Lawra Meschi does not necessarily need a competition to gain notoriety. With more than 850,000 subscribers on Youtube, 250,000 on Instagram and 1.3 million on TikTok, the artist from Vence, in the Alpes-Maritimes, is already very popular. But at 26, she decided to participate in the first edition of Urban Shakers, a competition from the L’Oréal Fund for women, which focuses on the fight against gender-based and sexual violence.
“The theme particularly touched me,” says the young content creator. I have two of my sisters who have already been victims of sexual harassment and I thought it was important to fight in my own way. This Wednesday, she will present a video on this subject in front of an audience of 600 people and a jury. She was selected from 500 candidates and will be in the final with eighteen others.
“I’m proud to have come this far,” she exclaims. I didn’t expect it because everything I’ve been doing since I started is behind my camera. I can’t see the live reactions. There, we go from virtual to real so it is necessarily a little scary. “. But for her, regardless of the results, she will have seen that her “content affects” and “makes people react” and, “that’s all that matters”.
Denounce with humor
Born in Cagnes-sur-Mer, Lawra grew up in Vence until she was 18. She “always loved making videos,” she recalls. She affirms, moreover, that she only knows how to “express herself through images”. After a year of lessons in Paris, she decides to work in order to buy her own equipment. “I started on Vine and then YouTube. My thing, in addition to staging, is really humor,” she says. Six years later and a “big community”, she can finally make a living from her passion. “I think it’s great to have the freedom to do what I love and that’s what I also try to convey as a message through my content,” she explains.
In the “digital narrative” she presented to the cast of the L’Oréal Fund for Women, she humorously denounces street harassment and sexual assault. “My goal in making this video, published a year ago, was to open the eyes of potential aggressors by turning them into ridicule,” says the artist. When such an event happens, you only think afterwards of all that you could have done and I tell myself that it can also give strength to the people watching who have been victims. »
Reach “a large audience”
Sexual assault, harassment at work but also inclusion are “subjects that affect her” and which she talks about on these channels. “With the tone of humor, I try to bring a little lightness to highlight these themes which are heavy but that does not mean that I do not take them seriously, on the contrary. I stage them hoping that it can reach a large audience thanks to my small notoriety [elle fait des millions de vues], and that eventually things will change. And then, I have the impression that in this way, it is sometimes easier to raise awareness about certain causes. His next video will talk about cyberbullying.
If she wins the final, she will become an “ambassador” for the cause of the competition and will collaborate with associations acting in the fight against sexist and sexual violence, in addition to artistic support. “It would be an honor for me,” she says. I could continue to make videos to talk about this kind of subject but also launch myself into other artistic works that I have started. She also makes sounds but also “action” short films, notably with one of her stunt sisters.