Printed in 200 numbered copies, the second issue (actually the third) of the fanzine Mire is immediately striking for its handcrafted appearance: a hundred pages printed on thin, rough A5 paper, stapled together, with a one-of-a-kind photograph glued to each cover.
Black-and-white throughout, Mire features on its dog-eared pages the work of around thirty visual artists: photographers (including Emma le Doyen, Clara Deshayes, Maciek Pozoga and Levi Mandel), designers, graphic artists, poets and prose writers.
Dead shark heads, declarations of love, vehicles, pop culture ads, disc jackets, a map of Versailles and a enormous cat head: these are the things that make up the maelstrom of Mire, like a television flashing through all its channels at once.
We fend off this narrative epilepsy by trying to impose our own sense of rhythm, taming it with our look. Moments of beauty come to the surface: a wave carved into the ocean (Pozoga), two lights sitting on skyscraper-like shadows (Mr. Perrin), a woman’s face (Le Doyen) and others. Bursting with ridiculous images, the whole thing is like a sample of the background noise of a generation, captured on paper.
