Weddings and rituals, the original lineup for Nuit Blanche 2026 at the Maison Populaire in Montreuil

Montreuil’s Maison Populaire is taking part in the 25th edition of Nuit Blanche, presenting a festive and offbeat evening to be enjoyed on Saturday, June 6, 2026. Don’t miss these free, quirky happenings to experience in 93!

Regulars know it well: the Nuit Blanche may be the wackiest night in Paris and the Île-de-France. And for those who haven’t yet experienced it, how to describe it... ? It’s a night when you might stumble upon a concert by giant moles. And Sufi dancing at the Petit Palais. And multicolored foam spewing out of the Centre Pompidou. Or fashion shows, sound-and-light performances, giant karaoke, wrestling bouts, xylophone concerts…

As you'll have guessed, the Nuit Blanche is a major celebration ofcontemporary artthat transforms Paris and the surrounding area into an open-air museum. During this exceptional evening, anything can happen! The participating artists are determined to surprise us with every new edition...

What bold surprises are in store for 2026? Nuit Blanche returns on Saturday, June 6 for its 25th edition. And if you’re hunting for your next thrill, you can already add the Maison Populaire de Montreuil to your evening itinerary.

The 93 district's popular art and culture venue has prepared some surprising and exciting events, which are sure to appeal to many contemporary art enthusiasts.

The Nuit Blanche program at the Maison populaire de Montreuil :

Nuit Blanche 2026 at the Maison Populaire
Saturday, June 6, 2026, from 9:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m.
I is Another — a playful take on the famous line by Arthur Rimbaud: “Je est un autre.” Artist Béatrice Duport chooses to feminize it to remind us that the universal subject has long been male (hetero, cis, and white), and that we have the power to reclaim these spaces for self-creation. This statement is unsettling: it suggests that the unity of the subject — the cornerstone of our Western society because it supports the formation of our identities — does not actually exist. It also invites us to view the “I” as a fiction in constant construction, always in progress. This decentered “I” comes to us from the other, who affects and contaminates us.

So we invited the Other to (re)discover itself: Vava Dudu, Cuco Cuca, H·Alix, Hamza Maysarah, Mariam Chfiri and Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens answered our invitations in the affirmative… For Nuit Blanche 2026 at the Maison Populaire, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens are also invited by the exhibition curators in residence to offer a talk exploring the links between love, sexuality, ecology and social engagement. Through collective rituals, including a series of symbolic weddings, the artists invite us to celebrate our connections with humans, non-humans, elements, and the planet.

Portrait of BETH STEPHENS; Credits: © Beth Stephens Portrait of Annie Sprinkle; Credits: © Annie Sprinkle

After channeling her experience as a sex worker and actress into radical performances in the 1980s-1990s, artist, performer and activist Annie Sprinkle develops, with her partner Beth Stephens — artist and professor at the University of Santa Cruz — an ecofeminist theory they term ecosexuality. In 2008 they publish the Ecosex Manifesto together.

First appearing in the early 2000s, ecosexuality is both an ecological and erotic practice that adopts a critical stance toward anthropocentrism — the worldview that centers humans. It deconstructs norms of gender, sexuality, and nature by mobilizing pleasure, humor and joy as political tools. In this approach, Earth is no longer a “mother” — a figure traditionally tied to patriarchy — but an intimate lover. A screening of their film Water Makes Us Wet — An Ecosexual Adventure will deepen their approach to loving the planet!

Portrait of Vava DUDU; Credits: © Palais de Tokyo

This event explores Vava Dudu’s work through the theme of love, understood as a field for artistic and social experimentation. A singular figure on the contemporary scene, Vava Dudu develops a multidisciplinary practice that interrogates norms around the body, identity and affective relations. Her approach to love sits within a broader reflection on forms of marginality, individual expression, and the making of subjectivities. A selection of Vava Dudu’s textile works will be hung in the Maison Populaire’s gardens, and people who wish to wear her messages and drawings on their own clothes will have them painted live during a performance by the artist. The event highlights how the artist approaches attachment, transformation and self-representation.

Hamza Maysarah

Hamza Maysarah is a multidisciplinary artist and queer Franco-Palestinian comedian based in Paris. They blend image, performance, humor and activism to advocate for LGBTQ+ and Palestinian causes, among others. Born into a family of refugees in Amman, Jordan, they explore themes of identity, exile and resilience.

Mariam CHFIRI

Mariam CHFIRI is the executive director of the Platform of French NGOs for Palestine (PFP), founded in 1993 in the wake of the Oslo Accords and aimed at paving the way for the establishment of a Palestinian state beside the State of Israel.

The PFP’s mission remains unchanged: to support civil society development in order to back the establishment of a democratic state in Palestine. Yet ongoing colonization, accompanied by de jure or de facto annexation of Palestinian territory by Israel, means the task is no longer merely to support the building of a Palestinian state but to work toward restoring the conditions for that project.

