cdelafforest

A little later, in a Parisian book box, a small book. I know the title well, the author too, and yet I have never read it. But now it’s calling out to me. The format is unusual, I like the yellowed paper of a book that has lived and travelled. I leaf through it slowly while the smell of vanilla wafts from the pages I turn. On the back, a short summary that starts like this. Because I now have grandchildren, I often feel like telling stories: it is the natural function of grandfathers, and perhaps their greatest merit. I crack a smile. I’ve always loved to listen to my grandfather, this wise old man that tells stories of all kinds. And I realised that I wanted to tell a story too. So inspired by this little book by Pagnol, and preferring to see design as a tool, for stimulating the imagination, I’ve created this small object mixing personal recollections, historical and fictional stories along with a collection of archives found in various books on lighthouses. Exploring how layout can serve the construction of a story made of heterogenous elements, I told myself a story. It is up to you to find the links you wish to see in it, to tell your own story.

« It’s a bit cliché but sharing: that’s what it’s all about » said this sweet woman in the electric blue jumper and astronaut trousers.

During my research I had collected a lot of documents of all kinds, which had nourished me, touched me… which I wanted to share. And among all these, there was this little phrase. 
“At the origin of writing, I said to myself one morning in front of my blank page, there is a voice that speaks to others. Thus the letter was the UR-genre, and all literature proceeded from correspondence – to which, after all, it ends in the act of reading. Every text was a letter insofar as it implied a destination.”
Nicole, E. (2007) Alaska. Paris : Editions de l’Olivier.

So I simply decided to address them to you as a letter. To link them together in this large envelope where all of them, although each one has its own form resulting from the content and the way I wanted to give them to you to read (through the font size, the text direction in a sort of playful way), would become a piece of the puzzle. 

Now it’s their turn to tell you a story.

As always, it’s always easier for me to do things when I’m not asked. Writing is often a game for me, a pleasure, and yet this time I found it difficult. Where to start, what to tell?
It started like this…

Night falls, and in Paris, on a majestic building, large letters light up. “What is between us?” These words resound like a call from the building itself in our direction. A few words, a simple sentence, which once again takes us on a journey towards an elsewhere. What do we share? What unites us? What separates us? Prem Krishnamurthy in one of his conferences once said that “Art is a way to share. To share narratives, to share stories, to share meaning, to find a space to gather in the world with those who might be different from you.” To create a link to transmit, to transmit to create a link. What is between us? said the neon lights. I would answer: ‘stories’.

Editorial design, small printed objects all tell stories in my opinion, and you will have understood, I imagine, that’s what interests me. Historical, political, fantastic. Of content, of relationship, of form, of texture… what else? And all this for what purpose? you might ask. To create links, transmit knowledge, arouse emotions. No, not always, of course, but it’s this kind of design that interests me at the moment: a design turned towards others, which serves to better understand the world in which we evolve, to recreate a link, which seeks to transmit something.

I wanted to understand what role we could play in this transmission of knowledge, this story sharing and the importance of storytelling in printed object. To do so I met various players in the “print world”, conducted some interviews to take the loneliness also of the solo research project out. 
(Very much intrigued by two different book Sarah Handelman brought us during the workshop “Building the page” I’ve managed to have a great discussion with her about books, the different roles played in their construction, the stories they tell us etc. And then, following a day of lecture I’ve been to, I also had the opportunity to meet Kristen Algera one of the editor-in-chief of Macguffin magazine)

These discussions about the importance of narration in printed works soon led to the importance of the technique and medium used to tell a story which led me to the exploration of layers of storytelling in small printed object. Indeed, design is both a question of surface and depth. What do we read between the lines? A book (or any other small printed object) laid out by a designer is not only about the content it presents: it is about layers. If you pay attention to the details of a book you hold in your hands, you may realise that the designer who created it, has linked together a whole set of elements that are not only ornamental but also have a story. The ornament as such (the iconography, the typography) has a story and then the way in which this ornament is played with also tells a story. That is to say, there is obviously the story told by the text you are reading, but there are also many other stories that make each book unique in its way of telling a story. Our work is therefore about understanding which audience we want to address and the angle through which we want to tackle our subject.

