Métamorphe — From Blackletter to Cholo

Gothic script was never meant to travel. It was built for Northern European scribes, carried to Spain, then loaded onto ships — and once it reached Mesoamerica it stopped behaving like a European alphabet. Blackletter absorbed whatever it landed in: colonial signage, devotional imagery, tattoo culture, the walls of Mexico City and the barrios of the American Southwest. What came back out was something else entirely — góticas mexicanas, and the Cholo writing that shaped a large part of how West Coast letters look today.

Lola Raingard follows that drift across two continents. Métamorphe / Shape-shifter is research as much as picture book: it tracks how a script adapts and hybridises the further it gets from home, and pairs the argument with the author’s own photographs alongside public-domain images documenting these gothic manifestations. Bilingual French and English throughout.

📖 Métamorphe / Shape-shifter by Lola Ringard zine launch
🗓 Thursdat, September 10th | 🕓 6 – 9 P.M.
📍 Le Grand Jeu, 15 passage de Ménilmontant, Paris 11