Brutus Labiche, Black Edelweiss, 2026

To kick off the summer season, CALM – Centre d’Art La Meute is teaming up with ExoBus to offer a day of performances bringing together young artists, local residents and audiences of all ages. Located just a few hundred meters apart, between La Blécherette and the Plaines-du-Loup eco-neighbourhood, our two organisations share the same aim: to offer direct and inclusive access to contemporary art, by supporting emerging artists and promoting local cultural ressources.

Black Edelweiss is a performance tracing the transition between two constructed figures, the monster and the baddie, both operating as mechanisms of dehumanisation. The monster remains invisible in proximity yet hypervisible in space, while the baddie is visible, consumed, and accepted, yet reduced to a role. The work moves between these states, revealing their shared logic of projection and control. Through body, movement, and the use of the camera as both tool and environment, the gaze is subtly reversed, activating a mutual awareness where presence is acknowledged rather than confronted.
The title Black Edelweiss references the memoir by Johann Voss, here reappropriated to unsettle inherited associations of blackness with darkness and to reframe it as a site of presence, agency, and authorship.

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Brutus Labiche, born Sandra Habiyambere in 1993 in Butare, is a Swiss Rwandan multidisciplinary artist working across painting, installation, and performance. She studied political sciences before working in modeling and creative direction. Guided by political frameworks and visual culture, her practice is shaped by an understanding of representation, power, and identity. Her trajectory ultimately led her toward visual art as a space of authorship, agency, research, and transformation.
Noise of Danger, performed at the Musée d’ethnographie de Genève, marked a foundational genesis in her artistic language. Through sound, movement, and fashion aesthetics, the performance unfolded as a ritual space where her worlds could collide and reconfigure themselves. From that moment, folklore revealed itself as a living archive, a field of resonance, dissidence, and tenderness.
Her practice researches Afro Swiss aesthetics through world building, where Swiss symbols and Black digital cultural references exist in symbiosis. Materials such as clay, hay, textiles, synthetic hair, wax, and sound become vessels of memory and belonging. Folklore functions as an evolving archive through which she reimagines identity and narrative.
Her recent group exhibition MINA, created in collaboration with Ayomide Tejuoso at 198 Contemporary in London, expands this research into Black feminist myth making, centering ritual space, embodied memory, and alternate narratives of belonging. She also develops Edelweiss Pirates, an installation based workshop serie that invites collective authorship and reimagines national symbols through shared making, plurality, and imagination.