Lycée de l’Image et du Son d’Angoulême (LISA)

So, at the start of each year, hundreds of thousands of artists and fans descend on Angoulême, a town of forty thousand, to celebrate the city’s street art at the International Comics Festival. The event was so successful that it led to the opening of the Comic Strip Museum, followed by a high school devoted to the visual arts.

Opened in 1989, the Lycée de l’Image et du Son d’Angoulême, or LISA, offers students cutting-edge instruction about sound, editing, graphic design, performance, and postproduction—which can be shown on its very own regional television station.

The school as a whole was experimental—both in its curriculum and in the design of its building, which resembles a unique combination of sculpture park and art installation. It’s hard to know where to rest your eyes: from the obelisk adorning the outside walls to the bright pink columns lining the halls to the Japanese bridge you cross between corridors. All these unexpected colors and features contribute to a visual feast that seems to have emerged, well, from a comic book.

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🖼 Available as a collectable, limited-edition art print