In a book of great elegance, Baudoin and Lepage combine their respective talents to offer us an autobiographical story with four hands, around their trip to Chile in full social and political boiling.
Shooting & editing: Ariel Suhamy.
Edmond Baudoin & Emmanuel Lepage, At the foot of the starsParis, Futuropolis, 2024, 264 p.
With almost eighty albums to his credit, Edmond Baudoin among the most prolific comic book authors. Famous for his ink drawings in China and his autobiographical stories, he received in 1992, for Couma Acò The Best Album Prize at the Angoulême International Comic Festival. Thirty years later, still in Charente, the Cité Internationale de la Bandee devoted a personal exhibition entitled to him: “ The beautiful season of Edmond Baudoin (October 2021-June 2022).
Outstanding designer and watercolorist, Emmanuel Lepagein addition to his travel notebooks, is known for his designed scientific reports and expeditions, like Voyage to the desolation islands (2011) andA spring in Chernobyl (2012). He is also the author of Muchachoan initiatory story on a young seminarian acquired in the theory of liberation during the Nicaraguan revolution. In 2021, he was the first comic player to be appointed naval official painter.
On the occasion of a trip by Grenoble high school students to the Atacama desert to meet astronomers, Edmond Baudoin and Emmanuel Lepage returned to Chile, a country then in full social and political boiling. After the October 2019 revolt announced as the gravedigger of neoliberalism, a joint conventional assembly prepares a project of progressive constitution, feminist and ecologist unique in the world. Without fear of the failure of the referendum and the return of a conservative stick that the surveys point out, the two authors of comics are enthusiastic for this in progress revolution, carried by a youth which intends to draw a final line on the Honni heritage of pinochhetism. By the hazards of a calendar that the Pandemic of Covid turned upside down, they attended the popular jubilation which surrounds the victory of the socialist candidate Boric in December 2021.
Combining China ink, watercolor and even photography, this graphic album borrows in turn from travel diary, field note, diary and journalistic test. Metaphysical digressions on the infinitely large to the denunciation of disheveled privatizations (especially in terms of access to water), the authors alternate between the scientific and political registers, while summoning the poetry of Pablo Neruda or the images of Patricio Guzmán. Also giving the floor to the young people who accompany them, they lend themselves alongside them to a double introspection where generational differences pierce, visions of the world, desires and similar expectations.