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Ilan Manouach (born 11 july 1980, in Athens) is a conceptual comics artist, a musician and a book publisher. He is mostly known for creating Shapereader, a tactile language specifically designed for the production of literary works for and from the visually impaired.

Conceptual comics Ilan Manouach holds a BFA from L’Ecole Supérieure des Arts in Brussels and is currently enrolled as a student in the MA Program of the Dutch Art Institute in the Netherlands. Since 2003, he has published more than a dozen bookworks under the catalogue of a small publishing house based in Brussels, La Cinquième Couche. He has curated four anthologies bringing together contributions from artists, critics, lawyers and different professionals of the book industry. His first book, published in 2003, Les lieux et les choses qui entouraient les gens désormais, was his first attempt to open the field of creative storytelling. According to comics critic Thierry Groensteen, « […] It is not surprising that Manouach is also a jazz musician. His storytelling is entirely built as a succession of drone sounds, melodic lines, disjunctions, syncopations and improvisations and variations around a main theme ». His narrative approach has consistently evolved throughout the years, after his first self-published book, La Mort du Cycliste where he first experimented with narrative structures allowing for an abstract, open-ended storytelling, based on a loose relation between the text and the images. In several later projects such as The Horse-Headed Statue, designed for an international architecture symposium in Greece in 2007, Écologie Forcée, a work commissioned by the Biennale du Havre in 2010 and Both Sides of a Wall, produced for the Comics Festival Sismics in 2011, he uses exhibition space as a way to recontextualise his narrative approach by engaging the spectator as the reader. Along with Xavier Lowenthal, he is also the director of the anthology « Le Coup de Grâce », a book that collects artists' contributions to book's call for the creation of undetermined, deliberately evasive, and iredeemably idiosyncratic narratives. His books have received generous support on different occasions from the Centre National du Livre in France and La Communauté Française de Belgique. He is a Fellow and an alumnus of the Kone Foundation in Finland. Currently he is busy presenting Shapereader, an invented system of tactile literature specifically designed for reader with visual disabilities. The exhibition and a related workshop has been scheduled in France, USA, Greece, Israel, Spain, Finland, Denmark and Switzerland. He has also contributed to several anthologies, such as Frédéric Magazine, Éprouvette, Glomp and Multitudes and has produced a few commissions for newspapers such as The New York Times and Internazionale. He is mostly known for the unsigned comic book appropriations, and the manifestos supplementing these editions. These books exist in the threshold of comics, contemporary art and conceptual poetry as is demonstrated by their recent inclusion in the avant-garde Ubuweb archive. He has published illegal appropriations of existing comic books, and reinjected the detournements in the book market. He continuously claims for the importance of an idiosyncratic “reader’s space”, beyond all imposed meanings coming from the author or from the prevailing readings of certain works. Following a mode d’emploi, consisting of a very simple chart of manipulations to guide him through the process, he seeks to instantiate this specific reader’s space, by retaliating upon this exact same book format. He claims that comic books, conceived as a mass-produced object and existing in their primary state are a powerful self-reflexive medium. These very limited print facsimile versions are distributed every year during the Angoulême International Comics Festival and have a big collector value. Katz is a pirated edition of Art Spiegelman's seminal graphic novel Maus. Katz is an exact copy of the French edition of Maus, with the difference that all the animal characters, have been redrawn as cats. The book was printed on November 2011 and it was seen in public for the first time in January 2012 during the International Comics Festival of Angoulême that ran under Spiegelman’s presidency. Two weeks before the official distribution of the book, the lawyers of Flammarion, the copyright holder of the French edition of Maus address the issue. Refusing to take on account the conversational nature of the operation and its very limited printrun, Katz is stated as a counterfeit of Maus and Flammarion seeks an injunction against the small Belgian press. Being already heavily indebted, the publisher, not able to afford the high costs in fighting the injunction, accepts an out of court settlement: the total destruction of the books and the digital files.. Noirs Noirs, is a fac-simile of the original edition of Les Schroumpfs Noirs : same cover, same stories, same number of pages, same format, and as close to the original in the quality of paper, its weight, and so on. But with one, single difference. The four plates of magenta, yellow, cyan and black that form the basis of offset printing have been replaced by four plates of cyan. The goal of this endeavour, apart from reactivating an old consensus, problematizing the innocuously naturalization of the ideological potential of colour, was also to shed light on the industrial fabrication of a book. Offset printing, a supposedly transparent and mechanic process, once it stops working correctly (here, regarding colour separation) can be thoroughly expressive. Tintin Akei Kongo Tintin Akei Kongo is the translated version of Tintin au Congo in lingala, the official Congolese dialect. The translation was commissioned by the artist and has been conducted in a collaboration with a certified translator during a prolonged art residency in the island of Ukerewe in Tanzania. The new book is an exact fac-simile of the original edition and follows the industrial standards and layout of classical comics. The goal of this endeavour was not simply to construe the artist's tasks through a redefinition of the possible interventions, by commissioning a translation himself; neither to emphasize the importance of discursivity and self-referentiality as a way to address comics both as a language and a form of logic. National identity is not only built by an internal crystallization process, a constant consolidation of the national and cultural feeling, but is mainly defined by external pressures. Tintin au Congo, the original version in french language, is still, disturbingly, one of the most popular comic books in Francophone Africa. The fact that it hasn't found its way to the African market with a Congolese edition, reminds the reader of Tintin Akei Kongo that distribution of cultural products is not solely governed by profit and market values. Adding lingala to the 112 different translations of the Tintin Empire, Tintin Akei Kongo reveals blind spots in the expansion of the publishing conglomerates. Shapereader Shapereader is a tactile language, specifically designed to allow the creation of universally accessible narrative works of tactile literature for, and from a visually impaired readership. While it has been mainly created for the purposes of a blind community, the Shapereader repertoire can also be experienced by the acquainted regular user. Shapereader advocates for new publishing grounds and challenges the visual predominance of language and storytelling experience. Through circumvention of the reader's visual sensorimotor stimuli, it activates the repressed tactile-sensory realm and offers a new diegetic experience by transposing semantic and syntactical structures cognizance to the reader’s fingertips.

