by Anaëlle Pirat-Taluy 

He begins to master the gesture: plunge the sieve into the basin, at a certain angle, collect just the right amount of material, evenly, then remove the sieve from the water, lying flat. However, he often has to repeat the movement several times before getting the result he expects. As for perfection, he knows he'd have to work tirelessly, day after day, to achieve it.

He has read somewhere that the Japanese estimate that it takes ten years of practice to become a master in the art of paper-making. In Japan’s few remaining traditional paper mills, the production of a sheet of paper is ceremonial, and there are even songs that the paper-makers sing as they go about their work, which does not tolerate any mistakes. He is aware of all of this, but he is not interested in doing it. First, because he doesn’t seek perfection; he’s looking for the pleasure of the gesture. Second, because the seaweed he uses doesn’t have the innate character of certain types of bark like kōzo, whose strong fibers make it possible to create a sturdy yet soft paper; it’s a difficult material, which won’t stand the test of time very well. Finally, because he loves his unique and imperfect sheets of seaweed paper, which are most of the time intended for nothing but to be themselves.

Of course, he sometimes plays with the sheets: he makes lamps, books, masks, collages, creates color compositions, plays with light. He tries out different uses, but rarely writes or prints on them. On occasion, he has received large orders, which he has always declined: it’s not his vocation to manufacture these sheets in large quantities.

He remembers when he first became interested in algae and the strong impression left by the sight of those tractors hauling tons of green algae washed up en masse on the beaches. The headlines in the newspapers at the time sounded like something out of a bad sci-fi movie: Invasion of the Killer Algae. Strangely enough, this made him want to make some deadly paper. He had heard of poison inks, made from arsenic and widely used in the 19th century— the same green color as seaweed, incidentally—but never of naturally toxic paper. Fortunately, during his first harvests, he realized that green seaweed is only dangerous in large quantities.

His initial idea quickly forgotten, he began to take a better look at this marine plant which is part of his environment, but to which he had never paid much attention. He first saw it as a material to be exploited, an inexhaustible resource that could be used in many fields. Then he saw seaweed as a singular species that could offer him a multitude of formal possibilities, a material that he could bring into his field of research and work.

The newly produced sheets of seaweed paper now rest on large drying racks made of melamine-coated plywood boards. They’ll need to be pressed again, several times, as they tend to buckle and resist the flattening process revealing their inherently unruly nature. Seaweed is surly, even when transformed into paper pulp, and these sheets will never be frozen objects. They will continue to live, reacting to light, heat, or cold; their color will fade, the pulp will rot, the sheet will crack. Seaweed paper is unstable, changeable, and alive.

by Anaëlle Pirat-Taluy 

The diver swam between the rocks, amid the moving seaweed. The tide was halfway out, and although he could have easily explored some areas further out to sea, he was now returning, clinging to the rocks that left him little room to move. However, he kept his head above water, looking for a few specimens that might be useful to him, and also to prolong the pleasant sensation of floating in a misty, silent world. He had tried to take pictures of this underwater garden, to capture and preserve what was happening beneath the water. He particularly liked the movement of the long blades of seaweed, the thick, pulsating forests of kelp disturbed by the swarming sea spaghetti, the sudden appearance of blood-red dulse amid the olive green of serrated kelp, the bright green moss of sea lettuce contrasting with its spongy appearance when it spreads out on the rocks at low tide. Sometimes another species, a sea anemone, a moss-covered crab, or a school of tiny fish, would add to his underwater landscape. It all seemed elusive, to say the least, as it was governed by the constant swaying of the water.

Arriving at the large rocks that form a barrier along the coastline, the diver finally straightens up. There, he notices algae clinging to the reef. There are several species, and their arrangement reminds him of a drawing he saw in the Florule du Finistère by the Crouan brothers while consulting the historical algae books in the library of the Roscoff Biological Station.

