[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 Grégory Castéra to discuss the book and its translation. 

Schedule

17:00 Reading 
17:30 Conversation between Yann Chateigné Tytelman and Grégory Castéra

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.

Grégory Castéra is curator-at-large and chief of "Learning from the Commons" at Kanal Centre Pompidou (Brussels), adviser at the Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht) and advisor for Kerenidis Pepe (Paris / Athens). He is a founding member of Council (2013-2023), Afield (2014-present), and Celador (2023-present). He previously served as Guest Professor of Collective Practices at the Royal Institute of Art (Stockholm, 2019-2022), co-director of Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers (2009-2012), and was part of the team that developed the Centre for Art and Research Bétonsalon in the University Paris-Diderot (Paris, 2007-2009). He has worked with artists such as Agency, Tarek Atoui, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Eglė Budvytytė, l’Encyclopédie de la parole, Jennifer Lacey, Franck Leibovici, Zoe Leonard, Mobile Akademie Berlin, Carlos Motta, Rosalind Nashashibi & Lucy Skaer, Marjetica Potrč, Zhou Tao, and Akram Zaatari. Among the projects that he has curated and co-curated are Shoreline Movements (Taipei Biennial, 2020), Collectively (Iaspis, 2019), Infinite Ear (Sharjah Biennial, 2013, Bergen Assembly, 2016, Garage Museum, 2018, CentroCentro, 2019-2020), Foreign Places (Wiels, 2016), The Manufacturing of Rights (Ashkal Alwan, 2015), On Ordinary Narratives (Villa Arson, 2014), and Playtime (Betonsalon, 2008, 2009). His recent essays include “Of Attentional Environments (The Pearl Necklace),” published in 2023 by Valiz in the anthology Sensing Earth, and “Where Are You Now? On Manon de Boer’s Stops (2025),” published in Newspaper Jan Mot, No. 145. He has also co-edited several publications, including The Against Nature Journal (2020–2022) and Le Journal des Laboratoires (2010–2012).