MANIFESTO OF THE AFTERMADE

Manifesto Aftermade CFAP.pdf

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Cercle-Franco Autrichien de Psychanalyse, Established in 2003

[French]

Fixing the Aftermade

Sooner or later, the Aftermade had to be fixed.Not to trap it — it would not survive enclosure — but to give it a first form, a ground, a foundation from which its apparition could finally recognize itself. The Aftermade is not a concept thrown into the air: it was born from years of observation, wandering, failed gestures, walls whitewashed too quickly, stubborn traces that refuse to disappear.

Within the Franco-Austrian Circle of Psychoanalysis, we have seen the same primitive scene return again and again:someone tries to erase, and something returns.This return has no author, no project, no aesthetic intention. It bears the force of discreet truths: those that rise again precisely because we believed them buried.

It became necessary to give a name to this resurfacing, to this insistence of the real, to these silhouettes born from an erasure that fails.We chose the name: Aftermade.

A word that says exactly what it should:what comes after one has tried to undo.

Today, the Aftermade must be placed into written form.Not a theory, not a method, not a protocol — but a declaration. A manifesto to draw a threshold: the space between effacement and re-appearance, between the matter that resists and the subject that projects, between what one hoped to suppress and what returns despite oneself.

To fix the Aftermade is simply this:to offer a frame to what continually escapes.

The text that follows is not a rigid frame; it is the first light cast upon a phenomenon that must remain alive, shifting, unpredictable. An oblique light, like the one that slips through workshops, wet walls, layers of plaster, crossed-out pages.

Fabrice Laudrin

Pont-Aven, November 23 2025

A rainy day when the light of the Nabis overflows from the walls of the Pont-Aven village.

Cercle Franco-Autrichien de Psychanalyse

1.  The Aftermade is born from an erasure that fails.

   Whenever a gesture — technical, social, intimate, political — attempts to make a trace disappear,

   and disappearance refuses to disappear,

   a form appears.

   This is the Aftermade: art that rises despite erasure.

2.  The Aftermade is not a work, but an apparition.

   There is no author, no intention, no premade creation.

   There is only an accident: a covering gesture,

   and the unpredictable response of matter.

3.  The form of the Aftermade comes neither from the surface alone nor from the gaze alone.

   It is born from the collision of two insistences:

   – the matter that percolates, rises, emerges,

   – the subject who projects, organizes, interprets.

   The Aftermade is the point where percolation and projection become indistinguishable.

4.  Erasure does not cancel: it triggers.

   The layer too thin, the pressure too strong, the lime too fast,

   the crossing-out too hasty, the overconfident “delete,”

   awaken the memory of the surface.

   The world rises again.

   And this rising calls for a gaze.

5.  The Aftermade belongs to the surface.

   To its memory, its pigments, its fibers, its salts, its scars.

   Every surface knows how to resist.

   Every surface knows how to let return what one hoped to drown in it.

6.  The Aftermade belongs to the gaze.

   For what emerges exists only in the measure of the one who sees.

   A child finds HIS bear.

   A teenager finds HER grandmother.

   An adult finds A ghost.

   Another sees NOTHING.

   An artist sees A form to détourne.

   What changes is never the trace: it is the subject opening.

7.  At the heart of the Aftermade stands Narcissus.

   But a Narcissus without a mirror.

   Here, the surface reflects nothing: it refracts.

   It fractures your gaze and returns to you, in fragments,

   not your image,

   but your unconscious in the act of forming itself in the stain.

   You think you see a figure.

   You encounter your own depth.

   The Aftermade reveals this:

   you never look at the trace —

   you look at yourself surviving in it.

8.  An Aftermade exhibits nothing; it reveals.

   A failed wall becomes a figure.

   The figure becomes a memory.

   The memory becomes a wound.

   The wound becomes a fantasy.

   And you call that “seeing.”

9.  The Aftermade is the most intimate art.

   Because it never speaks of what it shows,

   but of what you deposit into it.

   It does not narrate the world:

   it narrates the way you cling to it.

10.  The Aftermade is the most dangerous art.

    It removes the author, the style, the promise, the justification.

    It leaves you alone with an apparition rising

    and asking:

    “What have you done with what you wished to forget?”

11.  The Readymade seized an object.

    The Aftermade seizes a return.

    Not the chosen object, but the insistence of the real.

    Not what was there, but what returns

    after someone has tried to erase.

12.  The Aftermade is an art of the threshold.

    Between disappearance and reappearance,

    between covering and resurgence,

    between a gesture of negation and a truth that refuses.

13.  Born from walls, the Aftermade overflows walls.

    It extends to everything that resists:

    the crossed-out page, the erased photograph, the deleted file,

    the memory thought extinguished,

    the face that returns through wear,

    the archives that shine through censorship,

    life itself.

14.  The Aftermade is the art of unified apparition.

    Matter rises, the subject recognizes itself in it,

    and no boundary can any longer distinguish

    what comes from the world

    and what comes from you.

15.  Finally, and above all, the Aftermade is not a projective psychology test.

    It offers no constructed ambiguity.

    No psychological intention.

    No protocol, no interpretive grid.

    Projection is not solicited: it erupts.

    The Aftermade measures nothing — it reveals what rises when something refuses to disappear.

    The Aftermade is the art that no one makes,

    that every surface makes possible,

    and that every gaze transforms into confession.

    
    

The Aftermade is the art that no one makes,

that every surface makes possible,and that every gaze turns into an admission.