CAC Brétigny

Throughout their residency at CAC Brétigny, Charles Mazé & Coline Sunier are in charge of the art center’s visual identity, which is conceived as a long-term research. The ABCC of CACB is a collection of letters, signs, and symbols made in Brétigny-sur-Orge and the department of Essonne, or selected in relation to the art center, its program, and the artists invited to exhibit their work. This corpus is now embodied in a new typeface called LARA, activated one letter at a time on communication materials, which are all considered as spaces for publication and distribution of the collection. By associating multiple voices within the same typeface whose glyphs continue to grow in number, with writings that are alternately vernacular, institutional, personal, and public, The ABCC of CACB is an attempt to edit the geographic, political and artistic context in which CAC Brétigny is found.

LARA and BALI

Each caracter or sign is accompanied by a caption including: a) the Unicode number, b) the name, c) the transcription of the source from which the sign is extracted, d) the type of message, e) its author, f) its technical data, g) its location, and h) the date when the source was created.

Running parallel to LARA but in the opposite direction, BALI is a practical sans serif typeface with no contrast. Initially intended for the captions of LARA's letters and symbols, BALI is used on all of CAC Brétigny’s communication materials and by the team for day-to-day work. LARA and BALI can be seen as two extremes of the typographical transcription of a message. The former reproduces as faithfully as possible the visual aspect of the source while the latter stresses meaning thanks to the neutrality of its forms.

LARA and BALI are the names of the RER rapid transit trains linking Paris to Brétigny-sur-Orge, and Brétigny-sur-Orge to Paris.

The ABCC of CACB—LARA

LARA has been activated on each communication materials, which are considered publication and dissemination points for the collection. The entire LARA collection is visible online on CAC Brétigny's website.

CAC Brétigny

To reflect CAC Brétigny's daily reality and its different activities around its exhibitions and residencies, LARA includes a set of signs which is regularly updated according to the art center’s needs. The initials C, T, m, and m for the business cards of the staff members, a basket of fruit 🍲 announcing the dinner for a show opening, a hand in the act of writing ✍ for the center’s compliments slips, a sun with a big bright beaming smile 🌞 for the center’s summer closing, a reader in a hat 📖 for the book launches…

CAC ❤ Brétigny 🚬

Besides the signs connected with the center’s projects and scattered on the various communication materials, popular forms of expression are also recorded in LARA. Such messages are little studied because they are deemed vulgar, even violent, yet they have been written out by the region’s inhabitants and are revealing in a lively, frank and sometimes cathartic way of a particular geographic and political context.

CAC Brétigny is located near an area that is important for schools (the Lycée Polyvalent Jean-Pierre Timbaud and the Collège Paul Eluard) and extracurricular activities (a music school, the Léo Lagrange pool, the Auguste Delaune stadium). Thus, the walls around the art center are covered with all kinds of writing and graffiti by the region’s young people (91, Athis-Mons, Brétigny, Étampes, Fleury-Mérogis, etc.). Such graffiti sometimes make their way inside the CAC precincts, for example on the outside of the Annexe by Atelier van Lieshout, or in the visitors’ book that was in use during previous administrations. Not far from the theater entrance, a cherished space for the high-schoolers which they’ve nicknamed “Bedoland” (Stoners Corner) displays hundreds of inscriptions—family and first names that are occasionally accompanied by qualifiers or insults, telephone numbers or area codes, names of countries or cities, hashtags, YouTube addresses, etc.—, drawings and doodles—smileys 😛 😛, skulls with crossbones ☠ ☠, phalluses, raised middle fingers 🖕 🖕 🖕 🖕, thumbs-up as in Facebook likes 👍 👍 👍, or the famous cool S S S Ƨ Ƨ.

