Marion Jdanoff: Baguenaudes

Baguenauder means taking a quiet stroll with no specific goal in mind. Marion Jdanoff takes us on this stroll to find out where we stand. How do you invent your own thing? How and what to talk about? How to offer yourself, and others, imaginary worlds that are free of the norms. 

After Guerre, a highly personal story about death and friendship, Marion Jdanoff is continuing her personal exploration.

Baguenaudes is an attempt to extricate herself from the pitfalls that punctuate intimate relationships and the proximity of bodies. Overwhelmed by other people's images, Marion Jdanoff uses drawing as a counter-offensive, cobbling together her own intimate imaginary world. It's a world full of stones, plants, rivers, agave and factory bodies. We're clearly closer to a botany book than to Manara. As for the narrative, it's somewhere between a poetry collection and a hiking guide.

It's a book of keys, in which drawing is used both to materialise questions and emotions and to experiment with what it means to let go. The drawing does anything, tries to allow itself anything.
A parallel between drawing and intimacy runs throughout the book: what is a successful drawing, what is a successful physical encounter? What makes you want to?

Edition of 1300 copies

Interior offset on Munken print cream 115 g/sm

Cover offset on Symbol Card 350g/sm

16,5 x 22 cm

416 pages

Co-published in 2023 by Super loto éditions and Grante ègle with support from cnapfr and the Occitanie / Pyrénées Méditerranée region.

Texts: French

About the artist

Marion Jdanoff draws snippets of stories, anecdotes and also strives to translate concepts into images. In her work, she intertwines the personal (a lot) and the political (a little) and tries to find meaning in drawing rather than in making revolution. An open and unresolved question.
Moreover, she likes to draw with other people and to make it hard to tell who is who. It is in this spirit that she founded Palefroi in 2012 with Damien Tran. Together and separately, they do everything from posters to screen prints, handmade books, self-publishing and other bazaars.
After eight years of this very intense work as a duo, the pony (Palafroi is a horse) is currently in a well-deserved grazing resource. This allows for other explorations, less focused on the multiple and mixing with other practices, dance, public occupation architecture. She also participates in the Kythibong record label in Nantes.