Château de Prangins
| 11.3.2023 - 24.9.2023
Twelve comic artists, six weeks of residency at the château, a strip of paper 10 metres long plus a wealth of original and varied creations: that is the story of a collaboration between Château de Prangins and the feminist collective La bûche. The vernissage of this new temporary exhibition is free of charge and will take place on Saturday 11 March, from 16:00.
Château de Prangins has given 12 female comic artists from the collective La bûche free rein to create a temporary exhibition. Between July 2022 and January 2023, they spent a week at the château in pairs.
Their approach was to highlight female experiences and fates, and so they chose a common thread for the residency: the lives and voices of women of all classes and eras associated with the château from the 18th to the 21st centuries. Their drawings depict everyone from a young Englishwoman named Matilda, who became baroness of Prangins, to a wet nurse, as well as Katharina McCormick, an American suffragette and philanthropist who funded research into the pill. Taking inspiration from their surroundings, they also created images of people, animals and plants they encountered at the château.
Each artist presents works in a variety of media, including comics, engravings and drawings, which blend reality and fiction. Sometimes, the paper becomes a space where two creators with vastly differing worlds can come together. Taking their cue from the Surrealist game of exquisite corpses, each pair residing at Prangins drew some vignettes on a long strip of paper, without seeing what their predecessors had done. Their subjects included a woman imprisoned at the top of a tower, domestic objects (an iron, a bottle, a coachman’s boot) flying through the air, and half-human, half-animal figures roaming the countryside... This work, some 10 metres in length and symbolising the bond between the illustrators, will be shown in its entirety in the exhibition.
The vernissage on 11 March will be an opportunity to meet the artists and discuss with them the genesis of their individual and collective projects. Throughout the exhibition, artists from La bûche will be offering creative comic workshops for adults, children and families.
La bûche is a collective of female comic artists based in French-speaking Switzerland. Its aim is to bring together and publicise the work of women who are active in the medium, in a spirit of sorority and solidarity. The illustrators work on independent publications, artistic events and encounters. The 12 artists who took part in this collaboration are:
Agathe Borin Anouck Fontaine Léandre Ackermann
Katharina Kreil Maud Oïhénart Maeva Rubli
Cécile Koepfli Maou MarieMo
Anaïs Bloch BEEMO Vulpo Vulpo