One famous pedestrian underpass in Brétigny runs under the train station, linking the eastern and western parts of the city. Like any covered area that is accessible but unguarded, drawings, graffiti, political posters and stickers proliferate between each cleaning. Other RER stations in the region have the same type of underpasses, like Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, where a “Warning” spelled out on a broad sign bolted to the wall is addressed “to those whose greatest pleasure is to regularly spray-paint graffiti on the station underpass…”

CAC Brétigny

With the first three letters of the Latin alphabet ABC, it is already possible to write CACB, that is the start of CAC Brétigny. The first activation of the typeface LARA announced the reopening of CAC Brétigny, with a collection of capital letters AAAAAA, BBBBBB, and CCCCCC, which could be seen on the art center’s walls inside and out and along the path to the rapid transit train station. On this initial territory, one may run into a number of letters, including the A from a shop sign; a B on the signage of CAC Brétigny, designed in 2003 by Vier5—graphic designers in residency when Pierre Bal-Blanc was director—and a B from the art center’s first logotype, designed in 2000 by Antoine Groborne when Xavier Franceschi was director; and a trio of CCCs by the graffiti writer COSMOS, whose name appear on most of the walls around CAC Brétigny.

We would like to extend our warm thanks to Patrick Le Jeanne and the Historical and Archeological Association of Brétigny-sur-Orge for having put together and given us access to all of CAC Brétigny's bulletin, and to Franck Waille, who alerted us to the existence of and gave us access to the original Delsarte drawings and designs.

CAC“Brétigny

For “Vocales,” these typographic signs and iconographic symbols signify orality, i.e., the speech, dialog, or conversation that was collected. This new collection includes elements of punctuation borrowed from the Latin alphabet—elements indicating reported speech such as quotation marks—as well as iconographic symbols that depict speech 🗨, thought 💭, or discussion 🗪 with speech bubbles. Emptied of their original textual content for the occasion, these speech bubbles in some cases retain indications of intonation, exclamation, or interrogation, and have been integrated into the typography as emoticons. 

All of these signs come from local publications and local official bulletins like the monthly municipal bulletin for Brétigny-sur-Orge, which was originally called Brétigny Notre Ville (1977-1983) then Brétigny Aujourd’hui (1984-2002), and finally Parole (“The magazine that talks about Brétigny to the Brétignolais,” 2003-2014), a title that was given a plural in the end, Paroles (2015–). These publications—with names suggesting an ideal form of speech going from local elected officials to the inhabitants—abound in all kinds of speech bubbles and punctuation marks. In use since 2003, the current logo of the city of Brétigny , moreover, takes the form of a word in quotation marks and has been reappropriated by the city itself in 2006 with the logo “Brétigny 2010 Parlons-en.

Other signs, finally, come from the magazine Essonne, which has been published by the Departmental Council since 1999, including the talkative borrowed 🗨 from the titling on the magazine’s cover, and the logo 🗨 of the app VOX 91 (“I think therefore I say”) recently developed by the Department of Essonne. 

CAC😕Brétigny

In some of her works, the American artist Liz Magic Laser has used and modified drawings from the French singer and teacher François Delsarte (1811-1871). After losing his singing voice, Delsarte conceived an “expressive system,” a method for learning and gesturing for dancers, mainly published and posthumously transmitted by his students in the United States. Preserved in Louisiana, original and unpublished drawings by Delsarte were studied by the French researcher Franck Waille. A diagram entitled Écriture du Geste from 1839 presents a succession of variations of facial expressions 👿😈😦☹😏😊😲😞😕😧😯😨😳🙄😟😐😑😒🙂😬😠😡👹🙁😖. This set of 25 faces—produced by a systematic combination of eyebrows, pairs of eyes, nose and mouth—can be considered as an early version of emoticons used in today's electronic communications 👿😈😦☹😏😊😲😞😕😧😯😨😳🙄😟😐😑😒🙂😬😠😡👹🙁😖. 

Each show at CAC Brétigny is a chance to add signs to LARA and complete its Unicode characters. Introduced in 1991, standard Unicode is the official worldwide system for coding typography, assigning to each character a name and an identifying number. Including initially two smileys [☺️ U+263A, ☹ U+2639] in 1993, the latest Unicode update in 2016 brings the number of different facial expressions to over 80.

CAC Brétigny‼

For the last part of the 2016-2017's programme,“Le Final,” a collection of punctuation marks has been directly constituted within the places where the events are taking place. 

