SIRI GUSDAL

nowhere at all 2024

01. PROJECT OVERVIEW

Nowhere at all is a 9,500 word short story I wrote that explores the unsettling experience of living within a liminal, or transitional, space. Hand-stitched with a debossed cover, I designed the printed book so that its material form would act as a storytelling device, rather than just as a container for the text.

Each individual page responds to the narrative in some way, using a combination of distorted imagery, collage, negative space and repetition to reflect the absurd atmosphere of the story. This publication is the culmination of my last two semesters at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, which I spent focusing on the relationship between design, creative writing, and the book as an object.

02. SYNOPSIS
The story follows the narrator, Agnes, directly after she graduates university and finds herself with no friends, no money, no career ambitions, and nowhere to live. While looking for a room to rent, she finds herself inexplicably drawn to 4202 Birch Street, the last house on a dead end street at the centre of a labyrinthine suburban neighbourhood. The main floor of the house is gutted and awaiting renovations, leaving only the top floor available for rent.

Agnes notes that each room upstairs feels frozen in a different time, as if every few decades someone had decided the whole house needed to be updated according to the current trends but had been consistently prevented from completing more than a single room. It feels less like a home and more like a disjointed collection of individual places. She agrees to rent one of three empty rooms, without knowing who she will be living with.

The day she moves in, the house is eerily still and her roommates are nowhere to be found. Agnes ends up staying in the house for six months without ever seeing the people she lives with, but comes to know them through the rhythms of their routines and the traces of their lives she collects from the trash. She is simultaneously unnerved and comforted by her lack of relationship to them, obsessed with getting to know them, but totally unwilling to let herself be known by them.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE

03. EPHEMERA

The book includes several pieces of the printed ephemera and bits of packaging that Agnes pulls out of her roommates’ trash in the story. I wanted the ephemera to convey a sense of an altered reality: debris from a world that is familiar but not exactly the same as the one we know. Some of the items are referenced in the writing but some are not, allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions about what they’re looking at and what it might tell them about the person who threw it away.

04. THE DESIGN PROCESS
This project was largely driven by my fascination with the aesthetic and experiential quality of “the liminal” (and the adjacent concepts of the eerie, the uncanny, and the strange). My main objective in both the design and writing was to take the mundane and twist it into something unfamiliar. I started designing the book at the same time as I wrote the story, which made for a really experimental process where my visual explorations would inform the writing, and vice versa. Only a small portion of the work I produced during the process ended up in the final book design, but it was all in service of first determining what I was trying to convey, and then how I might convey it.

SKETCHBOOK EXCERPTS

DISTORTING IMAGERY ON SCANNER BED

RISOGRAPH POSTERS