'Cracks / Amsterdam' (A Tenement t-shirt ℅ Alix Chauvet.)

A typeface owing to poet, artist and designer Alix Chauvet, a script formed of cracks in city surfaces, Amsterdam:

I notice small cracks in the walls of the stairwell of my flat. I take a closer look and realise that some forms strangely evoke letter shapes. I see an O, an I, an X... All these marks, born of accidents, can be read as typographic signs. My mind starts to instil meaning in these meaningless defects. Walls become the epicentre of communication.

Alix Chauvet, MMXXV

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(100% combed and ring-spun cotton.)

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Chauvet is the author of the twentieth title in Tenement’s “Yellowjacket” series, Cyclamen. See here for a further word on this title, and order direct from Tenement here.

Through these creative ‘translations’ of Charles Baudelaire, Alix Chauvet—artist, designer, poet—refuses fidelity in favour of flirtation: her ‘flowers of evil’ line Amsterdam’s canals, drink from the same rainclouds as Rachel Ruysch’s bewitching bouquets, sprout through peat, and are tended by a distinctly feminist and nomadic sensibility. Chauvet—akin to Olive Moore, Sean Bonney and Lisa Robertson—takes the nineteenth-century French decadent as a contemporary accomplice for aesthetic and linguistic misbehaviour. Walter Benjamin once wrote of Baudelaire that he is ‘der geheime Architekt der Moderne,’ and in Chauvet’s hands, those foundations are made porous, unbuilt into cast shadows, into ribbons, into veins streaming across the page. Accompanied by scans of the French poems and Chauvet’s shadow photography, what Cyclamen ultimately offers us is a regenerative rewilding of the English language: a wondrous terrain ringed by vines of unruly syntax and dotted with the fruit of words refusing domestication by any single tongue.

Mia You