Fieldnotes - Issue nr. 2

In her darkly funny 1985 take on Dante’s Divine Comedy, acclaimed French writer and activist Monique Wittig restages the journey through the circles of hell, limbo, paradise from a lesbian feminist perspective. 

Never-before published in the US, Across the Acheron follows the adventures of “Wittig” and her anti-Virgilian guide through laundromats, billiard parlors, dyke bars, and picnic grounds of a 1980s San Francisco populated by hunters and their prey, lost souls, and fantastical beasts, including a robotic eagle and angelic bikers. Wittig reimagines Dante’s epic poem through a feminist and queer lens, subverting his cosmological order and upending gender identities and literary traditions. This edition brings the English translation of Wittig’s final novel back into print for the first time since the early-1990s, revised according to the author's notes, and with a new introduction by Sophie Lewis.

“Across the Acheron is a work of lesbian struggle and triumph across two kinds of hell. The hell of the classic western literary canon—and the hell of San Francisco. Monique Wittig brings all of her writerly powers and political experience to bear here, as witness to the horrors of heterosexual patriarchy and also to the possibility of another world for another life. Her work is a rare combination of deeply felt materialism and radical linguistic freedom. If we're to have another world, we'll need to create another language. She knew that, and she lived it.” — McKenzie Wark

“Even in fiction Monique Wittig’s writing is critical, prescient, brilliant, satirical, searing, and way ahead of its time. I’m so glad this work is back in circulation to revisit and revel in.” — Pamela Sneed

“In this unendurable yet compelling journey through the circles of patriarchal hell, Wittig encounters hordes of tortured women who do not struggle against their oppressors. Their brainwashing is as difficult to witness as their bloodied flesh. Only through communal activism does the seeker’s soul becomes tough enough to enter Paradise, where bare-breasted angels dismount motorcycles and offer baskets of 'cherries, strawberries, raspberries, apricots, peaches, plums, tomatoes, avocados, green melons, cantaloupes, watermelons, lemons, pawpaws, pineapples and coconuts.’ The bounties of Across the Acheron are lush and many.” — Dodie Bellamy

“A Guernica of the human (feminist) condition, a blacker, bleaker, more vengeful Alice’s tea party, this is a novel as graphic as a painting, whose brilliance its translators have creditably preserved.” — Publishers Weekly

Introduction by Sophie Lewis
Translated by David Le Vay with Margaret Crosland

+|`me'S-pace, doc. 001.b is book 1, volume 2 of a wider, ongoing project known as "For Love Alone" Christina'S-tead, a poetic enquiry into the current state of the English tongue.

"In a time when many are questioning if we still need formalism and feminism, Wertheim's +|`me'S-pace, doc. 001.b is a spirited and fun defense of both. Written in part as a didactic instructional manual that cannot keep itself from constantly going astray into beautiful and challenging language play, this is a book that asks crucial questions and reconfigures recent histories. It is essential for its arguments. But even more, it is fun to read for its word play"—Juliana Spahr.

Introduction by Dodie Bellamy and art by Lisa Darms.

This book/catalogue is published on the occasion of the final event of Noa & Snow, a gentle experiment between the everyday and the event, at the Volkskundemuseum, Vienna.

Publication Concept Alix Eynaudi, Goda Budvytytė
Design Goda Budvytytė
Printing Robstolk, Amsterdam
Edition 600 copies
Proofreading Bella Marrin

ENVELOPE Pattern design based on the Lila Dress and its signature cording by An Breugelmans

LE VESTIAIRE
Costumes & objects An Breugelmans Tapestries & trompe-l’oeil Cécile Tonizzo Weaves Lydia McGlinchey Photos taken inside of Jason Dodge’ show Cut a Door in the Wolf at Macro Museum by Carlotta Pierleoni Photos in Vienna Samuel Feldhandler

