X collective X : Je ne vous l’apprends pas

Je ne vous l’apprends pas is an experimental audio project that blends indigenous science fiction, Afro-cosmic autofiction, and binaural sound to question and undo Earth-bound systems of categorization. Under the artistic direction of Jamika Ajalon and inspired by her Anti-Lectures, the project brings together the writers Saya Mamani, Nayansaku Mufwankolo, and Meloe Gennai. Their work examines how language creates borders between identities, geographies, bodies, and ways of knowing, and how those borders might be unsettled.

The podcast moves fluidly across French, English, Italian, and other familiar languages. Sounds, words, cries, songs, and silences are layered to create a listening experience rooted in constant movement and transformation, resisting fixed meaning and stable form.

Each episode is composed by sound artist Legion Seven as a sensory performance in which audio shifts from dense, terrestrial rhythms toward the extraterrestrial, allowing the work to slip free from inherited social, racial, and linguistic hierarchies.
The project fosters exchange across Switzerland’s different linguistic regions while centering intersecting lived experiences of trans and non-binary people, racialized communities, and neurodivergent and disabled individuals, without separating these realities into isolated experiences. Sound becomes a shared space for experimentation and relation, where alternative ways of being, communicating, and belonging can be articulated beyond dominant hierarchies.

For the Antenna Festival, xcollectivex proposes a shared listening session featuring selected excerpts from the podcast, followed by a moderated discussion with the artists and producers. This conversation will address the motivations behind the work, the collaborative process, and the political stakes of the project. Alongside this, a listening station will be installed for the duration of the festival, enabling audiences to engage with the complete
podcast in their own time.

Je ne vous l’apprends pas explores movement, displacement, and the transformation of identities across borders by treating language, sound, and the body as migratory spaces that are continuously shifting, refusing containment, and opening pathways beyond national, social, and planetary boundaries.

The French expression “je ne vous l’apprends pas” translates as “I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.” The phrase carries an ironic, knowing tone, pointing to shared histories, implicit knowledge, and truths that circulate without needing to be
restated.