BufFarm ONE HEALTH: Coming Soon into a Graphic Novel!
By the end of 2023, the BufFarm team welcomed an artist-researcher in ecology, who embarked on drawing a reportage on ecological research in Southeast Asia. This seven-chapter graphic novel highlights the professions research on biodiversity in Southeast Asia, from Thailand to Vietnam. The book, titled “Researchers Among the Living,” will be published at the end of 2025 in French, English, and Thai.
A Chapter Dedicated to BufFarm One Health
Among the seven illustrated reports, the final chapter is devoted to the BufFarm One Health project – specifically, the ethnobotanical research our team has been conducting since 2021 in collaboration with the Lua community inhabiting the village of Ban Huay Phan in Nan Province.
Character sketches and original BufFarm artwork pages 6/35 and 22/35. Credits: Estelle CRUZ, 2024.
Why a Graphic Novel?
More accessible than scientific publications, graphic novels democratize scientific knowledge for a non-academic audience. Over the past decade, they have become increasingly popular for presenting complex societal issues in fields from biological to Social Sciences.
Depicting the BufFarm project through a drawn reportage also sheds light on the behind-the-scenes of ethnographic research – from fieldwork to data analysis. The reportage presents our underlying questions, wanderings, successes, re-evaluations, and paradoxes encountered by our interdisciplinary team of anthropologists, botanists, ecologists and microbiologists,. This scientific collaboration is part of a broader communication approach to share our work with the general public (conferences, photo exhibitions).
From field sketch to a comic artbook
At the end of 2023, our team was accompanied by Estelle Cruz during five days of interviews with the inhabitant of of Ban Huay Phan. Numerous sketches of buffaloes, residents, and architectural details were made on-site. These graphic notes were then enriched by reading scientific publications and consulting photographs taken by the artist-researcher, transforming them into a story (currently being written), which is then storyboarded before the final pages are drawn.
From Graphic Novel to Artistic Experimentation
Working at the interface between arts and sciences is part of an artistic experimentation process where drawing, text, composition, and materials interact. A classic graphic novel follows a creation process: 1/ scriptwriting, 2/ storyboarding, 3/ drawing the pages, 4/ colouring. In this experimentation, the work blends the four stages: a main narrative thread is defined with the researchers, on which pieces of text and images are created independently until they converge and articulate on paper to create a complete graphic novel chapter.
Drawing Technique
Seeking materiality, the final pages are painted with earth collected locally in the village. The comic pages were prepared with leaf imprints studied and collected on-site. Once coated with earth, the leaves are pressed onto the comic pages, onto which drawings and text are then inserted. The compositions of the pages are finally balanced by adding leaf imprints, text placement, etc.
In situ experiments in Ban Huay Phan village. Earth imprints collected on-site on 200g paper. Credits: Estelle Cruz, 2024
Arts-Science Exhibition
The first comic pages were exhibited last month at the Olivier Houg Contemporary Art Gallery in France. They will be presented from September 2024 at the BACC – Bangkok Art and Cultural Centre – as part of the Bangkok Comic Festival. In a bid to give back to the Lua people, 50% of the proceeds from the sale of original comic pages are donated to the Lua community.
Learn More:
– Instragram: @DrawforBiodiversity
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Nicolas Lainé (31 juillet 2024). BufFarm ONE HEALTH: Coming Soon into a Graphic Novel! BufFarm One Health. Consulté le 19 janvier 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/124ek
