The l’Inaperçu bookstore l’Inaperçu delighted to welcome you last Monday for the launch of the “ICONO PHONE” box set: a photo-memory game by Erik Kessels, conceived by Nadia Banian and Eric Chesnais and published by Pymaryd.

ICONO PHONE is the result of a collaboration between two unconventional and playful types of collectors. On one hand, there’s Erik Kessels, known for his passion for vernacular imagery. He loves hunting down anonymous images, isolating them from their original context to give them a second life. He has a knack for spotting, selecting, and compiling these anonymous photos, which he reinterprets through his own lens—always with humor and without judgment. On the other hand, Nadia Banian and Éric Chesnais, who are passionate about contemporary art and photography, enjoy taking everyday objects out of their usual context to give them a new status by collaborating with artists such as Erik Kessels.

Their goal is not to be exhaustive in their collections, but rather to bring together colors, shapes, memories, and encounters with the unexpected. For this project, they chose to focus on the iconic “dial” phones of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. Although these objects have disappeared from our daily lives, they remain present in our minds as reminders of a bygone era and a particular lifestyle and way of communicating.