After my visual essay and the exploration of telling story from found materials came summer, along with some great encounter. First this book that disturbed me. If on a winter’s night a traveler for Italo Calvino. A story that addresses you, the reader, who gradually becomes one of the characters in the story, which is itself made up of a thousand interlocking stories. A story of fragments, of superimposition, a puzzle. 

(To begin. You’re one who said it, Ludmilla. But how to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. Or else the real story is the one that begins ten or a hundred pages further on, and everything that precedes it is only a prologue. The lives of individuals of the human race from a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest –for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both– must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story.)

And so Marana proposes to the Sultan a stratagem prompted by the literary tradition of the Orient: he will break off this translation at the moment of greatest suspense and will start translating another novel, inserting it into the first through some rudimentary expedient; for example, a character in the first novel opens a book and starts reading. the second novel will also break off to yield to a third, which will not proceed very far before opening into a fourth, and so on…
Many feelings distress you as you leaf through these letters. The book whose continuation you were already enjoying in anticipation, vicariously through a third party, breaks off again… Ermes Marana appears to you as a serpent who injects his malice into the paradise of reading… In the place of the Indian seer who tells all the novels of the world, here is a trap-novel designed by the treacherous translator with beginnings of novels that remain suspended… 
*** 
You look through the correspondence again seeking more recent news of the Sultana… You see other female figures appear and disappear:
in the island in the Indian Ocean, a woman on a beach “dressed in a pair of big dark glasses and a smearing of walnut oil, placing between her person and the beams of the dog days’ sun the brief shield of a popular New York magazine.” The issue she is reading publishes in advance the beginning of the new thriller by Silas Flannery. Marana explains to her that magazine publication of the first chapter is the sign that the Irish writer is ready to conclude contracts with firms interested in having brands of whisky appear in the novel, or of champagne, automobile models, tourist spots. “It seems his imagination is stimulated, the more advertising commissions he receives.” The woman is disappointed: she is a devoted reader of Silas Flannery. “The novels I prefer,” she says, “are those that make you feel uneasy from the very first page…” 
from the terrace of a Swiss chalet, Silas Flannery is looking through a spyglass mounted on a tripod at a young woman in a deck chair, intently reading a book on another terrace, two hundred meters below in the valley. “She’s there every day,” the writer says. “Every time I’m about to sit down at my desk I feel the need to look at her. Who knows what she’s reading? I know it isn’t a book of mine, and instinctively I suffer at the thought, I feel the jealousy of my books, which would like to be read the way she reads. I never tire of watching her: she seems to live in a sphere suspended in another time and another space. I sit down at the desk, but no story I invent corresponds to what I would like to convey;” Marana asks him if this is why he is no longer able to work. “Oh, no, I write,” he answered; “it’s now, only now that I write, since I have been watching her. I do nothing but follow the reading of that woman, seen from here, day by day, hour by hour. I read in her face what she desires to read, and I write it faithfully.” “Too faithfully”, Marana interrupts him, icily. “As translator and representative of the interests of Bertrand Vandervelde, author of the novel that women is reading, Looks down in the gathering shadow, I warn you to stop plagiarizing it!” Flannery turns pale; a single concern seems to occupy his mind: “Then, according to you, that reader… the books she is devouring with such passion are novels by Vandervelde? I can’t bear it…”
in the African airport, among the hostages of the hijacking who are waiting sprawled on the ground, fanning themselves or huddled into the blankets distributed by the hostesses at nightfall, when the temperature dropped suddenly, Marana admires the imperturbability of a young woman who is crouching off to one side, her arms grasping her knees, raised beneath her long skirt to act as lectern; her hair, falling on the book, hiding her face; her hand limply turning the pages as if all that mattered were decided there, in the next chapter. “In the degradation that prolonged and promiscuous captivity imposes on the appearance and the behavior of all of us, this woman seems to me protected, isolated, enveloped as if in a distant moon…” It is then than Marana thinks: I must convince the OAP pirates that the book that made setting up their whole risky operation worthwhile is not the one they have confiscated from me, but this one that she is reading… 
in New York, in the control room, the reader is soldered to the chair at the wrists, with the pressure manometers and stethoscopic belt, her temples beneath thein crown of hair held fast by the serpentine wires of the encephalogram that mark the intensity of her concentration and the frequency of stimuli. “All our work depends on the sensitivity of the subject at our disposal for the control tests: and it must, moreover, be a person of strong eyesight and nerves, to be subjected to the uninterrupted reading of the novels and variants of novels as they are turned out by the computer. If reading attention reaches certain highs with a certain continuity, the product is viable and can be launched on the market; if attention, on the contrary, relaxes and shifts, the combination is rejected and its elements are broken up and used again in other contexts.” The man in the white smock rips off one encephalogram after another, as if they were pages from a calendar. “Worse and worse,” he says. “Not one novel being produced holds up. Either the programming has to be revised or the reader is not functioning.” I look at the slim face between the blinders and the visor, impassive also because of the earplugs and the chin strap that keeps the jaw from moving. What will her fat be? 

