Le feu ça brûle is a song by the French duo Charly and Lulu, released as a single in 1997. Charly (Charles Nestor) and Lulu (Jean-Marc Lubin) are best known as the hosts of the Music TV show “Hit Machine” on M6 channel, which they presented until 2003. The duo, very popular among young audiences, showcased a sense of camaraderie and racial co‑presence without visible hierarchy during prime‑time television at a time when French TV remained largely dominated by white presenters.
In her article “De l’émotion publique. Le feu d’artifice d’Ancien Régime, ou la zone grise de la fête” (On Public Emotion: The Ancien Régime Firework Display, or the Gray Zone of Celebration) Sylvaine Guyot examines the political and emotional roles of fireworks, from their origins under the Ancien Régime to the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games. This celebration was met with fierce criticism in France and abroad, with accusations of so-called “wokism” and outrage over the banquet staged on the Debilly bridge (which brought together drag queens, voguing performers, disabled athletes, and transgender models) seen by some as a blasphemous parody of the Last Supper. In her text, Guyot describes the pyrotechnic spectacle as an ambivalent force: both a moment of collective joy and a tool for domination.
Published in 1991, “Is Paris Burning?” is a text by bell hooks offering a critical analysis of Jennie Livingston’s film Paris Is Burning. Through a feminist and anti‑racist lens, bell hooks interrogates the representation of Black queer communities, revealing how voguing and ballroom culture are appropriated by dominant society. While the film has been praised for shedding light on a movement that was still largely underground in the 1980s, it also exposes this culture to a dominant white gaze. hooks’ essay highlights the contradictions between visibility and resistance, and raises essential questions about authorship and profit: who indeed is benefiting from these fires that light up the margins?
--A pioneer of intersectional feminist thought, bell hooks' work explores the interwoven systems of sexism, racism, capitalism, and imperialism, shedding light on how these forms of oppression overlap and produce specific effects. Particularly for Black women in the U.S. context.
Read the textThis flag directly borrows its text from the work Space Poem #7 (Color Without Objects: Intra‑Active May‑Words) by African American artist Renée Green, in which the words “Yellow Melting Like a Firework Petal” reference the poet May Swenson.
--Space Poem #7 (2020) by Renée Green is an installation composed of 28 hanging banners. Each banner features expressive patterns, poetic phrases, and tributes to cultural figures who have shaped the artist’s life. By intertwining language, color, and architecture, this work offers a poetic and political reflection on memory, culture, and perception.
DiscoverFollowing the Watts riots in 1965, a strict curfew was imposed in Los Angeles, accompanied by brutal repression in Black neighborhoods. In the shadow of this state violence, in South Central clubs or underground parties, dance emerged and evolved as a space of resistance (funk, voguing, waacking), asserting one’s existence.
Decades later, during the Covid‑19 pandemic, bodies were once again forced into isolation. Yet even then, dance infiltrated screens, balconies, and underground spaces. Online battles and virtual balls continued to pulse across distances, claiming space and presence. A curfew is never neutral: it is a method of social control aimed at disciplining bodies, silencing the margins, and erasing the spaces where minoritized people gather, create, and resist together.
On August 28, 1963, Josephine Baker (American artist, activist and French resistance fighter) spoke at the “March on Washington” alongside Martin Luther King, just before his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. The march brought together more than 250,000 people demanding an end to racial segregation, the right to vote and equal civil rights in the United States. Josephine Baker was one of the few women to speak publicly that day. These words are taken from her speech.
--“[...] I am not a young woman now, friends. My life is behind me. There is not too much fire burning inside me. And before it goes out, I want you to use what is left to light that fire in you. So that you can carry on, and so that you can do those things that I have done. Then, when my fires have burned out, and I go where we all go someday, I can be happy. [...]”
Read the full versionThis flag refers to the famous statement by Sojourner Truth (19th-century abolitionist and Black feminist): “I sell the shadow to support the substance”, referring to the self-portraits she used to sold to finance her fight for equality. The term “shadow” refers to both the photographic portrait, and the print left by Black bodies in history. In the context of voguing, shading is the art of criticizing with style, of catching the light (and thus casting the other person in the shade), of asserting one's superiority over a competitor through one's gestures or words. “Support the shading” honours these aesthetic strategies of resistance, where performance becomes a means of defying erasure. This play on words links the memory of political struggles for Black rights with queer flame, affirming that appearance, gesture and attitude are also weapons.
Shoot: to open fire is to take a life as well as an image. For Black Indigenous and Pee and LGBTQIA+ communities, who have long been targeted (by the police, by the gaze, by norms), this ambiguity is far from innocent. In the history of the medium, as in today's political context, both shooting and photography can serve as instruments of control, surveillance and even destruction.
But it's also possible to turn the situation on its head. Putting oneself on stage is a way of shooting first. Not to hurt, but to establish one's image, one's power, one's presence. In a world where queer and racialized bodies are slaughtered in the streets and erased from narratives, every “shoot” becomes a political act: highlighting in retaliation.
