DWYER, Jacob
Notes on Devils

In Lithuania, I recorded sounds. Upon returning to my home in the Netherlands, I used these sounds to form the base of an audio drama entitled, The Devil Museum. The book is a transcription of it — a script — which, with the benefit of time, I have re-read, reconsidered, and annotated.

In The Devil Museum, we read the transcript of the audio diary of a man tasked with photographing all 3,000 devil sculptures in a nearby museum. As the project begins to fail and the protagonist spends more time alone in their wooden cabin, the narrative moves subtly into subjects such as boredom, masculinity, and isolation. They cannot start their project because they’ve lent their entire working budget to a character named Martin, who’s constantly promising yet failing to pay him back. In Notes on Devils, we learn how Martin is a construct, an amalgamation of Jacob’s real-life male friends and acquaintances who have awkwardly found themselves in adulthood. Through his annotations, Dwyer elaborates on these influences, thinking through them to eventually imagine new scenes in the piece. Scenes in which these real-life relationships and the forms of masculinity at play within them can also be reimagined. [publishers’ note]

Click here to listen to the audio piece.

NB: Pretty nice pictures of devil sculptures from Lithuania complete the publication.

Published by Building Fictions, 2023
Design by Rudy Guedj
Artists' Books / Magic