He regretted not having made a copy of this particular drawing, and now he was trying to remember the details. The drawing showed the various layers of algae that appear with the tides, about thirty species represented in pencil, one on top of the other on the same rock, according to their formal characteristics. Higher up were the chicken feet of the pelvetia, capable of living out of water for several days. At the base of the rock were long strips of kelp, almost always submerged. Between the two were various specimens, not all of which he knew the names of. Perhaps he should go back to the library to find out more, but at the same time he quite liked his status as an enlightened amateur who was under no obligation to do anything. Last time, the library curator had brought him some rare old books and copies of the first algariums, and she had mistakenly addressed him as an eminent botanist. He had been surprised at how fascinating he found these algariums.

For now, he takes off his diving gear on the beach and stands for a moment to watch the tide. The tide is almost at its lowest point, and lots of seaweed has washed up, along with all kinds of mollusks and crustaceans that are organizing themselves until the sea returns. He has already had a good harvest today, with some beautiful specimens of various seaweed that he will sketch once he returns to his studio. For now, he just wants to enjoy the calm of the day, sit on the rock and watch the barnacles move.

by Julien Villaret

For him, who cannot draw, tracing letters by hand gives him the pleasant feeling of being able to combine precision of movement with elegance of line. It takes him back to his early years at primary school, when he patiently filled pages of notebooks to learn to write, and therefore to communicate.

Writing letters by hand, on a computer, or by twisting seaweed stalks takes him even further back, several millennia ago, when the peoples of Mesopotamia and Iraq began to record their trade using the ancestors of the alphabets they had invented. Their clay tablets were engraved, then fired and preserved, thus sealing the bond between people.

Writing letters takes him back to ancient Egypt, where pictorial forms of writing were used on papyrus—he should look into how this paper was made, perhaps it could be used with certain types of algae—and that takes him back to Greece, where the Phoenician script was perfected to create the first letter combinations that formed the basis of the modern Latin alphabet.

Finally, tracing letters takes him back to the 15th century, when, with the rationalization of printing by Gutenberg and the increase in printing capacity, printing went from being a craft to an industry, and the ancient scribe became an engineer. 

Towards the end of the 20th century, the development of typography underwent an unprecedented acceleration with the rise of digital technologies: the dematerialization of data led to the disappearance of tangible media and tools, the creation of typefaces is no longer the prerogative of the printer or foundry but has become that of the graphic designer, and digital tools now make it possible to design, edit, and distribute original typefaces directly to users. The typography market is full of independent, often untrained creators who, alongside well-established digital foundries (which generally manage more traditional fonts), offer more or less fanciful alphabets that make it easy and fun to create flyers, business cards, and other publications with few resources.

He can't quite remember how he came up with the idea of an alphabet inspired by seaweed. It may have started with the simple gesture of tracing shapes with the flexible stems of certain types of seaweed, drawing as one might with wool, string, or any other long, flexible material. He is not a graphic designer or typographer, but he believes that an alphabet must first reveal an idea, a point of view, an almost philosophical concept that is materialized through lines, strokes, proportions, and the balance between letters, the shape of a curve, and the space between characters.

Printing and typography techniques have evolved over the centuries, bearing the marks of the political upheavals of one era and accompanying the technical advances of another. Renaissance engravers such as Garamont, Jenson, and others developed the foundations of a pure, airy, and modern style of writing that adapted to the dissemination techniques of the time through books and influenced those that followed. The Enlightenment brought harmony to forms and ideas. Man was accountable only to himself, and less and less to God. It is this intellectual framework that shaped our current world and fostered industrial and scientific development, initially a source of wealth, but which has led inexorably to the current catastrophe. If writing evolved with humans from ancient times to the industrial period, what form will it take in the era of accelerated ecocide? Will we be able to translate the urgency of the ecological situation into the straight lines of an A or the zigzags of a Z? These questions are undoubtedly too heavy, overwhelming, and dizzying to tackle head-on. What he would simply like to do is write with algae, giving writing a living, vegetal, non-human dimension.

