The artist

Cocovan is a 38-year-old French-Iranian performance artist, born and raised in Paris, France. She began her career in the arts as a musician at the age of 16, and moved to the United States at 21 to pursue a career as a pop singer, working between New York and Los Angeles. Over the following decade, she released several EPs, toured internationally and collaborated with renowned musicians, but gradually grew disillusioned with the music industry and its superficiality. She began looking for a more direct relationship between art, the artist, and those who encounter it.

In 2016, Cocovan stepped away from music and turned to another form of art: performance art. She began creating performances and installations, choosing the street as her place of work. In her words, “the street is a space of passage, open to chance and randomness, where art is often absent, yet perhaps most needed.”

She created the “Poetic Interventions,” a series of ephemeral performances staged directly in public space, intended to enchant the urban environment and disrupt the daily routine with unexpected beauty. Whether sitting on a moon above the Pont des Arts in Paris, covering Venice Beach in flower petals, or lying on a bed in the streets of London, Cocovan sought to remind people that poetry could be found anywhere, especially where they least expected it.

One of these performances would lead, by chance, to the creation of The World Letter in Berlin in 2017. What began as a one-day street intervention has since grown spontaneously into an ongoing monumental participatory artwork involving more than 25,000 people around the world.

Cocovan has presented her work across more than 17 countries, from the streets of cities around the world, to Art Basel Miami and Refinery29’s 29Rooms. She has also collaborated with organizations and institutions including UNICEF, The Sandbox, Institut français and Jane Goodall’s Roots & Shoots, among others. Her work has been featured by media including Artnet, France Info, Refinery29, AJ+, The Hollywood Reporter, RTBF, TV5MONDE, LA Weekly, Radio Nova and RFI.

She has given a TEDx talk at Columbia University and spoken at the United Nations Headquarters, both in New York City.

She is based in Paris, France.

Cocovan on social media:

Public speaking

Cocovan gave a TEDx talk at Columbia University in New York. She has also spoken at the United Nations headquarters in New York and has given lectures at schools and universities around the world, including Sciences Po Paris and Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv, Ukraine.Through her story, she recounts how she went from being a pop singer to traveling the world with a giant love letter, and shares the discoveries she has made along the way.

What can 25,500 love letters from humanity can teach us about the world?