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The Lyric Mill’s Open Portal, 2026
For its second edition, the Lyric Mill joins the French national initiative Rural Heritage Days, held this year under the theme “Windings and Wanderings.”
From June 26 to 28, 2026, the Lyric Mill in Metz-le-Comte invites the public to embark on an artistic journey shaped by memory and living creation. This new edition pays tribute to three departed poets while celebrating the vitality of today’s voices.
Guided by a dozen artists, visitors follow a creative path woven with poetic, musical, and visual windings and wanderings, tracing unexpected connections across borders — from Burgundy to Canada, from Italy to Senegal, from North Macedonia to Switzerland.
The individual journeys of the participants embody the project’s interdisciplinary spirit. Most wear several artistic hats. Many are binational. All are citizens of the world. (See their biographies in French)
The program opens with the flute of Elena Stojčeska and the guitar of Romain Petiot, blending classical repertoire with the folk traditions of the Balkans in delicate harmony. The Franco-Macedonian duo SoliPse then leads the audience on a “Musical Hike from East to West,” with a stop in Argentina and the captivating world of Astor Piazzolla.
The duo also accompanies the poetic performance “Senghor – Šopov: Intersecting Parallels,” interpreted by Franco-Senegalese actor and photographer Amadou Gaye and Virginie H Jagger (to be confirmed). The performance honors two major twentieth-century poets born far apart yet united by deep ethical and aesthetic affinities. It reminds us that in poetry, “2 + 2 = 5,” to borrow Aimé Césaire’s striking formula — and that parallels may indeed meet.
The Lyric Mill’s musical itinerary continues with a Canadian détour: composer and musician Michael Spiroff, traveling from Toronto, offers "A Stroll Across the Keys," followed by “A Journey through Time,” a concert enriched with visual projections performed by flutists Elena Stojčeska and Bogdana Bushevska.
The poetic wanderings unfold with “The House Outside,” a space that inhabits us as much as we inhabit it — a place of passage and layered identities. Swiss-based poet and photographer Mia Lecomte explores this territory alongside Paris-based poet and pianist Laure Cambau. In this concert-reading, music does more than accompany poetry: it opens its hidden chambers.
The journey then extends into Italian landscapes through the voice and the silences of Anna Chiara Peduzzi. Born in Como and now living between Paris and Champallement, just steps from the Lyric Mill, her writing — poised between philosophical reflection and aesthetic experience — immerses the audience in what critic Paolo Lagazzi calls “a magma of sensations, both crucial and fleeting.” Her bilingual reading (Italian and French) is accompanied not by music, as is customary, but by the photographs of Pauline Desramont, placed in dialogue with her verses.
Desramont’s work is exhibited alongside the sculptures of Sophie Archambault de Beaune and the paintings of Vesna Vujičić-Lugassy in the space dedicated to “Deep Time.” This collective exhibition offers its own compelling détour, as the three artists carry forward the timeless gesture of art: the enduring attempt to grasp the depth of the human experience.
Faithful to its philosophy of bringing contemporary creation into dialogue with cultural and literary heritage, the Lyric Mill gives special prominence in its youth program to Achille Millien, the Nivernais poet and folklorist.
Entitled “Letters from My Lyric Mill” and led by Nicole Huc of Théâtre de la Huchette in Paris, the youth program sets out from the Nièvre toward wider horizons, gathering traditional songs and tales along the way. Children are also invited to meet Mia Lecomte around her book The Displaced, which gently explores themes of migration, adaptation, and resilience while opening reflection on biodiversity and today’s ecological challenges.
Program designed by the “millers” on behalf of the Aco Šopfov Poetry Foundation, and implemented with the support (subject to renewal) of the Town Hall of Metz-le-Comte, the Nièvre Departmental Council, the Tannay‑Brinon‑Corbigny Community of Communes, and Groupama.