By collecting several samples of a small brown algae characteristic of the Brittany coastline, Bifurcaria bifurcata, from the foreshore, he formed the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet in lowercase and uppercase. Then, as the algae dried, highly expressive letters emerged, giving rise to a homogeneous assembly. He recorded these small dried algae shapes in a notebook, creating a portable alphabet that he carries with him everywhere, just as a lead type founder might have done in Gutenberg's time. From these signs, the ALG Bifurcaria typeface was born: a simplified version of this organic alphabet, adapted to digital tools. all you need to do is install it on your computer to be able to write with it. As the marine environment is teeming with species of seaweed, he began to imagine an entire family of typefaces completely determined by the aesthetic attributes of kelp, dulse, sea lettuce, and other himanthalias.

He senses that there is something more to this seemingly harmless practice of seeing letters in seaweed. Perhaps the assertion that now, more than ever, we must come to terms with the living world. Alongside the endless ideological and political conflicts that are unique to our species, we are witnessing increasingly frequent and senseless natural phenomena: heat waves, floods, mega fires, mass extinctions... This is Gaia's response to humanity's destructive activity. By considering the Earth and its ecosystems as a whole, an interconnected and sensitive entity, this key concept opens the door to a reversal of our relationship with nature and culture. We can then envisage another way of being in the world, one that is less anthropocentric and more free.

He wanted to capture all these disparate thoughts in the few knotted algae that he simply placed on a white sheet of paper. He wanted to articulate a system of autonomous signs that would recreate a link between humans and nature. So, discreetly, he tried to give shape to this idea, observing the seaweed underwater as he would have observed the characters in a printer's type case. He drew, corrected, shared his thoughts, drew again, and the concept of the alphabet of life was born: his Algalphabet.

by Julien Villaret

I started collecting antique lamps in Berlin about fifteen years ago. Lamps from factories, workshops, communal spaces, made of metal, bakelite, or chrome-plated steel. Early 20th-century models had already reached exorbitant prices, so I naturally turned to more modest fixtures produced during the GDR era, when VEBs (state-owned factories that produced by and for the people) flooded Eastern Europe with a whole range of standardized, durable, and inexpensive products. The particular political situation at the time gave rise to a very interesting, raw and nostalgic style, drawing on modernist influences but adhering to the functional criteria of communism.

When I ended up with too many lamps to store in my workshop, I decided to sell them, and this Sunday hobby almost became a job. I became an expert in lamp repair, my workshop was full of spare parts of all kinds, and I knew the design of most East German lamps produced before the fall of the Berlin Wall in minute detail. It was around this time that I learned to look at lamps differently, no longer as mere functional objects but as works of art in their own right.

For example, couldn't a wall lamp by designer Charlotte Perriand express grace and beauty? The purity of its forms and the language it established with light, in my opinion, elevate her Volet wall lamps to the rank of true works of art produced in series. Many artists have also created unique lighting fixtures or site-specific light installations that they have incorporated into their sculptural practice without distinction of medium or category. Martin Kippenberger, for example, who with his twisted street lamps humorously expressed a certain irreverence and provocation, or James Turrell, who through his immersive light installations so skillfully evoked transcendence and immateriality. As for Noguchi's Akari lamps, they symbolize for me the perfect encounter between nature and craftsmanship. The elegant light fixture diffuses a soft, milky light. The mulberry paper that forms the lampshade follows the contours of a bamboo skeleton, giving it a disturbing physical presence and making this object an icon of 20th-century design. 

So what place could my seaweed paper have in this unique dialogue between art, design, and light? First of all, it is important to remember that seaweed would not exist without light: sunlight enables this marine plant to photosynthesize, reproduce, and create living matter. Then there is light again, which causes the depigmentation of Ulva washed up on the beach, leading to its bleaching and degradation. There is therefore an essential link between algae and light, which accompanies the life and death cycle of green tides, and this is precisely the idea revealed by the luminous presence of the seaweed paper lamps.