🏺CAC🏺🏺🏺Brétigny🏺

In a text written for a movie's scenario which aimed to present her work, French sculptor and ceramist Valentine Schlegel draws a list of various actions, without any hierarchy: “I pound the clay / I pose the plaster / I dig into the wall / I dig into the earth/ I nail down leather / I cut wood / I row / I throw a clay pot / I make jams / I sculpt wood / I row / I put on my clodhoppers / I twist a rope barefoot . the beach / I plant something / I cut back the trees / I peel something / I pick up everything (on the beach) / I embroider.”

In conjunction with the exhibition “This Woman Could Sleep in Water,” LARA has grown to include elements from Valentine Schelgel’s varied output. The set of letters and signs describe, as Valentine Schlegel does in the excerpt quoted above, the different activities she might engage in over the course of a day, e.g. sleeping, with a self-portrait as a sleeping figure 😴, or a dozing cat 🐈; eating, with a series of cutlery and kitchen utensils 🍴🍴🍴🍴🏺🍽; collecting, with a series of knives 🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪, which she had an amazing number of; working, with some of the chimneys 🔥 and vases 🏺🏺🏺🏺🏺 she created; picking, with a slip-coated earthenware piece by Andrée Vilar depicting a hand holding a flower 💐; giving, with multiple objects like siren-shaped whistles 🧜, greeting cards 👩, and embroidered ships ⛵, which she produced for her friends and family.

CAC Brétigny ℳ M 

For “Double Memory” a collection of heavy or stiff capital M’s in block letters and light and dynamic handwritten capital ℳ’s has been gathered, all found in documents dating back to World War I and brought together in the Galateau Collection by an inhabitant of Brétigny-sur-Orge. Printed history (newspapers, posters, leaflets, etc.) and history written by hand in the battlefield (correspondences, diaries, notebooks, etc.) intermingle here, conjuring up possible memories, where all the occurrences of one and the same letter have different meanings.

  🏞  CAC 🧜 Brétigny 🌌

For “Desk Set,” the ABCC of CACB has grown to include the drawings of the bibliographer and “internet visionary” Paul Otlet (1868-1944). In Brussels in the 1920s Otlet created his Mundaneum, which aimed to integrate all of the world’s knowledge in a Répertoire bibliographique universel, or Universal Bibliographic Repertory, characterized today as a “paper Google.” He designed numerous plates exposing his theories, notably the Encyclopedia Universalis Mundaneum, from which we have borrowed 24 emojis [📽️👩🏞⌚🔮🏢🚪⌨️🌌④👩📕🗣️🚪☎️🗄️💀🧜📰🖼️📄🌐⌨️🧠] referring to certain keywords from the introductory text to the exhibition. This group forms a partial rebus that resonates with the themes tackled in the American film Desk Set (1957) and the practices of the four artists featured in the show, such as the transmission of knowledge and the connections between man and machine.

 〰  CAC 〰 Brétigny 〰

For Florian Sumi’s “MEMBRAINS” exhibition, typographical characters were borrowed from machines found in the technical workshop of the Lycée Jean-Pierre Timbaud of Brétigny-sur-Orge (which neighbors the art center) and the site of Florian Sumi’s COMPUTERS” residency. The machine shop boasts both conventional and digitally operated machine tools that are manufactured in France as well as Germany, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. Besides the logos of the brands, the machines bear lots of indications about security, measures, scales, and technical graphic signs needed for their operation. Decontextualised and defunctionalised, the characters that have been chosen form abstract microseries of waves and frequencies (〰 〰 〰 〰 〰 〰 〰 〰 🌊 ◣), indicators and arrows (↕ 🔁 🔁 ⦳ ⦳ ⇄ ⌖ ⎆ ⎆ ⎆ ⎆ ⎆ ✋ ∢), embracing a new narrative in any of the written materials about the show. 

CAC 🌺 Brétigny

In Brétigny-sur-Orge, like in many other cities in France, 135 streets and 24 city facilities bear a man's name; 11 streets and 5 facilities a woman's name. Thus, CAC Brétigny (formerly the Centre culturel Gérard Philipe) is located at rue Henri Douard, in the Espace Jules Verne, and next to a complex of schools and sport facilities called the Lycée Jean-Pierre Timbaud, the swimming pool Léo Lagrange, the music school Gérard Philipe, the Collège Paul Éluard, tennis courts René Audran, and the Auguste Delaune stadium.

