Ulli Lust

Translating Sensations

“Any real-life event can be the cause for comics.”

Ulli Lust is a cartoonist and the author of several award-winning graphic novels. Her published work also includes comic journalism featuring observations on contemporary life. Her most celebrated graphic novel, Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life, is an autobiographical work which revisits the trials and tribulations of her rebellious 17-year-old self on a hitchhiking trip through Italy some 25 years later. The novel was translated into ten languages and won several awards, including the 2011 Prix de la revelation at the Angoulême International Comics Festival. Her recent autobiographical novel, How I Tried to Be a Good Person, is a memoir of a passionate but ultimately disastrous love triangle between herself as a young artist in Vienna, her older partner, and another man who had recently emigrated from Lagos. The work was shortlisted for the Fauve d’Or at Angoulême in 2018.

 

 

 

Lust’s narrative-based work also includes Voices in the Dark, an adaptation of the novel Flughunde by Marcel Beyer, which presents a fictional account of Helga Goebbels, the daughter of German World War II minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels. Since 2013, she teaches as a professor for comics and illustration at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hannover, Germany.

 

As a mentor, Lust is seeking applicants who want to create a nonfiction comic work, be it documentary, autobiographical, or based on historical events. “Any real-life event can be the cause for comics,” she says. “The question is how to shape it into an exciting visual narrative. The images do not have to represent an utterly realistic view; comics can translate the sensations that come with being alive. Any historic or biographical incident gets its significance by the emotions it triggers in us. The author’s job is to enable the readers to see other people’s perspective and understand their feelings, to transmit the experience, how it feels to be in other people’s skin.”

Applicants should ideally have some experience in graphic storytelling and comics, and perhaps have even already created a book. “Comics are a complex medium—countless decisions have to be made concerning the layers of interrelated aspects of a comic: The images, text, storyline, composition, consistency, and so on. Mentoring a comic project is not just mental support, it is quite similar to the work of an editor. We will talk about your narrative intentions and what can actually be seen on the paper.”

ullilust.de

Watch the video statement to find out more about what Lust is looking for in applications:

Nominees

Ness Ilene Garza

The Mosquito

Focusing in on autobiographical material in which no topic is off-limits, Ness Ilene Garza proposes a graphic novel she describes as a "spiritual thriller." An art institution offers a residency program for BIPOC artists. However, being kept constantly inebriated rather than sufficiently fed, the participating artists begin to waste away. And though the director of the residency has promised only artists would be allowed on the property, more and more donors start to show up, who seem to be more interested in the BIPOC artists' bodies than their body of work.
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Özge Samancı

Evil Eye

Media artist and graphic novelist Özge Samancı proposes a murder mystery set in Istanbul ahead of the 1995–96 elections, as a conservative party rises to power using religion to cynically appeal to voters. The novel explores the tactics right-wing populist leaders use throughout the world: sowing fear, celebrating binary thinking, “othering” marginalized groups, and using anger and hostility to promote divisions.  Evil Eye melds humor and suspense as narrative devices to trace the rise of authoritarianism. While the story‘s atmosphere and many anecdotes are autobiographical, the plot is fictional. Find out more

M.S. Harkness

Time Under Tension

M.S. Harkness is the author of the graphic novels  Desperate Pleasures  (Uncivilized, 2020) and Tinderella  (Kilgore Books, 2018) and various self-published works. Her project for Forecast is a 260-page graphic memoir titled Time Under Tension, which examines the author’s life in her twenties as she uses movement and weightlifting to find balance while living with past sexual trauma. The narrative is a sequel to Desperate Pleasures, and takes place over one year of her life as she becomes a certified personal trainer.
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Mentee

Evil Eye

Özge Samancı

Mentors Edition 6

Tatiana Bilbao

From Stories to Spaces

Francesca Bria

Data Democracy and the Green Transition

Sofia Jernberg

Sound as Organized Time

Ulli Lust

Translating Sensations

Mathilde Monnier

Unlimited Gestures

Emeka Ogboh

Sensing the World