Each issue of the ‘dead pages’ is our (re-)interpretation of vintage books, magazines or print ephemera we found and collected. It’s format is reminiscent of a magazine and exceeds the usual size of the other books in our catalog. Each edition of ‘dead pages’ is composed of loose 64 x 44 cm prints that are folded in half and contained in a screen printed, PVC sleeve. It is an open, but numbered edition. ‘dead pages’ has been created as an attempt to look at and reexamine hidden messages that exist in our library.

Dead Pages No. 5: Parasites unfolds as an interspecies collaboration carved by bugs and completed by Wysocka / Pogo. In its fifth iteration, Dead Pages turns its attention to the strange intimacies between decay and desire. Parasite begins with a chance discovery: a Chinese manuscript from 1898, unearthed by artists Wysocka and Pogo in Tokyo’s Jimbo-cho neighborhood. The object itself was already transformed, its pages meticulously tunneled by an unknown insect. The bug’s silent labor etched filigrees through the paper, never touching the ink, as if respecting language while feasting on its vessel. From this devoured relic, the artists constructed a new book-object: a hybrid work where paper, image, and absence intertwine. Into the eroded manuscript they inserted images from a 1970s entomological dictionary—a taxonomy of the creatures that consume, preserve, and annotate through destruction. The resulting work, rephotographed and reassembled, forms the tactile architecture of Dead Pages No. 5. The artists are acutely aware of the dangers of aestheticizing the foreign or the ruin. The Chinese manuscript is a resistant surface—a language and history that remain opaque to the artists and to the viewer. Making that opacity part of the work’s conceptual core reframes the manuscript as something that resists full consumption, even as it is materially transformed. In this way, Parasite turns the act of appropriation back on itself: the artists become implicated in the same parasitic exchange they document, their own gaze unsettled by the awareness of what cannot be read, known, or possessed. Appropriation can flirt with exploitation, fetishism, or voyeurism; self-awareness or critique is often central to legitimizing the practice. In short, the history of using found images is really a history of artists negotiating the tension between inheritance and invention, possession and transformation, reverence and critique. Parasite lingers on the fetish of touch—the sensual surface of paper, the vulnerability of printed matter, the animal as collaborator. Here, reading becomes an act of infection, the page a shared skin between human and insect. What remains is both a ruin and a resurrection: a manuscript rewritten by hunger, remade by those who found beauty in its wounds. The object carries languages and contexts that remain partially unreadable to the artists. Rather than treating this opacity as absence, the work embraces it as resistance — a reminder that not everything can be translated, possessed, or aesthetically consumed. In reworking the manuscript, Wysocka and Pogo sought not to restore or extract meaning, but to listen to what time, insects, and chance had already inscribed. The resulting book-object reflects on the ethics of looking, touching, and reconfiguring cultural material — an acknowledgment that every act of artistic transformation is also a form of parasitism.