vixnde

Product of a lifetime by Brussels-born, Rotterdam-based artist/singer-songwriter Viana Afoumou; vixnde* is an intimate and layered exploration of sound, silence and voice, intertwined with stories and songs. Some would call her genre raw pop. “Suddenly, I was surrounded by horses. I sat by the water to refresh my feet, then I laid down and I closed my eyes. After a few minutes, one of them came by and sniffed my nose. I was a little bit scared but I stayed still. The horse was whispering a song.” - vixnde *vixnde: pronounced viande, meaning “meat” in French. A neologism and analogy which became Viana Afoumou’s “brand”/artist identity for several reasons: I. A girl in her primary school figured out one day that her name sounds similar to the word “viande,” which became her nickname for the rest of the school year. II. Years later, the joke ironically started reflecting how she tends to feel: like a steak in one of the storefronts of the slaughterhouse in the “Marché du Midi” in Brussels, surrounded by different displays, other pieces of meat and the sellers who try to outshout each other. III. She tried to use “viande” as an artist name, but unfortunately the Instagram handle was already in use. She replaced the “a” with an “x” and it worked, incidentally defining her artistic identity through social media.