Philippe and I went to work, asking for recommendations, reading books, thinking about our context and what we wanted to convey. We were open to more unconventional types of text; we approached a food critic, a comedian, etc. Also, as a visual artist, most of the time I give my images for free to be published. We had no financing plans and quickly realized we had to give a fee for the writers’ time! Anton Kern gallery fortunately offered to co-sponsor it. Anyways, for months, we wrote to writers and agents. As we got a few positive answers, we started the collaborative process… but the deadline got closer and closer, and the focus became to find the right people and then ask them to pick a pre-existing work and write something for it.
In the end, we managed to work with three amazing fiction writers – Lauren Groff, Carmen Maria Machado and Nick Mulgrew. Each has a distinctive language that connects with the kind of modern surrealism you can find in my visuals and in two artists: Darren Bader, whose work is often conceptual and just exists in the world in the form of a text, and Austin Lee, who’s an adventurer and likes to dab into various mediums. Legion Seven is a friend of Philippe’s – a poet, musician, and performer.