Green Dolphin On Horseback Salad is a book that could have been a movie, or perhaps will be. Like the film Le Rayon Vert by French director Éric Rohmer, this book does not have a predefined script. For his film, Éric Rohmer only had a brief synopsis, a few rather vague lines about some relatively abstract love story. According to him, the course of the movie was to be constructed from the choice of actors and their meeting within the same shooting environment. He therefore gave them the freedom to improvise and to imagine the story gradually. Éric Rohmer would gather the film crew at the end of each day so that they could define together the direction to take for the next day.

For the creation of this book, there were not a few lines around a potential story, even if it was abstract. The editorial project is based on the meeting of the personal graphic universes of each artist/graphic designer and on the construction of a possible narrative story, linear or not, coherent or not. The field of possibilities was opened to all proposals. The idea here is to see how forms produced separately can be articulated together and generate a potential storytelling.

Each author had a precise function as for the shooting of a film. There is the props man (Jean-Marc Ballée), the casting director (Christophe Gaudard), the stuntman (Olivier Lebrun), the set painter (Karl Nawrot), the script girl (Nina Kennel) and the music composer (Tatendalxa).

The edition is in a way both an artist’s book since all the images are made especially for this edition (drawings, collages, sculptures, models...) and a shaping of a fictional scenario. The nature of the final printed object obliges the spectator to respect a sequence of pages in an agreed order (usual reading direction). Each construction of double-page directs the composition of the following double-page. There is no preliminary narration, just a rebound in the manner of an anadiplosis in literature, a sequence which builds, from page to page, a «story».

Green Dolphin On Horseback Salad proposes a hybrid form of publishing. By being freed from reaching a predefined objective, the various productions open up to new perspectives. The book then shows another way of presenting the work of each artist by leaving a large part to chance and improvisation. It brings together these artists around their research approach (conceptual, ethical, social...) and not around their formal approach, their individual graphic universes, thus focusing on creating meaning rather than a simple juxtaposition of images.

This edition is an object of its own. Instead of showing separately the production of each author or trying to artificially link them to make a «showcase» book, Green Dolphin On Horseback Salad proposes a singular way of articulating the different works. Using the same improvisational scheme as Éric Rohmer’s in his movie Le Rayon Vert, the authors’ various works combine to create a specific possible story telling.

DEGRÉ ZÉRO

+ 7 SUNS GREEN RAY