Artist edition of Repetition and Ruins, text Dalie Giroux, drawings by Julie Evanoff
2026
Repetition and Ruins offers avenues
to question and radically re-think our shared condition as 21st-century earthlings living in, by, and against power accumulators: capitalism and the state. In these pages, images and
concepts give notice and interpretation to connections between power accumulators and daily life, apparent in the repetition of the things we say, the things we silence, the things we do, the manner in which we move through space, the
geography we operate in, the names
we give to things, the things we deem
impossible, the things we throw away, repeatedly, over and over again, at an
industrial scale, as a choreography
of the whole. Readers are invited to let themselves be haunted by the painful but enlightening notion that our individual lives participate in the
choreography of accumulation; and
that this form of life, this performance of the whole, in landscapes made from heaps of languages and heaps of waste, could also be something else, another choreography, for another form of life. Perhaps a choreography of dis-accumulation?
—Dalie Giroux
I discovered Dalie Giroux’s talk Repetition and Ruins through a panel discussion on Moyra Davey’s film “i confess” (2019). I watched the full video of her talk and was so magnetized by Dalie’s ideas and the elaborate chalkboard drawing she made that I made a spontaneous mini-comic and sent it to her asking if she would collaborate on a book. She was enthusiastic and many conversations followed in response to my multitude of questions. The text and drawings for the comic went through many iterations. I drew images from how-to books, children’s encyclopedias, art history, and pop culture to interpret, amplify, and contrast her ideas. This book combines my drawings with Dalie’s words in vignettes and scenes that create openings for readers to wonder about their connections and the multilayered meanings that emerge.
—Julie Evanoff
This edition of Dalie Giroux and Julie Evanoff’s Repetition and Ruins was produced on an AB Dick-360 offset press salvaged from a local school district. At our studio in MacArthur Park, Los Angeles, we watched pages shoot out of this cranky machine, including Dalie’s words: “Repetition, as thinking, is as good as it is bad. It IS. And it is inescapable.” MacArthur Park is known for its history of labor demonstrations, immigrant communities, and, in the last century, art schools. In Spring 2026, at the time of printing, the streets of the MacArthur Park neighborhood were emptied by raids, cluttered with chain-link fencing, and maligned by political candidates. Inside our building, the press materialized Julie’s drawings and Dalie’s words.
—Rakish Light, June 2026