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Worldbuilding

activity of personal development

I explore my favourite playground in my spare time, between visual arts and literature, to keep alive the seeds of my initial vocation. I have developed a range of evolving expression tools to create illustrations and projects that fall into the category of "paper architectures," which shape a fictional universe or "Worldbuilding" constructed from reflections on contemporary social and environmental issues. This utopian universe also serves as a spatial and temporal framework for a few illustrated short stories that I have written and self-published.



maison auto construite en 1920
When innovation meets performance.
 "One Week" Buster Keaton 1920


This photo extracted from the film "One Week" or "The Portable House" by Buster Keaton dates back to 1920. It serves as a good entry point into the fictional universe I have been building for a few years. Let’s observe the image: this modest house is made exclusively from "bio-sourced" materials. It is a mobile or "nomadic" object, as can be seen by watching the film. It is a kit intended for self-construction using a low level of technology. The land is practically undeveloped, or as one might say today, "artificialised." The roads are devoid of asphalt, which was still in its infancy at this time, taking us back a century. It was still the era of slow vehicles that raised clouds of dust in their wake. The electric or telegraph poles are already numerous, witnesses to technological progress that can be found inside the house and even more so in the film "The Electric House," shot two years later by Buster Keaton. The "happy owners" seem indulgent in the face of their minor issues interpreting the assembly plans, the main thing being to finally have a love nest. What we do not yet know at this point in the viewing is the fate reserved for this little modern American pavilion, a victim of the climate before succumbing to the passage of a locomotive. The final scene demonstrates that what makes a house is the people who live in it.

couple devant leur maison en ruine
Final scene of the film.
 "One Week" Buster Keaton 1920


The fictional universe I have imagined brings us back in some aspects to the time of silent cinema, but in an environment inevitably reshaped by rising sea levels, where humans would have agreed to ban the use of all products derived from petroleum, starting with asphalt, as well as shutting down nuclear reactors. And above all, they would have relearned out of necessity to live in a world with low levels of technology and communication, taking care to restore natural environments to re-establish the human anchoring as a link in the chain of life.

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A first work entitled "Igor vs the Pseudologue" outlines the contours of this "Worldbuilding". Written and illustrated at the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was self-published.

Thierry Monnier   ✎2024