The 28it is meetings of the Comic Strip and the Illustration of Bastia ended on Sunday, September 19. About ten events (meetings, exhibitions) took place in the heart of the Corsican city, in particular at the Una Volta Cultural Center, at the Noir & Blanc gallery and at the central library of Bastia. Juana Macari, director of the Una Volta cultural center, confided in this somewhat special 2021 edition.
What has changed for BD in Bastia with this health crisis?
Indeed, current conditions have changed everything. We have decided to choose a fallback period for the second time, which considerably changes our organization. The schedule was complicated to organize, especially with school children, because we are in the middle of the start of the school year. Usually, the meetings with the children are rather well established. What has also changed is that we are perhaps more careful in the programming. We are less ambitious when it comes to inviting international authors. Finally, last year, we had two cycles of exhibitions. However, we have only organized ten exhibitions this year. For us, that’s not a big deal. In normal times, we can go up to 15. We privileged the quality. And then, the two editions of September are really different in terms of audience. If in 2020, the public was still cautious because of the health crisis, this year, we find a festive energy. From Friday, at 4 p.m. as soon as they left school, there was a lot of traffic.
Will you come back in the spring next year?
We have planned from March 31 to April 3, the usual period, with our four days. The schoolchildren will have returned a little longer and they will have resumed their mark. We, ‘wait until that to find our dates. It’s never comfortable not having your period. This time we are at the same time as the Heritage Days, the Gribouillis festival in Bordeaux, and BD-fil in Lausanne. We feel that we are in a period of compensation and I hope that in 2022 we will find a rhythm that is really ours.
What is the soul of this festival?
It’s its simplicity I think. I think it’s interesting to play on this sense of conviviality, which is in our DNA, here in Corsica. We can have this image of us a little gruff. But it is from the facade. What is most important for BD à Bastia is the word encounter. Here again, we must indicate that we are not a salon. We manage to part with this commercial relationship with the album. We work much more on the meeting, which will lead to buying a book as an object and which will also have a more intimate story. This life that we are going to build around the albums, that’s what makes the soul of BD in Bastia.
You have invited 28 authors, organized 11 meetings and set up 10 exhibitions for festival-goers. What do you remember from this edition?
Saturday is an important time. I especially remember this palpable atmosphere of an audience happy to be able to come back. In the end, the most important thing was to have held the bar. We can see that this is important for the public.
Looking more closely at your program, we can see that you only welcome 8 women during the festival. Is this selection representative of the current situation in comics?
Yes. And we could have had nine with Marion Fayotte, who could not come due to health concerns. however, when I set up the partner tables, I also told myself that there are not enough women. When we put together our programming, we don’t want to be guided in that way, by saying to ourselves that we absolutely need a female presence, for such a percentage of the number of authors. This is quite typical of the current comic book situation. On the other hand, the situation is totally the opposite for the youth illustration.
Since 2016, when the authors of comics stood up against the historical sexism of the sector in Angoulême, do you pay more attention to the choice of guests?
Fortunately, this is done a bit on its own. It is difficult to constrain oneself and to say to oneself that it is imperative to program this or that person. We program authors we love. Even if I have a natural sensitivity towards works / albums made by women, we must continue to operate in terms of content and not in terms of quota.
You invited Cy, illustrator and cartoonist from Radium Girls (Glénat). You published a cartoon interview, which was a hit on Instagram. Did you expect such a return?
We are so beside it. She’s super active on Twitch. I admit it’s pretty crazy. At no time did we say to ourselves that it was going to have an impact on BD in Bastia. However, it was the case very quickly.
What are the relations that the festival maintains with its territory?
BD à Bastia maintains a very strong relationship with its territory and its audience, even if it is a little less numerous this year. Each year, we receive students who come from Bonifacio, for example. They are almost 5 hours away. We do this very regularly. And then he has this meeting between an author and a place. The author spends a day or two with classes. For this edition, it was on Île rousse, located in the heart of Balagne, with the association Arte Libre. Simon Lamouret agreed to spend a day in contact with the classes. On the occasion of the meetings, he left ten originals of Bangalore (Mailify). The other great adventure that illustrates this link with the territory is Cosmolitude 2021. This show was born from the encounters that were woven during the festival. With Yann Le Borgne, who comes from Ajaccio, the music group Jakez Orchestra is bastiais and Christian Humbert-Droz who comes from Geneva. All these little people have met here. After a few years, they decided to come up with a real recreation project. I think it’s a dream for a festival.
In this return to school, have you had any crushes?
This is not obvious. But in the works that we exhibit, there is Mechanical Sun (Here and there) and for its author, Lukasz Wojciechowski. It’s an album that I loved. With the team, we met a man as warm as his work is minimalist and cold. It’s quite astonishing to see this author-architect so open and curious about everything ….
Precisely, for its 28e edition, BD à Bastia mixes the 1is art and the 9e art. Where does this idea of mixing comics and architecture come from?
Each year, we have a theme for our major collective exhibition. Architecture, the subject has been floating around BD in Bastia for two or three years. Our main idea was to be able to talk about architecture in a fairly simple and accessible way. News in comics also helped us. There have been quite a few releases on this subject in recent months, which is often a trigger for our thematic exhibition. And these two disciplines dialogue quite easily because of their construction methodology, quite simply.
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