Ramona Badescu & Benoit Guillaume

Writer & Graphic designer, Romania & France

  • Ramona Badescu +

    Born in 1980 in the south of Romania, Ramona Badescu arrived at the age of 10 in the south of France, where she has been living ever since.
    As a writer of children’s literature, she has written some thirty books, including the Pomelo series, with Benjamin Chaud. Her books were translated into more than fifteen languages. She likes to make text and images dance in new or simply amusing combinations, around questions related to the appearance, transformation, and disappearance of things.
    She regularly collaborates with Delphine Durand, Benjamin Chaud, Bruno Gibert, Fanny Dreyer, Aurore Callias, Amélie Jackowski, Walid Taher, and Benoît Guillaume, for the creation of illustrated books (albums, short novels, poems, theatre plays).
    She also creates books on her own, such as Tiens!, where text and photos are mixed together for young readers.
    Most of her books are published by Albin Michel Jeunesse, Les grandes personnes, Hélium, Le port a jauni, or Cambourakis.
    She is also a translator (from English), and co-directs documentary films with Jeff Silva.

  • Benoît Guillaume +

    Benoît Guillaume was born in 1976. After attending graphic design schools in Quimper, Paris, and New York, he worked as a graphic designer in an agency before settling down as a freelance designer. He draws and directs several animated films and currently devotes himself to comics, drawing and painting for commissions or personal work. His work spans from the notebook format to more ambitious forms, often made outdoors, on the asphalt or on the ground. His work sometimes takes the form of the graphic novel, other times a visual portrait of a city or a country.

    His books have been published by La Cinquième Couche, l'Association, Cambourakis, Actes-Sud BD, Massot; fiction stories (Le fantôme, La sorcière, adapted from a novel by Marie Ndiaye), graphic novels (Birmanie, fragments d’une réalité), travel stories (Chuc Suc Khoe, Alger-Marseille allers-retours, poems accompanied by drawings (Par hasard, Bus 83, with Ramona Badescu)

    In 2017, he co-created the Mineolux publishing house, which publishes his own work or the work of other artists.


L’empreinte des nuages (The Track of the Clouds)

L’empreinte des nuages (The Track of the Clouds) is the beginning of a work of writing and painting around the question of this double movement of the sky and the earth that cross and rub against each other. This friction is materialized in the form of a cloud. We are spectators of the clouds, of their moving, free form, with temporary contours, with no other intention than "to be clouds" and whose presences are nevertheless significant for our human, vegetable, animal, and mineral lives. With this project, Badescu and Guillaume seek to question what clouds, through their passing nature, imprint in, and around us. What patterns, desires, freedoms, awareness of our limitations.
This project is supported by the publishing house "Le port a jauni" in Marseille, which publishes bilingual French-Arabic books in its "Poèmes" collection. Ramona Badescu and Benoît Guillaume previously published Par hasard (2019). Their book Bus 83 will be published in the same collection in the summer of 2020.