Author: S.T. Lore
Client: Discipline
Designer: Annie Wu / S.T. Lore
Illustrations: Joshua Petherick
Photographs: Nicholas Mangan
Pages: 208 pages, 18 x 12 cm
Format: Softcover, Offset Print
Year: 2012, English, ISBN: 978-0-646-57919-1
Presented in a flip novel these two novella-length works of fiction are the first solo publication by S.T. Lore and feature a complimentary duo of stories that pivot around characters immersed in ambiguous scenes of claustrophobia, obsessive archiving, impossible architectures, image-saturation and delusion.
'Institute Zagreb 1986' intertwines two contrasting narratives about a religion conceived by a pair of demographic analysts on the rooftop of an abandoned building and a lonely rock-collecting character named 'The Saxon'. The narrative is collated through uncovering archived audio recordings retained by an ʻexplosion proofʼ telephone. Institute Zagreb 1986 is interspersed with a series of graphic elements created for the publication by artist Joshua Petherick.
'The Air of Conquerors' is a surreal detective fiction set against a backdrop of the South Australian Desert scattered about with ruined Parisian monuments. It chronicles an academic search for a solitary telephone operator who disappeared long-ago into a subterranean hotel. The narrative was written in reference to a series of photographs taken by the Australian artist Nicholas Mangan while on residency in Paris in late November, 2011. These images were shared with the author as part of a correspondence project exploring the fictionalisation of images — both historical and the everyday ...
discipline
worldfoodbooks
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INSTITUTE ZAGREB
'The men’s faces loom in the parabolic glass: frozen, obtuse, blank ... their visage magnified in harmonised bureaucracy and autistic dedication. She had already been questioned by them once, not that long ago, about the disappearance of certain items from BEACON Pty Ltd. Was this visit the same again?
“Tell us about ZAGREB. The Institute Zagreb. What does it mean to you?”
Nothing. No reply and the men hover closer.
“We found these parts: copper-free aluminium cast housing, the number 9 fabricated from heavy duty aircraft bolts, the rest includes lead compartments for various moving parts, weapons grade steel, and it has been coated in something ordinarily used on the outer surface of submarines.”
The girl blinks in response but does not move. Her eyes are followed by their stare but that is all.
“Look I’m afraid you’ll have to leave her alone. This therapy will take at least three treatments and she is still not sure of her bearings. I have to ask you to leave.” Another hulking figure shadows the nurse in the doorway, so the men pause for a brief moment before exiting into the corridor and reluctantly leaving the premises via one of the exterior glass lifts. On the far-side of the city, they could see the empty space BEACON Pty Ltd once occupied. In the distance is the cleared spot, a blasted void. They exit into a de-compression chamber on the ground floor, where they are required to wait for 30 minutes.
"Look We Don’t need this. I’m telling you. We’e not going to find out any more, we should be going out there and seeing for ourselves what the place looks like . You wanna sit around here, bent out of shape like jagged knives, while the evidence is stacked up beyond the few metres of a simple moat? We just gotta time the tideflow and we’ll be sweet ... What about the girl? What’s her age? I don’t know, maybe Twenty-one, Thirty, thirty-two. Who can tell? I know that she doesn’t lie all day in the sun if that helps. Girl drips into view like tall milk. Forget about it. I know what you’re thinking. You wanna put her back in there and use her as a decoy, put her in a position to be taken back ... I mean, what else do we have? ... Do you even have a map of this place? ..."
*PART B Illustration by Joshua Petherick (2012)
