Elene Usdin

Born in Paris, Elene Usdin graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris in 1996 with a degree in graphic design and moving image. She made her debut as a painter on Léos Carax’s film Pola X. Winner of the Prix Picto de la Jeune Photographie de Mode in 2006, she joins the Esther Woerdehoff gallery for a time. Claude Nori and Éditions Contrejour published her first monograph in 2013. She collaborates with Compagnie Decouflé, La Fondation Lafayette Anticipations and Opéra du Rhin. In 2020, Wayne State University Press publishes her photographs of Detroit. In 2021, Éditions Sarbacane publishes her first comic book, René́.e aux bois dormants, awarded the ACBD Grand Prix de la Critique, the Prix des Libraires du Québec, and the Prix Artémisia. She is exhibited in 2022, at the Galerie Barbier in Paris, the Festival BD in Bastia, the Festival Étonnants Voyageurs in Saint-Malo, and the Musée Royal d’Art et Histoire in Brussels.

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 from North to South. Their escape becomes an opportunity for introspection, and the random path they follow leads them to pay homage to their respective mothers. The narrative is divided between the two friends’ past, told through the dark drawings in Beckie’s logbook, and the present, painted in a faded range of colors reminiscent of polaroids. Finally, the comic strip that Beckie is writing and that we are reading is revealed. Meta writing, in which we discover the reasons for their flight and what binds them beyond appearances. But also the tragic fate of Gloria, a young debutante with shattered dreams, who left Rome and ended up in Detroit. The polluted water scandal that erupted in the fading industrial city in 2017 is the backdrop to these special stories.