Le Dictateur #05 – FAQ

Mousse celebrates its 90th issue with a collectible edition, with a special design and format, entirely focused on fiction.

Bringing together a cohort of writers and artists, Mousse #90 – The Fiction Issue stems from the eponymous Fiction column that has dwelled in our pages for five years, and expands its scope. It was developed together with Rosanna McLaughlin, Skye Arundhati Thomas, and Izabella Scott, who collectively coedited the art and literature quarterly The White Review between 2021 and 2023.

Here you'll find reprints from both Mousse and The White Review as well as new stories and translations we have jointly commissioned. Seven interludes, intended to open up other worlds through images, feature portfolios of drawings by Atelier dell'Errore, Michael E. Smith, Camille Henrot, Michael Landy, Simone Forti, Adelaide Cioni, and Evelyn Taocheng Wang.

An artist's book presenting a photographic study of onions.

On Onions is a photographic study of onions by artist Elad Lassry (born 1977). Characteristically highlighting the spectrum of hues and shapes for the vegetable, Lassry's selected taxonomy includes sections on red, yellow and white onions, each of which possesses its own distinct taste and benefits. On Onions is Lassry's first artist's book, and the work will exist only in book form; it is at once wry, refreshing and disorienting in its biology workbook style, which makes fruitful use of "the confusion that results when there is something just slightly wrong in a photograph" (as the artist has described his practice in general).

Composed by the artist and arranged by Stuart Bailey, the book includes an essay written by Angie Keefer about the effects of sliced onions on human tear ducts.

An immersion in the flow of language, words, and images within David Douard's work.

A jumble of workshop views, recent productions, and reassembled fanzines, inner GLOw' replica delves into the roots of David Douard's practice. The "zines," which he has been compulsively producing for years, interact with his works, contaminating them. Pages of collages, drawings, photocopies, scraps of tape, torn magazines, slogans picked up on social media, and photos taken with smartphones reveal the density and formation process of the artist's language. This flow insinuates itself and transmutes within his sculptures and installations, whose teeming and polymorphous materiality is revealed in an exhaustive set of objective photographs.

Three texts are added to this iconographic corpus: a phantasmagorical fiction by Charlie Fox, an essay by Ingrid Luquet-Gad, and a poetic enumeration by Nina Kennel.

inner GLOw' replica—the first book published by Zzz—is the result of a long collaboration between David Douard and designers Thomas Bizzarri and Alain Rodriguez.

Born 1983 in Perpignan, David Douard lives and works in Aubervilliers (France). Language is the very basis of his work. The texts and poems he collects on the Internet are manipulated, transformed in order to become a vital flow, feeding into his sculptures. Through language as an ingredient, David Douard redefines space as hybrid and collective by injecting anonymous, chaotic, deviant, ill and frustrating poems in it. As he recreates an infected environment where the real world used to be, the fantasy brought by new digital technologies expands.

Texts by Charlie Fox, Ingrid Luquet-Gad, Nina Kennel.

For #2 in the ¶ (Pilcrow)-series Romy Day Winkel has approached collecting, or hoarding, as an aesthetic of patience. Through her selection of Wikipedia-articles she looks at what happens when objects, magical or otherwise, are all put together. If it is impossible, and perhaps even uninteresting, to know when a collection or archive is finished, how does one start to hoard impatiently

¶#2 consists solely of texts and images found on the online collaborative platform Wikipedia. ¶#2 is assembled by Romy Day Winkel, designed by Tjobo Kho and Wouter Stroet, edited by Jan-Pieter ‘t Hart and published by OUTLINE.

„Ungenießbare Zeichnungen“ is a series of visual traces by artist Shin Kudo. „Ungenießbar“ means „Unenjoyable“ in German, which is a term that is used to describe a certain category of fungi, considered not edible but also not poisonous. What is enjoyable and what is not? For whom should it be enjoyable? Spores, Blood vessels, nature energy, Alien….Shin Kudo’s intuitive drawing triggers our feelings between our daily world and the world that we often overlooked - The world full of life circling and endless streaming.

The book contains 24 drawings from the “∞” series and the spore print series “The Unknown Friends”, following with an interview conversation with the artist. 

Emil Lime collects various materials that nurture and give shape to Esther Gatón’s artistic practice, including collages made with her phone pics, sketches, sporadic notes and drawings, together with the writing of authors that have been influential on the work: Fredy Massad, María Fernanda Ampuero, Darya Diamond and Cory John. 

For the project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine a group of people/ performers memorize a book of their choice. Together they form a library collection consisting of living books. After years of learning by heart and reciting for readers, some of the books have now been written down from memory to create new editions, versions resulting from this process. This book is one of those books, chosen by one person, learned by heart and recited many times, and now written down again from memory. This edition is not a re-edition of the original text. It is a re-writing of the text after the process of reading, memorizing and reciting, with all the alterations that might have occured in the course of this process.

With the series '24 European Ethnographic Museums' Van der Heide questions the construction and identity of the ethnographic museum today. Here, the project becomes a collection of artefacts in and upon itself and by recording the names of these institutions Van der Heide places the viewer in front of the dilemma: who is authorized to decide what is an artefact, and what should be collected and for what reason? In the 19th century, with the birth of the current European nations, museums openly referred to their colonial past. Today the museums bare more euphemistic names like: ‘Museum der Kulturen’ or ‘World Museum’ but still place the West as the self-acclaimed center of the world.  The existence of the ethnographic museum, which is intertwined with the complicated and loaded colonial past, has been subject to contemporary criticism. While some of the European ethnographic institutions have attempted to come to terms with the past of their collections and their heritage, Van der Heide focuses upon how language continues to reflect the political present of the institutions.