I Is an Other

FORTHCOMING · JANUARY 1, 2026

ABOUT THIS ISSUE

“I is an Other,” Arthur Rimbaud wrote, naming a truth we spend a lifetime circling.

This issue of The Pasticheur begins from the understanding that the self is never singular. Identity emerges through others: through language, memory, inheritance, desire, trauma, culture, and chance.

The works gathered here treat the self not as a fixed core, but as a process. A negotiation. A practice shaped by doubles, masks, mirrors, and absences. Across painting, photography, sculpture, poetry, and collaboration, this issue asks how we come to inhabit multiple identities, and how those identities inhabit us in return.

I Is an Other approaches alterity not as abstraction, but as the medium of the self.

At the heart of this issue is the work of Céline Nieszawer and her double, Pupa Neumann.

Through twins, mirrored figures, erased faces, and staged repetitions, their work explores the instability of identity and the figure of the double as a fundamental condition rather than an exception.

Under the name Pupa Neumann, identity becomes porous, speculative, and deliberately fractured. The “I” speaks beside itself, through itself, and sometimes against itself.