[Blancage] - Entry No. 02 — the CHE

Concarneau - Blancage n°02 - The CHE— (c) Fabrice Laudrin 2025

[French]

The CHE

Concarneau, 2025

residues of black spray-paint (20 cm)

Description

Beneath the municipal blancstock spread in a single thin coat, a wall in Concarneau lets three letters rise back through: C H E. Not an effigy, not the stature of a hero, but a simple word — or rather its skeleton.A trace that no longer seeks meaning, only persistence.

The letters lie there like bones in the sand: simple, hard, undeniable.The blancstock administers silence.The wall, in turn, administers memory.

Erased : CHE

A name reduced to three letters, each 20 cm high, vertical, obstinate.

Erased by overpainting.

What has been erased is not a portrait.

It is not Che Guevara; it is what remains of him when everything is removed: the ideology, the image, the legend.

Remained : Three letters endure — three letters permanently available, endlessly mobilisable.

Here, ‘CHE’ belongs to the family of poor signs: those that survive precisely because they say nothing except the possibility of seeing the world otherwise.

The municipal erasure believed it had suppressed a message.

It merely whitewashed a symptom.

And that symptom, in the rain, returns.

Analysis

‘CHE’ does not need a face to be heard, any more than ACAB or 1312 need an author.These are signs that no longer belong to the order of language; they belong to the order of the trigger.

The function of ‘CHE’ is not to persuade. It is to strike.

This extreme economy — three letters only — is the secret of its resilience.A revolution can be reclaimed, betrayed, commodified;but a revolution reduced to three letters is irrecoverable, because it carries nothing that can be appropriated.A face can be appropriated.Three letters, never.

This ‘CHE’ becoming a ghost beneath blancage is proof that political erasure fails by structure:to erase the symbol does not suppress its force; it reconfigures it.

Here, the wall does not repeat Che Guevara. It repeats: ‘The world could still tip over.’

Problematic

Are we facing a language — or a transcultural spirit?

The truth is likely double:

A language, because three letters can be written, repeated, transmitted without effort.

A transcultural spirit, because these three letters travel better than the ideologies they once condensed.

‘CHE,’ as it reappears here, is neither a word nor a doctrine:it is a naked force, quick to activate, an archaic code of readiness for reversal —a fracture-line simple enough to be universal, and empty enough to be endlessly reawakened.

In sum: a linguistics of refusal, or an immediate breath that exceeds languages..

Status within the collection

Catalogue : "Blancage"

.Section : Figures Born of Erasure

Numéro : 02

Titre interne : Le CHE (20 cm)

Localisation : Concarneau, Ville Close, boundary wall.

The piece is regarded as a typical example of a form generated by mistake, and a major marker for understanding how, in coastal cities, erasure becomes a second graffiti — the one produced by the administration itself.