THEM, PROTEXTIONS
Han-Gyeol Lie, Mette Edvartsen, Lydia McGlinchey, Clara Amaral, Ujjwal Kanishka Utkarsh, Jennifer Lacey, Cécile Tonizzo, Sabina Holzer, Alice Chauchat, Jason Dodge, Joachim Hamou, Quim Pujol, Litó Walkey, Serena Lee, Mihret Kebede

PUBLIC MEDITATIONS
Anne Faucheret, Elizabeth Ward, Kirsty Bell, Tony Just, Sabina Holzer, Samuel Feldhandler, Frida Robles

TEXTURAGES Paula Caspão VIGNETTES Alix Eynaudi

Poster picture of Claire Lefèvre’s Grimoire/Giant Notebook/Bison Book Rasa Juškevičiūtė

INSTITUTE OF REST(S)
Alix Eynaudi, Paula Caspão, Quim Pujol
Back side A thread for Alix Eynaudi, woven as a table placement by Genė Janušauskaitė in 1936, out of the flax she had sawn and harvested herself. Photographed by Kristien Daem in 2022, after Aldona Malašauskienė revealed the placement to her son Raimundas.

In Dodie Bellamy's imagined "sequel" to Bram Stoker's fin de siècle masterpiece Dracula, Van Helsing's plain Jane secretarial adjunct, Mina Harker, is recast as a sexual, independent woman living in San Francisco in the 1980s. The vampire Mina Harker, who possesses the body of author Dodie Bellamy, confesses the most intimate details of her relationships with four vastly different men through past letters. Simultaneously, a plague is let loose in San Francisco-the plague of AIDS.

Bigger-than-life, half goddess, half Bette Davis, Mina sends letter after letter to friends and co-conspirators, holding her reader captive through a display of illusion and longing. Juggling quivering vulnerability on one hand and gossip on the other, Mina spoofs and consumes and spews back up demented reembodiments of trash media and high theory alike. It's all fodder for her ravenous libido and "a messy ambiguous place where pathology meets pleasure." Sensuous and captivating, The Letters of Mina Harker describes one woman's struggles finding the right words to explain her desires and fears without confining herself to one identity.

DEARS is a print magazine for transversal writing practices at the crossroads of art, poetry and experimental writing. It brings together authors and writers from different backgrounds and constitutes a dedicated platform for texts escaping the usual genres and disciplinary boundaries.

DEARS promotes the exploration of new forms of language as a way to foster new forms of living together, and emphasizes the growing relevance of trans- versal writing practices in this respect.

DEARS no. 5 / Summer 2023 / ever.over

With texts by Diaty Diallo, Douglas Keaney, Dzifa Benson, Sevinç Çalhanoğlu, Jana Vanecek, and an epigraph by Trinh T. Minh-ha.

This issue of Pages assumes seep as a post archival mode: in the Merriam-Webster dictionary the verb 'seep' is translated as follows: to flow or pass slowly through fine pores or small openings, to enter or penetrate slowly, to become diffused or spread.

The biology or politics of seeping is like that of raw petroleum oozing at natural oil seeps. Unlike refined oil which has sponsored modernization and its aligned archives, crude oil pours beyond historical purpose and defies structural elevations. It instead disfigures the ground through which it dubiously spreads.

Seeping is a posthumous affair. It is the gradual leaking of a long withdrawn interior. Like the bleeding of a punctured corpse, when the pumping of the heart has stopped, when the body is lifeless and apathetic to any 'hail', yet continuing to bleed. Seep as archive is an eternally post-apocalyptic expansion, retraction, deviation, subtraction, or simply the arrival of (non-)things.

