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Camille Sauthier

Awarded

Camille Sauthier

'Mise en pages, Mise en cage' (diploma work)

Graphic Design

Jury report

About books and insects
What have graphic de­sign and en­to­mol­ogy in com­mon? Graphic artist and in­sect col­lec­tor Camille Sauthier asked him­self this ques­tion. Are there par­al­lels in the two pas­sions? He was struck by the fact that both the boxes he kept his in­sects in and the pro­gram back­ground for 'In­De­sign' fea­ture grids. He en­joyed plac­ing el­e­ments on both grids. In order to an­swer his own ques­tion he looked for im­ages in both sub­ject areas and com­pared them. He pro­duced a record of his re­search in the early part of his book 'Mise en pages. Mise en cage'. This part is in black and white. On a dou­ble page, we see a pho­to­graph of the spine of a book de­tach­ing it­self from the cover and on the right a pho­to­graph of a tree with the bark peel­ing off. Camille Sauthier shows el­e­ments in com­mon at a vi­sual level – these are play­ful com­par­isons. The graphic de­signer ex­plains that he tried to de­sign the book like a ter­rar­ium, an eco-sys­tem, a lit­tle the­matic world. His re­flec­tions and in­spi­ra­tions from re­search lead on to a colour sec­tion of the book. Here we find items from books that Sauthier de­signed him­self. Items that are beau­ti­ful but at the same time alien­at­ing. An in­stal­la­tion, for ex­am­ple, looks like a lit­tle flower gar­den: the de­signer has pushed lit­tle la­bels that are usu­ally found in beds or pots to give in­for­ma­tion about the seeds into bun­dles of books. He ex­plains that here he is com­par­ing the lit­tle la­bels from the plant world with book­marks, be­cause they are sim­i­lar to each other. On an­other dou­ble page are two piles of books with coloured pages. One gets bluer and bluer, the other goes from brown­ish-red to green. The de­signer says this is a jux­ta­po­si­tion of heaven and earth. We find the key to these ob­jects on the last of the coloured pages. Here we see his ob­ject con­fronted with one from the sci­ence that pro­vided his in­spi­ra­tion. Camille Sauthier's work min­gles the worlds of his two pas­sions po­et­i­cally, and thus cre­ates a new one – his own per­sonal world. The switch has been made, the ques­tion about com­mon ground an­swered vi­su­ally, if not com­pletely re­solved sci­en­tif­i­cally – but who minds about that.
Ar­i­ana Pradal

Biography

Camille Sauthier
Born in
1983
Education
designer HES en communication visuelle, spécialisation design graphique

Web

www.valenthier.ch

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