In the first artist’s book of the painter Anna Schachinger, the beings she depicts share the experience of various adventures: they carry themselves through a pack of wild dogs; they have legs that are also hippopotamuses, and knees like watermelons. Schachinger’s drawings sometimes condense into busy scenes and picture puzzles or evaporate into mere contours, with a creeping, fragmented narrative in which bodies dissolve and merge. This gives rise here to a queer body language of mutual affinity.

In the accompanying short story “Air-Root Creatures” by the author Margit Mössmer, the pack of wild dogs and other motifs from Schachinger’s drawings reappear. We discover ourselves to be in a hotel, an elderly woman sits down at a breakfast table, and things are already underway.