The Brest-based visual artists' collective XYZ rediscovers territories through typographic safaris. "We collect characters or signs present in the city", explains Jean-Baptiste Moal, founding member of the collective. It can be letters, visuals, tagseuros, everything that constitutes the heritage of a city. The idea is to create a sort of alphabet of a city or a territory and to rework it to create an original font.
The collective has carried out this work in Brest, with a font called "Sans Souvenir de Brest", in Le Relecq-Kerhuon, in Vitry-sur-Seine, and currently in the Landerneau Daoulas region. The font can then be deployed through all kinds of graphic creations: postcards, stamps, etc.
Walk around with the locals and look up
"We invite people to join us to walk around, look up and rediscover the city. The residents also tell us their stories." Behind the letters, the signs and the signs, the collective retraces a part of the history of a city and its inhabitants. "For example, when signs are removed, we often find painted letters behind them with a very different cachet.
in Brest, there are many inks (marine), but also traces of the Second World War : the city was largely destroyed during the war. In the font "It's a collective with variable geometry, which allows us to find a new balance each time and to enrich the projects. We work a lot around history and heritage, which we try to highlight in a contemporary way, on very diverse subjects such as letters, graphic novels, illustration, or scenography." The collective has worked on dazzlepainting, a type of camouflage that was used during the First World War.