Inside a public space still mostly planned, built and frequented by men, it is not surprising that the erotic or sexual graffiti we observed in Essonne depict almost exclusively phalluses, sometimes accompanied with text (insults, names, phone numbers...). Only 2 vulvas and 4 breasts—certainly drawn by men—were collected against 103 phalluses and 2 buttocks. These graffiti have been observed in the public space, on and around public and semi-public institutions, and religious buildings. 

For Núria Güell's exhibition “Au nom du Père, de la Patrie et du Patriarcat”, a collection of 24 signs attests to this unequal distribution and illustrates a fact that is far from new, i.e., men like to mark their territory—to declare who and where they are. In classical antiquity, erotic graffiti were common and phalluses already predominate in the inventory made in Pompeii. Separated from the body, sometimes with wings or legs, the genitals seem to behave independently. 

We should bear in mind that if they are now considered offensive and provocative, phallic representations did not always have this reputation and could had a protective or curative symbolic function. In Roman antiquity, for example, phallic amulets were worn as jewelry, and votive offerings were made in the form of a penis.

Some writing systems contain symbols to signify the external sex organs. Today, thanks to Unicode standard, Egyptologists have access to such signs for their scientific transcriptions, and it is surprising to find them absent among emoji. To fill this gap, the use of other emoji such as 🍆, 🍌, 🌺, 🍩, 🍑 or even 🍣 is now common practice, a strategy we adopted to integrate these new signs into our typeface LARA.

CAC BréTigny

“Who hasn’t tried to take away from the O in a newspaper headline its value as a letter by sketching in eyes, a nose and a mouth, or make Y less stern by turning it into a champagne glass? …The most direct way of changing letters into something figurative is to transform the sign or the word into an expression that is rich in imagery. It produces a powerful interference between ‘visibility’ and ‘readability.’ This double effect is often the rule among modern graphic designers, for example, looking to engrave a brand in people’s memories, the observer being ‘intrigued’ by the play of the abstract (letter) and the concept (image).” (Adrian Frutiger, Des signes et des hommes, Denges [Lausanne], Éditions Delta & Spes, 1983, p.116)

To write the title of the show “Futomomo,” we put together a collection of anthropomorphic letters and object-letters, F, M, O, T, U. Springing from the logos of brands, companies, and businesses that are found in the yellow pages or on the signs seen in business parks and commercial zones of Essonne, these letters transpose “what unites flesh and things” in the space of “visual communication.”

A Btgn

The typeface for communications on the show “les cellules blanches, nues et le sommeil électrique” springs from the first sentence of a manuscript note taken down in shorthand by an anonymous stenographer and dating back to 1981. The document comes from Sébastien Rémy’s personal records. 
 
Stenography is a system of signs that allow one to write more quickly than traditional longhand writing, ideally at the speed of spoken language. A practice largely entrusted to women and associated with the phenomenon of bureaucratization, stenography can be employed in a professional or personal context. Several methods of stenography continue to be used in France, for example. Besides the various rules they share, the methods depend on a certain amount of freedom and adaptability which lead to personalized writing systems that are difficult, even impossible, to decipher for a reader or even another stenographer. 
 
To make these personal illegible signs part of the LARA typeface, we had to take advantage of a coding area that is specific to Unicode (the world standard of digital typeface coding) known as the Private Use Area (PUA), a unique space of formal and semantic freedom in coding written signs. Whereas standard Unicode permits a strict, unchangeable standardization of language on any terminal around the world, PUA enables a completely free use of 137468 entries whose interpretation is neither standardized nor pre-established, and hence must be privately agreed upon.

