Le Dernier Cri: Inside Marseille's Legendary Screen Print Workshop

Since 1993, Le Dernier Cri has been one of the most uncompromising independent publishers in Europe: a screen print workshop that makes books, posters, films and exhibitions entirely on its own terms. Born in the Paris punk and self-publishing scene and based for more than thirty years at La Friche la Belle de Mai in Marseille, the studio publishes artists working on the margins of comics, illustration, outsider art and contemporary art.

We visited the workshop in Marseille to see where it all happens, from the presses and drying racks to an archive that fills the building, and spoke to founder Pakito Bolino about independence, "graphic infection" and why screen printing matters more than ever.

FG: Le Dernier Cri emerged from the Paris punk and self-publishing scene at a moment when mainstream comic publishing was contracting. What did screen printing give you not only as a technique, but as a model of artistic independence that conventional publishing could not?

LDC: Screen printing gave us freedom. It was cheap, physical and immediate. You didn't need a publisher, a big printing company or a lot of money. You could make a book yourself, from the first drawing to the final printed object. You control the whole process.

Traditional publishing generally asks you to adapt your work to an existing market. With Le Dernier Cri, the workshop became a tool for artistic independence, a way of creating our own distribution network, community and economy.

FG: You moved Le Dernier Cri to Marseille and established the workshop at La Friche when the building was still largely abandoned. After more than three decades, how deeply has the identity of the studio been shaped by Marseille and by this particular space? Could Le Dernier Cri have become the same organism anywhere else?

LDC: No. I don't think Le Dernier Cri could have become exactly the same thing anywhere else.

Marseille has always been a city of contradictions: Mediterranean and European, rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, completely chaotic. That energy is present in the work.

When we arrived at La Friche de la Belle de Mai, it was almost a wasteland. There were huge empty industrial spaces, very little money and a lot of freedom. We could build things ourselves. It was more like a laboratory. That environment was essential to Le Dernier Cri. For more than thirty years, the workshop has remained based at La Friche.

The physical space is important because Le Dernier Cri has always been based on making things physically: the workshop, the smell of ink, the screens, the piles of paper, artists arriving from different countries and working together. La Friche became a territory for us, a place where art, music, publishing, punk culture and different forms of popular and marginal culture could collide.

Could Le Dernier Cri have existed somewhere else? Maybe. But it would have been another kind of monster.

FG: You have described Le Dernier Cri's ambition as a form of "graphic infection": images capable of entering people's minds and changing how they see. What must an image possess for it to have that power?

LDC: I am an artist and publisher. I travel around the world looking for artists who make free, marginal, engaged, spontaneous, handmade and uncompromising work. I'm interested in artists who are outside the normal circuits, people who don't necessarily fit into contemporary art, illustration, comics or publishing.

The image has to contain something that escapes classification. The line needs to be really personal.

"Vomir des yeux" / "Puking through the eyes." That is the idea behind Le Dernier Cri: a kind of graphic infection. An image should enter your brain like a virus. You see it once and then, years later, it comes back.

A good image doesn't necessarily explain anything. It can be grotesque, beautiful, disgusting, funny, violent or completely absurd. But it has to have its own life and personal style.

FG: Much of Le Dernier Cri's imagery is simultaneously seductive and alarming. How do you distinguish meaningful transgression from provocation that exists purely for shock?

LDC: I don't really think about provocation as a goal. If you make something simply to shock people, it becomes boring very quickly.

What interests me is ambiguity. An image can be beautiful and horrible at the same time. It can attract you before you realise that something is wrong.

Meaningful transgression comes from necessity. The artist has to go somewhere because that is where the image naturally leads them. I prefer an image that makes me uncomfortable for the right reasons to an image that simply screams, "Look at me, I'm shocking!"

Again, vomir des yeux. The point isn't to shock for five seconds. The point is to leave a stain in the brain.

FG: Le Dernier Cri has always resisted the hierarchy between "high art" and supposedly low or popular culture. Has greater recognition from museums, galleries and collectors complicated that position, or has it allowed the work to infiltrate the establishment on its own terms?

LDC: We never really cared about the hierarchy between high and low art. For me, a children's drawing, a punk flyer, a comic book, an advertising image, a medieval engraving or a painting in a museum can all be part of the same essence. What matters is the intensity of the image, not its social status.

If Le Dernier Cri can bring artists, images and books into museums without cleaning them up or making them respectable, then that's interesting.

FG: Your publications are extraordinarily labour-intensive objects, yet accessibility and affordable editions have always been central to the project. How have you protected that principle while keeping an independent workshop alive for more than three decades?

LDC: It's a constant war. ART KAIDA.

To keep independent publishing alive for decades, you also have to accept paying yourself a ridiculously low salary. You have to accept sometimes paying artists in books rather than money, forget about contracts and copyright, and remain partly outside the system.

Being independent means creating your own rules, but it also means accepting the economic consequences of that choice. Freedom has a price.

The important thing is that there is always a door open for people who don't have much money, so that they can still afford to buy a print or a piece of art. Le Dernier Cri was never created to make luxury objects for a small number of collectors. We make objects that circulate.

FG: At a time when images are increasingly generated, circulated and discarded digitally, does the slowness and physicality of screen printing feel more radical now than it did in 1993?

LDC: In the early 1980s and even in 1993, screen printing was a tool used by a relatively small underground scene. Today, the medium has experienced a real revival and has a visibility and presence that simply did not exist back then.

Screen printing has become fashionable again, but I think there is more to it than fashion. In a world where images are produced instantly, endlessly copied and consumed for two seconds before disappearing, the physicality of screen printing has a different kind of power.

You have to make the screen, mix the ink, put the paper down, print it, let it dry and start again. It takes time. And every print carries traces of the process: sometimes accidents, imperfections, variations. The image becomes an object rather than just another file or image on a screen.

I'm not against digital technology. We use it too, and it can be an incredible tool. But precisely because digital images are now everywhere, the physical and handmade nature of screen printing has become more radical. In a way, what was once an underground technique has become a contemporary language again.

FG: Le Dernier Cri now possesses an enormous archive spanning books, prints, films, music and exhibitions. How do you preserve that history without allowing something born from rebellion and experimentation to become fixed or institutionalised?

LDC: I have absolutely nothing against preservation, museums or the idea of bringing together the whole production of Le Dernier Cri in one place. On the contrary, I think it could be a very interesting thing to do.

Unfortunately, I don't have the financial means to create my own foundation, and I don't really feel that the existing institutions in France are currently interested in taking on this kind of collection. You only have to look at what happened with Art Brut. Jean Dubuffet eventually had to move his collection to Switzerland, where the Collection de l'Art Brut was established in Lausanne.

So the question is not whether we should preserve this history. Of course we should. The question is: who is willing to take responsibility for it, and under what conditions? I would be very happy if the entire Le Dernier Cri production could one day be preserved in a place where it could remain accessible, alive and available to future generations. But I don't want it to become a mausoleum.

Le Dernier Cri is not finished. The archive is not a monument to the past. It is more like a pile of ammunition. There are thousands of books, prints, films, posters and drawings. They continue to create connections between artists and generations. Younger artists discover older artists through the archive and then produce something completely different.

For me, preserving the history doesn't mean freezing it. It means keeping it alive, so that it can be reused, transformed and contaminated again.

Feed on these images. Digest them. Regurgitate them until your very last cry.

FAWW Gallery stocks a selection of hand-pulled screen prints from the Le Dernier Cri workshop in Marseille. Browse the Le Dernier Cri collection.