le Presque Code

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Le Presque Code
Graduation project on the French Civil Code (one of the major texts of Law) : reinventing the book by cutting out words in order to create a new content, one poetic, amusing, even lyrical.

Law can be seen as boring, rigid and worrisome. However, with a little tweaking of the text the Civil Code can become poetic, aesthetic, even fun, by choosing words on each page in order to invent a new text. By cutting out unwanted words and making new sentences, one can imagine a new Code, one expressing more than the notions of right or wrong, legal or illegal, allowed or not allowed. It takes a lyrical substance thanks to the careful choice of specific photos that underline a particular feeling and emotion in relation to the pages.
This interactive reading proves that by reading in between the lines, a whole new meaning can
be created.

For my Masters project, I chose Law as a topic for various reasons.

Law was my first choice of career, one I pursued for over 4 years until I realized its rigidity and the impossibility of working abroad meant too much to me to continue on this career path. However, law in itself still holds a great interest to me and as of today I have never regretted studying it for so long. Not only is it a very interesting field, it also offers a unique perspective on French society and moral values, as well as inducing rigour, discipline and general culture. Even though I have never looked back on it and am absolutely passionate about graphic design, it seemed adequate to try and link two very different professions in the one project that would signify the end nine years of studies.

I also wanted to communicate this interest for law to visual artists who tend to disregard it as boring and redundant ; in my experience, studying law can be very amusing and provide light readings - although probably not often enough! Indeed there are designer jokes about Comic Sans MS and there are jurist jokes about famous laws and court cases.

This combination of law and design served yet another purpose: I wished to prove that one is not exclusive of the other, in general as well as concerning my own experience. I am proud to have studied both and to be able to combine them in everyday life and work, applying rigour to creativity, culture to design, attention to detail to projects, reality to passion.

The French Civil Code is the first and most symbolic book of law in France ; compiled for the first time in 1804 on Napoleon’s initiative, it represents a reformation and codification of the French civil laws. It is divided in three Books - persons, property, aquisition of property - and contains more than 2,000 articles.
For this project, I chose to focus on the articles of the first Book, first because they contain the most basic civil rights such as citizenship, persons, adoption, mariage, second because it leaves me the opportunity to resume this project later on by focusing on the other Books.

The challenge was to find a way to raise interest about law by making it a lighter reading while keeping the spirit of a law book. I wished to change its perspective and not destort it completely - it had to still be a project about law, however lyrical and poetic it became. After much tests and debating, I decided to keep the articles as they were and choose the words I wanted to keep, so as to create a new content which would still obviously come from the original text. Therefore, the technique was to put the text into a basic layout, one article after the other, one page after the other - and to cut out everything I didn’t want to keep.

As an afterthought, I added photos from two very different photographers, Robert Adams and Cédric Delsaux, in order to underline some pages, induce irony to others, emphasize an emotion and create surprise in the reading and the general aspect of the book. Robert Adams made very aesthetic black and white photos which depth and beauty coincided with my project. The work of Cédric Delsaux is a contemporary interrogation of the modern world, between fiction and reality. I chose those artists specifically for their profound oeuvre and their relative anonimity for the public ; I find that famous photographies are already so well-known that they almost become meaningless, or at the very least people already have their own vision and understanding of them. I wanted the readers to be stimulated in their imagination and not to try and paste a ready-made interpretation of an image on a brand new project.

In the original Civil Code, this series of articles regarding nationality and citizenship repeated the words 'française', 'France', etc so many times it almost seemed ridiculous and pompous. Cutting out all words except those on the page symbolized both this feeling of self-importance so typical in France and the absurd debates about nationality that were taking place at the time in France, under the Sarkozy presidency.
I wished to underline those facts as well as denounce them as being shallow and far from my personal opinion.