Calvino, I. If on a Winters Night a Traveler, p. 95-97.

My prompt was to make a 52 pages book and I wondered: How fragment can come together to create a story?  I’ve collected things, made research.
And then, as I was once again inspired by materials of all kinds, I began by saying to myself that the best way to relate them visually in the book would be to draw, using illustration as a means of re-appropriation but also to put all those informations on an equal footing. I saw this project as an excuse to write and experiment with my way of illustrating things.

What’s the story ? What’s the content that you want to explore ?

I didn’t really know and was afraid of mine own shadow. My subject was too broad: fragment could be anything and everything. What did I want to tell? Frustrated I’ve made few terrible drawings (here is an extract).

And others, listening to podcasts about Adrianna Willis work which undoubtedly inspired me a lot. Not least in my subsequent desire to understand the importance of the audience I was addressing.

                     ADRIANNA WALLIS – THE READERS
Adrianna Wallis wondered about the fate of lost letters, those that could not reach their addressee or be returned to the sender. This led her to the mail processing centre in Libourne, France, where employees open lost letters in search of clues. It is in these lost letters, these bottles in the sea, that the artist immersed herself : letters of love, friendship, family stories, inner turmoil, hopes and questions… And she decided that, whoever the addressee, these crumpled pieces of life where the intimate and the universal meet, should be heard. Since 2017, she has obtained from the Post Office that it does
not destroy these letters and sends them to her. At a rate of one box every three months, she has collected
around 20,000 letters.
A real reading marathon, a dozen volunteers – the readers – will take turns for 12 hours to read all the letters contained in a box.
Wallis, A. (2019) Lettres à L., à G., à Mon Loup, Maman, Tante L., Monsieur et Madame P. et à nous.
Available at : https://www.franceinter.fr/emissions/une-journee-particuliere/une-journee-particuliere-14-mars-2021. (Accessed : 8th November 2021).

    

But it then occurred to me that illustration was not the most successful medium to explore what I wanted to (this idea how constructing a story of fragments of stories). It did not talk enough about collection, the fragment itself and ways of compiling things. Indeed, I had realised that I’m always fascinated by objects made by designer (The art of looking sideways by Alan Fletcher, Stuff we Like by Music etc.) that combine all sorts of materials, heterogenous elements and manage to create links between them. I wanted to explore that, so I turned again to Calvino, observing how he had woven links between multiple stories. And then, looking more closely at the images I had collected, I noticed that together they could tell two parallel stories that from time to time intertwine. The story of these women and their representation founded in french archives (inspired by Calvino) and the story of all these other images I had: fragments of research, of personal interests that I never took further. 

