Manuel
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From A for “abstain” to V for “steal”, the artist and researcher publishes an exhaustive and serendipian primer on forms of protest action in art and beyond.
“It has to be wildly encyclopedic,” his publisher Grégoire Chamayou, director of the Zones à la Découverte collection, advised him when sending the first manuscript. So, Martin Le Chevallier, iconoclastic artist and researcher (who was artistic director of Libé), loaded the boat. And his Directory of subversions, sprawling manual of mobile and rebellious forms which navigate between activism and artistic practices, has at the same time swelled without limit, exceeding all chronological limits, while drying up drastically from the point of view of their representations.
The book, crazy in its radicality and purity, but also a little stiff, resembles a small directory of almost 300 pages, whose instructions without images are broken down by actions. An exhaustive and serendipian primer which takes in its net (anti) actions as diverse as “s’abstenir”, first entry in the manual, until «want», last occurrence which comes like all the others in a thousand and one nuances, from “steal to redistribute” which returns to the French peasant revolts in the 18th century, “steal stolen works” which point out the delicate question of the restitution of works looted during the