CAC 🎭 Brétigny

For the “Slash Universe” exhibition, artists Dana Michel and Yoan Sorin have created a series of 14 drawings illustrating upcoming actions during the exhibition: 

BOIRE SES LARMES 😢👅, ↪ ⛰SE CACHER SOUS UN ROCHER, SOURIRE AVEC UNE ALLURE DE COWBOY EN RETIRANT SES LUNETTES 🤠🕶️, 🦵 🦵 _ ÊTRE AU DESSUS DU SOL, S’HABILLER EN RAMPANT 🐛 👕👖, FRAPPER DES MAINS ET DES PIEDS 👏➡️🦶 ↔️ 🦶, Rouler dans un trou 🚶↪️🕳️, FAIRE DU YO-YO AVEC UNE PERSONNE ENROULÉE DANS UN FIL 🚶🪀 ⤵🚶, MARCHER EN ZIGZAG 🚶⌇, SE CACHER À DEUX LES CHEVEUX NOUÉS 🧑🧑 AVEC DEUX GRANDS BRAS 💪💪 🚬🌻 RAMASSER DES OBJETS, SE REGARDER PENDANT QUE DES OBJETS TOMBENT 👀👀⬇️👟⬛🍎🚬, METTRE DES CLOPES DANS ✋🚬UN VERRE À BALLON EN 🍷ÉQUILIBRE ⚖️, 🕺🦵🦵🧳 DONNER L’IMPRESSION DE DANSER AVEC DES JAMBES MOLLES SUR UNE VALISE, 🧑🧑🕶️PARTAGER UNE PERRUQUE ET DES LUNETTES.

These drawings, which contain both the representation of the action and its textual description, were made spontaneously on a tactile tablet by Yoan Sorin and then patiently redesigned to be integrated into the LARA typography as emoji.

*/ABCCginrty{¶é∞**))

*, **, /, ¶, {, ∞ and )) are the names of the seven sculptures comprising “The Weavers,” an exhibition by Xavier Antin. Endowed with artificial intelligence, they form a community, at once a political ecosystem and the locus of an experiment in collective writing that will, for the duration of the exhibition, produce a narrative in several voices. “The Weavers” communications initiative is an opportunity to present these seven characters. The typographic signs *, **, /, ¶, {, ∞ and )) were taken from 21 typefaces produced between 1921 and 2015 and are associated with Claude Garamont, a French typographer and printer of the 16th century. Garamond is the typeface chosen by Antin to compose the publication which will transcribe the daily discussions between the sculptures. According to the authors and the techniques used over time, these multiple versions of punctuation or mathematical signs vary surprisingly when in fact they are affiliated to the same typefaces, designed in 1592. Similar and distinct at the same time, the 21 versions of the seven signs produce 147 different invitation cards making impossible the “collectionitis” sometimes associated with the ABCC of the CACB.

🌫 CAC 🌪 Brétigny 🌫

“In the joy of triumph, they went so far as to use this newly stored centrifugal force and out of sheer pride playfully increased by a substantial amount the speed of the Earth’s rotation. Days lasted only hours now, until the day when, rotation speed having reached exactly seventeen times the original speed, they fearfully telegraphed from Ecuador that men and things would no longer stay on the surface of the ground.”

● ☁ ☁ 🙋
🙋 🌌 🙋 🙋
☁ 🦵 🦵 💨
☁ 🌌 🌀 🌀
☁ 🌫 🌪 🌫

The engraving by Léonard Sarluis illustrating this excerpt from Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension (Gaston de Pawlowski, 1912) is divided into twenty parts that have been added to the LARA typography via emojis and then scattered throughout the communication supports announcing the exhibition “Sâr Dubnotal.” Transforming the engraving into something abstract, this division redistributes the jumble of stars 🌌, planets ●, air 💨 🌫, clouds ☁, and bodies 🙋 🦵 swept up in the whirl 🌪 of centrifugal force 🌀.

