Sylvain Prudhomme likes to travel, and along the way capture portraits and snippets of words that he makes into his literature. Born in France, he spent his childhood in different African countries, in Cameroon, Burundi, Niger, Mauritius, before coming to study Literature in Paris, then directing the Alliance from 2010 to 2012. Franco-Senegalese from Ziguinchor, Senegal.
Son roman By the roads (Gallimard) published in 2019 and awarded the Landerneau Prize and the Femina, already offered us an atypical crossing of France through the figure of a hitchhiker, that curiosity for the multitude of possible existences pushed us to travel the departmental roads to meet people to touch for a moment the truth of their lives. He then published in 2021 Storms (Gallimard), then The Child in the Taxi in 2023 (Midnight), another car story, which earned it a finalist for the 2024 Booksellers Prize.
His latest novel published in October by Editions de Minuit, “Coyote”, traces a 2,500 km hitchhiking journey along the Mexican border.built over the yearsmeetings he had and the conversations he exchanged on this occasion with motorists, ordinary women and men, who embody this bordering and liminal region.”
Rather than a first-person travel story, he places the words of motorists at the center and seeks to reflect the orality of the people who speak to him: what they have to say on their territory, the day after the election of Donald Trump, on this border with multiple issues and symbolic power which resonated in every speech of the presidential campaign, but especially about them. Because for Sylvain Prudhomme precisely “the most interesting thing is when they digress, when they start talking about very intimate things, and it’s all these asides, all these unforeseen moments where we are in the sensation and in the emotion which make that we understand much better what they are going through“.
« Oh, Silvano!
Look at these colors on the desert.
Look how beautiful it is.
We have the sunset to ourselves.
Do you want me to tell you my opinion?
We were lucky to be born into this life.
What do you say about life: beautiful, right?
It is beautiful but it is short, you have to live it well.
Gently.
Gently.
With art. »
With the light, with the color of his book, Sylvain Prudhomme wanted to associate other images, those from the documentaries of the filmmaker Stéphanie Barbey whom he invited to share his Grand atelier. Born in 1972 in Geneva, Switzerland, Stéphanie Barbey holds a master’s degree from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences. She studied documentary cinema at Ateliers Varan, Paris. Since 2006, she has been an associate at Intermezzo Films and works as a director of documentaries for cinema and television.
She also works on the United States, which she films in particular in the documentary Broken Land, released in 2014 and co-directed with Luc Peter; about white Americans who live on the Mexican border in a paranoid obsession with illegal immigrants“paradoxically absent from all the images” explains Sylvain Prudhomme. They are not there but they are everywhere.
Stéphanie Barbey’s latest documentary released in 2023 is entitled Dreamers, nickname given to undocumented immigrants who arrived as children in the United States since the DREAM bill (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) aimed at regularizing them, filed in 2001 and still awaiting adoption by Congress. Minors, they are considered not responsible for their arrival on the territory and therefore protected. As adults, their reality shifts into clandestinity, and their presence becomes illegal.
Reportage :
Today, Vincent Josse’s report takes us to the North to Cateau-Cambrésis, on the occasion of the reopening of the Henri Matisse departmental Museum of which Sophie Le Flamanc is the deputy director. After 18 months of closure for work, the museum reopens its doors and expands its exhibition spaces, rethinking the route and the scenography around the work of Henri Matisse. It was the artist himself who chose before his death to donate 82 works to the museum he created in 1952 in his hometown of Cateau-Cambrésis. Today, the museum’s collection offers a broad panorama, both from a temporal point of view and the techniques used, of what Henri Matisse was able to achieve throughout his life: paintings, sculptures, engravings, pasted papers , cut-out gouaches, stained glass windows, liturgical objects, costumes, tapestries… Sophie Le Flamanc underlines the extent to which Henri Matisse tried his hand at all forms of art. The Henri Matisse Le Cateau-Cambrésis Departmental Museum will be free for the first week of reopening, from November 23 to December 1. The opportunity to also discover the temporary exhibition “How I made my books” highlighting Matisse’s illustrated books until April 13, 2025.
Cultural advice:
- Stéphanie Barbey strongly recommends that we read the latest book by Gabriella Zalapì “Ilaria or the conquest of disobedience” published by ZOE.
- Sylvain Prudhomme chose a collection of short stories that has been with him for a long time, “Manual for housekeepers”, by Lucia Berlintranslated by Valérie Malfoy.
Musical programming:
- The Cure, A fragile thing (2024)
- Albin de la Simone, The escape (2013)
- Junior, Mediterranean (2024)
