Still Charlie After All These Years
Among the events that led to the creation of the Galway Cartoon Festival, one of the most important was the murder of five cartoonists and seven others at the offices of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine in Paris. A lot of our initial motivation was to do something positive and good for cartooning, show that the art was important and valued.
And so, ten years on, we feel the need to mark the anniversary of those tragic events. Not with mourning, but with a celebration: Of the lives that were lived right up until that day, of their humour and art, and of the spirit of satire that inspired them.
So we are holding a “cartoon seminar”, an illustrated conference, bringing together cartooning talent from Ireland and other countries – France in particular of course – as well as writers, academics, and others with an interest in visual satire, to look to the future.
We are receiving generous support in this project from Galway city via the CAIRDE fund, as well as from the Embassy of France in Ireland and the Galway French Consular Agency.
Introducing Ça Presse!
Ça Presse in action
Our partners in this will be Ça Presse, a media and information education association with a particular focus on press cartooning. Founded in 2019 in Lyon, it works with adults and school groups to help them understand the media and develop critical judgment.
Thanks to them, we already have some very significant guests lined up for the conference in October:
Camille Besse was born in 1983 and grew up in Paris. After studying for seven years she became a graphic designer, and began her career as a cartoonist at Charlie Hebdo.
Her other drawing credits include Causette, L’Huma Dimanche, Le Pèlerin, Marianne, and Journal des Activités Sociales.
She also works as a comic artist and animates TV cartoons.
Thibaut Soulcié is a French cartoonist and comic strip artist. Born in the Loir-et-Cher region in 1983, Thibaut grew up in a farming family before studying art and graphics in Paris and Strasbourg.
His work has appeared in many media outlets including 28 Minutes (Arte), La Revue Dessinée, Fluide Glacial, Télérama, Marianne, Fakir, CQFD, L’Équipe, and more recently L’Est Républicain and Médiapart, for whom he draws sports coverage in cartoons. Other work includes Les Supères with Jorge Bernstein and Homo Politicus with writer Nena.
Coralina Picos is the founder and director of Ça Presse.
“We would like it [the future of press cartoons] to be a bright future, but it doesn’t necessarily look rosy because there are many newspaper editorial offices that don’t publish images, and there’s no artistic direction.
“That’s why we partner with newspapers like Libération or Marianne, which have artistic directors and really give cartooning a prominent place.”
