Periodicals

The moment human fingertips lifted from the ground, upright walking became a privilege rather than a mere posture. The liberated hands could now be used to create tools for defense and hunting. The pupils’ gazes shifted from a level view to a downward perspective, a physical change that also translated into an awareness that overlooked other species. The spine, situated at the center of the human body, acts like a covert ruler, measuring the scale of evolution and supporting the illusion of being “human-centric.” Thus, humans stand, placing themselves far above all other creatures. Following this profound gestural revolution came the imagination and manipulation of non-human animals (the Others), turning them into livestock and companions, as their wildness was rewritten as docility. Their bodies became resources to be medicated and refined, transforming into instruments for milk and nutritious meat production. They became basic knowledge and research data, linking humanity’s ever-expanding and illusory colonial territories.

Discussions and attempts to understand often struggle to escape the limitations of human centrism. Trapped in a persistent ethical dilemma, we find it difficult to navigate the unequal power dynamics that confine us. As the urgency of environmental and ecological issues intensifies, a question repeatedly emerges: Is it possible for us to construct a relatively equal multi-species world? Can we, with greater humility and introspection, relearn how to coexist with the Others? This fourth issue does not offer answers; instead, it comprises reflections and imaginations, as most contributors have long-standing experiences with or ongoing research on non-human animals. Through observation, education, painting, writing, and image-making, they seek to loosen the existing “ethical relationships” and “orderly rules.” Returning to the interior of the body, each vertebra of the spine accumulates traces of human transitions and memories that have yet to dissipate. However, the spine has never fully completed its evolution; its flaws are evident, and the hidden pain it causes always accompanies the body. Perhaps it is this persistent pain that continually reminds us that suffering, which may seem unrelated to us, can be perceived anew from the fissure of spines. By stepping into the bodies of Others, to feel and acknowledge them, a slow exchange occurs that reopens our imagination and generates a relationship that has yet to be named.

Contributors:  Eva Koťátková, Hsu Che-Yu and Chen Wan-Yin, Victoria Soyan Peemot, Sha Shuang, Liz Pui Yee Chee, Robert Zhao Renhui, Qindi Hu, Chuangbin Chen, Lei Zhu, Wantanee Siripattananuntakul, Boria Sax, Candice Lin and Justin Torres
Assistant Editor: Jierui Ou
Designer: Can Yang

Avec Camille Demirian, Gabrielle Culand et Fleur Caméra, Camille Chambon (Karaocake), Sara Lehad, Radio Hito, Federica De Ruvo, Miskin Télé, Nana Esi, Sara Mokrani, Vivien Goldman, Eve Alpert et DJ Ventilateur.

SPRING/SUMMER 2026

FEATURES
David Joselit and Janine Iversen in conversation, Mirror Trick: On the self-regenerating oeuvre of Bettina by Cecilia Bien, INSIDE THE PEARL II:Inframince, the Message in Miniature (Conceptual Commodities and N-Dimensional Translation) by Matilda Lin Berke

PORTFOLIO
Bettina (1927-2021)

ON DUCHAMP
Trevor Winkfield, Jutta Koether, Charles Gaines, B. Wurtz, Mark Polizzotti, Nolan Simon, H.P, Timothy Baum, Yasumasa Morimura

POETRY
"7 Delays for Marcel Duchamp" by Terrence Arjoon

REVIEWS
Margaret Kross on Haynes Riley at Coin, Justin Kamp on Josiane M.H. Pozi at American Academy for Arts and Letters, William Corwin on Come Together: 3,000 Years of, Stories and Storytelling at the Morgan Library and Museum, Kimberlean Donis on Sophie Rivera at El Museo del Barrio, Jonah James Romm on Heaven is a Train Car, Q/R Trains

Mutt Art Review considers the encounter with a work of art to be a starting point for a new literary work of its own. Four times per year, they print essays, fiction, poetry, reviews, diaries, and experiments. They foster writing that is sharp, alive, and takes risks in attempting to evaluate what is meaningful in the art experience.

