Liberté, égalité, digitalisation

The title rewrites the French Republican motto — Liberté, égalité, fraternité — by replacing fraternité with digitalisation, framing the print as a commentary on the displacement of civic solidarity by digital infrastructure. The substitution is the work's conceptual core, and the mokuhanga medium adds a particular friction to the subject: water-based woodblock is among the slowest, most material-bound printmaking processes, requiring carved cherry or shina blocks, hand-applied pigment, dampened [washi](/glossary/washi), and the physical pressure of the [baren](/glossary/baren). Producing a critique of digitalisation through this analog procedure is itself part of the argument. French mokuhanga practitioners frequently use the medium for politically inflected work, drawing on France's long history of the print as a vehicle for social commentary — a lineage running through Daumier and the twentieth-century affichistes. The print situates Rodride within that tradition while engaging the distinct material vocabulary of Japanese water-based printing.