In French “mettre le feu aux poudres” means to spark or trigger a conflict, while “jeter de la poudre aux yeux” refers to creating an illusion or distraction to mislead people (literally, to throw dust in someone's eyes). Combined on this flag, these sentences capture a pressing question in today’s cultural moment: over the past year, France (and especially Paris) has seen a wave of high‑profile exhibitions dedicated to Black cultures and identities. Long excluded from mainstream cultural narratives or reduced to token representation, these subjects are now taking center stage in the country’s most prestigious institutions. Major shows and retrospectives mark a striking shift in visibility. For many, these exhibitions are long overdue acknowledgments of voices and histories that have shaped the cultural fabric of France and the word.But this surge in representation also raises critical questions: Is it a sign that museums, festivals, and art institutions are truly beginning to decolonize: rethinking their structures, narratives, and power dynamics? Or is it a surface-level movement, a rebranding exercise that makes institutions appear progressive without addressing deeper inequalities? This exhibition, by its very existence, is part of that moment and part of that question.
This fire is the one that fights back, brings people together and warms them up. The “foyer” is the French word for home, for family and for fireplace. Houses of voguing are those chosen families, born in the 1970s to welcome those whose biological families had excluded them because of their gender or sexuality. Confronted with poverty, racism and police violence, they formed spaces of care, hospitality and survival.
In her bookn désir démesuré d’amitié, Hélène Giannecchini traces the history of some of the affective and political relationships that structure queer communities. Drawing on Donna Gottschalk's photographic archives and intimate accounts, she recounts the ways in which friendship can become a defining force, a modality of resistance and a shelter. These diverse desires for friendship are at the heart of voguing houses, based on alliance, creativity and mutual protection. They are also at the heart of the We Others exhibition at Le Bal, on view until November 16, 2025.
More about We OthersIn the 1970s, there were actual fires that devastated homes in government‑abandoned neighborhoods of Queens, the Bronx and Harlem, and then there were the voguing queens who set the dancefloor on fire. There's the fire that destroys and the fire that liberates.
Published in 1963, James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time is an essay that engages in both intimate and political reflection on structural racism in the United States. Through two letters (one addressed to his nephew, the other to American society), the author denounces the psychological effects of white supremacy (as did Frantz Fanon before him), analyzes racial hatred and the ambiguous role of religion in race relations. This text refuses to choose hate as an answer to hatred, but also rejects the illusions of integration without justice. Baldwin notably notes that the U.S. white society is refusing to take a clear-sighted look at the racial exploitation that punctuates its history, particularly its colonial and slave‑owning past. Even today, The Fire Next Time is a central reference for anti‑racist struggles.
This discreet but tenacious fire, stubborn and headstrong, refuses to be extinguished or to shine to please. It symbolizes minority memories that do not seek visibility; stories that resist exposure and retain their opacity so as not to be recuperated or simplified. It's a fire that smolders, deep in the shadows, stories that still elude capture.
FIRE!! was a radical African‑American literary magazine founded in 1926 in Harlem by a collective of young artists including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Bruce Nugent. Published in a single issue, it marked a generational break within “Harlem Renaissance” movement, claiming a provocative, queer and popular aesthetic. Its title evokes a fire of revolt, as well as a desire for artistic and literary renewal and profound social and political change. Short-lived but powerful, the magazine is now considered a manifesto of the Black avant‑garde.
Discover“Chaumière” (literally thatched cottage) is a traditional rural house in northern and western Europe, named after its thatched roof. The term refers not only to the building itself, but also to “La petite chaumière”, one of Montmartre's first transvestite cabarets, founded in 1919 on rue Berthe and burnt down in the Roaring Twenties.
Dans A Burst of Light and other essays, author and activist Audre Lorde (a major figure in Black, lesbian and decolonial feminism in the USA) evokes a flame-body that runs through her writing. She notes: “I am going to write fire until it comes out my ears, my eyes, my noseholes – everywhere. Until it's every breath I breathe. I'm going to go out like a fucking meteor.” The point is not to write about fire (anger, injustice, desire, struggle), but to write with fire.
The flag first refers to the House of Ebony, one of the most famous voguing houses founded in the late 1970s. It also evokes Ebony Cham, a finalist of Star Academy (the French equivalent of American Idol) during season 2023‑2024, whose participation was punctuated by racist and sexist attacks on social networks (a recent example of France's misogynoir). Last but not least, it refers to Ebony magazine, founded in 1945 by John H. Johnson, which aimed to portray the daily lives of African‑Americans, widely absent from media representations.
In Western mythology, the dragon is presented as a creature to be fought or dominated. It symbolizes the “other”, the “savage”, disorder and everything that escapes patriarchal, religious or imperial control. It is an obstacle to be overcome. To breathe fire is to live as a dragon.