Encounter - La Fille et le Dragon - Latitudes Contemporaines

Kubra Khademi and Nicole Lapierre

Debates

1h
L’Affranchie bookstore, Lille
Free
Latitudes Prod.

Encounter – La Fille et le Dragon

In 2024, Kubra Khademi, a Hazara feminist artist from Afghanistan, published her first graphic novel, La fille et le dragon [The girl and the dragon]. She gave the text to Nicole Lapierre, a French anthropologist and sociologist. For Latitudes Contemporaines, Soazic Courbet, director of the bookstore L’Affranchie, has organized an encounter between the two writers.

One day during the winter of 1989, in a poor refugee family which had left Afghanistan to escape the Soviet Army, the mujaheddins and the persecutions which the Afghan Sunnis systematically inflicted upon the Shia Hazara, a little girl was born, with her hands completely open, considered a good luck sign for the household. She was the sixth child alongside ten other children. The mullah refused to choose a first name for her, to record her birth in the family Koran. Why should he, for a mere girl? In the end she was given the name Kubra, meaning “great.” The child showed talent in drawing, a gift which for her became like a kind of armor, protecting and strengthening her against the hardships she would experience living under the double, iron rule of religious fanaticism and the patriarchy. With her weapons, pencils, brushes and a fierce determination, Kubra began an incredible journey as an artist, with a sacred mission: killing the dragon!

A unique graphic and literary depiction of the invincibility of art, an homage to women, to life, to freedom.

Accessibility infos :

Encounter in French without surtitles

Biography(s)

KUBRA KHADEMI
Kubra Khademi is an Afghan Hazara feminist performer and visual artist based in Paris. Through her work, she explores her life as a refugee and as a woman. She studied fine arts at Kabul University, before attending Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, Pakistan. In Lahore she began to create public performance, a practice she continued upon her return to Kabul, where her work actively responded to a male dominated society by extreme patriarchal politics. After performing her piece known as Armor in 2015, Khademi was forced to flee her home country, and arrived in Paris. She continued her performance work in Europe, accompanied by Latitudes Prod., and developed her practice of drawing and painting, represented by the Eric Mouchet Gallery.
In 2022, she designed the poster for the Avignon Festival and presented a solo exhibition at the Collection Lambert as well as a major solo exhibition at the Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern in Germany.
In 2023, the premiere of her new performance The Golden Horizon (افق طلائی) has taken place at the Théâtre de la Ville, Paris. From October 2023 to February 2024, her works will be on show at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne alongside Pablo Picasso’s Suite 156 as part of the exhibition of the same name. In 2024, she publishes with anthropologist Nicole Lapierre her first graphic novel, La fille et le dragon, at Éditions Denoël.

NICOLE LAPIERRE
Nicole LAPIERRE, socio-anthropologist, is Director of research Emeritus at CNRS and Co-editor of the journal Communications. Her main research topics are migrations, minorities and memory. Author of many books in Social Sciences, she also explores new forms of writing. Her book, Sauve qui peut la vie, won the Medicis Prize for non fiction in 2015. Since then, she published Faut-il se ressembler pour s’assembler? (Seuil, 2020),Le plus menteur d’entre nous (Seuil, 2023).