collection Digressions
Benjamin Seror
Captures Éditions
French, English
Softcover
36 pages
215 x 135 mm
2017
ISBN 9782955877821
This second title in the Digressions series finds artist Benjamin Seror discussing with Keren Detton, Julie Pellegrin and Eva Wittocx the origins of his performance The Marsyas Hour and the multi-layered cultural references underlying his practice. In the course of the discussion the three interlocutors consider the evolution of the Seror oeuvre, its roots in pop music, comedy, the movies and literature – not to mention 18th-century French painting – as well as the importance of collecting stories and of improvisation/digression as a starting point. Convinced of the power and performativeness of language and “the way memory gives an overall view of people, places and periods”, he looks forward to “an equivalence between reality and fiction, in the sense that our ability to invent our living environment will always be indexed to the quality of the fictions we produce.”
(source: https://www.thelibraryproject.ie/collections/tsundoku-art-book-fair-2023/products/digressions-02-benjamin-seror-julie-pellegrin-valerie-cudel?)
About the Artist
Benjamin Seror is a French performance artist currently based in Brussels. Speech is his principal artistic subject and tool, and he often narrates long improvised stories inspired by the phantoms of literature, art history, and everyday adventures. His stories can lead the audience far into the heart of the Inferno or to dancing all night long to the delicate sound of the Perfect Kiss by New Order. Benjamin is also a musician and his narratives include emotive songs that play with the affective modes of language.
(source: https://www.kabk.nl/en/teachers/benjamin-seror)
About the Collection
Initiated in 2017 by Julie Pellegrin and the team of the Contemporary Art Center La Ferme du Buisson in collaboration with the Captures editions, Digressions is a collection of interviews (bilingual French / English) which accompanies the programming of the Art Center. Through conversations with the guest artists, the notebooks give access behind the scenes of the projects and testify to the reflections, research, methodologies and sometimes doubts or trial and error that nourish a work process. By giving the floor to the artists, the whole collection makes very singular voices heard which nevertheless resonate with each other to explore shared questions around the performance and the writing of the exhibition, the commitment corporal and political, of the decompartmentalization of disciplines.
For each issue, there is a change in color of the cover paper with or without embossing, distinguishing the publications in relation to the artistic project. The inside pages are printed in a pantone tone and the transition to the English language is materialized by a double-page image resulting from the research work. Postcards from the exhibitions are printed and inserted randomly into the notebooks like bookmarks. The elegant and dynamic layout by Claire Moreux marries the intricacies of reflection by inviting the reader to navigate, literally, in the text.
(source: https://www.lendroit.org/catalogue/fiches/2910-Virginie-Yassef)
About the Publisher
Captures’ initial priority was to publish artists’ books, an association artist, graphic designer and publisher, free of all constraints. Subsequently, with the constant desire to prioritize the artist’s voice, uncover research, differences and debates on the question of art, other collections were born: monographs, collective works and interviews.
captures-editions.com
(source: https://captures-editions.com/en/)
