Books published by Actes Sud

A folk-art movement emerges in the face of unchecked consumerism and waste managementDressed in masks and costumes made from garbage, a generation of Congolese street children and artists draw their inspiration from ancestral clothing arts to stand against the ecological disaster their country suffers. French photographer Stéphan Gladieu (born 1969) captures the movement in his portraiture.

Between 1978 and 1981, Sophie Calle went on a clandestine exploration of the then abandoned Hotel du Palais d'Orsay. She selected room 501 as her home and without any pre-established method, set about photographing the abandoned hotel over 5 years. As she explored, she picked up items she found: room numbers, customer reception cards, old telephones, diaries, messages addressed to a certain "Oddo" and more besides. What happened to room 501? More than 40 years later it has disappeared and an elevator has taken its place. At the invitation of Donatien Grau, the Musee d'Orsay curator, Sophie Calle returned, equipped with a flashlight, to explore the site again during the lockdown period. She hunted down the ghosts of the Palais d'Orsay, now connected to the present by the visitors that had also deserted the museum. The work reconstructs the artist's archive of photography, letters, invoices and other daily items which bring a forgotten past back to life. To provide commentary on her discoveries, Sophie Calle called upon the archaeologist Jean-Paul Demoule, who writes a series of texts combining fact and fiction. All this evidence has been assembled together to create an objet d'art which resembles an investigation notebook.

Catalog of an exhibition held at Mucem, November 21, 2019-March 1, 2020.

After Failles Ordinaires (2012) which revealed Géraldine Lay's keen eye and original talent, the photographer here continues her urban explorations of humanity in Great Britain. Faithful to her precise, detailed method and ever attentive to the potential for surprise and chance in any setting, Géraldine Lay mentally apprehends her territories before photographing them. She senses the light and atmosphere, immersing herself in a setting rather than reconnoitring, an approach that brings intimacy to the heart of anonymity. Some critics have rightly highlighted the cinematographic dimension of the artist's work but such an interpretation overlooks the essentially photographic nature of her pursuit and, in each of her 'photograms', her exacting work reminds us how photography was invented before cinema, and had a special ability to capture and hold the delicately ephemeral. In doing so, she creates a new aesthetic unique to the photographic craft, an aesthetic that imbues all of her work. As we traverse suburban streets and squares, lives are captured in the mystery of their daily existence. As the Irish writer, Robert McLiam Wilson writes, 'People walk and wait. They talk, drink coffee. They cross streets. They work. They move about. Citizens busy with citizen things. Like all citizens everywhere, they are multiple, varied, various. Men, women, children. They are also British. Incredibly British. They couldn't come from anywhere else.' In an age of exponential standardized universality, Géraldine Lay's photography reaffirms both the permanence of unusual individualities and the resistance of collective identities.

Koto Bolofo¿s film work has garnered several awards and featured at a variety of festivals, including the Berlin International Film Festival, the BBC British Short Film Festival, Amnesty International Film Festival, London Film Festival, Venice International Film Festival, Cambridge Film Festival and Cape Town International Film Festival. Along with his short films, Koto Bolofo has shot for many prestigious international magazines and journals. He has also published three books: Racing Style, Sibusiso Mbhele and his Fish Helicopter and Venus Williams. Bartabas is the performing name of the French horse trainer, film producer and impresario Cl¿nt Marty. In 1998, he founded the equestrian performing show, Zingaro, which means ¿Gypsy¿. In 2002, he founded the Acad¿e du Spectacle ¿uestre (Academy of Equestrian Arts) in the Grande Ecurie of the Palace of Versailles.

JR is a contemporary French artist. Using his photo collage technique, he has managed to cover the walls of the world with his art, appealing to people who would never usually go to art galleries.

A unique look at the works of Djamel Tatah and those of the minimalist artists in the Lambert Collection. Djamel Tatah's refined paintings reveal the way in which humanity can assert itself as a presence in the world. From reality, ordinary life and world events, the artist paints life-size figures which seem to be suspended in time, set in unspecified places and caught up in a world of silence. Reinterpreting solitude as virtue, Tatah intends to surpass reality, experimenting with colour, light and line to explore his feelings of being part of the world. This catalogue creates a dialogue between the collection's minimalist artists such as Robert Barry, Robert Ryman, Robert Mangold, Richard Serra, Sol LeWitt and Brice Marden, among others, and Tatah's sober refined life-size figures, which somehow seem suspended in time and detached from the world. The artist draws inspiration from everyday situations or major news events to create a metaphysical representation of contemporary man. While Djamel Tatah's work shows a clear relationship with modernist and contemporary monochrome painting, it is also part of a more classical tradition. Hence, the Paris School of Fine Art (ENSBA), where has taught since 2008, has loaned over fifty works from its own illustration collection, works by Delacroix, Matisse, Corneille de Lyon, Cimabue, Giotto, Piero della Francesca, and more, with a view to broadening the dialogue with Djamel Tatah's work over time.

Offers unparalleled insight into Gus Van Sant's world - his films, his collaborations and inspirations - on the occasion of Cinematheque Francaise's 2016 retrospective of the filmmaker's work and life.

A richly illustrated book surveying more than forty years of artist Nils-Udo's development.

Explores peoples attachment to their countries, and the planets role in forming ones identity, as well as the paths and consequences of human migrations. This book also discusses subjects ranging from Tuvaluans forced to leave their Pacific island, to a human cannonball who catapults himself over the US-Mexico border.