Issue 57 of the Movement Research Performance Journal (MRPJ) takes up the keyword “work.” Given that Movement Research has a history of being an organization of artists laboring for and with one another, we invited contributors to consider, revise, or push against questions like: how are things working today? What is the condition of labor in the field of dance and performance? What does it mean to be or have a body that works, on which work is (or isn’t) projected? How do idealizations of the laboring body and/or the ethos of collective practice relate to or obscure the lived experience of making dance works, working in dance, or balancing artistic production with the productive demands of one’s so-called “survival job”? To work in dance (or the arts in general) is indisputably to be exploited. But the contributors to this issue both directly and obliquely take up the experience of working as both enervating and energizing (in often contradictory ways), and draw from their different experiences of working work’s uneven distribution across the globe, the abelism that belies work’s regimentation, and the on-going struggle to find solidarity among arts workers.

More than thematically linked, the issue’s three sections also reflect a desire to address how this publication itself asks artists to work. Artist-run since 1990, the burden of administering a publication like the MRPJ was (perhaps) once outweighed by the promise of what this kind of project could do to shape the field of dance and performance. Today, that editorial and administrative labor dovetails all too well with what has become naturalized as an expectation of practicing artists—that they write about what they are doing or want to do in grant applications, that they create content to be used both for educating and marketing to audiences, and that they develop a discourse that signifies the value of their work in relation to any number of fields other than dance.

For Issue 57, the MRPJ editorial team (Josh Lubin-Levy, John Arthur Peetz, and Nicole Bradbury) gave the keyword “work” to three artists designated as “Contributing Editors” (nora chipaumire, Jerron Herman, and Alex Rodabaugh). nora, Jerron, and Alex were each invited to invite three to five other participants to join the discussion but also encouraged to pass on the administrative and editorial labor to the MPRJ staff.

Issue 57 is only the beginning of thinking about how the structure of a journal on and by artists needs to adapt to an era in which content creation exists in overdrive.

Theories of dance dramaturgy can be found in a growing body of literature on the field (see our incomplete reading list in this issue). But for Issue #61 of the Movement Research Performance Journal the editors decided stay in the not-knowing by inviting contributions from those whose work touches on dance dramaturgy with curiosity, anxiety, anarchy, as well as a conviction for the intimacy it requires and a resistance to its history of institutional/state authority.

At the heart of the issue is a special section by Contributing Editor Ligia Lewis. Across Lewis’ works there are not only a range of dramaturgs, but the role of dramaturgy shifts and morphs in relationship to the differing works and over time.  The reinvention of the dramaturg that Lewis’ work articulates is something that has proliferate throughout the field of contemporary dance. The rest of the issue includes a range of texts, some from practicing dramaturgs, others from to those who have reluctantly accepted this title, and still more who reject the role outright — all exploring a simple question: why has there been an explosion of interest in, perhaps even desire for, dramaturgs in contemporary dance? The explosion I’m thinking of is not about a growing professionalization of dance dramaturgy (though that is certainly happening…). I mean simply that more dance and performance artists are including dramaturgs as part of their process, and at the same time seem to be continually reinventing what the dramaturg is meant to do. What can we make of the desire for the dramaturg as well as the desire to continually reinvent this figure and its function?

Exhibitions by American Artist and CB Evans, conversations with Che Gossett and Dean Spade, and short stories by Lola Olufemi and Orion J Facey.

Pina is a printed, portable exhibition space. We function as a commissioning platform, collaborating with artists to create exhibitions existing solely within the pages of a magazine.

this issue of mnemotope feels especially charged; charged with politics as well as humour, absurdity, gentleness and a vice-grip on the present moment. getting to share in the vitality and emotion and outrage and stillness and hilarity and chaos within these words reminds us that there are other people living different lives who feel as intensely as we do, and we’re not going mad - or at least, not going mad alone.

The tenth issue of Errant Journal looks into the decolonial practice of refusal. By being the absence of an action, refusal foregoes the binary relation or reactionism that is implicit in much of our resistances. A refusal is not against something per se but is rather aimed at opening up space for another way that may yet have to be imagined. More than an act of withdrawal or disengagement, refusal is generative of change and the creation of true alternatives to the status quo. Continuing from its own practice of refusal throughout the first nine issues of the journal, this issue explores a wide variety of ways and contexts in which refusal is practiced and looks into what subjects, histories, and politics these refusals produce. From refusing measurement and categorizations, to fugitivity, illegibility, (hunger) strikes, laziness, trespassing, and moratoria, this issue asks what is made possible when people no longer participate and instead become ungovernable.

