The Angoulême International Comics Festival announced on Wednesday the cancellation of an exhibition devoted to the cartoonist Bastien Vivès after the “threat” received by this author from controversial works deemed child pornography and misogynism. Highlighting security issues and taking care not to position itself on the background of the controversy, the management specifies in a press release that “physical threats were made against Bastien Vivès. It is therefore not possible for the event to consider that its programming could pose such risks to an author and, potentially, in a few weeks, to its festival-goers”.
The exhibition “In the eyes of Bastien Vivès” was to open at the end of January in the Charente city on the occasion of this event, the most important for the world of comics. While the controversy has swelled in recent days, with the launch of an online petition against the exhibition (more than 100,000 signatories), the FIBD initially refused to change its programming. But “new facts have radically changed the nature of this situation and now impose on the Festival the need to cancel this exhibition”wrote management on Wednesday, who also reported “of intimidation […] against members of the Festival team”.
The Bastien Vivès case is tearing the world of comics apart. Mainly known to the general public as co-author of the best-selling Lastman or for his comic strip on the world of classical dance Polina (Casterman), he also signs books featuring the most outrageously twisted taboos and sexual situations. Attacked since their publication for “apology for incest” or “trivialization of child pornography”.
“The Festival considers that the work of Bastien Vivès, as a whole, falls within the scope of freedom of expression and that it is up to the law to draw the boundaries in this area and to justice to enforce them”, shighlights the FIBD on Wednesday in its press release. Culture Minister Rima Abdul Malak said on Tuesday that “certain words” past of Bastien Vives “are not acceptable”, saying “understand emotion” current, in an interview at Parisian. Qualifying her argument, she adds that “It’s not the exhibition itself that is the problem” and that we “can’t reduce this author to two comic strips and a few lines spoken in an interview”. “Incest excites me to death”had launched Vives in the magazine miss in 2017. His defenders assure that he was joking then.