The art of living in translation.

Some stories take longer to tell.

The ones about what it actually costs to recreate home elsewhere. What it does to your sense of time, language, home. What you learn about the place you left, and the place you arrived, that people who stayed in either will never quite see.

Alternarratives brings you stories from between places. It consists of solo episodes drawing on experience. It questions what it means to straddle two or more worlds, one of which is constantly misrepresented by the West, and takes on the challenge of creating space for a new narrative.

What’s happening here

Conversations that don’t rush to conclusions. The most recent series, Thoughts From Between Places, explores the immigrant mindset as a model for reinvention in an unstable century. Coming June 2026 on Spotify and Apple.

Bloom: Extending the Portrait into Voice

A podcast series in development. Conversations with women of African descent who participated in the Bloom portrait series by Dutch artist Dagmar van Weeghel; extending a four-year visual project into one medium it couldn’t reach: voice. Coming 2027.

Alternarratives Agency

A strategic storytelling agency for institutions that need to tell better stories about the “global south”. Coming soon.

About Lys

Strategic storyteller. Producer and host of This From Between Places. French Béninoise, based in the Netherlands. Fifteen years in international communications, two masters degrees from Sciences Po, four languages, and a career built on the conviction that the stories institutions tell about the “rest of world” shape the world they get.

New here? Start with the podcast.