CAC Brétigny

The 22 letters springing from the “Bestiary of Tonguelets” designed by Mercedes Azpilicueta and Vanina Scolavino—and used to compose the title of the exhibition “Bestiario de Lengüitas”—are strewn throughout the center’s communication supports. Human legs and animal paws, a serpent, an ear, and other letters taking shape return us to the distant figurative origins of Latin script and language. The letters echo the “protagonists [of the exhibition] (whether they are living or dead, real or fictional—humans, protheses, animals, demons, or plants), conversing in a polyphony of language and voices that muddle linear narratives.” (Virginie Bobin)

CAC Brétigny

For the communication of Sara Sadik's exhibition, the collection of signs comes from her Instagram account, and more specifically her stories, where she broadcasts her own gleanings of anonymous messages from social networks or song lyrics from Jul, Ninho or PNL (French rap artists). In this selection around romantic relationships, different voices mingle, and end up printed on invitation cards: an unexpected welcome for these often denigrated words, coming from gadjis and gadjos[1] that are "forgotten by love". They are the ones who invite us to the exhibition. So,

          “What are you waiting for to come DM me?”

These voices are integrated into the LARA typography in the cellphone emoji 📱, a typographic sign itself containing other signs— being container and content at the same time. It's the cases for other text media emojis (roll 📜, books 📖, newspapers 📰 and sheets of paper 📄📃🧾📋📝) and technological communication objects, whose appearance matches the brand of the terminal used or the platform consulted.

[1] Marseille slang term to designate a boy or a girl, deriving from the term used by the Gypsies to designate a non-gypsy girl or woman.

CAC👍👎Brétigny

“[Gestures 👍👎] were used in the circus to either kill or spare the combatants; the thumb turned down: death.” Bruno Munari, Supplement to the Italian Dictionary, Mantova, Corraini, 1963, p.21

While the meaning of the gestures 👍👎 in ancient Rome is debated nowadays, thumbs up 👍 or thumbs down 👎 are now part of the everyday representations of "popular" on social networks and digital platforms, alongside the up or down arrow ⬆️ ⬇️, the heart 💟❤️, the star ⭐, the tick ✅✔️, or the grade from 0️⃣ to 🔟. An ascending or descending form of popularity, the 👍 was first introduced by the social network Facebook in 2009. The following year, 👍👎 both become available as emoji with Unicode 6.0 and are part of a set of more than 30 manual gestures. We're all used to seeing these signs as “Like” buttons that can be activated with a click or tap of the finger, sometimes accompanied by a number to quantify that popularity, but we rarely see them out of context and on such a disproportionate scale as on the communication media “The Real Show”.

CAC🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷Brétigny

Decomposed in the style of an herbarium, the signs of branches🌱and flowers🌷are sampled from Camille Bernard's painting entitled Nest (encounters), like so many elements to be assembled to constitute a nest or a bouquet💐.

Most of the emojis available in the Nature category date from 2010, and later additions add variety to the growth of the plants that gradually come to life, from the young shoot from which we can follow seasons🌱🪴🌿🍃🍂to the fading flower🌷🥀. While the appearance of plants within emojis is still recent, the floret❦, a stylized form of flower or leaf, is one of the oldest typographic ornaments, seen as early as Antiquity on Greek lapidary inscriptions. Finally, two nest emojis, one empty and the other filled with eggs, are added to the new version of Unicode 14.0 in 2021 but were not yet available on the various platforms in this spring of 2022.

CAC Brétigny

The series of 15 symbols accompanying the exhibition “Playworlds, 2018-2022” by Switchers comes from material that contributed to the production of the play Switch in 2018. In response to the question “How did it feel to be part of the ACTION of the RIOTS?”, the actors’ states of mind seem to us to echo the current mood:

“Adrenalized, Anxious, Confused, Energetic, Frustrated, Insecure, Kinda releived [sic], Nervous, On edge, Overwhelmed, Panic, Proud, Pumped, Releived [sic], Scared”

Written on yellow Post-it notes in English, these messages incorporate the font LARA into the Memo emoji 📝, both a short note to help remember something and a tool for collaborative work that can be moved around. In its form as much as its contents, this source brings to mind the work of the writer Octavia E. Butler—an important reference for Switchers—and more specifically her working and motivational notes to self:

“Tell Stories Filled with Facts. Make People Touch and Taste and KNOW. Make People FEEL! FEEL! FEEL!”

