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Typography as Translation: Alessandro Segalini on Designing Dreamscapes

In this illuminating discussion, Alessandro Segalini, master book designer and typographer for Contra Mundum Press, reveals how typography performs a kind of  translation —— not between languages, but between the inner architecture of a text and its physical manifestation on the page. Speaking about his intricate design work for Dreamscapes 1 —— Betrayals (101 & 202 Nights), Segalini explains how the “clothing”  and “shoes” of writing fundamentally shape our reading experience, with type setting the tone.

‍Dreamscapes presents unique challenges: a genre-blending narrative that weaves together prose, poetry, and dramatic elements, each requiring a distinct typographical treatment to guide readers through shifting rhythms and modes of thought. Segalini’s work doesn’t merely dress the text —— it creates a visual grammar that helps readers navigate the work’s prismatic complexity, using typeface, spacing, and layout as interpretive tools.
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The designer thus built a bridge for the screening and book celebration within the intimate space of Barzakh Café, showing how Sara Whym’s writing opens up to invite not only disparate readers but also different forms of artistic expression into its fold. In particular we see how Segalini’s typographical choices connect Whym’s multi-faceted poetic text with Rambert Caron’s jazz accompaniment and Mahsa Biglow’s visual interpretations in the multimedia piece Prism: A Beauty Shop Quartet. This convergence demonstrates how book design can serve as both foundation and catalyst for broader artistic collaboration.

Poet and publicist Alexandra Gold on reading Dreamscapes.

“Reading for Sara Whym has given me an opportunity to experiment with poetic performance beyond the self, to create an embodied character that blends my identity with Sara’s. For the duration of each fragment, I become a surrogate for her voice, allowing the story to unfold through me as a vessel for a new medium, just as Maia writes through and with Ondine, sculpting a chimera of language —— and generations of daughters.”

Dreamscapes 1 Launch at PowerHouse Arena
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On May 13th at PowerHouse Arena in Brooklyn, the first volume of Sara Whym’s genre-defying Dreamscapes, entitled Betrayals (101 & 202 Nights), came to life through an event blending literature with theater and ritual, as reflected in this video created by artist Mahsa Biglow. Contra Mundum Press publisher Rainer Hanshe introduced the work as existing beyond genres and even beyond the physical book itself, setting the stage for performances as fluid as Whym’s hybrid writing.

Poet and publicist Alexandra Gold voiced the haunting prose of the book’s first “dreamscapes,” while Ondine —— the spectral child at the story’s center —— was embodied through an incantation and dance by artist Daonne Huff, in flowing blue fabric: together, they transformed the space into an apt home for the poems, which Hélène Merlin-Kajman has described as “little theaters” where scenes become “unstable, flexible, elastic and metamorphic.”

Their performance was woven around the work’s two central characters: Maia, the narrator, and the daughter she aborted 23 years earlier, thus evoking a work which, as Mark Polizzotti has noted, creates a “shifting, oneiric world” where characters “drift in and out and fade away and reappear.” The launch became its own protective veil of stories, where literature, performance, and audience converged in the liminal space between memory and dream.