When lit, they bathe the room in a green halo that envelops us in a colorful and soothing bubble. They use a simple LED strip and a sheet of seaweed paper attached by small magnets to a folded sheet metal structure to diffuse the light. Each flowering season, a new sheet of seaweed will be produced to replace the previous one, which will have been bleached by time. The timing of this renewal depends on how long the lamp is used. It will take a few weeks or several months. It is a slow process that the user can decide to slow down or speed up, creating a more sustainable, symbiotic, and organic interaction between themselves and the light object. The used sheet can then be returned to nature as compost, thrown into the sea to feed the fish, or kept as a trace of the time spent with the seaweed and the light.

by Julien Villaret 

He gets on the scooter, a little restless, and turns the ignition. His knee hurts, but the adrenaline hasn’t worn off yet, and the pain is bearable. Earlier, as he rode along the quiet roads of Nong Khiaw, he didn’t see the little orange cones marking a patch of fresh tar on the broken asphalt and drove straight through it, like a mouse into a glue trap. He was wearing a helmet and shoes, so the worst was avoided. But he still has big scratches on his legs that will take a long time to heal.

Now, all he can think about is getting back to his research and moving on. His goal in setting off this morning was to find one of the seaweed farms that he has seen several times through the window of the bus as it took him from Luang Prabang to Nong Khiaw. Here, kaipen—a kind of seaweed chip—is a national treasure. He had tried it as soon as he arrived in the country and couldn’t get enough. The seaweed’s vegetal taste is enhanced by the aroma of roasted sesame seeds, as well as chunks of fried tomato and onion. They can be eaten seasonally as an appetizer or as a side dish, and it’s a delicacy in Laos.

But what interests him beyond these gastronomic considerations is the production economy set up by the farmers of these riverweed. How are they used, harvested, processed, how often, and with what tools? The large drying racks set up by the roadside, with hundreds of sheets of seaweed exposed to the sun, immediately reminded him of his own seaweed paper production 10,000 kilometers away—different methods and a different purpose, but the same gesture and material. He wanted to find out more about it. For example, he could see himself back in Europe using Ulva-based kaipen in a culinary performance. For him, this food has unparalleled aesthetic and gustatory characteristics, and the idea of food as an artistic experience has always interested him.

Meanwhile, he finds himself lost in the Laotian countryside on roads that wind between karst mountains, isolated villages, and lush green streams. When he sees one of these streams, he stops to check if there are any men or women busy collecting riverweed. He knows it’s been in bloom for a few weeks now, and he’s hoping for a clue that might lead him to some local producers. Several times he stops to interview people on the side of the road. He communicates by waving his hands, pointing to the river, and then mimicking someone putting food into his mouth. The villagers look at each other in amusement. They don’t understand what he’s trying to tell them.

No one speaks English or French in this remote region. Then he gets an idea: he has several photos on his cellphone, taken while making seaweed paper last summer in Brittany. He finds them, and when he shows them to an old woman, her ageless face lights up. She seems to have finally understood what he’s been talking about for the last hour—the kaipen! With a few vague gestures and brief phrases, she tells him where to go: a little further down the river, then turn right onto the path. There he should find what he’s looking for.

This time, his scooter starts straight up. The machine seems to retain no memory of the unfortunate episode this morning, unlike its rider, who is starting to feel his wounds awakening. Never mind—he’s soon on a rocky dirt road leading down to the river, and after a few minutes of nervous driving, he spots a fenced-in property, behind which hundreds of green squares seem to line the garden. It looks like an installation of chlorophyll solar panels, meticulously arranged around a small farmhouse, where inside, three women are hard at work. He waves to indicate his presence. He’s shown to the gate and ushered into the property.