With contributions by:

- Mariam Motamedi Fraser / Geo-Archive
- Richard Goldstein / Dennis Oppenheim's Dilemma: Should he Sell Art to the Shah?
- Babak Afrassiabi, Nasrin Tabatabai / Contemporary Hole / Unfilmable
/ Seep
- Saleh Najafi / Wounds of Archive¹
- Mark von Schlegell / The Artist Abstract #6
- Nima Parzham / The underground
- Adam Kleinman / Vanished Theories
- Suzanne Treister / Algorithm
- Alexi Kukuljevic / The Dissolute Subject
- Matts Leiderstam / Andy Warhol, Suicide (Purple Jumping Man), 1963
- Eugene Thacker / Black Infinity; or, Oil Discovers Humans
- Vivian Ziherl, Natasha Ginwala / Infrastructural Suspensions: Global Spanning, Atmospheric Seepage and Measures of the Undecidable

Issue 04, Structure, traces the scaffolding of our lives, seen and unseen. We travel from the palaces of Versailles to the basements of Russian resistance, from origami folds to mechanized labor, from cosmic geometry to the twitch of a stimming hand. These are the choreographies that hold us, train us, divide us, and sometimes set us free. This issue moves through power's choreography with Vinícius Portella tracing repression from TikTok algorithms to Candomblé persecution, Sasha Portyannikova documenting dance as survival under Russian authoritarianism, and Ellen Jeffrey revealing how stimming becomes its own radical dance practice. Mariam Ala-Rashi finds cosmic alignment in contortion while Michael O'Connor explores the body as origami, structure folded into self. Katja Vaghi contrasts baroque precision with contemporary chaos, and Nathaniel Moore exposes the market forces shaping European dance. Cover and insert artist, Maria Harfouche, captures structure through double-exposed analog photography and layered compositions that reveal how moments build upon each other.

A Dance Mag is an independent magazine that looks at the world through the lens of dance. It transcends differences, distances, and disciplines to tell the stories of people from all over the world, who are dancing their lives and giving their bodies a voice. 

A contemplative photographic series by Jochen Lempert, created during a residency at the Moulin des Ribes in Grasse, a former mill nestled in the Provençal landscape.

Known for his background in biology and his distinctive analogue black-and-white photography, Lempert brings a scientific sensitivity and poetic restraint to his exploration of the site's immediate environment.

Shot entirely on location, the images focus on subtle interactions between natural forms and their surroundings. Rather than constructing grand ecological narratives, Lempert observes everyday life in and around the mill, drawing attention to the interdependencies and ephemeral presences that define a place.

With the intimacy of field notes and the tactility of silver gelatin prints, Local Ecology. Moulin des Ribes is both a document and a meditation. It reveals the overlooked ecologies that persist on the periphery of human attention, transforming the act of looking into a form of ecological engagement. In the silence of these photographs, Lempert proposes a different kind of knowledge—rooted in slowness, attunement, and care.

The photographs included in this publication were taken in the summer of 2021 during a residency at La Società delle Api, Moulin des Ribes, Grasse, based on an idea by Cristiano Raimondi.

Jochen Lempert (born 1958 in Moers) is a German photographer. Trained as a biologist specializing in dragonflies, he began his career as a photographer in 1989, at the age of 31, developing an artistic practice based on this scientific heritage, marked by images of nature where the animal and vegetal go hand in hand.

les petites histoires sont quatre courtes fictions contemporaines. Entre le lonely langoureux New York des années deux mille, le pont poétique et capricieux de Louis 2 de Bavière, l'histoire vraie de Sandy Stone dans les seventies et la satire cinglante et drôle d'une galerie d'art, ces livres sont de brefs univers vivants et curieux.

En 2025, quatre petites histoires sont racontées par quatre auteurices dans quatre livres : L'effondrement du pont de Sam Bouffandeau ; The Gallery de S. M. Drogo ; Exit de Juli Le Nahelec; «Que faire de Sandy Stone?» de Mia Trabalon.

L'édition des petites histoires a été imaginée par Élise Comte, Chloé Delchini, Perrine Estienne, Gabriel René Franjou, Justine Gensse, Bastien Hauser, et Cyprien Muth. Ce collectif d'éditeurices est né à Bruxelles, où les petites histoires ont été imprimées, chez Graphius. 
La maquette, réalisée par Chloé Delchini, à été composée avec Otto, une typographie dessinée par Sam de Groot et Laura Opsomer Mironov, chez Dinamo Typefaces.