Hot Bodies Choir & Club Hot Bodies x Gérald Kurdian; Credits: ©Hot Bodies

Hot Bodies is the stage name of Gérald Arev Kurdian — musician, performer, versatile DJ and Master of Ceremonies for the Hot Bodies Club and Hot Bodies Choirs projects. Rooted in collective experience, Hot Bodies treats pop music as a shared sensory communion, a space where emotions, desires and trance flow freely. The choir projects bring together volunteers around a practice of writing and choral singing, where experiences, ideas, and practices drawn from queer, feminist, pro-sex, and decolonial activism are exchanged as a basis for writing revolutionary lyrics. These unique, polyphonic, and indomitable documents become the foundation of a choral score set to electronic music by Gérald Kurdian, collaboratively arranged and performed by all participants. Navigating between collective club rituals and minimalist songwriting, Hot Bodies Club embraces pop in its broadest sense — popular, porous and transformative. Its universe blends synthetic textures with melodic intimacy, crafting songs that are at once fragile and euphoric, intimate and unifying.

Its latest EP, Digital Fairy / Folk Songs, produced by Don Turi (Jeanne Added, Chien Noir) blends clair-obscur cold wave with bright pop melodies — a contemporary tale for club kids and misfits. On stage, Hot Bodies delivers an embodied, magnetic, and sexy performance in constant metamorphosis. Their concerts blur the lines between live performance and the dancefloor, inviting the audience into a mutant pop universe where vulnerability becomes strength and collective emotion the driving force.

Vava Dudu was born in 1970 in Paris, where she lives and works. From 2012 to 2018 she lived in Berlin. In 1985 she left school at 15 and enrolled in the preparatory class for the Beaux-Arts at the Académie Grandes Terres, then in the Fleuri Delaporte fashion school. Since then she has practiced textile creation, drawing, poetry and music, making clothing and works that reflect her multidisciplinary approach. A stylist outside any scene, she has worked as an accessories designer for Jean-Paul Gaultier and collaborated with Björk, Lady Gaga, Marilyn Manson, Neneh Cherry, Kate Moss and John Galliano. In 2001, Vava Dudu and Fabrice Lorrain won the prize of the National Association for the Development of Fashion Arts (ANDAM). They organized a runway show in the backrooms of the gay club Les Docs, on Rue Saint-Maur. Her work has been shown in exhibitions and performances, notably at Le Confort Moderne (Poitiers, France), Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France), the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (France), Lafayette Anticipations (Paris, France) or Komplot (Brussels, Belgium). Vava Dudu asserts her outsider status in contemporary art, affirming that she “prefers extremes to the middle.” Her career as a stylist and artist runs alongside her activity as a singer in the group La Chatte, founded in 2003 with Stéphane Argillet and Nicolas Jorio, with whom she released five albums. Her artistic universe, joyfully mixing texts and drawings, unfolds across various media. Portrait of Cuco Cuca; Credits: © Zbigniew Kotkiewicz

Cuco Cuca

Cuco Cuca is a transgender hacker-dreamer born in 2011. Between demonstrations, clandestine parties and nocturnal interventions, they turn the city into a site of political and artistic experimentation. Their work blends pirate projections, modified voices, light installations and digital détournements to question surveillance, social norms and fixed identities. For them, queerness is not merely an aesthetic but a way to blur codes, render bodies and stories unstable, free and elusive. The night occupies a central place in their practice: a space for escape, encounter and resistance. In parades and clubs, Cuco Cuca pursues the moment of collective bug, the instant when systems of control waver and new forms of community emerge.

Portrait of H.Alix Sanyas; Credits: ©Makoto C. Friedmann

H. ALix Sanyas

H·Alix Sanyas is an artist, filmmaker, graphic designer and trainer in graphic design. Their practice centers on creating resistance tools and rallying signs for transfeminist communities. H·Alix has been an active member — as both activist and graphic designer — of numerous collectives. They also collaborate with many feminist partners in the field of graphic design. In 2018 they co-founded the Bye Bye Binary collective of post-binary typography, supporting and expanding post-binary character drawing, aligned with the free-movement and the organization of exhibitions, conferences and publications.

PROGRAM:
21:00 How to become ECOSEXUAL? Online course by Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle
21:45 Screening of Water Makes Us Wet—An Ecosexual Adventure, by Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle
21:45 Exhibition and performance by Vava DUDU
22:30 Discussion on curatorial programming with Mariam Chfiri + Hamza Maysarah
23:00 Hot Bodies Choir
23:30 Reading-performance by H·Alix Sanyas: JEAN DOES NOT RETURN
00:00 Hot Bodies Club
00:30 Cuco Cuca — DJ set interrupted with Hot Bodies’ co-performance
Event in partnership with our friends from MABA in Nogent-sur-Marne to celebrate their 20th anniversary and the Maison Populaire’s 60th in friendship.