David Desrimais is a publisher and a digital expert based in Paris, France.
Founder and director of JBE Books (Jean Boîte Éditions, since 2011), he publishes books in the digital age, in the fields of arts, humanities and poetics. Conceived hand-in-hand with worldwide artists and authors, all the books are shaped for International distribution (now in 15 countries). In the academic field, David Desrimais is committed to several programs and diplomas for the teaching of Editorial Creation in the 21st Century. He notably intervenes at Duperré (Paris) and at the University Clermont Auvergne (UCA) where he co-directed from 2016 to 2022 as associate professor and associate researcher the Master’s degree in Publishing (CELJG). Former Head of Digital Projects for the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (2007-2017), David Desrimais regularly works as an expert and director of digital projects for cultural and scientific institutions, as well as for private clients (Mobilier national, IDDRI-Sciences Po, Mairie de Paris, Cartier, Google Arts & Culture…).
Country
Franck Leibovici (France)
Franck Leibovici is a poet and artist whose work is based on found documents (texts, videos, sounds) usually turned into scores. Leibovici’s devices are labelled “artworks-tools” as they are intended to be performed both as artworks and instruments for practitioners whose expertise is situated outside the artworld. Leibovici’s tools have been applied to various contexts : geopolitical conflicts, international criminal law (at the international criminal court) or, in lighter moments, art history and love encounters. His last publications include de l’amour (jbe books, 2019), low intensity conflicts – un mini-opéra pour non musiciens (éd. mf, 2019), des opérations d’écriture qui ne disent pas leur nom (éd. questions théoriques, 2020), exercices (aoc, 2022) and what time is it ? stories about painting, shadows and the sun (jbe books, 2023).
Merieme Mesfioui (Morocco)
Merieme Mesfioui-Durgamaya is a Moroccan graphic designer and illustrator based in Angoulême, France. Her work combines calligraphy, traditional Moroccan motifs and elements of Islamic art with an erotic and contemporary touch. Eroticism is used in her work as a tool for transgressing and claiming the rights of women and the LGBTQIA+ community in the SWANA region (Southwest Asia, North Africa-Asia South West and North Africa).
Hippolyte Hentgen (France)
Hippolyte Hentgen is a duo of artists, composed of Gaëlle Hippolyte and Lina Hentgen. Gathered under this fictitious name thought as a sphere of sharing and a tool of distancing of the notion of author, the two artists explore a territory of research mainly directed towards the image. If their practice is anchored in drawing, they also venture into other fields of representation, such as performance, set design, film and sculpture. By appropriating the codes of comics and press cartoons, they multiply the tones and references and revive a mass visual culture by sliding and grafting. Drawing from art history as well as from popular culture, they seize iconic images inscribed in the collective memory and restore them in an immense protean and composite collage of great stylistic freedom.
Ilan Manouach (Greece)
Ilan Manouach is a researcher, a musician and a multidisciplinary artist with a specific interest in conceptual and post-digital comics. Currently a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Ilan has a PhD from Aalto University in Helsinki where he examined how this century’s frontier technologies such as AI, financial technologies and globalized logistics reshape the comics industry. He is mostly known for Shapereader, a system for tactile storytelling specifically designed for blind and partially sighted readers/makers of comics. He is the founder of Echo Chamber, a Brussels-based non-profit organization with the mission to produce, fundraise, document and archive radical and speculative artistic practices in contemporary comics. The topics of his research and artistic practice include conceptual comics, post-internet publishing, and synthetic media and AI. On the side, Ilan works as a pirate/librarian for the Conceptual Comics Collections at Ubuweb and Monoskop, is an appointed expert in experimental comics for the Belgian government for its national public funding program (CCAP) and works as a strategy consultant for the Onassis Foundation and its visibility through its new publishing activity.
