Blackout is an acclaimed short novel by Brussels-based author and art curator Chateigné Tytelman.
Spring 2020. During lockdown in a mountain village with his partner and young child, Yann Chateigné Tytelman becomes haunted by the presence of his dead father. Provoked by memories of him, of their laconic relationship and of the class antagonisms that emerged between them – the father was a manual labourer while his son ‘turned his back’ and entered the art world – Chateigné Tytelman starts writing letters, piles of them, which have as their subject that most mystical, most incomprehensible of phenomena: silence.
Condensed into a series of short fragments, Blackout interweaves the letter to the father with the observations of an art theorist who surveys with precision the occurrences and experiences of silence in painting, music, literature and philosophy.
Taking inspiration from Emily Dickinson, the White Paintings of Robert Rauschenberg, Jean-Antoine Watteau’s depiction of poor Pierrot, John Cage, Vija Celmins’s ocean drawings, the music criticism of David Toop and the theoretical writings of, among others, Michel Serres, Giorgio Agamben and Paul B. Preciado, as well as from the recent global pandemic, Chateigné Tytelman invites readers to tarry with the void at the heart of modern society and to confront the spectres of death and disease among us.
Yann Chateigné Tytelman has been curator at the KANAL–Centre Pompidou Brussels, head of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD – Geneva, and chief curator at CAPC in Bordeaux, among other positions. He is a guest lecturer in the Curatorial Studies programme at KASK & Conservatorium, Gent. In 2023, he co-founded Celador, an art space run by a reading group collective in Brussels.
Les Fugitives, 104pp, 18cm x 120cm, hardback, 2025
