Year
Title
2023
Blackout
Text by
Pictures by
Design by
Exzerpt
Press Release
Yann Chateigné Tytelman
Claire Evrard
⊕
Review
Available here
Publisher
Yann Chateigné Tytelman
Blackout
Published by Les Fugitives, London
Translated from the French by Clem Clement
With a preface by Suzanne Joinson
Place your order here
It all started with a letter to my father. It had been about ten years since his death, and I suddenly felt like writing to him about the silence, his silence, the silence between us. It started in 2020, as a necessity. The silence, then, was striking. It resonated with other erased voices, other voids, other emotions. I thought I would not be able to stop. Neither diary, nor essay, nor short story, Blackout is a weaving, a braid made of these lines of silence, and tells, in fragments, the story of a dispossession, of an entry into darkness. — YCT
'We carry our own silence and that of others like organs. We make our own silences and harvest them. In Tytelman's haunted and haunting text, even ghosts are breathing.' –Gareth Evans
‘A haunting, delicately woven elegy; a luminous act of love written into the void. Let it draw you in. Let it speak to your own silences.’ – Suzanne Joinson
‘A moving account of a son’s search for his father’s ghost, as well as a riveting enquiry into the notions of silence and absence in music, literature and visual art. Extraordinary.’ – Jude Cook
‘Blackout offers an extended reflection on living within silence and emptiness, but through the accumulation of seemingly disconnected stories something else emerges: the pangs of absence enfolded one after another – but absence is always presence, silence is a teeming noise...’ – David Toop
Spring 2020. During lockdown in a mountain village with his partner and young child, Yann Chateigné Tytelman becomes haunted by the presence of his dead father. Provoked by memories of him, of their laconic relationship and of the class antagonisms that emerged between them – the father was a manual labourer while his son ‘turned his back’ and entered the art world – Chateigné Tytelman starts writing letters, piles of them, which have as their subject that most mystical, most incomprehensible of phenomena: silence.
Condensed into a series of short fragments, Blackout interweaves the letter to the father with the observations of an art theorist who surveys with precision the occurrences and experiences of silence in painting, music, literature and philosophy.
Taking inspiration from Emily Dickinson, the White Paintings of Robert Rauschenberg, Jean-Antoine Watteau’s depiction of poor Pierrot, John Cage, Vija Celmins’s ocean drawings, the music criticism of David Toop and the theoretical writings of, among others, Michel Serres, Giorgio Agamben and Paul B. Preciado, as well as from the recent global pandemic, Chateigné Tytelman invites readers to tarry with the void at the heart of modern society and to confront the spectres of death and disease among us.
Hardback, 104 pages, 180 x 120 mm
ISBN 978-1-0683001-5-8
Year
2023
Title
Blackout
Text by
Yann Chateigné Tytelman
Pictures by
Design by
Claire Evrard
Exzerpt
Press Release
⊕
Review
Available here
Publisher
Yann Chateigné Tytelman
Blackout
Published by Les Fugitives, London
Translated from the French by Clem Clement
With a preface by Suzanne Joinson
Place your order here
It all started with a letter to my father. It had been about ten years since his death, and I suddenly felt like writing to him about the silence, his silence, the silence between us. It started in 2020, as a necessity. The silence, then, was striking. It resonated with other erased voices, other voids, other emotions. I thought I would not be able to stop. Neither diary, nor essay, nor short story, Blackout is a weaving, a braid made of these lines of silence, and tells, in fragments, the story of a dispossession, of an entry into darkness. — YCT
'We carry our own silence and that of others like organs. We make our own silences and harvest them. In Tytelman's haunted and haunting text, even ghosts are breathing.' –Gareth Evans
‘A haunting, delicately woven elegy; a luminous act of love written into the void. Let it draw you in. Let it speak to your own silences.’ – Suzanne Joinson
‘A moving account of a son’s search for his father’s ghost, as well as a riveting enquiry into the notions of silence and absence in music, literature and visual art. Extraordinary.’ – Jude Cook
‘Blackout offers an extended reflection on living within silence and emptiness, but through the accumulation of seemingly disconnected stories something else emerges: the pangs of absence enfolded one after another – but absence is always presence, silence is a teeming noise...’ – David Toop
Spring 2020. During lockdown in a mountain village with his partner and young child, Yann Chateigné Tytelman becomes haunted by the presence of his dead father. Provoked by memories of him, of their laconic relationship and of the class antagonisms that emerged between them – the father was a manual labourer while his son ‘turned his back’ and entered the art world – Chateigné Tytelman starts writing letters, piles of them, which have as their subject that most mystical, most incomprehensible of phenomena: silence.
Condensed into a series of short fragments, Blackout interweaves the letter to the father with the observations of an art theorist who surveys with precision the occurrences and experiences of silence in painting, music, literature and philosophy.
Taking inspiration from Emily Dickinson, the White Paintings of Robert Rauschenberg, Jean-Antoine Watteau’s depiction of poor Pierrot, John Cage, Vija Celmins’s ocean drawings, the music criticism of David Toop and the theoretical writings of, among others, Michel Serres, Giorgio Agamben and Paul B. Preciado, as well as from the recent global pandemic, Chateigné Tytelman invites readers to tarry with the void at the heart of modern society and to confront the spectres of death and disease among us.
Hardback, 104 pages, 180 x 120 mm
ISBN 978-1-0683001-5-8