The Swiss comic book festival BDFIL’s 17th edition will take place in Lausanne between the 1st and the 14th May 2023. As the theme of this year is science in comics, NCCR SPIN collaborates with the festival to organize a public discussion between Laurent Schafer, author of comic books Quantix and Infinix (ed. Dunod) and NCCR SPIN scientists Prof. Anna Fontcuberta i Morral (EPFL) and Pierre Chevalier Kwon (University of Basel).
The discussion will include the representation of (quantum) physics in comics, scientific communication in comics and the impact of science (especially quantum computers) on our society. It will take place on Sunday, May 7th 2023 from 11:00-12:15 at PLATEFORME 10 – Espace Midi. It will be moderated by Marie Le Dantec and will be held in French.
The comic book Quantix and Infinix by Laurent Schafer, ed. Dunod.
About Laurent Schafer and his work
Laurent Schafer has been a journalist for various Swiss magazines and newspapers. In parallel, he worked as a freelance illustrator. Passionate about science, he wrote and drew his first comic book "Quantix, la physique quantique et la relativité en BD", which will be published in 2019 by Dunod. This comic book for the general public weaves the link between the quantum world and our daily lives through the adventures of an ordinary family. Quantix is postfaced by theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli and has been translated into several languages.
Laurent Schafer's second comic book, Infinix, de l'infini cosmique à l'infini quantique, was published at the end of 2021. Michel Mayor, Nobel Prize in Physics, has written the preface. An independent sequel to Quantix, Infinix takes the reader to the farthest reaches of the Universe and to the strange quantum vacuum. Laurent Schafer is currently working on a third volume. As with the first two volumes, Claude-Alain Pillet, professor at the Centre de Physique Théorique de Marseille-Luminy, is the scientific advisor.
About BDFIL
The Lausanne International Comics Festival (BDFIL) is a comics festival organised every year since 2005. Each year it welcomes an average of 80 artists (Swiss and international) and 30,000 visitors. BDFIL takes over the urban wastelands and cultural hotspots of Lausanne, under the magnificent vaults of the Rasude, on the bustling station square, between the illustrious walls of Plateforme 10 and in the lively echoes of the Maison de quartier sous gare.
This year’s guest of honour is comic author Pénélope Bagieu, who famously illustrated the comic book Culottées (in its English version: Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World), a series of surprising and lesser-known portraits of courageous women rejecting cultural norms through the ages and from all over the world.
In the exhibition “Do you have a minute to talk about science?”, 25 artists try to answer the question posed by EPFL and UNIL scientists “What would animals do if they suddenly could control the building materials used by humans?”
The full program of the festival can be downloaded in pdf format.