140 x 203mm, 28 pages, single colour risograph printed inner, five colour risograph printed cover, saddle stitched, 2022

Written between the summer and winter solstices of 2020, this is a sequence of twelve sections, each one marking a turn in the weather, a break in cloud, a spell between intimacy and distance. Inspired by Chris Marker’s 1983 film of the same name, Sans Soleil explores a poetics of dissolve, mediation and temporal sabotage. It asks, what is it to touch and be touched across fluctuating scales and times, to figure memory and dailiness in the tension of image and its repurposing as commodity and affective currency? In a chiaroscuro lyric of light and shadow, Sans Soleil dwells in the virtual ecotones where species might touch, meld dreams or experience ‘a sort of cramp in language’ which signals elemental change as song. Each section was written in synchronous sessions where the lines were written ‘in turn’ between fred spoliar and Maria Sledmere, alongside para conversations about the uses and abuses of pastoral.

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