You’ll find here my visual essay, exploring what I did for the beginning of Unit 2 as well as the way I work, collecting daily, bits of everything.
(https://youtu.be/tXpGck4JfhY)

In 1989, a group a friends —including my parents— made a trip from Paris to Timbuktu in 2CV. I have a lots of archive documents from that trip such as images, travel journals of different persons but also a text about the genesis of that trip.
I am very much interested in my work to tell stories, explore the gap between reality and fiction, but also collect stuff and try to talk about the things I discover. Start with a personal story and try to make it universal is also something I find very interesting… So for all those reasons (and many more) I’ve decided as a starting point to look at the bits that I didn’t know in the writing that I had. I’ve collected some names, and I’ve made research.

Algerian desert between Illizi & Djanet (marvelous place know for it’s cave painting), 2CV Charleston, Dakar rally in 1986, Thierry Sabine & Daniel Balavoine, legendary city of Timbuktu, the desire to do something exceptional at a time when everything was possible…

I wanted to know more and more, and my informations to be as accurate as possible so for severals weeks I’ve collected: informations, archive images, typography… all sort of documents.

Our writing in the Hoggar
is a nomadic writing
because it is all in sticks
which are the legs of all the herds.
Legs of men, legs of mehara,
of zebus, of gazelles,
everything that roams the desert.
And then the crosses say whether you go right
or to the left. And the dots, you see, there are
a lot of dots. These are the stars
to lead us at night, because we,
the Saharans,
we only know the road,
the road that has as its guide, in turn,
the sun and then the stars.
And we start from our heart,
and we turn around it
in ever-widening circles,
to embrace the other hearts
in a circle of life, like the horizon
around your flock and yourself.
— Dassine Oult Yemma

I could go on and on as I’ve collected lots of really interesting knowledge but I think you’ve got that. To talk a little bit more about the process then, I arrive one day at a point when I add to ask myself how to communicate all my findings. I found fascinating the power of words and their capacity to make us travel, in reality as well as in fiction.
And I wrote a tale.

