Elene Usdin

Born in Paris, Elene Usdin graduated in 1996 from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris, in graphic design and animated images. She started as a painter on Léos Carax’s film Pola X. Winner of the Picto Prize for Young Fashion Photography in 2006, she joined the Esther Woerdehoff gallery for a while. Claude Nori and Éditions Contrejour published her first monograph in 2013. She has collaborated with the Compagnie Decouflé, the Lafayette Anticipations Foundation and the Opéra du Rhin. Wayne State University Press published her photographs of Detroit in 2020. In 2021, Éditions Sarbacane published her first comic book, René́.e aux bois dormants, which won the ACBD Grand Prix de la Critique, the Prix des Libraires du Québec, and the Prix Artémisia. It is exhibited in 2022, at the Galerie Barbier in Paris, at the Festival BD in Bastia, at the Festival Étonnants Voyageurs in Saint-Malo, and at the Royal Museum of Art and History in Brussels.

Project at Villa Medici:

Currently being written, “Detroit, Roma” is a musical comic book project, in collaboration with Joseph Siran. Fleeing their hometown, two teenage girls cross the United States together from North to South. Their escape becomes an opportunity for introspection, and the random path they follow leads them to pay tribute to their respective mothers. The narrative is divided between the past of the two friends, told through the dark drawings of Beckie’s diary, and the present time, painted in a faded colour scheme reminiscent of polaroids. Finally, the comic book that Beckie is writing and that we are reading is revealed. Meta writing, where we discover the reasons for their escape and what links them beyond appearances. But also the tragic destiny of Gloria, a young premiere with broken dreams, who left Rome and ended up in Detroit. In the background of these particular stories, the polluted water scandal that broke out in 2017 in the declining industrial city is woven in.

© Joseph Siran