A book published by presses du réel edition of 3 earthenware sculptures for  Consortium Museum

‘I spent the entire time of the lockdown in a farm, which I renovated for a friend in the countryside.

That is, eighty days in a house in the middle of the forest, without ever going out or almost, yet with friends. We formed a community of our own, sharing life and work together.

This particular time was nothing like a silent spring (to quote the title of Rachel Carlson’s book). Nature was strong and reassuring around us.

We could pay attention to it, close attention. I would even say cohabitating with it rather than paying attention to it, which allowed us to better understand the dynamics of the living.

Here a mole moving in the ground, there birch sap filling bottles. 

We saw different hues succeeding one another, and throughout the entire time, I was finally able to sit and draw…

I filled 30 sketchbooks with steno drawings, for the most part realised with a thin, black felt-tip pen, except for a few coloured ones…

Drawings or gushes like automatic writing, made without thinking, without restraining myself, in total freedom.

Perhaps 4,000, 5,000 of them, drawn while listening to Kompromat, a group founded by Rebeka Warrior and Vitalic.

These drawings do not speak of my practice as a designer. They are snapshots of my brain. 

At the end of the lockdown, I surprised myself transforming some of them into animated cartoons, so that to keep touch with this material and make this suspended time last.’ 

matali crasset 

« ... matali crasset has a sense and a taste for a community she draws here in a realistic, pre-digital manner, by making interpersonal links visible—someone’s arm is extended into cables connected to the other’s arm. The digital era has banned wires and cables further and further, only leaving people’s traces in the history of our erasable memories.

Science Fiction had thought out this “plug and play,” these tethers and cables linking mankind to machines, machines to machines and cosmonauts and astronauts to each other.

With well-mannered aliens’ tentacles, spring branches or deer antlers, this book’s threads unfold along cool narratives. Medieval references find their rightful place here when crenels, hennins, iron masks, and hinge-mounted shutters wrap up these drawn heads—cuckoo clock heads.

Design creates this body growth in that the accessory is considered as a new part of a mutant yet familiar and reassuring body...”

Franck Gautherot

A first edition of 3 earthenware sculptures, made after the drawings and produced by Le Consortium, accompany this publication.

matali crasset : les trognes

préface de Franck Gautherot

collection The Drawing center 344 pages

Editeur Les Presses du Réel