This bilingual book was jointly inspired by the city of Matera, in the Basilicata region of southern Italy, and by Vienna. It presents a comprehensive archive of verbal images as it explores themes of identity, translation, expectation, otherness, shame, and materiality. Personal notes, essays, and expressions are either randomly juxtaposed or methodically ordered based on poetic or quotidian spaces, and condensed into a volume filled with remembered and imagined scenes.

The author's own texts are complemented by guest input from Chiara Cardelli and Claudia Calcagnile, an interview with Ferdinand Schmatz, and drawings by Rudi Klein. Italian and German texts alternate, together creating with the color images and fold-out pages at the end of each chapter a text-image composition that offers multiple perspectives.

Autorentext

Stefanie Brottrager, artist, graduate of the Institute of Language Arts, University of Applied Arts Vienna