The Tribe:Interviews with Jean-Michel Mension
Between 1952 and 1953, Mension haunted Saint-Germain-des Pres as a member of the legendary Lettrist International; direct progenitor of the Situationist International. In "The Tribe" Mension recounts this vie de Boheme, whiled away with Guy Debord and an assortment of hard drinkers and thinkers.
Between 1952 and 1954, Jean-Michel Mension haunted Saint- Germain-des-Prés as a member of the legendary Lettrist International, direct progenitor of the Situationist International. In a series of conversations, Mension recounts this very particular vie de boheme whiled away with Guy Debord and a rogues’ gallery of hard drinkers and thinkers.
The Tribe is a rare, vivid tour of a moment and milieu barely noticed at the time by the tourists who flocked to the Left Bank for a glimpse of Sartre & Co. The rich iconography includes many of Ed van der Elsken’s celebrated photographs of “the tribe” and a trove of Letterist leaflets and posters.
Reviews
The Tribe relates the Parisian wanderings of a heterogeneous group of individuals who cultivated laziness and revolt, alcohol and talk, drift and chance, creative hopes and encounters ... in the quest of a Rimbaldian derangement of the senses, of detournement of art and daily life by the defiance of order, by vandalism, be delinquency, but also by an altogether contemporary quest for a supersession of Marxism.