The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève is delighted to continue the Spoken Worlds program for its 10th year, in collaboration with Emmanuelle Pireyre, author and director of the writing workshop at HEAD – Genève.

The Spoken Worlds invites authors and artists who practice writing to present a reading/performance of their work, followed by a discussion. This year’s guiding thread is the passage from one language to another, since we all live through adventures with languages—mother tongues, foreign languages, learned or forgotten ones—that connect us deeply to our histories.

Nassera Tamer presents a reading and introduction to Allô la Place (2025, Verdier), a narrative that weaves together the threads of her re-learning of Moroccan Arabic—both a parental tongue and a ghost language of immigration—and her fascination with phone shops, those “semaphores carrying elsewhere, the past, the future, here and now.” She revisits the sonic traces that accompanied the writing of this text, which makes audible the “black hole” of her language, its silences and tremors, and the stories murmuring through the phone shops.

Born in 1982 in Le Havre, Nassera Tamer studied law and literature. She lives and works in Paris. Allô la Place, published by Verdier, is her first novel.