Hélène Daccord

Hélène Daccord, a graduate of ESSEC, ENS, and Princeton, is an entrepreneur, musician, and researcher. After five years working in international relations, she founded Pax Musica in 2024, which she now leads full time.

Passionate about music, Hélène founded and directed the ESSEC Symphony Orchestra in 2013, created the association Les Muz Solidaires during the COVID crisis in 2019, and published her first book, Quand la musique fait l’histoire (Passés Composés, 2023).

She has also been actively involved in several humanitarian and academic projects during the 2015 migration crisis in Jordan and Germany, focusing in particular on refugee integration policies in Europe.

As part of its artistic fellowship program, PAX MUSICA is partnering with La Rocabella to offer professional refugee musicians in France a unique space for creation and exchange, at the heart of a multidisciplinary residency overlooking the Mediterranean.

In dialogue with filmmakers, sculptors, photographers, and graphic novelists, the musicians will work on both personal and collective projects, including the creation of an original soundtrack and the preparation of a public performance.

The Rocabella Cross-Residencies 2025–2026 are part of Les Gardiennes de la Méditerranée, a collective creation inspired by the stories of three women—activists, scientists, free divers, water sports professionals, fishers—women deeply committed to protecting the Mediterranean. These testimonies, shared at the opening of the residency, will nurture the entire creative process, serving as raw material to be reimagined, interpreted, and transmitted.

Two film teams will follow the sculptors throughout their creative journey, producing short films that blend documentary and poetic fiction. PAX MUSICA’s musicians will collaborate closely with these teams and artworks, designing and performing original sound creations:

• Sculpture & music: translating shared stories into sonic worlds, echoing the gestures and materials shaped by visual artists.
• Film & music: composing and recording soundtracks, soundscapes, and improvisations inspired by the creative process and the themes explored.

The artistic intention? To weave together voice, matter, image, and sound. To explore an authentic and engaged form of cross-disciplinary creation, where music becomes a medium of transmission, memory, and collective transformation:

• Highlighting the voices of women working for the Mediterranean.
• Offering artists a free yet demanding creative space.
• Inventing a poetic and embodied way of narrating ecology, through the encounter of visual arts, cinema, and music.