by Anaëlle Pirat-Taluy 

In July 2002, in a copy of L’art rupestre protohistorique de Bretagne : artefacts, signes et motifs (Protohistoric Rock Art in Brittany: Artifacts, Signs, and Motifs) by Paul Ferdinand Jacobsthal, which belonged to prehistorian and archaeologist Jacques Briard, I discovered a handwritten letter from a certain D. Le Goofic. This letter—written in strange, flourishing script—put forward a fascinating hypothesis about the use of seaweed in Bronze Age funeral rites in Brittany. The eminent archaeologist had just passed away, and I had been commissioned by the French Prehistoric Society to inventory the books in his library, which he had donated to us. The bookshelves covered three high walls in Mr. Briard's former office: It took me several days to catalog and analyze the works it contained, as it was rich in rare books, specialized references, editions annotated by the world's greatest historians, and unique manuscripts. It was an ideal, almost magical library for the student of Armorican archaeology that I was at the time.

I found no information about D. Le Goofic. He was probably one of those amateur archaeologists who like to imagine new discoveries and try to demonstrate their knowledge by using a borrowed style and references to current research. Mr. Briard must have found the hypothesis appealing. As for me, despite the almost laughable fantasy of the ideas developed in it, this letter was the catalyst for the research I am still conducting today. I am pleased to reproduce it here.

"Dear Mr. Briard,

Have you seen the results of recent studies on the burial mounds and graves in the region? No doubt you have! You are responsible for most of the discoveries made in Brittany, but the technologies available to researchers today are simply fascinating and still have many surprises in store for us. You will therefore have noticed, as I have, among the finds unearthed during the current excavations, the presence of traces of seaweed in the ÎIe Blanche* coffin near the skeleton's skull. This discovery leads us to various conjectures, which I would like to share with you here. Thanks to the remarkable work of archaeologists from the universities of York and Glasgow, we know that seaweed was an important part of the diet of ancient peoples living on the shores of the Celtic Sea. In-depth studies of burials dating back to 3000 BC have also revealed the variety of objects that were placed in the graves to accompany the dead on their journey to the afterlife: weapons, jewelry, everyday objects made of ceramic or bronze, tools, and even all the equipment needed to organize feasts. Significant residues of organic materials such as wood and leather have also been found in the graves, suggesting that we will never know the shape of many of these objects.

Finally, we know the importance of the head among Celtic tribes: it was the seat of the soul, the place from which the spirit departed when the body died. I am obviously not telling you anything new, you know all this better than I do, but these elements that I am sharing with you here allow me to corroborate my hypothesis. Indeed, I believe I can say that seaweed played an important role in the rites and ceremonies of that time and that, like other materials whose use is well established, it may have been used to make objects. You might say that algae may simply have served as food for the long journey that awaited the deceased, or even as an offering to the gods who would welcome them. Certainly, but I believe that algae are greatly underestimated, and that their properties and potential were quickly understood by the Celts. My idea, quite simply, is that seaweed was used to make masks!

Masks are both a reflection of divinity and a representation of the individual. They establish a link between the human world and the spirit world, and their use, particularly in funeral rites, was well established at that time. So their use is established, but what did these masks look like? This is where the archaeologist's knowledge and imagination come together. If we consider the aesthetics and manufacturing processes of the time, as well as the characteristics of certain types of seaweed, we can imagine that they may have been woven, as if to make clothing. They may also have been crushed to obtain a paste that could be molded into faces. There would probably have been few decorations on masks made from such a material: exaggeratedly rounded or oval faces with simplified features. The nose would have been barely protruding, but there would have been a strong protrusion of the forehead, brow ridges, and chin. The mouth would have been a single line expressing the emotion of the figure. No other features could have been drawn on this mask: no hair, no beards, no engraved patterns or decorations, just simple holes for the eyes. These masks could have the rudimentary appearance of the overmodeled skulls of the Neolithic period found in the Near East or in the Pacific Islands, or they could resemble the rough and powerful figures of Dogon wooden ceremonial masks. We could also compare them, in terms of use and form, to the masks of Mesoamerican cultures made of amate paper, which we know about indirectly from Spanish descriptions... I hope you will forgive me for these somewhat crude ethnographic comparisons; they are purely the result of my enthusiasm!

