Rasmus Klump is a comic strip series for children created in 1951 by Danish couple Carla and Vilhelm Hansen. The series was translated into a number of foreign languages – in French it has come out by the publisher Casterman, as Petzi. This very popular comic series for children tells the adventures of the bear cub Petzi and his friends: Pingo the penguin, Riki the pelican, L’Amiral the seal, among others. In my rip-off of Petzi Fermier, renamed Riki Fermier, I have obliterated all the agents of the story, except one. All bubbles have been redirected to Riki the Pelican, the only remaining character, which incidentally is the only animal in the original story that can be described as a filler. Alone, in a village Riki remains a passive witness to the reconstruction of an old farm. There are nor real absences only replacements, and Riki Fermier is a haunting reading experience. Following other well known works such as Georges Perec’s La Disparition, or Carmello Bene’s Romeo and Juliet, I have applied a lipogrammatic operation into an existing body of work in the form of a book. This first attempt helped me establish a very basic chart that would provide me with some ground rules for my next experiments: a) apply one and only one operation on the totality of the book, b) remain as close as possible to the original edition- don’t distract attention by changing the original form, with the risk of rendering significant details that can be purely formal, c) problematize and reactivate an element of the story or the book that is left unquestioned, or that serves a motivated suspension of disbelief during reading.
Belgium: La Cinquieme Couche | 27 pages | softcover edition | CMYK | 2015 | 220mm x 295mm | SOLD OUT
