Books published by Actes Sud

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.

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 luxury pop-up format book of paper constructions expanding on the Hermes scarf brand's designs.

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.

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.