The film creates an image of femininity as a hyperbolic creature, of drag as a camp monstrosity halfway between the human subject and the living object, initially presented to the viewer in a frontal shot. However, the film reverses the gaze: the drag queen, who is in the beginning stared at, becomes the viewer. Her movements unfold the world of the book – it opens up a miniature fiction and subordinates itself to the gesture of the sculpture’s tentacle, that initiates an encounter between the two beings. The miniaturisation enables the hierarchical relationship of size to be reversed: the small clock, like an icon, is only a representation of the real object – Summoning, by Andy Hope 1930, offered to the viewer like a ritual, whose silence and planimetric composition emphasize the reverent tone. Yet the ceremony blurs the boundaries, and the excessiveness of the drag queen as priestess, setting the mechanism of time in motion, gives her control over Time not unlike that of a puppeteer, and she manipulates time at will.

Juli Susin lives and works in Montreuil and Albisola.

He graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 1991.

He was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2023. Susin’s practice covers photography, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, film, writing and artists’ books. In the 2000s, he set up Silverbridge, an publishing project for collaborative artists’ books, now known as Royal Book Lodge.

His major cycle Chronos Swimmer is a long-term investigation in the form of autobiographical fiction that combines installation, film, music, photography, ceramics and an artists’ book. In 2023, the cycle was presented at the Musée des Abattoirs in Toulouse. In 2025, his novel and photographs will be published by Hatje Cantz.

Susin’s work has been shown in institutions such as: La Chapelle de Saint-Augustin, Beaux Art de Paris; Forum Stadt Park Gratz; Museum of Contemporary Art, Mexico City; Oscar Niemeyer Museum, Brazil; Garage Center, Moscow; Fotohof, Salzburg; Fondation Miglorissi, Asuncion; Musée des Abattoirs, Toulouse.

Mirron Mitzkewich, born in Moscow in 2000, left Russia in 2018 and became a political refugee in 2024. He lives and works in Paris, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Cinema and Audiovisual Studies at Université Paris 1 in 2022.

Since 2018, he has directed and co-directed several experimental short films in digital and Super 8. Since 2022, Mirron Mitzkewich has been collaborating with musician and composer Jeanne Susin on music videos and live recordings. The same year sees the start of a collaboration with Royal Book Lodge, editing video archives and producing new recordings of exhibitions and performances. In 2023, he worked on the editing and partial direction of the film Chronos-Swimmer by Juli Susin and Raisa Aid, presented at the Musée des Abattoirs, Toulouse. In 2024, co-directs the short film « Summoning » with Juli Susin. His latest work, an audiovisual installation entitled « Alienum Corpus », questions selfrepresentation, aiming to transcribe personal experiences of gender transition and exile, a

reflection on alienation in one’s own body and in the world.

Royal Book Lodge emergerged from a collaboration between the artists Juli Susin and Véronique Bourgoin at the end of the 1980s. Its modus operandi is a creation of books that enable a dialogue between artists and synthesizes experimentations with different media as painting, sculpture, photography, film, installations, ceramics, writing. RBL features a list of over forty artists’ books. Often limited editions with elaborate designs, each book offers

innovative stagings of images, texts, and sometimes objects, creating hybrid forms between book, sculpture, and artifact.

From 2000 Royal Book Lodge has made publishing a collaborative process that transcends the physical reality of the book and generates unexpected correspondences, which unpack questions caught up in various constructs of our time related to materiality and dissolution, autobiographical structures and mythological encodings, fiction and reality, human and inhuman, violence and art’s potential as a pharmacological first aid kit.