working in the fringes - experimentelle comics /// Barthélémy Schwartz und Loïc Largier

In the organizer's words:

In 2024, Kulturnetz e.V. will continue its close collaboration with the publishing house Adverse, which, like Kulturnetz e.V., works at the interface between artists' books and experimental comics. The comic artists Barthélémy Schwartz and Loïc Largier will be invited. Both have been exploring the genre of comics in an experimental way for years, but have taken very different paths. The exhibition working in the fringes explores these two different paths and is grouped around one comic by each artist.

The comic Le Dépli by Loïc Largier is a poetic commentary on the structural characteristics of the comic genre. His part of the exhibition will revolve around this comic. In Le Dépli, Loïc Largier plays with structural features and breaks them up, working with them beyond the usual formal expectations of the comic genre. There are inserts, leporello-like extensions, different pages and page sizes, so that there are no clear assignments of image elements and text elements. This results in multiple ways of reading that also break with linearity or a linear narrative, which is assumed to be a basic element of the comic genre. It shows more than ever the attention that its author devotes to technical and conceptual questions, to which he responds with a rigorous approach that never excludes the possibilities of failed attempts and at the same time expresses his belief in the fertile powers of poetic writing.

Barthélémy Schwartz's comic book Far West, around which his part of the exhibition is grouped, as well as several other works, are meta-comics in the sense that they deal with the visual corpus of the genre. In this sense, they can be read as comic historiography. Far West refers to cheap western comics of the 1950s. Schwartz collages, tears up, changes and rearranges both the images and the original contexts. In his own way, Barthélémy Schwartz recreates a situationist score and introduces the idea of dissolution into the comic strip with his palimpsest images. However, his intention is by no means reduced to a purely aesthetic and self-referential game, but rather aims to subvert the mystifications of the popular narratives and images he uses through a game of poetic and critical deconstruction/reconstruction. In this way, Far West openly reveals political aims. Other works by Barthélémy Schwartz will also be presented. His points of reference are comic classics such as Tintin and the comic culture of the 1950s.

As part of the exhibition, Barthélémy Schwartz and Loïc Largier will hold an intensive two-day workshop on the range of formal possibilities of experimental comics. The term comic will be interpreted broadly to explore a wide range of possibilities.

Maximum 10 participants, workshop fee 90 € (50 € reduced)

Workshop languages are English and French

Registration is possible at zinefest@kulturbuero-bremen.de

https://kulturbuero-bremen.de/

In cooperation with the publishing house Adverse and the Literaturkontor e.V.