Did I ever tell you about the lost tree? It was called that because it grew alone in the Ténéré region of the Sahara desert in northeast Niger. A real miracle. But for you to understand the magical aspect of this story, I have to tell you a little more about this immense desert. Close your eyes and try to imagine. During early human history, the Ténéré was a fertile land much more congenial to human life than it is now. The region was inhabited by modern humans for as long as 60,000 years ago. We know about them because they hunted wild animals and left us evidence of their presence in the form of stone tools. Then, about 10,000 years ago, ancient hunters created rock engravings and cave paintings that can still be found across the region. Later, the human population dwindled as the Sahara dried out, and by 2500 BC, it had largely become as dry as it is today. If you went there tomorrow, you would see that this part of the Sahara Desert has one of the harshest climates in the world. It is hyper-arid, extremely hot, sunny and dry year-round and there is virtually no plant life. The annual rainfall is extremely low, and often several years can pass with no rainfall at all. Water is notoriously difficult to find, even underground, and wells may be hundreds of miles apart. But there was a time when the region was beneath the sea; later it became a tropical forest. Can you imagine? It is even said that a major dinosaur cemetery lies southeast of Agadez at a site called Gadoufaoua, «the place where camels fear to go « in Tuareg; many fossils have been found there, having eroded out from the ground. An almost complete specimen of the crocodile-like reptile Sarcosuchus imperator, nicknamed the SuperCroc, was discovered there by paleontologists. Fantastic, isn’t it? So it’s a pretty incredible part of the world, which, as you can imagine by now, holds many secrets. And today I’m going to tell you one of them.
One day when I was about your age, a pregnant woman came to our village. Nobody knew what country she came from, how old she was or even what her name was. Even today, nobody knows her story, but one thing is certain: the day she arrived, she was running away. As she hardly spoke our language and her features were very different from ours, we quickly determined that she probably originated from a distant country. Even today, I remember her face perfectly, with its long brown hair, eyes in which one seemed to see the ocean, and very light skin scattered here and there with freckles. She was a very beautiful woman, affectionate and generous, but also very discreet. She was invisible in a way, but always there, listening to those who wanted her to. Months passed, she made her place in everyone’s hearts, helping every day with extreme patience, making jewellery, milking the goats, learning our language. I have fond memories of those moments when, at nightfall, we would prepare the taguella1 together, those crispy little breads that we would bake in the heart of the hot sand. It was always the moment she chose to tell us stories of a thousand colours. In the moonlight, we would stay for hours, hanging on to her every word, which would transport us to far away places.
And then one day she lost her child. She remained as gentle and caring as ever, but a certain pain could now be seen in her eyes. A little glow had gone out of her, and yet she said nothing. But she would often be seen leaving the village, walking into the heart of the dunes, carrying a small jug on her hips. No-one knew where she went, but everyone respected her silence and the apparent importance of these moments that she took for herself. Until one day, when, piqued by curiosity, I asked her the meaning the meaning of this ritual; that’s when she invited me to accompany her. We walked in silence for a good hour. Finally, she stopped, crouched down and stirred the sand in front of her, revealing a shrub no higher than 15 centimeters. I watched her dust it and water it and then she explained that she had left her country with an acacia seed. In the Ténéré region, the land was arid, nothing had grown in the area for many years. But she had not given up, as if she could not keep her child alive, but had decided to make our land fertile again. And her little seed had sprouted. It wasn’t the biggest, nor the most impressive looking tree, but it was powerful simply in its presence: it was there. Alone in the middle of the desert.  
Every week he was visited by his guardian who came to water him, to say sweet words to him, to rest at his feet. Until one day, she left as she had arrived, and no one ever saw her again. Her beautiful tree remained for decades, seeing generations of children clinging to its branches from all sides, providing a meeting place for local lovers, a landmark to lost travelers, a bit of shade to nomads and coolness to dromedaries. 
And then one day the beautiful tree disappeared in its turn. Years passed and people found other places to meet. Over time they forgot. But it is said that deep in the desert, if you listen carefully, you can still hear the wind blowing through its branches, and the sweet voice of the woman singing. 

Then I asked myself how would my story look like if it was made of images? (using this question also as a prompt to work quickly and experiment with my style of illustrating things).

And then I wanted to create something a bit more coherent, so I started again, doing only line drawings, in black and white.

And then I tried to illustrate some of my research too.

And tried to see how it would look like to have a more scientific approach toward my subject.

Trying to dissect what I was able to do for this first step of Unit 2 wouldn’t
be very interesting, given that just for once, I did my best to work instinctively, without trying too hard to know where it would lead me (following the instructions of the task we were meant to be doing).
However, in my opinion, the aspect that stands out once again from this work is the narrative process used. Probably not made in the most
successful way, but at least it is the very principle of the GIF that I’ve made: an element leads us from one image to another, creating a story in an intuitive way. And so, storytelling is for me the way that my ‘100 screengrabs experiment’ is positioned relative to the discipline of graphic commu-nication design. I believe that stories take a big place in graphic design and communication. Very often graphic designers use story through images,
text, layout, writing to convey their message because as Stuart Bailey states it, “Designers can’t rule the world, they can only make it more like it already is.” (Toward a critical faculty, 2006) and if you think about it, most of our lives is made out of stories. We spend our time telling each other anecdotes, reflecting on moments that have passed or will come, reading other people’s stories – real or imagined, watching movies to travel or learn. As I explained it in my last written response, I have always had a great attraction for narrative objects, from which, I realised that what I like most is telling stories, manipulating texts as much in their formatting as through the writing. I would like to continue thinking about how to construct and deconstruct a story, finding new ways to reintroduce writing in my work while exploring the importance of storytelling in graphic design (through the text but also through iconography or layout). To do so, I was encouraged during my midpoint assessment to ask myself questions like: Why is storytelling and writing important in graphic design? How can you use these formats to challenge graphic design?
Trying to reflect on previous work and my approach to GCD, I realised that I am interested in the different ways of appropriating, creating and editing a set of documents of various natures (archive, text, photography, illustration) in order to create narratives.  As Prem KRISHNAMURTHY, says it in his P!DF, « Design exists not only as a tool for encouraging consumption, but also as a way to deliver timely ideas to new audiences and generate formats for interaction » (p16). And this interaction plays an important role in my work. I like to make things readable, share ideas with people, intrigue them, communicate information in a more playful way to encourage people to want to know more.

