Bisus from L.A. Anna Haifisch
In French. Hardcover, 52 pages, 30 x 22 x 1.1 cm. Misma, November 2024.
When Anna Haifisch arrives in Los Angeles to spend three months in an artist residency at Villa Aurora, she is struck by the visual saturation caused by the city's signs and signs. It is a veritable of letters, numbers and signs that intertwine in all directions and on all supports, without the slightest shame in relation to typographical rules. If the profusion of advertising creates a joyful confusion, the campaigns to prevent seismic risks and fires are there to spoil the party. The threat of a natural catastrophe lurks around every corner, and an oppressive fog stains the postcard of the golden state of California.
Anna Haifisch, who initially enters the residency to develop a children's album project, ends up getting involved in the task of making a graphic inventory of her stay in Los Angeles. As in a travel diary where notes and images are pasted and kept as souvenirs, Anna redesigns the city's posters, advertisements, labels, packaging, fast food menus, instruction manuals for survival kits... Everything she sees, she stores and then meticulously reproduces with her colored pencils. The result is an exuberant visual patchwork, where sometimes some animals that get lost in the scenery are insinuated (a dog looking out the window, a coyote crossing the road, seals doing somersaults backwards in Los Angeles Bay...).