With contributions by Thamil Venthan Ananthavinayagan, Ritika Biswas, Jake Bowers, Irene de Craen, Diana Al-Halabi, Fatemeh Kazemi, RJ Ledesma, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Musa Shadeedi, Dewi Sofia, Diba Taj-Abadi, Dicky Takndare, Zoe Todd, rémy-paulin twahirwa, Siddharth Unnithan Kumar

Clipping 3 takes its cue from unbound echo, a sonic installation by Aimée Theriot which explores echo as both a material phenomenon and a conceptual method. Moving between scores, essays, field notes, mythology, and oral traditions, this issue considers echo not as a return of the same, but as a process of transformation—a mediated doubling that reverberates across sounds, memory, technology, architecture, and embodied practice.

With contributions by Aimée Theriot, Emile Frankel, Pelumi Adejumo, Vivian Wang, and more.

"In the three previous issues of Worms, we have plumbed the depths of the mind, unravelled the mysteries of the heart, and traversed the vast expanses of the soul. For this next instalment, Worms 12, we have sought to get back to our roots, to burrow our heads and tails into the soil from which we came. The central tenet of our fertilising mission has always been to champion the best and most experimental writing we can sink our teeth into, to challenge the exclusivity of traditional publishing, and to bring what’s lurking underground to the literary topsoil. We revel in writing that corrupts form, defies genre, and subverts style; work that deals in the uncomfortable, the uncertain, and the untoward. We ask: what can literary form reveal to us about ourselves, our heroes, the global landscape. We don’t need to remind you of the turmoil of our current moment. The frequency and escalating depravity of the bad news that reaches us through the black squares in our pockets says it all. Instead we return to writing to excavate its radical potential; writing as protest, as remedy, as subterfuge, as escape.

While we cast our net far and wide, in putting this issue together a constellation of themes and ideas naturally emerged. From the complexities of history, legacy, and lineage, to the persistence of ghosts, grief, and memory; from the trappings of masculinity to the transformations of parenthood, pregnancy, and birth; from acts of community-building to queer kinship, messiness, and desire." (Note from the publisher)

Worms Editors: Caitlin McLoughlin, P. Eldridge, Arcadia Molinas

Featuring: Tourmaline, Namwali Serpell, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Jamieson Webster, Wayne Koestenbaum, Sophie Robinson, Missouri Williams, Robert Glück, Bambi Lake, Amber Husain, Mar García Puig.

Contributors: Eve Esfandiari-Denney, Madame Nielsen, Gaye Kynoch, Izabella Scott, Maxy Lury, Lou Ferrand, Tadhg Haran, Chariot Wish, Donna Marcus Duke, R.Z Baschir, Charlotte Pelissier, Anju M Kasturiraj, Vic Brooks, Saffron Morter-Laing, Dove Ginsburg.

Photographers: Michel Delsol, Xavi Permanyer, Alexander Coggin, Robin Christian, Veronika Korjagina, Joseph Hayes, Ciarán Óg Arnold.

Artwork & Illustration: Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Rifke Sadleir, Ivy Shepherd-Barron, George Paul, Katya Labowe-Stoll.

Design: Caitlin McLoughlin

Founded in 2023, A4 is a poetry review which showcases and explores contemporary writings practices. Run by Littérature Supersport collective, the object is seen as the extension of their events. The review takes the form of 4 postcards which, when placed side-by-side, form an A4-sheet. A light (even precarious) format for literature that slips into the back pocket of pants and hangs on fridge doors. Each issue features unpublished texts by 4 authors.

This issue presents texts by : Amandine André, Gary Farrelly, Fanny Garin, Michael Strunge.

Character fractures and narration slides and shifts (or transcendentally shits? To quote Geneviève Pastre) as Tongue Ring returns for its second issue of experimental writing in English/French, this time with original contributions and translations* of texts by HippolyNe NxNN, Geneviève Pastre, Leonora Dora Donova, Wayne Kostenbaum*, Benjamin Krusling*, Jonathan Martin, Mawena Yehouessi, Brontez Purnell, Gorge*, Anne-Sarah Huet PLUS trenchant reviews, mysterious gossip, lonely hearts, ads and more.

