Unhoused

Unhoused is a composite fieldwork document—drawn, written, layered—that emerged through collaboration between cartoonist Mana Neyestani and anthropologist Mirco Göpfert. What began as a series of interviews, drawing lessons and message exchanges gradually evolved into something less easily classifiable: a joint attempt to trace how displacement unsettles not only bodies and homes, but also narrative, memory, and authorship itself.

The resulting work moves across three interwoven registers. The first is public and discursive: a series of Wikipedia edits that reveal how identity, kinship, and truth claims are rewritten through digital struggle. The second is political and forensic: a report drawn from Neyestani’s imprisonment, typed in clipped, compressed form and language. The third is intimate and disoriented: a dream sequence that distills the mood of narrative suspension, doors that open into nowhere, speech that cannot find its place. The three registers are folded together by other forms: a sketch-based dialogue, a reflective monologue, and a glossary that reframes rather than defines. Drawing, marginalia, and typographic shifts are meant to reframe how the piece is read: not as a single narrative, but as a layered encounter.