Bookcover of Baldamus ou le diable aux trousses by German writer Oskar Wöhrlé, published in French for the first time by La Nuée Bleue. An autobiographical novel of wandering and exile in early twentieth century Europe.

Beneath heavy and threatening clouds, Steinlen’s etched character might well be a Baldamus, a rascal and poet with a scathing pen, crossing as best he can restless times and countries. The title’s Fraktur and the text’s Antiqua meet as if we moved from one Europe to another, while the ​“black forest” green, color of adventure, chance and bad reputations, also evokes these cross-border regions where unusual paths have their starting point. The loose wrapper can be removed to keep only the picture. The back cover’s text unfolds vertically, as the hero rushes ahead through the storms, both real and of the mind.

Two small books about the Krutenau neighbourghood in Strasbourg: the first one indexes its streets, the second one the leaves of its trees. The Rues were drawn using a city map, scaled to 1/5000, ranked by length and captioned with the count of their trees. An alphabetical index and another by page give their French and Alsatian names. The Feuilles were harvested during three days of walk and pressed into encyclopedias. They were then digitalised and sorted out according to the day and time of their picking up. A single index indicates the place where each of them came from. An archive of Fall 2016, with Christina Schmid.

Prague, Austria-Hungary, 1904. My great-great-grandmother Kamilla Neumannová founds her publishing house and launches a cheap collection of modern foreign litterature translated for the working class: Knihy dobrých autorů, The Books Of The Good Authors. In the villa in Žižkov, cradle of Czech anarchism and avant-garde, the metamorphosis of the book into an art object joins the struggle for social revolution and national independence. Translators, illustrators and typographers work hand in hand to publish these exceptional books.

I stumbled upon the story of Kamilla and her publishing house, founded right after her divorce, and overshadowed by the many male political and artistic stories of the family. Moved by this collection’s identity, at once graphic, literary and historical, I wanted to save these books from oblivion. I decided to make another book to tell their story, which is also that of Kamilla, independent and avant-garde woman figure fighting for her convictions through the first decades of the twentieth century. Over one hundred and fifty titles were published during twenty-six struggling years of existence.

I chose to make a ​“beau livre” with generous dimensions, whose subtle variations of paper and layout highlight the reproduced objects. The colors of the papers echo those of the books in the collection. The bilingual reading is slow and immersive: the book is to be laid on a table and one must take their time to read it. Both languages (French and Czech) are separated to preserve a form of mental and visual calm. Similarly, a second level of information, documentary, runs with but does not interrupt the main text written by Kamilla. The linear but modulated narration first lets us meet the books, reaches step by step the heart of the story, then distances itself gradually to embrace a more contemporary look. A corpus of period documents underpins the story.

Master thesis under the supervision of Cyrille Bret.

From conceptual art’s accumulations of the ordinary to Aristotle and his theory of places, this exploration follows the footsteps of an ancient conception in which aesthetics and reason are almost equivalent: not of equal importance, but of equal efficiency. A logic of the list, at once simple and almighty.

Awarded best master thesis of the Haute école des arts du Rhin, showcased in Lectures de mémoires #2. 2015 — 2016 Crossover (Rhinocéros, 2017). Published by the Haute école des arts du Rhin. Send me an email to receive a copy! (Publication in French, free + shipping costs.)

Summer 2012, internship in Berlin with Monobloque: a coincidence of places, fields and languages. The story of this experience is told through twenty layers of tracing paper whose interactions evoke the subtlety of the encounters. Place and size of texts and pictures change with each page. Only page numbers and captions keep still on the left, like an intangible binding.

Book design of Grundton, by photographer Falk Weiß.

For two years, Falk has been crusing the Berlin subway, one line a night. Painstakingly he has been building the photographic index of the underground colored atmospheres, neon light on tiles of all sorts, before the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (the Berlin transportation company) tears them off to replace them with metal plates. Some 1500 photographs digitalised from their contact sheets, carefully named according to the location, date and station of the shooting, and accompanied by hints on the photographer’s intents — schmutzig weiß (dirty white), kalt aber hell (cold but bright) — expecting a finished form for a hard-to-complete enterprise.

Most of the pictures are shot head on, extracting pieces of walls, spreads of color, textures and rhythms from the stations’ landscape. Some stand out because of a tunnel’s uncanny perspective, a corridor’s broken line or vanishing protagonists: so many reading directions to get lost in the depth of the collection. The book is a prosaic and sensitive journey into the hues and cadences of the Berlin U-Bahn. The Italian format, small and easy to handle, goes allong with the horizontality of the photographic expedition. The photographs follow one another and resound in a colorful continuum. Hinge-images play the role of gateways between the different sequences, suddenly opening the view beyond the screen of the tiled walls. Through three different arrangements of the photographs, the layout alternately brings us forward into the journey or gets us lost in the quivering inertia of the surfaces. The Bloque typeface, designed by Dorothée Billard and Clemens Helmke, inscribes the project within the cocoon of the Monobloque collective. A visual summary echoes the final index. On the silkscreened cover, 1846 tiles redrawn after one of the photographs throb together in a colorful play.

This project was conducted during an internship with Dorothée Billard at Monobloque.