Presentation of Ilan Manouach

Ilan Manouach (born 1980) is a conceptual comics creator, publisher, exhibition curator and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Liège after completing his PhD at Aalto University. He is the founder of the Brussels-based organization Echo Chamber, which aims to produce, support, document and record radical artistic practices in contemporary comics, as well as the director of the international research project Futures of Comics with the aim of the historical study of the mutations of the comics industry under the influence of economic developments, globalization and technological accessibility. Throughout his work, he investigates the language and possibilities of the medium of comics, the extensibility of their use beyond their traditional function, the ideological background that characterizes publishing and translation practices, the possibilities for decentralized and group creation of projects, etc. Among his dozens of works, all designed to provoke discussions and reflections centered on comics, stand out Shapereader, an experimental tactile reading system of comics through ideograms (tactigrams) for visually impaired people, Katz, an indirect conversation with his Maus Art Spiegelman through his groundbreaking gestural appropriation and deliberate misrepresentation, TinTin Akei Kongo (TinTin in the Congo), an identical book to TinTin's editions but translated into Lingala, the language spoken in the Congo and in which this particular adventure of Herge had never been translated for obvious reasons, One Piece, consisting of all the published material of the popular manga in a single monstrous volume of 21,540 pages that can only be considered as a conceptual, non-utilitarian sculpture-spectacle, coming into "collision" with the content of et al.
Speakers: Ilan Manouach, Yiannis Koukoulas