To accompany the release of the book, we spoke with Zéphir about his relationship to travel, what led him to develop the world of Calentura, and what he brings into this imaginary universe. Here is the full interview:

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Calentura imagines other ways of “being a society.” If one idea from the book could materialize in your experience of the real world, which one would you choose?

The one that describes a country populated only by anonymous people, where anyone who becomes famous is condemned to exile. It would imply a form of general equality, the end of hierarchies, and a complete overhaul of our systems of values. Ideally, it would happen without coercion or punishment.

Throughout the narrative, one senses that you explore the ambivalence of the relationship between the individual and the group, between fusion and contamination. What interests you in this porosity?

Since returning from my travels almost nine years ago, my daily life has alternated between long periods of solitude—linked to making my books—and weeks spent in collective settings, often quite intense. Like everyone, I try to find the right balance between these two necessities: being alone and forming a kind of family. I think these back-and-forth movements, along with my lack of geographical anchoring, give rise to questions that find their way into what I write. Like many others, I feel that our time calls for a renewed sense of the collective, a form of socialism, lest we fall into ever more brutal fragmentation between people, countries, the land, and what inhabits it. How do you shape a society from a multiplicity of individuals, when everything is designed to reinforce each person in their own beliefs? This question contains so many others, and I don’t think my book offers even the beginning of an answer. I simply hope that these small poetic devices, set up throughout the sequences, approach this porosity from a somewhat new angle. On another level, I am fascinated by writings that claim the individual is an illusion—that there is no fixed entity within oneself that one could point to and say: “this is me, this is what I am.” From this perspective, there would be only one Reality experiencing itself through a multiplicity of viewpoints. In that sense, there would be neither individual nor group, neither inside nor outside—just an emergence constantly actualizing itself. How this kind of teaching might color and transform our interactions is something that deeply interests me.

Calentura is sometimes depicted as a utopian society, alternating between idealistic and quite violent propositions. Why did you choose to describe a fictional world through its potential dysfunctions?

Using fiction to propose desirable futures and ways of breaking free from the capitalist system seems very important to me. I have great sympathy for authors who engage in this, in science fiction or elsewhere. However, I don’t think my work belongs to that approach. The book does not aim to propose a model of society. I wanted a country that would be, in a sense, realistic—one that, even while depicting impossible phenomena, deals with the same paradoxes we experience. I did not want an ideal place—where humans would have untangled the knots of their emotions—but rather to approach our own reality from a poetic perspective. I see poetry as a force that reveals the invisible lines underlying relationships; it operates as a form of unveiling of what is at play beneath the surface of things. The evocation of an imaginary country was a pretext to try to summon that force.

Can “calenture” be read as a disappearance of the ego? Is this a form of necessary loss of self that you suggest throughout the narrative?

I hadn’t thought of it that way, but it’s an interpretation I quite like. This question of losing oneself, of the nature and role of the ego, interests me deeply. Most of my reading revolves around this. I didn’t approach the writing of the book with the intention of suggesting anything in particular, only to engage with this theme through my own lens, to play with it. It’s only now that the book is finished that I realize how much the theme of the disappearance of the ego appears throughout the narrative.

There seems to be something of a learning process, or an initiatory journey, for the character we follow. What does he have to learn?

“What am I doing here?” That’s a question I asked myself almost every day during twenty-eight months of travel. It could just as well have been: “what am I supposed to learn from all this?” 
It took that journey for me to glimpse that what we are truly looking for cannot be found at the end of any road, in any country, nor contained in a relationship, a situation, or an experience—even the most radical ones. I believe that what we seek, sometimes without knowing it, is to be in the world without the burden of the self. It also took that journey for me to realize that travel contains nothing more essential than everyday life. It’s as if the world keeps repeating, to both the nomad and the sedentary: “you are yourself the screen that prevents you from seeing me.” Perhaps that is, in part, what the narrator has to learn.

Many of the experiences lived by the main character involve funerary rituals. Where does this come from?

We know how much the way the living treat the dead can tell us about a people and their country. Since these rites are fundamental markers for understanding a society, it seemed relevant to highlight them in the creation of Calentura.
On a more personal level, it probably also comes from the fact that, without any morbid fascination, I think regularly about death. In recent years, I’ve read with great interest various texts on the subject: books by Vinciane Despret, articles from the journals Millecosmos and Jefklak… I think these writings helped give rise to the scenes of funerary rituals in the book.

You chose to involve other artists and collaborators—how did they concretely participate, and why?

I am increasingly looking for ways to make practices like writing and drawing—usually solitary—more collective. Here, I simply invited artists I admire to inhabit the pages of a particular sequence.
Since I wasn’t sure my idea would work, I didn’t want to ask each of them to create a new drawing; instead, I chose to use one of their existing images that resonated with the atmosphere of the book. I was happy to receive only positive responses. It made me want to continue this dialogue in a fully collective book—but that’s for later.
The sequence in question tells of a country where the only TV channel continuously broadcasts the dreams of its sleeping citizens. Since dreams are perhaps the most intimate thing there is, it felt right that they be represented each time through a different style. Maybe one could say that a dream is to the dreamer what style is to the artist? In any case, I liked this analogy between dreaming and drawing. I also wanted the book to escape me a little, to expand it through other graphic approaches.

You chose to include a series of paintings in the book—why? What role do they play within the narrative?

Since the narrative is quite dense, both in text and drawing, it seemed important to give it some breathing space by incorporating large images that verge on abstraction, where the line disappears into matter. It was above all a question of visual rhythm within the book. The entire book is conceived as a kind of long poem: using painting as a counterpoint to the comic sequences felt relevant. I approached this series without any prior vision, as if the paper were another space to travel through.
The panels are populated with human figures, so I wanted to remove them in the painted sections, which I conceived instead as traces of sensations—impressions left by the memory of a place, of colors, of smells.

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Zéphir is an author, primarily of graphic novels. His work is characterized by a great formal freedom: he uses a wide range of tools and techniques, blurs boundaries, and plays with genre conventions. A single book can thus be read as a work of science fiction, a poetic essay, or a travel journal.
He pays particular attention to the resonance between line and text, creating narrative tension and echoes that linger after reading. His long journey through Latin America, from November 2015 to March 2018—accompanied by his cat perched on his shoulder—deeply nourished his imagination, something the reader can sense through the themes explored in Calentura.
This is his second book published by Fidèle, following Rondes de nuit, whose original paintings were exhibited at Galerie Martel in Paris.