LE STUDIO Editions No. 2: Spieglein / Yutata’ti is dedicated to the Mexican theatre collective Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol. Edited by Garbiñe Ortega, the publication features a foreword by Lise Lendais and Pierre-Emmanuel Finzi. The book was created during the Covid-19 pandemic, accompanying a theatre collaboration between Mexico and Austria.

The publication brings together essays, conversations, photographs, performance documentation and collages created by children involved in the project. The contributions move between theatre and film, fiction and documentary practice, personal experience and political reality.

The idea behind the design was already embedded in the title: Spieglein, or “little mirror.” We conceived the book as a physical mirror consisting of two equal parts. The German edition begins at one end and the Spanish edition at the other. Rather than simply placing the translation after the first section, the two languages lead into the publication from opposite directions and meet in a shared visual section at its centre.

This principle also determines the treatment of the images in the central section, particularly the collages created by the participating children. This section forms the visual heart of the publication. Individual pages are rotated, while photographs—including portraits of the children, some of which were taken by Elsa Okazaki—repeatedly change their orientation and invite readers to turn the book as they move through it. Reading thus becomes a physical act and an ongoing shift in perspective.

Yellow marks transitions, frames images and interrupts the quieter text pages. Through the children’s handwritten notes and collages, the design occasionally resembles a notebook or personal diary. A flexible grid connects the different materials without making them formally uniform: essays remain essays, photographs retain their spatial presence, and the collages are allowed to feel direct, irregular and alive.