Joëlle de la Casinière

Joëlle de La Casinière has spent the last six decades working independently in the intersection of film, poetry, and visual arts. She became a painter while involved in advanced literary studies. After turning twenty, she sold all her pictures and her motorbike, and set off to the Americas, traveling light. Up until 1976, she made films with friends in Cuzco, Lima, Barranquilla, Popayan, San Jose de Costa Rica, New York, and Montreal, working specifically on scripts, sound, and editing. In those years, she also invented a writing style in letters to her friends that she called tablotins. These handwritten books of graphic poetry are made out of collages that combine annotations, travel logs—a handwritten style featuring bursts and scraps, where the composition crystallized a diverse range of elements: calligraphies, typographies, graffiti, ornaments, drawing, and collage, among others. With Michel Bonnemaison and Jacques Lederlin, she restored a beautiful old Flemish barge in which to live and work while cruising along the canals of Europe. With the feeling of now being in a “posthumous situation,” be it on board the boat and sailing, or in her Brussels studio, she is currently writing texts and composing tablotins, as well as working to ensure the survival of the Montfaucon Research Center collection, of which she is the trustee.

All works courtesy of the artist Joëlle de La Casinière and Departmental Museum of Contemporary Art (Haute-Vienne, France)

A selection of Joëlle's work is included in OBRA 03, On Paper.