[Launch] Blackout by Yann Chateigné Tytelman

Join us for the launch of Blackout by Yann Chateigné Tytelman, translated from french by Clem Clement and published by Les Fugitives 2025. Neither diary, nor essay, nor short story, Blackout is a weaving, a braid made from lines of silence. Through fragments it tells a story of a dispossession, of an entry into darkness. After the reading Yann will be joined by Anne-Claire Schmitz to discuss the book and its translation. 

Schedule

17:00 Reading 
17:30 Conversation between Yann Chateigné Tytelman and Anne-Claire Schmitz

About

Blackout (Les Fugitives, 2025) is a brief, intense, fragmentary account of silence and darkness in visual art, music, literature and philosophy. The writing juxtaposes essayistic observations with an emotionally-charged letter to the father, dead for 10 years, exploring an increasingly elusive bond: a laconic childhood, the son’s rejection of his working-class background and the loss of his father to dementia.

It all started with a letter to my father. It had been about ten years since his death, and I suddenly felt like writing to him about the silence, his silence, the silence between us. It started in 2020, as a necessity. The silence, then, was striking. It resonated with other erased voices, other voids, other emotions. I thought I would not be able to stop. Neither diary, nor essay, nor short story, Blackout is a weaving, a braid made of these lines of silence, and tells, in fragments, the story of a dispossession, of an entry into darkness. — YCT

Yann Chateigné Tytelman is an author and curator. He lives and works in Brussels where he co-founded Celador, a space for "doing things with words". His work touches on issues of sleep, silence and the politics of obscurity. He has been a curator at the KANAL-Centre Pompidou Brussels, head of the Visual Arts Dept at HEAD in Geneva and chief curator at CAPC in Bordeaux, among other positions. He curated projects on ecology -- How to be Organic?, Country SALTS, Bennwil, 2022; Regenerative Futures, Thalie Fondation, Brussels 2024 --alternative histories -- Material Thinking: Gordon Matta-Clark, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, 2019; By repetition, you start noticing details in the landscape, Le Commun, Geneva, 2019, and destruction -- A Gittering Ruin Sucked Upwards, HISK, Brussels, 2022; Four Sisters, Jewish Museum, Brussels, 2023. His writings appeared in Artforum, Les Cahiers du Musée National d'Art Moderne, Conceptual Fine Arts, Frieze, Mousse and Spike. He teaches at KASK Curatorial Studies in Ghent and the Danish Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. He is also a PhD supervisor at the Royal Academy of the Arts in Oslo. He is currently working towards a book and an exhibition about the disappearance of the night.

Anne-Claire Schmitz is a curator based in Brussels. Since 2020, she serves as senior curator at M HKA, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp where she developed exhibitions with artists Anthea Hamilton, Jim Shaw, Bruno Zhu, Sara Deraedt and Elene Chantladze among others. In 2019 she curated ‘MONDO CANE’ the exhibition by Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys for the Belgian pavilion of the 58th Venice Biennale. From 2012 until 2019, she has been committed to the conception and artistic direction of La Loge, a non-profit space dedicated to art, theory and architecture. Prior to this, she was a curator at Melly (formerly known as Witte de With) in Rotterdam.