Some stories begin with a declaration. Others begin with a question.
For Marie-Lou Sauter, who creates and performs as LØU, the questions began early.
Growing up in a religious environment in Germany, Marie-Lou found herself wrestling with questions about right and wrong, belonging, identity, and what it meant to be different.
Music became the place where she could ask questions she wasn’t always able to ask elsewhere.
What began as a private creative practice eventually became something much larger: a life in music, activism, community-building and artistic experimentation.
Today, Marie-Lou works across music and performance, exploring identity, emotion and the spaces between categories. Her multidisciplinary work includes music, theater, movement and visual elements. At Utrecht’s HKU, she developed The Last Meal, a multidisciplinary musical-theater work examining hope, grief, ambition and what happens when artists feel forced to abandon their dreams before they have had a chance to be seen.
In this episode of Voices of Solidarity, Alex Storer speaks with Marie-Lou about her journey through music and activism, the feminist electronic music collective Xena, the power of vulnerability, her connection with Shishani, and the importance of embracing what exists “in between.”
Music as a place to ask questions
Marie-Lou’s relationship with music began when she was a child.
Growing up, she played music in church. But the experience also introduced her to profound questions about morality, identity and belonging.
As she grew older, music became a place where she could explore those questions.
She describes her music almost as a diary—a way of revealing things about herself that she can’t necessarily express in everyday life.
Music became a way to ask the questions I wasn’t allowed to ask.
For Marie-Lou, vulnerability is not something to hide.
It is part of the creative process. And ultimately, it can become a form of resistance.
From music to activism
Marie-Lou’s activism grew naturally out of her experience as a woman making electronic music in an overwhelmingly male-dominated environment.
At 17, she joined with four other women involved in music to create Zena, a feminist electronic music collective.
Their goal was not simply to create another event series. They wanted to create spaces where artists who were routinely overlooked could find one another, perform, experiment and build community.
Zena organized events, parties and festivals and created a magazine and podcast series showcasing artists and their work. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the collective moved much of its activity online.
The project grew to the point where clubs began approaching Zena asking them to create inclusive bookings. But Marie-Lou saw a problem with that.
The goal wasn’t to become the people who did inclusion for everyone else. The goal was to change the mindset. “We want to change the core of how we approach things.”
Real inclusion isn’t simply about finding someone who looks different and putting them on a stage. It’s about changing who gets invited into the room in the first place.
The challenge of sustaining solidarity
Marie-Lou also speaks honestly about something that anyone involved in grassroots activism will recognize: How do you keep going?
Zena has been largely volunteer-driven, and Marie-Lou talks about the difficulty of maintaining consistency and endurance while also trying to make a living.
It’s a familiar tension. People want to create change, but they also have to pay rent, build careers, maintain relationships and take care of themselves.
Solidarity isn’t powered by an unlimited supply of energy.
Sometimes it requires knowing when to slow down, when to make space for others, and when to return with renewed energy.
Art that refuses to stay in one category
That same refusal to stay inside a single category appears throughout Marie-Lou’s artistic work.
As LØU, she describes herself as a genre-fluid producer and music-performance artist, combining elements of indie, electronic music and R&B with theater, movement and visual elements.
Her work deliberately plays with the boundary between performer and audience.
Her 2024 HKU project The Last Meal brought music, script, acting, movement and visual design together in a multidisciplinary performance.
This isn’t separate from the philosophy she describes in the interview. It is the philosophy.
The form itself becomes an exploration of what happens when we stop insisting that things must fit neatly into one category.
Finding the space in between
Perhaps the central idea of this conversation is the space in between.
Marie-Lou’s artistic identity is deeply connected to this idea.
We often organize the world into binaries: A or B. Left or right. Male or female. Pain or joy. But human experience doesn’t always work that way.
Marie-Lou asks what happens when we allow several things to exist at the same time.
“How can things coexist?” For her, queerness offers one way of understanding that complexity. There can be ambiguity, contradiction, uncertainty, grey zones, asnd there can be beauty in them.
Her artistic work embraces that movement. A performance can take us from sadness to laughter, from softness to intensity, sometimes within minutes.
We don’t have to choose one emotion and reject the others. We can experience them all.
The work begins with ourselves
One of the most powerful moments in the interview comes when Alex asks Marie-Lou what advice she would give someone who doesn’t have a creative outlet.
Her answer is surprisingly simple: Start with yourself.
Look at what you reject within yourself. What do you dislike? What do you hide? What don’t you want other people to see? And why?
Marie-Lou suggests that the judgments we hold toward ourselves can become the same judgments we project onto other people.
If we begin to develop compassion for those parts of ourselves, our relationship with the world can change as well.
The result isn’t necessarily a simpler life. In fact, Marie-Lou suggests that life becomes more complex.
But perhaps complexity is not something we should fear. Perhaps it is something we need to learn to hold.
One thread leads to another
Marie-Lou’s story also connects directly to another thread in Voices of Solidarity: Amsterdam-based Namibian-Belgian artist Shishani.
The two met at a music conference and quickly discovered a shared commitment to creating greater inclusion in music. Their connection soon became action.
When queer rights in Namibia came under threat, Marie-Lou and Shishani helped organize a fundraising event in a matter of weeks, bringing artists together to support people doing the work on the ground.
It was an example of solidarity becoming something tangible. Not just an idea or a statement, but action.
That connection also opened the door to other creative collaborations.
Marie-Lou has worked with Sites of Memory, an Amsterdam-based artistic initiative that brings erased and underrepresented histories of slavery and colonialism into public conversation through creative work.
Her work with the organization has included marketing and communications for its productions.
One connection led to another. One act of solidarity opened another door. And another thread entered the tapestry.
❤️ And sometimes solidarity changes our own lives
There is another beautiful moment in Marie-Lou’s story.
She describes having spent years feeling lonely, angry and frustrated.
Then, through the connections created by this work, something unexpected happened. She met her partner.
The work she was doing to create connection for other people ultimately created a new connection in her own life.
It’s a reminder that solidarity isn’t always a one-way transaction. We give something. We show up. We create something together.
And sometimes, in ways we couldn’t have planned, we find something we needed ourselves.
A thread in the tapestry
Perhaps that’s what makes Marie-Lou’s story such a powerful addition to Voices of Solidarity.
Her message isn’t that we should move neatly from pain to happiness. Or from fear to certainty. Or from one identity to another.
It’s that we can make room for complexity. We can hold grief and joy, vlnerability and strength, questions and conviction, difference and connection.
We can live in the spaces between.
And sometimes, the work of changing the world begins by looking honestly at ourselves.
It begins with a question and becomes a song.
The song becomes a connection. The connection becomes solidarity. And another thread enters the tapestry.
🎙️ Listen to Marie-Lou
Voices of Solidarity is a podcast from OUR PRIDE exploring the people, stories, creativity and acts of courage that connect our global LGBTQIA+ community.
Listen to Alex Storer’s full conversation with Marie-Lou above.
Then explore more of her work as LØU and follow the journey of an artist who is refusing to choose between the categories the world has given her.
https://www.instagram.com/lou.do.lou/
Keep weaving.
If Marie-Lou’s story speaks to you, share this episode with someone who might need to hear it.
And if you have a story, a voice, an image or a piece of art that belongs in this tapestry, we want to hear it.
The tapestry is never finished. And neither is the work. One voice. One story. One thread at a time.
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