Artist's book: an illustrated collage-book made up of recurring visual
elements from Franco-Belgian comics. The publication is designed in the traditional format of
the bande dessinée.
The latest book of Ilan Manouach, Compendium of Franco-Belgian comics
takes as a starting point the 48cc (48 pages, colour printing, hardcover)
comic book format. The name contemptuously christened by the alternative
publisher L’Association, points to the product of a normative and
just-in-time book industry that dominates the French-speaking publishing
landscape. During a single afternoon Manouach purchased a selection of
forty-eight second hand 48cc books and after careful reading he built a
non-exhaustive idiosyncratic index of the elements considered to generally
define the tradition of franco-belgian comics. Among a variety of comics
proto-memes, meta-narrative devices, paratextual elements and other
hovering dark clouds, shark wings, identity stereotypes and body-shaped
holes, the Compendium presents itself as an orchestral comic
book, where instantiations of its typology, freed from the imperatives of
specific narratives can be read as the in situ
building blocks of the European BD.
Ilan Manouach (born 1980 in Athens, lives and works in Athens and
Brussels) is a musician, a book publisher and a multidisciplinary artist
with a specific interest in conceptual and post-digital
comics. He
currently holds a PhD researcher position at the Aalto University in
Helsinki (adv. Craig Dworkin) where he examines the intersections of
contemporary comics, art and poetry. His work claims for the importance of
comics as a materially self-reflexive medium, unaffiliated to any general
art history. He has more than twenty published bookworks under his belt,
solo exhibitions to important comics events worldwide. He is mostly known
for Shapereader, a tactile system of communication for comics artists with
visual disabilities. His
work has been written about in
Hyperallergic,
New York
Magazine,
World Literature Today,
Wired,
Le
Monde,
The Comics Journal,
du9,
50watts
and Kenneth Goldsmith's
Wasting Time on the Internet and his
works are also part of the Ubuweb online contemporary art archive. He is
the director of Futures of Comics, an international research program that
explores how comics are undergoing historic mutations in the midst of
increasingly financialized, globalized
technological affordances and proposes to map the social, economic,
racial and gendered forces
that shape the industry's commercial, communication and production
routines. It took place in 2019 during the Fumetto Comics Festival. He was
the curator of the Festival Shadow Libraries: Ubuweb in Athens, that
proposed to examine the uses of the archive in regards to artistic
production and explore the conceptual consistency and the ethics of
digital preservation and distribution in web libraries, through the lens
of its users and makers. The festival consisted of two symposia, four
workshops, an exhibition of media works and a 24h video
programme and took place in the Onassis Cultural Centre in March 2018.
