One person

For several years now, French artist Marc Buchy has been publishing a series of tourist guides dedicated to cities around the world. He commissions artists to design the content and insert it into a recurring layout. The guides take an exclusively digital form. They are on sale at www.n2-h4.com. So, invited by M.B. to produce this guide to Brussels, I offered to return the invitation to its sender, suggesting that the aforementioned become the hero of a dreamy stroll through the city of Brussels, which has such a flattering reputation. After all, the publisher knows the city as well as the author. We follow him through places that are dear to his heart, and that the author of the drawings in this guide is obviously familiar with. A four-handed creation, in which we follow each other like shadows. I do the drawings and graphic compositions, and M.B. adds linguistic content, bouncing off the city's celebrated multiculturalism. A way of returning the invitation, perhaps in a game of tennis, to me, a lover of alphabets? A way of publishing Tintin in several languages? Who knows? A philosophy from M.B. to Y.V.P., and vice-versa, in any case. Here are a few excerpts, stolen from the clutches of commerce.

A Hegelian, even pre-Socratic, idea presented itself: to propose, to investigate, an antithesis to last year's exhibition at the Orangerie in Bastogne. This was a fresco as well as a map of the city of Bastogne, apprehended in its diurnal face. It was painted on the ground using stencils and coloured ropes. All orchestrated and punctuated by yours truly, but shaped for the most part by a group of children. So that was our thesis. A year later, here's the project: reverse everything. An antithesis, then. It all starts with the title. The exhibition entitled "Close to the shops (and the stars)" in 2023 becomes "Close to the stars (and the shops)" in 2024. It follows that the cards, posters and flyers for this second exhibition, this time showing a nocturnal Bastogne, undergo the same process of reversal.

These three prints accompany the exhibition held at the L'Orangerie art centre in Bastogne in May 2023. 

The A3 poster for the exhibition intertwines an advertisement for an estate agency, an optician and a photo of an American flag. A sort of core sample of the subconscious of Bastogne, once the scene of the Battle of the Bulge, now an attractive commercial town. On the front, a starry constellation is drawn with undulating lines threading through the names of the town's shops and restaurants. 

The A5 invitation card features a Google Map of the centre of Bastogne on the front, and on the back a graphic composition again combining information about the exhibition and a list of Bastogne's shops. Each card is hand-punched with a few stars. The American flag also plays the role of ghost. 

The small leaflet features a sentence evoking cross-country skiing on the front, and a graphic composition suggesting a zigzagging track.

As December approaches, French artist Marie Glaize collaborates with other merrymakers to design an edition that encapsulates the year ahead. In a word: a calendar. Invited to work on the 2023 edition, in the company of Louis Clais, we spent a weekend in Paris during which we considered a dozen possible calendars: a calendar on the perishable leaves of a tree in the Buttes-Chaumont park, a calendar scattered on the anonymous doorbells of Parisian residents, and so on. The choice was the subject of a debate as bitter as it was joyful. At the end of the weekend, a solution was found around the sign "=", separating all the dates of the year. A Zen equivalence of days, à la John Cage. An inclination to fantasy leads some of the opposing factions to add a cut-out shoe to this clear equation. A sort of seven-point boot to leap over the throes of the day. This double sesame would be slipped into the pockets of friends: an equivalence and an accessory. However, it is soon a cousin of the '=' sign that appears: the '≃' sign. This equivalence in nuance wins votes, like the mathematical formula that has finally run through our exchanges. The days passed, and the doubt still plagues Marie Glaize, our Queen of Sheba. She launched the idea of a postcard that would allow our equations to leave the Parisian flat where they were born. And so it is done: the Post Office offers us its logistical support. 2023 is going somewhere. 2023 is going to someone. Well, more or less...

January 2022: Omicron is in the air, just like the various Covid passports in the world. I can’t go out of my living room. Everyone speaks on television. We ask numbers to tell us the thruth. Everyone speaks in his or her own name. One tries to teach the children’s people the rigt way. All the boys and the girls in the country are concerned. It’s not sure you’re gonna success this way my Macron. You neglected the human candour in the end. And then it seems that the separate elements of this edition, decorate the other works in the neighbourhood . A comment, a caption, a call for actions. This is how it works, this edition. 

The group named Curatela Placebo, formed during the first months of the pandemic, in the context of the Visual Arts department of the IUAV university of Venice, is composed of Margherita Falqui, Marina Marques et Silvia Marchese. It conceived and produced an edition as a First-Aid-Kit. It integrates the contributions of Enrico Boccioletti, Francesco Fazzi, IOKOI, Mariko Hori, Maria Electra Pacini, Raffaella Naldi Rossano, Nuvola Ravera, Margherita Soldati, Marco Sgarbossa, Michele Tiberio & Diletta Tonatto, Stefania Zanetti & Matteo Bellomo. My own contribution is a list of what would constitute, accoring to personnal and/or popular convictions, a "Beautiful death", and what would be on the contrary a "Stupid death". 

The text, written by the group, presenting the whole edition is the following : 

" In the last few months we have been conducting research together, on a current and relevant issue: the loss of the sense of smell, especially caused by covid. The loss of smell is not a topic, it is a symptom: it means losing contact with an invisible reality that surrounds the things we have around us. It is losing confidence in one’s intuition. Due to the constant deodorizing and digitizing of things the loss of smell was already a relevant topic of research, both as a disease and lack of contact in our contemporary world, and it now seems imperative to us to address it.