Fragments (pour en finir avec la bande dessinée)
Fragments is an artist’s publication, a metacomic book, a post-comics production and a citational montage novella at once. Compiled throughout the long covid-19 lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, and juxtaposing samples and interpretations from canonical comics and graphic novels as well as texts by Blanchot, Deleuze, Pinter or Walser, Fragments delivers the scrappy story of (mental) illness, seclusion, and escape. Notwithstanding its subtitled aim to 'end with comics', of which it features many traces, this booklet is intentionally left to be read in different, personal ways. Its fragmentary aspect is directed toward the longstanding 'tradition' of autobiographical novels and comics as well as to the comics legacy itself concerning its (lack of) dialogue with literature and philosophy at large. Fragments also bears the mark of a question that haunted me since my PhD in the arts at least: how to develop a graphic narrative from verbal and visual scraps on without making use of a pre-defined (linear) script? How, in other words, to keep the multiplicity of life and remembrance at play?
Presented @ The Green Corridor, Brussels, in dialogue with Lore Smolders and Tim Bruggeman, 11 February 2024.
96 pp., 14 x 21,5 cm, 50 copies, digital print, Infinitif, 2023.
Reviewed by Jan Baetens in La Revue Générale, september 2024.
