The Remix Comix keynote speaker on Friday will be Ulli Lust, an Austrian comics author living and working in Berlin. In her lecture, she will talk about graphic journalism and documentary storytelling, and share some of your ideas and techniques.

To most European comics readers, Ulli Lust is no stranger. Her work has been awarded the Prix de Revelation in Angouleme, the Max and Moritz Public Award, the Ignatz Award for Best Graphic Novel, the LA Times Book Award, and she was nominated for an Eisner Award. Her books have been translated into English, French, Dutch, Swedish, Italian, Spanish and Croatian…

There are many sides to the oeuvre of Ulli Lust that are interesting, but we start with two aspects we find also extremely valuable inspirations for the Remix Comix project.

First and foremost, she has written the tremendously powerful and heavy book Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life, visualizing and narrating a fascinating road trip about growing up, street life, sexism and society from below. This book, as many other of her works, shows how Lust masterfully tells meaningful stories, like modern fairy tales, in a wonderful ‘dance’ of imagination, reportage, reflection and depictions of harsh and brutal reality.

The second reason why Ulli Lust has become our ultimate keynote speaker, is because of her years of experience in the genre of city reporting through visual storytelling. In the past, she made inspiring reports about Berlin and Halle, in which every detail tells a story, all elements of street life return as personae. At times she mixes up fantasy with reportage, as in the beautiful series about (imagined) floods in the Dutch city of Haarlem.

Remix Comix is ​​ curious to take a look into the comics cuisine of Ulli Lust: how does she observe cities, streets and the people walking and living there? How does she visualize her stories, how does she make her personages move, talk and come to life?