Spillovers

 The desire to bring the real body violently to life in the words of the book (everything that is written exists).

Monique Wittig

In 2020, a book was found in a well. This well, as many other of life’s cavities, was contaminated by superficial practices of intensive monoculture. Its water, having turned unsanitary, had then dried up for quite a long time. It was inside this hole, then, dried up yet viscerally imprinted by the memory of water, that a translation of “Lesbian peoples: material for a dictionary” written in 1976 by Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig, was found. The glossary presented here proposes a continuity with Wittig and Zeig’s clairvoyance, by elaborating further on the rings and fiction bags that Spillovers must touch and weave in order to
tangle the times and produce water.

Ritó Natálio

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Designed by Maura Grimaldi, the book Spillovers is one of several offshoots of the multidisciplinary creation of the same name — which premiered as a performance at the Batalha Cinema Centre in 2023 and as a film at the 10th Queer Porto (winner of the Casa Comum Award) — based on an expansion and fictional invention around the work Lesbian peoples: material for a dictionary, written in 1976 by Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig.

The book brings together the original text of the performance — a transfeminist glossary that guides the experience of this imagined community of Spillovers, lovers who summon the body, eroticism and somatic experience to deal with ecological violence and, eventually, to produce water — and a whole network of iconographies and textualities that overflow the worldviews of this invented community, with contributions from Guarani researcher and activist Geni Núñez and drawings by Odete and Josefa Pereira.

The work was selected by the jury of the 2025 Book Design Award to be included in the set of 20 Portuguese books nominated for the international competition Best Book Design From All Over the World 2026, promoted by the German foundation Buchkunst. In Portugal, it can be found at Livraria Aberta, Ler Devagar, Tigre de Papel, Livraria da Travessa, Livraria das Insurgentes and Greta Livraria.

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