Linguistic and artistic conference given by Anne Balanant on Friday 23 February 2024 at lunchtime (12:30-13:30) at the Espace des Langues (building L, ground floor of the BU des Langues).
Anne Balanant is a librarian at the École des Beaux Arts in Angoulème. She lived in Iceland from 2014 to 2016 and set up a library dedicated to micro-publishing in the Kaktus art centre in Akureyri (2015). She will be presenting a research project she has been carrying out since 2021 as part of Erasmus +, between Iceland and France, and which she will continue in 2024 in Reykjavík. She will tell us how she has been able to (re)discover a whole network of effervescent international artists who have been exchanging with Iceland since the 1960s. In the pages of the books produced by these artists we obviously find landscapes (volcanoes, snow-capped mountains, fumaroles and deserts of ice), but perhaps above all the humour and spirit of Fluxus, which came to fruition with the SÚM movement in Iceland, formed in 1965 in Reykjavík. These artists met in Stuttgart, Reykjavík, Paris, London, Düsseldorf, Copenhagen, Paris, Seyðisfjörður, Amsterdam, Munich, Florence, Akureyri... This varied cartography has enabled her to discover other collections of artists' books, including those in the Kandinsky library in Paris, the Boekie Woekie bookshop in Amsterdam and the library of the Reykjavík art school (Listaháskóli Íslands). She will tell us about her exhibition entitled Fjall - Bók - Bátur (Mountain - Book - Boat), which shows a fragment of the inventory begun for this project. In the more distant future, she will publish this inventory in a book that will form the International Imaginary Library of Icelandic Artists' Books. https://cdla.info/2024/01/18/fjall-bok-batur-livres-dartistes-en-islande-2/