Joseph Rabie

Montreuil

Growing up in South Africa, cartooning became Joseph Rabie’s arm for dealing with Apartheid. And though as an adult he has always enjoyed writing, his creativity has taken him down other avenues, training as an architect, and establishing one of France’s earliest multimedia studios. The French National Library chose his digital artwork in interactive photography for preservation against computer obsolescence. In 2017 he completed a PhD in urban studies, taking the position that the notion of place is profoundly subjective, and demonstrating this through a personal account of the places that have “made” him. Defying academic convention, written up as a story, his dissertation committee considered it a tour de force. In 2019, a memorial he designed to the victims of the Shoah in Biržai, Lithuania, was inaugurated. Joseph recently completed writing a work of fiction that recounts how money, machines, meat, landscapes, artificial intelligence and elephants (among other things) pertain to the end of the world. (He is currently looking for an agent or publisher.) At present, he is involved with a group of fellow architects, urbanists, landscape architects, philosophers in a reflection upon how one might go about establishing the Greater Paris bioregion.