Books

Blank Stare is the first publication in the CommonWealth series, published by Chillzone. 

Compiled of graffiti written in the streets of Iran, combining the urgency of emotional expression amidst the political suffocation of people during the 2026 government-imposed internet blackout.

This story was written by a Chinese activist/writer about her arrest and detention during the waves of resistance in China in late 2022. To evade censorship, she disguised it as a translation—told through the voice of an Iranian Kurdish woman amid the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising happening at the same time. 

After fleeing China, the author reclaimed the story through footnotes—uncovering hidden meanings and restoring its Chinese context. What first read as an Iranian story became, on re-reading, a coded Chinese narrative. Iran stood as both real and metaphorical—a displaced symbol, through which the interconnected struggles in different movements echoed.

The two waves of reading, months apart, became part of the story’s form. This “non-nonfiction” reveals a paradox: in China, truth must appear as fiction or elsewhere to be told—making the fiction more real than reality itself. 

Two years later, the piece was translated “back” into Persian by an Iranian Kurdish activist. And now, it arrives here, in this zine of tripped, layered languages. 

Author: Wu Qin
English Translation: Aaris WOO and Yixi
Farsi Translation: Somayeh Rostampour
Visual & Layout: Maoyi, If A, Hu Jiamin
Interior illustrations: Hu Jiamin
Published by Tofu Stand (Tofulogy 002)

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 It is the gradual leaking of a long withdrawn interior.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

The new issue consists of 8 plays and performance texts by Iranian women writers living in or outside Iran. Whether based on actual experience, fictional, or drawn from archives, these texts deal in one way or another with the question of the stage. They produce a contested space of performance that is inevitably linked to the performer's body, whose thresholds are stretched and contracted into potentially new forms of staging. The authors in this issue place their writing in performative relation to the specific historical and sociopolitical conditions in which they live and work. In many ways, the writings interrogate the politics that delineate the stage itself.

The authors in this special issue are: Nasim Ahmadpour, Nil (Alista) Aghaee, Naghmeh Manavi, Athena Farrokhzad, Nazanin Sanatkar, Azade Shahmiri, Zahra Mohseni and Naghmeh Samini.