Pauline Brocart & Federico Nicolao

Pauline Brocart is a freelance graphic designer. Born in Paris in 1994, she graduated from ECAL Lausanne in 2018. As much an artist as a designer, she gives a privileged place to collaboration in her work. She works in art, fashion and design. She has also contributed to the design of numerous publications and projects in contemporary artistic creation. In 2021, as part of Piccole Baie Books’ “pensare per immagini” collection, she published her first book of photographs, entitled Chora. Today, she continues to explore territories in the making. Federico Nicolao is a writer and philosopher. He is founder and director of the magazine Chorus, Una Costellazione and the Centro Studi Piccole Baie. A former resident of the Académie de France in Rome, he was program director of the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Musée Picasso in Antibes. With Cécile Debray, he founded and directed the artist residency festival ¡ Viva Villa!. He teaches contemporary art theory and practice at the ECAL in Lausanne and image theory at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Paris Cergy.

Piccole Baie books is a publishing project conceived by Pauline Brocart and Federico Nicolao. Their approach to publishing is deliberately atypical and experimental. It takes its cue from writers and artists who are protagonists of a dissemination of texts on a micro-drawing and micro-scale (Lourdes Castro, Michel Butor, Franco Toselli, Emmanuel Hocquard – with whom they have been in contact – have never ceased to fascinate them). Pauline Brocart and Federico Nicolao work on their publishing project in several countries and languages, each time giving themselves the freedom to choose the subject of their research, to produce in turn small editions, with irregular and undisciplined publication and distribution. The originality of their approach has led them to collaborate over the last few years with numerous writers and artists (Micol Assael, Laurent Berger, Anne Bertrand, Zoé Cornelius, Suzanne Doppelt, Elein Fleiss, Yannick Haënel, Raphaël Lain and Angela Detanico, Pierre Leguillon, Jochen Lempert, Francesca Torzo, to name but a few), pushing back with them the limits traditionally assigned to publishing by the industry. The question of the time needed to gestation a project – be it a book, a magazine, a poster or any other form of publication – is one of their main concerns, if not the only one. This is why they have chosen to work with a particular focus on artists’ residencies (as with the Paysage Ouvert project at the ateliers des Arques in the Lot region), to the point of deciding in turn to instigate two very special artists’ residencies: one that gives the name to their publishing project, the “Piccole baie”, in a house on the Ligurian coast in Italy, in the heart of a nature reserve, the other, “Meeuw”, in Burgundy, on board a boat that can remain docked or sail along the French canals to the sea.