Amandine Puntous is a comic strip author and illustrator from the Haute-Loire. She lives and works in her studio, perched in the Jura mountains. Amandine fills her sketchbooks with inspiring material, takes a close look at reality, and lets her drawings deliver the poetry of the places and people she meets.
She also teaches at art school, and offers artistic workshops based around her work as an author at Ateliers du Gommascope, founded in 2018 with Nicolas Bougère (Animation & stop motion) and Julie Hauber (photography & cyanotype).
Amandine Puntous is also a volunteer with the Épicerie Séquentielle association, a collective self-publishing structure that has been publishing Les Rues de Lyon since 2015, offering a ten-page historical account of Lyon every month. The magazine is produced entirely by local artists and distributed directly to bookshops.
Amandine Puntous stayed at the Alliance Française de Banjul for an artistic residency. Her work focused on the faces of the French-speaking world in The Gambia, through portraits and testimonies of various key French-speaking personalities in the city of Banjul. The residency enabled her to explore in greater depth the links that language and art forge between people of different origins, cultures and backgrounds, here in the context of an English-speaking country.
During her month of creation, Amandine met French-speaking people living in Gambia to draw their portraits. During these drawing sessions, each person’s voice was recorded, so that the French-speaking world could also be perceived through the sound of each protagonist’s voice, as a way of testifying to its plurality and diversity.
At the same time, Amandine kept a daily logbook of her stay in Gambia, in comic strip format, with one page per day. A record of her discovery of the country, this notebook is a way of keeping a record of her trip. Finally, Amandine also gave workshops on the creation of comic strips to young Gambian artists, keen to develop their skills in this art form.
At the end of the month’s residency, the portraits were presented at an exhibition at the Alliance Française.