The Shapereader consists of an ever expanding repertoire of anaglyph shapes called tactigrams designed to provide haptic equivalents for objects, actions, affections, characters and so on. Created from scratch, their design is based on criteria of simplicity, easiness of memorization and distinguishability. For example, a category of shapes assigned to affections includes primary states such as joy, fear or sadness as well as more advanced ones such as coercion, remorse and unease. Each affection is available in three incremental intensities and this change of magnitude is intuitively translated by the gradual thickening of the shape's core pattern. These affections can be combined synergetically allowing for an unprecedented realistic, fine-tuned and rich description of the emotional states of the plot's characters.

The first narrative work to be built upon the Shapereader repertoire is Arctic Circle, an original tactile novel of 57 pages, written in English, narrating the story of two climatologists digging in the North Pole. In the midst of an imbroglio of conflicting interests from traders, human rights activists and impoverished Inuit dwellers, the two protagonists are pursuing research for an ice column that contains records of climate changes of past ages. They hope to decipher those cryptic patterns, pretty much the same way the readers of Arctic Circle engage with the work. Six hand-held communication boards and three large-scale panels allow the reader to get acquainted with the Shapereader repertoire. They carry all the tactigrams (tactile indexes) for 210 different shapes, providing equivalents for the specific features of the story. These shapes are sorted to groups according to their semantic content and function so that they can be easily traced by beginner readers: characters, props, settings, actions, affections, graphic and textual devices.

The Shapereader has been presented during the International Comics Festival of Angouleme, and workshops have been conducted in Athens, Tel Aviv and France.

Publisher

Ilan Manouach is also the initiator of two small publishing houses based in Athens.

Topovoros (the translation of the neologism 'locavore' describing a group of persons that only consumes locally produced food) is an non-profit hyperlocal initiative consisting of a limited print run book catalogue with a main interest in politics, urban space and radical movements. Eager to bring in Greece an eclectic array of important texts, Topovoros has released among others translations of works from Donna Haraway, Eyal Weizman, Mike Davis, Valerie Solanas, the Black Panthers, Robert Smithson, Guy Hocquenghem, Craig Dworkin, Anne Fausto-Sterling. The structure of the company follows, as its name suggests, the dynamics and ethics of the organically and locally driven niche gastronomic category. The design, printing, binding and distribution of the books is done strictly within the precise geographical area, the 200 acres of the neighbourhood of Exarchia in Athens.

Inkpress is a small publishing house that specializes in translating, designing and distributing important works of the world literature of comics in Greek. Since six years now, it holds under its belt, books from Dan Clowes, Chester Brown, Kaz, Debbie Drechsler, Ivan Brunetti, Gilbert Hernandez.