Mailys Mendes, born in 2003 in Clermont-Ferrand, is a drag performer and visual artist.

She has been painting and experimenting since her adolescence, and it is through this that her artistic practice explores questions of puberty as women and gender minorities.

She questions how identities are shaped by social, political, and cultural norms.

Between stage, image, and text, she is interested in bodies as spaces of construction, constraint, and finally, reappropriation. How to recognize oneself in one's body and home, how to transform, inhabit, and above all, resist.

By using recycled and recovered materials, she attempts an ecological and symbolic approach. These materials become bodies, accessories that blur the boundary between stage and daily life, between body and home.

Her works therefore address the gestures that construct identities.

She wants to speak to all those who need sensitive spaces where emotions, memories, and minority experiences can be shared without shame.