Aziza François is a Brussels-based musician, composer, and vocalist working at the crossroads of sound, embodiment, and ecological awareness. Her artistic practice is informed by a mixed cultural heritage and a transnational life shaped by multiple relocations. In February 2026, she joins Studio 88 Artist Residency as an Artist-in-Residence as part of the Reviving Nature: Botanical Breath program, to further develop an immersive sound-based project exploring music, sensory experience, and collective listening.
Born in Chad to a Chadian mother and a Belgian father, Aziza grew up between Chad, Madagascar, and Gabon before settling in Belgium at the age of eighteen. This transnational trajectory—marked by displacement, cultural rupture, and re-rooting—continues to inform her artistic language. Her arrival in Europe triggered a profound inner collapse that led her into a long and necessary search for identity and belonging. Over time, Aziza found grounding through nature, meditation, and somatic awareness, elements that now function not only as personal anchors but also as core conceptual tools within her work. Music became a space of embodiment: a way to inhabit the body, listen inwardly, and reconnect with what lies beneath inherited borders and contemporary acceleration.
Aziza’s eponymous musical project, AZIZA, emerged from years of collaboration as a bassist and backing vocalist in various projects before evolving into a deeply personal compositional practice during the COVID-19 lockdown. Her music draws from a wide constellation of influences—traditional African music, soul, hip-hop, and rock—yet resists fixed genre classification. Instead, it unfolds through repetition, simplicity, and presence.
Working primarily in a solo format today, Aziza builds her compositions using bass lines, layered vocals, and voice-driven textures that evoke ritual, trance, and introspection. Her sound operates as a vessel: one that carries memory, silence, and the body’s intelligence. Earlier iterations of the project included a trio formation, active until 2023, but the current solo direction reflects a desire for intimacy, vulnerability, and direct sensory engagement.
Beyond performance contexts, Aziza increasingly situates her music within healthcare environments and nature-centered initiatives, exploring sound as a tool for care, awareness, and reconnection with living ecosystems.
Aziza’s artistic formation is largely experiential and self-directed, shaped by years of performance, collaboration, listening, and research rather than formal academic institutions. Her learning process continues through somatic practices, meditation, and an expanding interest in body-based knowledge systems. She is currently deepening her engagement with somatic and embodied methodologies as part of her ongoing artistic and personal research.
Aziza has collaborated as a bassist and vocalist with multiple musical projects, including Anwar, Arona & The Kilombos, Besac Arthur, Jeanna, and Keita Takei.
She presented her first solo concerts in 2021 during the “Standing for Culture” movement, with performances at Les Halles de Schaerbeek and the Beursschouwburg in Brussels. The trio formation of AZIZA concluded with a final performance at the Forest Sound Festival in 2023.
Her debut EP, Haouaz Gun (2024), released on vinyl and digital platforms, reflects a soul-rock orientation developed during the trio period. While Aziza has not centered her practice around awards or institutional recognition, her work circulates through concerts, independent releases, and alternative cultural spaces, emphasizing process, presence, and lived experience over formal accolades.
During her residency at Studio 88, Aziza will develop Birth, a long-standing but previously unreleased composition now reimagined as an immersive, multisensory experience. Birth is conceived as a guided auditory and sensory journey through the four elements—water, earth, wind, and fire—where composed music intertwines with natural soundscapes.
The project integrates guided somatic practices such as breathing, movement, and vocal exploration, inviting participants into a shared space of introspection and ecological awareness. At its core, Birth seeks to cultivate a sense of unity between human beings and their environment, proposing the body as an extension of the natural world rather than a separate entity.
The research will encompass musical, scenographic, physical, and sensory dimensions, including sound, smell, visual atmospheres, and tactile perception. Aziza plans to open the work-in-progress to participants during the residency, using these encounters as moments of dialogue, feedback, and collective reflection.
Looking forward, she envisions future collaborations with artists and scientists to further explore the body, the environment, and the unknown tools they offer—continuing her search for groundedness, presence, and shared sensorial knowledge.
More about Aziza François on her website.
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