Brief: 

Last year, I worked on a conference about communication disorders and more particularly on what are called “tongue-twisters” as a possible remedy for certain disorders. After researching the subject, I decided to invent a fictional story around the subject as it allowed me to refer to historical and scientific facts while integrating many tongue twisters and convey information in an entertaining way. This conference was based on a script conceived as a real ephemeral editorial object, that is to say written and then put into form.

Very much interested in that approach I would like to create a series of small publications/objects that would work in a similar way: take a small subject that interests me, collect a lot of information on it and then think about how to communicate it. 

Work steps:

• What do I want to work on? (It can be a specific theme, an idea, an image etc.)
  – What is the iconography on which I am leaning?
  – What is the form I give to my subject?
  – What makes it a collection? What is left from one object to another? What is changing?

• And why not increasing my research within an editorial object.

I want to think of different ways of approaching a subject: I made a fiction about and containing tongue twisters, I could have done something more strict or a series of illustrations …

References: revue faire (https://revue-faire.eu), Il paraît (https://shop.ichetkar.fr/cosaques/524-191-goria-il-parait-editions-cent-pages.html), fond international (http://fondsinternational.com), Vulgaire —podcast by Marine Baousson, the art of looking sideways — alan Fetcher, https://www.instagram.com/matin_queljournal/
 + look for different forms of conferences/way to talk effectively about a subject

• 

Everything started with a collection of images that turned into a typology of homes, using illustration to put them on an equal footing.

Then came experiments like recontextualization, construction and deconstruction.

Later, I asked myself questions that helped me through my research process. What would our houses look like if we could see the mixture of different cultures through architecture? Combining parts of houses from around the world.

Why do we care so much about our houses? Bachelard states that understanding the house is a way to understand the soul. This approach to houses was one of the first texts I’ve read on the subject and it enabled me to understand that I wasn’t interested in the building itself but more in human relationships to home. Our houses are witnesses of our everyday lives, and I believe we are attached to them because of memories and experiences we carry within us. So I drew my house of memories which made me wonder how to make a house tell a story before getting that, once again, I had to turn to others because Illustration is inclusive and people orientated.

 What makes you feel at home? I drew the answers and that’s how I realised the gap between my imagination and the reality that I didn’t know. I had understood that illustration allows for interpretation, flexibility with memory when physical objects or photography don’t as much. 

 So I redrew again and again a similar object (changing the color, the size…) before showing it back to the original person to see if they still think of home when they look at it. I wanted to explore the idea that one form can bring back many different memories and thus, somehow, create links between people. So I showed it to others, using illustration as a prompt for interaction about memory, and asking myself what level of similarity to the original do we need to make connexions. 

How far can we go before it’s just a random object that doesn’t mean anything? 

Having had time to move on a bit, I realised that the bridge between the reality that I didn’t know and my own imagination could be something really interesting to explore further through iterations. I thought of postcards as they always get sent to people who weren’t there when the events happened, but is also used to report something. I started to create images of my memories, aiming again to give form to something that is formless.

Then came the idea of randomly collecting images from Google Maps of places where I have never set foot, thus questioning the link between a real moment that has passed and one that never existed at all. I have started to redraw them and plan to start a correspondence of fictional travel, closely linked to what is happening to us right now. Everything must change so that everything can stay the same said Lampedusa.