Zines

Beautiful Homes

Beautiful Homes is a sci-fi dystopian silent comic about the search for a home, started in March 2024. The story takes place in a time and place where language has lost its communicative function, replaced by a new alphabet composed solely of images: the images of a bygone era are the diphthongs that make up the non-words of this fictional world. 

The driving theme is the search for one's own home, conceived both as a nest in which to be happy or quiet and as shelter from external pitfalls, from the stranger whom I cannot understand, with whom I cannot speak (because the word has lost its meaning), from the ill-intentioned or even simply from people whose intentions I do not know. Home is family, but also independence, self-determination. Home is both belonging and separation. Home is property, almost always... Home is soil, it is land, and land must be defended at all costs.  But to what extent? Where is the line between protection and paranoia? Is it right to desire someone else's home? When does a house truly become “someone’s”? 

The zine subtly and awkwardly attempts to address those questions, producing the initial drawings, but these drawings eventually flipped those ideas upside down: what if it’s the house that doesn’t want to be inhabited, and defends itself? What if it has a kind of consciousness made of walls and concrete? So suddenly, following a back-and-forth trail, this question has somehow become the answer to all the starting inquiries. Ultimately, it all led to an ongoing quest for a mythical, perhaps unattainable place. In the end, it’s not the final place that defines Beautiful Homes, but the search for it.

Printed in collaboration with enter press. 19 × 27 cm risograph print in yellow, flat gold, and federal blue on Fedrigoni Arena Natural Rough 120 GSM paper. Sewn binding. Edition of 100

About Michele Dissegna

Michele Dissegna (1992) is a comic artist based in Venice, Italy. His work spirals through comics, illustration, and book/zine-making, merging the speculative with the autobiographical. His creative process is hopefully often the result of arranged, organised spontaneity. He is part of enter press, an illustration collective, risograph print studio, and independent publisher founded in 2020 in Bologna, Italy.