Jana Novotny-Jakoubek
Born in Prague, Jana Novotny (*1979) studied Art History and German Philology in Zurich (Switzerland). On her way to obtaining her PHD in the field of Contemporary Art, she worked in radio and television editorial offices, theatres and in various art projects. From 2011-2022 Jana Novotny was the artistic director of Fumetto Comic Festival Lucerne and responsible for programming and realizing exhibitions, symposiums, frame- and mediation programs in Switzerland and abroad. Fumetto is an international nine-day festival dedicated to avant-garde comic crossing borders to other art forms, existing since 1992.
Bastien Vivès (France)
Born in Paris, Bastien Vivès spent his childhood drawing with his younger brother. He took live model classes from the age of 10 years. Vivès studied Applied arts at the Institut Sainte Geneviève Paris (6th) and three years at the Penninghen School of Graphic Arts in Paris and eventually Gobelins School, still in Paris, where he studied animation. He achieved success first on the internet (on the Catsuka forum) under the pseudonym “Chanmax” with the character Poungi la Racaille. His first album, Elle(s), published in 2007 by Casterman under the KSTR label and when he was 25 years old, in January 2009, Vivès received the Angoulême Festival Revelation Award for his album A Taste of Chlorine (Le goût du chlore). In 2010 and 2011, he participated of the online drama Les Autres Gens, written by Thomas Cadène, drawing seven episodes. In 2013, he published the “French manga” series Lastman, together with Michaël Sanlaville and Balak.
Michael Fikaris (Australia)
Michael Fikaris has developed primary research for this collection of Australian Small Press Comics out of an interest in the potential for the distribution of art/stories via physical formats in a pervasively digital future. Fikaris has recently set up the ‘silent army storeroom’, a research initiative within his own working studio up the back of an established Melbourne group studio warehouse. Fikaris’s broader research interests and outcomes are motivated by the rapidly expanding practices and roles of comics in the 21st century. He has recently co-edited a book, featuring contributions from leading comic art communities, journalists and activists published by Kus! Komiks (Latvia) in late 2019. Fikaris was also awarded Australia’s National Platinum Ledger Award for contribution to Australian comics.
Laura Caraballo (Argentina)
Laura Caraballo ( born in Buenos Aires) is a curator, researcher, and teacher that currently lives in Paris. In Argentina, she first acquired a solid training in the history of visual arts. She joined the Chair of History of Media and Contemporary Communication Systems in UNLP, and spent four years teaching visual communication and cultural industries. Pursuing her research on comics and its visual qualities, she defended her Ph.D. thesis in Esthetics on Alberto Breccia’s visual work in comics, at the Paris Ouest University in 2016. She transposed her research work into exhibition format when she co-curated three Alberto Breccia original boards exhibitions in BD Colomiers festival, Pulp Festival, France, and in the CNB in Buenos Aires. In the contemporary art field, she co-curated the collective exhibition “Briser la glace” at Le Magasin CNAP in Grenoble. Always interested in confluences of comics and contemporary art, she currently works on trans-feminist activism and self-publishing in Argentina. She is an associated researcher and teacher in the Angoulême EESI and postdoctoral researcher in Bordeaux Montaigne University.
Baris Uygur (Turkey)
Baris Uygur started to work for comic magazines with age 16, in 1994. Between 1994 and 2004 he wrote for weekly magazines Pişmiş Kelle, Gırgır, Çete, and Alarm. He also was the editor-in-chief in Alarm magazine. In 2007, he co-founded the weekly Uykusuz magazine and its Subsidiary Murekkep Publishing, which published over 100 comic books and graphic novels. Uykusuz magazine, in which Uygur also took the duty of editor-in-chief become the most selling weekly magazine in Turkey with up to 100 thousand copies during the Gezi Uprising weeks and an average of 70 thousand copies weekly between 2007 and 2014. In 2018, he founded the Interdictum Verlag in Berlin, Germany; with the intention of creating a safe haven in case the publication in Turkey becomes impossible because of censorship or obstruction in distribution. Currently he is publishing the digital edition of Uykusuz Magazine via Interdictum Verlag in Berlin worldwide. He writes humorous crime-fictions as well and he has published two novels and several detective stories. His novels are translated into German too. Baris Uygur holds a bachelor’s degree in communications and a second bachelor’s degree in History. Currently he lives and works in Berlin.