Les Mondes Parlés: An Evening with Adèle Yon around "Mon vrai nom est Elisabeth".

The Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève and HEAD - Genève continue their Mondes Parlés programme in collaboration with Emmanuelle Pireyre, author and director of the creative writing workshop. HEAD will have the pleasure of welcoming Adèle Yon for a reading from her first book, "Mon vrai nom est Elisabeth", followed by a conversation with Emmanuelle Pireyre.

Born in 1994, Adèle Yon is a researcher in film studies. It was while preparing a thesis on the figure of the ghost double (notably in Hitchcock) that she came to realise her research subject was echoing a far more intimate story: the silence surrounding her great-grandmother, Elisabeth.

In "Mon vrai nom est Elisabeth", the author conducts a genealogical and historical investigation. Through family letters, psychiatric archives and the testimonies of her relatives, she unearths the fate of Betsy, forcibly committed in 1950 and lobotomised at the request of her husband and father. The diagnosis of "schizophrenia" conceals an entirely different story: that of a woman experiencing profound post-partum exhaustion in an era that had no tolerance for female insubordination.

Poignant and rigorous, the text sits at the boundary of personal narrative, documentary road trip and essay. It unfolds across several layers: the weight of heredity, the history of systemic violence against women, and a critique of punitive psychiatry in the twentieth century. Winner of the Prix littéraire du Nouvel Obs, the Prix Essai France Télévisions and the Prix littéraire du Barreau de Marseille, this debut book establishes itself as an essential work of rehabilitation.

Payot Libraire will be present at the event to offer "Mon vrai nom est Elisabeth" for sale. A signing session with the author will be organised at the close of the evening.

We look forward to welcoming you all for this time of exchange and reading.