DIE GLÜCKSELIGEN INSELN

»The Blissful Isles« // Graphic novel // as part of the 5-volume and 1000-pages debut-novel »At the edge of the world man sits and laughs«, written by Philipp Weiss, published by Suhrkamp, 2018 It is a mysterious pain that causes the world around Abra, a young Japanese woman, to come apart at the seams: the ‘pain in the machine’, namely in her mechanical prosthetic arm. She sets off on a vertiginous journey through Tokyo which gradually strays from the coordinates of reality; a descent into hell through cultural archives, simulations, and strange loops of the self. The Blissful Isles is about the idling search for a foothold and the loss of the other in a mediatised world. For this volume, Philipp Weiss’s text was translated into images by the Viennese artist Raffaela Schöbitz.