Lucille Calmel

 

when I'm good, I'm very good, but when I'm bad I'm better

 

After a long process, we are glad to have come up with Lucille Calmel's first monograph, focusing on more than 10 years of artistic work, including performances, musical and poetry shows, collective projects, digital or physical experiments and various exhibitions.

This book gathers theoretical and experimental texts from renowned artists and art critics, such as Jacques André, Franck Bauchard, Hortense Gauthier, Laure Limongi, Antoine Pickels, Hugues Warin. These personalities all have a strong connection with Lucille’s work or the sector in which she evolves and stretches out.

Her production is already very graphically rich with her obsession for bold red standard Arial typeface for example. We could only inspire ourselves from all of this. From live performances to computer glitches, body experiments, webcam blurriness, laptop fetishism, random subtitled series screenshots or infamous emails – these all gave us enough visual material to play with. However experimental her work is, our interpretation of it for this book had to be mastered as we also had some texts to transcribe.

The book is organised in visual sections and textual sections. The firsts gather full-size pictures set in collections; screenshots, webcam performances, photographs of the body, long poetic & visual emails, herself & her laptop, skies from movies. The second type of section, mainly texts, consists first of a long interview with a lexicon, then the texts from the guest authors bordered with her forty-page curriculum vitæ in tiny characters. The texts are set in a conflictual way, pushing and jostling with each other throughout the page to use it almost entirely. The author’s texts all start on the same spread and are set in different size fonts depending on their lengths, therefore occupying almost the same total page surface. 

Last but not least, for the book launch she performed with Gaëtan Rusquet, literally, on the books. These were set out as a stage; with paint drippings, glitter and mirror glueing, each copy become a unique piece of her art.

 

,,,elle lu si le calme,,,

 

Anouk Boyer Mazal is a Brussels based photographer. We commissioned her to do our portfolio of pictures but also for a imaginative series where you can glimpse our favourite projects (the last photo on this page).