Published by IIKKI in 2022, Queen of Nowhere brings Kourtney Roy’s photography into a project conceived with musician Dayve Samek, also known as Trance Farmers. The collaboration is central to the book’s identity: rather than treating music as contextual material, the project positions photographs and sound as parallel contributions to a shared work. It therefore asks to be considered both as a photobook and as one part of an exchange between two artistic practices.

Roy’s work here is associated with autofiction, yet the project has been described as extending beyond that category’s usual limits. The title reinforces this ambiguity. Its “queen” suggests a performed identity, while “nowhere” withholds a stable territory in which that identity might be fixed. Without reducing the photographs to autobiography, the book frames self-invention as an open-ended photographic method—one capable of moving between persona, fiction and the artist’s own presence.

The publication gives that inquiry a clearly defined book form. Across 132 pages in a near-square 220 × 240 mm format, the photographic work is given sufficient space to stand independently while remaining connected to Samek’s musical contribution. The importance of the collaboration lies less in one medium explaining the other than in the different tempos they bring to the project: the held image and the unfolding duration of sound.

For collectors, Queen of Nowhere deserves attention as a precisely situated example of cross-disciplinary photobook publishing within Roy’s bibliography. Its significance rests on the way collaboration is built into the conception of the work, rather than added as supplementary commentary. The result occupies a productive threshold—between photography and music, self-representation and fiction, autonomous book and paired artistic project.