Printed source of the book “Discours sur le déchet” by Étienne Candel :

Revised and expanded edition.

Étienne Candel is a cultivator of dazzling, ironic and situated writing practices. His trashtexts are thus: a bulky-waste prosopopoeia. Through transforming refuse into writable surfaces he gives voice to a possible language, one coming straight out of the toothless mouths that populate the city. It is an entire fauna of marginal people leaned up on Haussmanian facades, jabbering about and calling out: cat-burglar bandits, seductresses, unemployed professionals or nostalgic retirees, bar stool philosophers and failed artists, tramps united insolidarity and post party hangovers, etc.

The “Speech on Waste” that inspires and introduces this book proposes changing our way of seeing the discarded, the obsolete and the residual. Printed on the precious paperscraps of Surfaces Utiles, this book also illustrates the manifesto of a publishing house that publishes by virtue of what the industry sheds as “waste“.