In Fécamp (Seine Maritime), Catel Muller, known as “Catel”, lives 50 meters from the house that Anita Conti occupied towards the end of her life. This geographical proximity would almost be enough to justify his choice to dedicate a biography to it, any neighborhood is inspiring. That would be reductionist. And let’s forget that the designer, associated with the screenwriter José-Louis Bocquet, her husband, also directs a collection at Casterman, “Les clandestines de l’histoire”, whose vocation is to revive the memory of notable women that posterity has forgotten.
“Remarkable” is the word that suits the woman who was the first French oceanographer. At the same time a documentary filmmaker, inventor, resistance fighter, whistleblower, photographer, poet and environmentalist (before her time), Anita Conti (1899-1997) lived the dense and hectic existence of a romantic heroine. Going through his life, under a title as sober as Anita Conti (Casterman, 368 pages, 24.95 euros), also recounts a century of exploration of the seabed, fishing innovation and female emancipation.
When he moved to Fécamp, about fifteen years ago, Catel knew almost nothing about Anita Conti. Painted on the hull of a training ship or on the façade of a secondary school, his name still resonated strongly on the pontoons of the old cod port, from where he left to go fishing in Terre-News.
The illustrator began painting small portraits of herself in Moleskine notebooks, before creating larger ones for the needs of a television documentary. The obvious then became obvious: tell the journey of this character “incredible that she freed herself from her chains at a time when women had no right to vote, therefore no right to exist, and not even the right to get on a ship, unless they requested insane authorizations”He explains in his workshop, an old factory where pebbles, a material formerly used to consolidate roads or in the cosmetics industry, were reduced to powder.
“Role models” for “today’s young people”
As they do in each of their biographies, Catel and Bocquet carried out extensive documentation work before filling in the slightest blank page. His main source was Anita Conti’s adopted son, the visual artist Laurent Girault-Conti, who manages the archives of “the lady of the sea”, as she is still called in the Caux region. The material quickly became abundant.
Born in a bourgeois environment without money, married to a diplomat from whom she separated by mutual agreement without divorcing, Anita Conti was not only an art bookbinder (her first profession) who made her passion, the sea, a subject of study. The self-taught man also raised the alarm about the dangers of overfishing, participated in mine clearance operations during the Second World War, established fisheries in Africa, launched himself into aquaculture, crossed paths with Cocteau, Mac Orlan, Giraudoux, Cousteau… On board herring vessels or military ships, she has continued to share the daily life of exclusively male crews, challenging the superstition according to which a woman brings bad luck on a ship.
You have 62.14% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