CAC 🕳 Brétigny

For Carlotta Bailly-Borg and Cécile Bouffard’s exhibition “Crazy Toads”, we scoured maps of the Essonne region in search of bodies of water that provide a habitat for frogs and toads. The Carpe d'or lake, the Morsang reservoir, the Salmouille, the Brûle-Doux lake, the Mauvais Temps stream, the Sangliers pond, the Misery marsh, etc.: medieval-named living environments for these batrachians, often associated with magic and all sorts of other beliefs.

Removed from their cartographic context, these wetlands become viscous, soft, intestinal and uterine, and may echo some of the artists’ works. Abstract and strange, they are forms onto which we can project others, like a Rorschach test. This collection of 16 symbols integrates the LARA typeface into the emoji Hole 🕳, a cartoon-like round black hole evoking a burrow as much as a sewer manhole or a bottomless pit.

CAC Brétigny

Presence of the human body in writing and typography can be observed at different levels. It is first present implicitly in calligraphy where, “like in dance […] the whole body participates in the action” (Tim Ingold). It is also represented in the multitude of anthropomorphic alphabets and decorative lettering designed since the 15th century. In typography, the recurrent analogy of the letter as a skeleton dressed up in period clothing has proved persistent, as has the anatomic vocabulary still used to describe the shape of letters (leg, eye, body, belly, etc.) And, today, the number of emojis representing parts of the human body and diverse human activities is increasing all the time.

For the exhibition “From muscle” (Partir du muscle) curated by Daisy Lambert, a group of dancing superheroes and heroines will be integrated into the LARA typography. These children’s drawings were made during a workshop designed by the artist Johanna Rocard with pupils at the Les Coquelicots primary school in Bruyères-le-Châtel. These characters will be added to the LARA typography by the “Superheros” emoji 🦸. Despite the emoji 🦸 being gender neutral, its Unicode name is masculine. We have therefore chosen to change the name for “Superhero·ines” for the captions accompanying the signs.

         The XYZ of the ABCC of the CACB

For the exhibition “JUMP”, which marked the reopening of  CAC Brétigny in 2016, the first instalment of the typography LARA was a collection of capital letters AAAAAA, BBBBBB and CCCCCC, observed on the way from Brétigny train station to the art centre. The first three letters of the Latin alphabet, ABC, can already be used to spell out CACB, the first letters of CAC Brétigny. It was both about getting to the art centre and introducing its language. 

This time, for the 2023-2024 off-site season, we will be leaving the art centre to go to the season’s other venues scattered across the region, in Brétigny-sur-Orge, Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, Arpajon, Saint-Michel-sur-Orge and a few other neighbouring towns. On these new paths, signs (TAGINES, FIESTA PAËLLA, Créa’tifs, LA BOÎT' À BRONZER…), placards (JE VEILLE POUR MON MAITRE 🐶, Salon Climatisé…) and graffiti (LA PLANÈTE CRAME ON VA CRAMER DESSUS, JUSTICE POUR NAHEL…) paint a certain portrait of the Essonne area. This time, we have collected the last letters of the alphabet, UVWXYZ and uvwxyz, as well as other letters with accents yet to be included in the LARA typography, such as the capitals ÀÇÈÉÊËÎÏÔÛ and lowercase àçèéêîïôû.

         The construction of the ABCC of CACB

To announce the new off-site season “Bascules” and the CAC construction site in Brétigny-sur-Orge, a selection of characters illustrate different building trades: bricklayers, glaziers, electricians, painters, movers, all busy in a cartoonish farandole. They are taken from company advertisements published in several Essonne directories printed between 1958 and 2010, and feature in the LARA typography under the emoji 👷 Construction worker.

Coline Sunier & Charles Mazé

Coline Sunier & Charles Mazé are graphic and type designers. They lived in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy from 2008 to 2018, and are now based in Paris and Marseille. They were fellows at the French Academy in Rome—Villa Medici in 2014-2015, and are now graphic designers in residency at CAC Brétigny and CRAC Alsace. Coline Sunier (FR/CH) is part of the teaching staff of institut supérieur des arts de Toulouse  (isdaT), and Charles Mazé (FR) is part of Atelier National de Recherche Typographique (ANRT) in Nancy. They cofounded the publishing house <o> future <o> in 2009.