Anguille
Abyme · Christophe Jacquet dit Toffe · 2019
A video artwork sold as a typeface, made by filming live eels on the banks of the Loire in February 2019.
About
Christophe Jacquet dit Toffe filmed eels moving in a white container on the banks of the Loire, capturing their looping, shifting forms as a stand-in for cursive letterforms. The result is a 9-minute video file sold for £48 that functions as a typeface only in name and spirit, with no installable font data. The piece draws on eel mythology, Seamus Heaney, and the biological enigma of the European eel's life cycle to position typography as something living, transient and ultimately unresolvable.
Classification
Anguille defies conventional typographic classification: it is a video file documenting live eels filmed from above, presented as a typeface in concept only. It is categorised as display due to its purely artistic and non-functional nature.