For the past seven years, Pia Paulina Guilmoth and Jesse Bull Saffire have been scavenging within a sixty-mile orbit of their home: abandoned houses collapsing into the earth, mould-streaked cardboard boxes, the hunting camp at the end of the road, a politician’s discarded gay porn collection, yard sale leftovers, a junk-shop beside the waterfall. Family photos, town reports, forgotten newspapers — fragments of lives slipping out of memory.
“Everything was done on a beat-up Xerox machine we found sitting in the rain outside the fire department on Heavy Dump Day, 2024. The pages are a rearranged scrambled up history of old mill towns and pine-shadowed villages, somewhere between antique and Y2K. Debris and rituals, chaos and celebration, mildew and domestic comfort.”
The book collects these rescues, re-assemblies, and accidents: material both tender and grotesque, mundane and uncanny. Among them are photographs taken by Pia and Jesse on 8 MP digital cameras while trespassing and scavenging for material, alongside images from Pia’s own family archive. In their hands, the cast-offs of rural central Maine transform into a jumbled chronicle — a history that never asked to be preserved, yet somehow survived, soggy and stubborn.
All in all, ‘Fishworm’ is about dykes digging through trash.
21,6 x 28 cm
232 pages
1000 copies
Softcover w/ poster dustjacket