Unit 26 of Southampton’s Bargate Centre will be transformed into a punk publishing house next month as award-winning artists The Girls take over with their installation The Paper Eaters.

Straight from London’s Selfridges, the artists will be working with volunteers and students from Southampton Solent University to create and perform pieces of work to appear in two new editions of The Girls’ photo-story magazine.

As artists-in-residence The Girls will adopt the personas of the flamboyantly dressed Editors-in-Chief of the magazine. The shop will be filled with surreal paper-inspired objects, and personal artifacts, suggesting the innocence of a bygone Britain.

Paying homage to traditional printing methods, each issue of The Paper Eaters will be compiled using traditional hand-cut and paste collage techniques typical to the photo-story, whose popularity was at its height in the 1980s.

The limited edition collectable magazines will be for sale both from Unit 26 Bargate Mall and from the papereaters.co.uk from December onwards.

Visitors will be able to talk to the artists and to the magazine contributors on-site as well as enjoying numerous interactive activities. The Girls are working in association with Millais Off-Site Projects.

The preview is on Saturday 27 November and the exhibition runs from Fridays to Sundays 12-5pm until 17 December. The shop will also be open on other selected week days. Admission is free. For more details log on to The Paper Eaters website, The Girls website or the Millais Off-Site Project website.