now rooted on the French Riviera after five years between Japan and Berlin. I deliberately decline the cold, rigid codes of conventional art spaces to compose a world of my own, where contemporary art, ceramic poetry and sensitive mediation interlace like a rhizome.
Graced by such precious encounters, my path too is nourished by an international lineage of makers, from a selective year of research at Ishoken (Tajimi, Japan) to peers exhibiting at the Venice Biennale, by way of a Berlin art scene I’m still closely tied to. For institutions and for people alike, I fashion tactile forms and places of refuge, to mend our domestic rituals through tenderness and shared joy.
Exhibitions
- Graduation Exhibition 2024 (Ishoken, Tajimi · 2024)
Featured work, Ceramics Lab, 21st cohort, Mélodie Razaka.
Earth & Matter
Ceramics, and a research into stained glass: matter taken up in bare hands, there where emotion settles, becomes flesh, and catches fire in the clay. A first manner of turning what wounds into what binds.
Ceramics
My ceramic pieces, shaped entirely by hand, are anything but inert: in them I seek a sense of embodied divinity, sacred talismans that crystallise the intense emotions of the present moment into clay.
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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.
Far from industrial perfection, I let the earth keep the raw warmth of the body and the memory of my French-Malagasy heritage. These pieces turn our wounds into living connections, and this research remains open to residencies, exhibitions and conversations with galleries.
Inner Child series
In resonance with Ayako Rokkaku, Tenko Club and Marina Diamandis.
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Made at Ishoken, the Tajimi City Pottery Design and Technical Center, my first ceramic series was a quiet rebellion. After years spent orchestrating institutional projects for the Institut français du Japon in Kyoto, this return to the earth was a visceral need to come back to the body. 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
In resonance with Tomoya Sakai, Takashi Murakami and Caroline Polachek.
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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.
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In resonance with Madame Zo (Zoarinivo Razafindrambo) and Zizipho Poswa.
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 enquiry in which the collective, women, and care become a gesture, a table laid as an act of resistance. To repair, here, is to make a place for another, at my table.
The Empowered Plate
A nomadic relational installation, a hospitality of care.
A nomadic community supper club I founded in Berlin, made to bloom again in new territories. 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.
The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression.
In resonance with bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Malagasy oral traditions and Florence and the Machine.
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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.
I welcome partnerships with museums and cultural spaces around the world to activate this hospitality of care.
Photography
Since 2016 · ongoing visual research.
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In resonance with Delphine Diallo and Octavia Butler.
Photography was my very first artistic language. Long before I shaped clay, it was through the lens that I caught my first visions, at Osaka University in 2016, before representing my university at the national JACES photography competition, where the series was awarded. It already carries the pillars of my research: care, women and the power of colour.
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, answering one another, the podcast a laboratory of the voice for the poems. To give language to the wound, and so convert it into connection.
Poetry · Douceur et Douleur
Collection in progress (in French), in close collaboration with a typographer.
In resonance with Audre Lorde, Sheena Ringo and Paris Paloma.
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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.
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
In resonance with Malagasy oral traditions, bell hooks and Florence and the Machine.
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A poetry and voice podcast (in French) exploring memory, identity and intimate spaces.
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. Each page, a hand extended to the inner child.
In resonance with Ayako Rokkaku, Bibi Lei, Hiromi Tango and Marina Diamandis.
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Since December 2025, a daily coloured-pencil drawing practice, a visual journal.
In resonance with the raw, emancipated gestures of artists like Ayako Rokkaku or Bibi Lei, my visual journal is an intimate archive of presence.
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.
Influences
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Visual arts
- Ayako Rokkaku
- Bibi Lei
- Takashi Murakami
- Delphine Diallo
- Madame Zo (Zoarinivo Razafindrambo)
- Hiromi Tango
Ceramics
Music & Performance
- Florence and the Machine
- Sheena Ringo (椎名林檎)
- Marina Diamandis
- Paris Paloma
- Kiki Rockwell
- Caroline Polachek
Thought & Literature
- bell hooks
- Audre Lorde
- Octavia Butler
- Malagasy oral traditions