The algae used to make the masks may have been chosen for their color, in the natural shades of red, green, and brown that the material offers. I am no expert in the symbolism of colors, but it seems that red is reserved for men of power, or even representations of gods, while green and brown are for beings of nature and men of the Earth. The red mask would then be worn by masters of ceremony and other sorcerers representing divine forces on earth. The green and brown masks would be used to represent and identify the faces of the dead in the afterlife. All of this leads me to believe that seaweed is sacred. Associated with funeral rites and celebrations, used as a material as noble as wood and metal in divine representations, necessary for life on earth as well as in the afterlife. After all, such an abundant and rich resource certainly deserved more respect than it does today. I hope you won't find these few thoughts too extravagant, but after all, don't we need dreamers to advance science?

D. Le Goofic

* The author of the letter refers here to a schist chest discovered in 1967 in a field in the commune of Locquirec. This chest, which was used as a burial place for a young adult, was remarkable for having remained particularly well sealed, allowing a skeleton and various objects to be recovered in a good state of preservation.

by Julien Villaret

For me, printed images are like living organisms. They are born under the printer nozzle, taking shape from the ink that passes through the mesh of a silkscreen, or is set on the paper by the rollers of an offset press. We look at them, we admire them, they live their own lives, then age and fade like a flower or the tired body of an animal. In the windows of travel agencies, obsolete postcards of faraway destinations retain only the blue sky of CMYK printing. This creates a chromatic monotony that I've always found moving.

This phenomenon of image aging, otherwise known as depigmentation, is well known in the graphics industry. Suppliers of printing inks, for example, have defined two types of scale to quantify these losses of contrast and color due to extended exposure to light: the wool scale and the gray scale. The latter distinguishes different shades of gray that, when compared to a printed image, indicate the degree of contrast or shimmer loss due to light exposure. This is unavoidable over time, whether we're talking about postage stamps or 4-by-3-meter posters stuck on roadsides.

The same thing can be observed in Ulva-based algae paper sheets, which contain green pigments such as chlorophyll. These are essential for photosynthesis, the process by which algae produce energy from light. Over time, the chlorophyll will undergo photochemical degradation and the algae will turn white. This is what consistently happens to most of my works made from seaweed paper. They're ephemeral, degrading over time, and that's fine. It seems to me that art is more a process than a fixed product, and we have to accept that its forms are not eternal. This is especially true with work produced from natural materials like algae, mycelium, vegetable dyes, and so on.

This notion of ephemerality, underlying the physical properties of seaweed paper, can also be traced back to the origins of green tides. This cyclical, seasonal phenomenon of environmental pollution by algae is encouraged by the runoff of nitrates and phosphates from intensive agriculture. Ulvae first pile up on beaches, then turn white and eventually rot away. They are then collected for incineration, or undergo a slow degradation process before disappearing, soiling the coastline in the process. In this way, nature seems to be rebelling against the excessive exploitation and utilitarian management of its resources.

Georges Bataille expressed this concept of an excess that produces nothing, to be squandered freely without counting the cost, in his 1949 work The Accursed Share (“La part maudite”). Applied to the economy, society, and the individual, expenditure or loss is not simply an aimless use of energy, but a form of excessive, irrational consumption that escapes any utilitarian or productive calculation. The philosopher's examples include sacrifice, feasting, excess, the consumption of useless resources, and the destruction of goods.

Extending this concept to the natural world, we can draw a parallel with green tides, which serve no purpose and are not a part of any functional process, but which by their scale open up a space of imbalance and destruction for the environment. While the consequences are indeed unfortunate—the poisoning of animals or walkers with toxic gas, the prevention of the development of other species, the disfigurement of the coastline—we can't help but see in the expansion of green tides a certain reaffirmation of life through loss, a way for living organisms to free themselves from the constraints imposed by man, revealing a living force that is impossible to control.