Michaël Ferrier Inter-Media: Writing the World Between Image, Music and Text

Abstract

Informed by his practice of music, drawing, photography and calligraphy, and depicting various experiences of border crossing between cultures, languages and media, Michaël Ferrier’s eclectic writings are characterised by an aesthetic hybridity that defies generic classifications. In line with his critique of the primacy of the visual in contemporary societies, his versatile prose frequently uses synaesthesia and refers to numerous art forms such as jazz, painting or cinema, thereby appealing to the reader’s five senses. Ceaselessly experimenting in his literary work with the flexible form of the novel, between fact and fiction, Ferrier published in 2019 his first photo-text, Scrabble, which is analysed in depth in the second part of this article. In this autobiographical narrative focusing on his childhood in Chad in the 1970s, the numerous black and white illustrations introduce a complex game of presence and absence that mirrors the way memory functions. Haunted by the traumatic advent of civil war that brutally halted Ferrier’s stay in Africa, this multi-media work circles around an ominous image of the author playing Scrabble with his brother as the conflict is about to break out; evoked at the beginning and the end of the text, this decisive image however remains elusive—a “ghost image.”.