
















- Edited by Alice Dusapin
- Texts by Frédéric Boyer, Jo Melvin and Emmanuel Tibloux. Interview with Carsten Nicolai and Anne-James Chaton.
- Designed by Coline Sunier & Charles Mazé
- November 2022, English/French, Monograph
- 240 pp., 21 × 29.7 cm, softcover
- Edition of 600
- ISBN 978-2-9576611-3-8
- This publication was co-produced by Académie de France à Rome-Villa Médicis, and made possible thanks to the help and support of Le Centre d’Art Mobile, Bernard Collet, Galerie Far West, Isabelle Gaudefroy, Lebeau & associés, Olivier Michelon, Andréa Stillacci, Xavier Veilhan and Charles Znaty.
Anne-James Chaton is a writer. That’s what people say about him most often. He is also a musician and performer, who for several years has been exploring the landscapes of experimental sound poetry. Anne-James Chaton is also a visual artist, although his artworks have always been more discreet than his literary work. The fields of experimentation are however the same—it is always about writing.
I have the solution for the planet is dedicated to this specific kind of production and brings together for the first time eighteen series of works created between 2003 and 2022. The series are deliberately scattered throughout the publication, thwarting any attempt at a purely chronological or thematic reading, since each series is linked to another, and the repetition of some of them produces a saturation effect that is essential for immersing oneself in the work. The guiding principle in presenting the works has been to avoid reproducingthem systematically. Even if some of them have a definitive physical materiality, here others find a new form, specific to the printed page.
The works are accompanied by notes written by Anne-James Chaton. Like rules of composition, they explain the appearance and functioning of each series. The book is punctuated by three unpublished texts by the editor and writer Frédéric Boyer, the art historian and critic Jo Melvin, and Emmanuel Tibloux, director of EnsAD (École normale supérieure des arts décoratifs), and concludes with an interview between Carsten Nicolai and Anne-James Chaton conducted in spring 2022.
All texts have been published in their original language.
Anne-James Chaton (born in 1970 in Besançon) has developed a multi-polar work, based on a continuous study of the textual materials that punctuate the daily life of contemporary societies. This “poor” literature, produced on a daily basis by a multitude of machines—cash register receipts, museum entrance tickets, leaflets, business cards, credit cards, subscriptions, etc.—constitutes the material for his textual work, which is also used in the production of his work.
The plural and polyglot dimension of his work has led him to develop projects with artists from other scenes and other languages. He has created pieces with Phia Ménard, Sylvain Prunenec, Valeria Giuga, and has written numerous albums with guitarist Andy Moor (The Ex), German musician Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto and Sonic Youth member Thurston Moore. His books are published by Al Dante and P.O.L., his visual works are shown by the Far West Gallery and his sound compositions are published on the German label Noton. Anne-James Chaton was a fellow at the Villa Medici, French Academy in Rome in 2020–2021. He received the Bernard Heidsieck-Centre Pompidou International Prize for Literature in 2022.