Graphic design by Charlotte Collin (Formula Projects).

This issue of OEI proposes the first large-scale synthesis of Lettrist photography as a precise “system” – going through the Lettrist movement’s engagement with photography from the 1950s up until 2013. It reproduces around 430 photographic works and documents, and also includes English translations of texts by and interviews with Isidore Isou, Maurice Lemaître and Frédérique Devaux.

The first phase was to call photography into question. Through scratches and tears, the surface of the image was worked on, transformed within itself. This is the chiselling stage. Then we propose Lettrist photography, which transforms the old object into a letter or sign, redefining it as a simple particle in a system of elements that has become the alphabet of a new script. Hypergraphic photography goes even further, using any sign or graphic design to create a poly-writing system resulting in billions of characters, existing, artificial or new. Going even further, in 1956 our movement introduced infinitesimal photography, creating works composed of elements that exist only insofar as they allow us to imagine other elements, non-existent or possible. Each element must make us think of other elements. Infinitesimal photography is made up of billions of pieces of virtual data! Then, in 1960, the Lettrist movement unveiled a new dimension: supertemporal photography. With supertemporal photography, I offer a framework within which each viewer can act in his or her own way. Far superior to today’s happenings it has no time limit. The image is forever open to new amateurs who erase or continue what has already been done on the photograph by previous amateurs. It’s a work that has been going on for centuries! This is our creation in photography. […] We amuse ourselves at the level at which things are done, and we see them twenty years ahead of time. To say that Lettrist photography doesn’t exist is to say that no photograph exists …
—Isidore Isou, 1973

Photography on Edge – 25 visual dossiers compiled and introduced by Geoffrey Batchen + ”Wanting more” – on and from the work of Australian artist Justine Varga + translations of a selection of Geoffrey Batchen’s essays into Swedish

”The published history of photography has long been motivated by a number of key principles: innovation and originality, authorship and nationality, chronology and medium specificity, technical excellence and aesthetic achievement. The folios [in OEI #102–103] offer an alternative way to regard this history. They comprise a series of repetitious fragments drawn more or less arbitrarily from across various photographic practices and genres. In every case, these folios present a photography on edge: tense, nervous, unsure of itself—at least when compared to the self-certainty we encounter in most histories of this medium.

A photography on edge is a photography that escapes the usual definitions. […] One thing is for sure: if they are to be included in future histories of photography, then we will need to set aside our prejudices and presumptions and learn to say what we see, and not just see what we already know how to say.”

— Geoffrey Batchen in Photography on Edge

To be in a group is to submit to a form of disorganizing organization that hangs on careful balance: to be devoted to a collective without being engulfed, to be disciplined by it without sleepwalking to the tune of a leader’s will, to integrate without dissolving into it. As infants born into a sexual union from which we are then necessarily excluded, the yields and limits of assembly are evident from the outset. Before we arrived in the bloc, we lived our lives in other groups: the family, the religious order, the cafeteria table clique. You can sit with us. You can’t. Some groups we remember entering. Others we didn’t elect, but deselected.

As a form of critique whose object of analysis is suffering, psychoanalysis understands the pains of the group. Its full task is to make sense of them as a condition of the many as much as of the one. As the psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu glosses the problem of thinking about groups, the “commonplace” assumption is that the group “is a pooling, a sharing” through which “the energies, enthusiasm and capacities of individuals who freely assent to the discipline of the group” coalesce into a unified forcefield. Yet, as Anzieu stresses, this idealized description eats itself. It collapses union with sharing, with collectivity. We know that groups rely on sharing. He asks, “a sharing of what?”

Psychoanalytic cults. Cowboy churches. The Epstein Class. Iranian monarchists. Fascist liberals. Clinics and their radicals. Discipline and holding. Getting together, falling apart.

Essays by Séamus Malekafzali, Tracy McNulty, Richard Seymour, Zahid Chaudhary, Danny Hayward, Eri Linsker, hannah baer, and more.

OEI #112–113: A Cosmology of Bliss concerns Bliss (aka Blissymbols or Semantography) — an unspoken language made of countless little geometric symbols, many resembling the things they point to, others remaining more mysterious. Charles K. Bliss (1897–1985) began the project in 1942 while a stateless refugee in the Shanghai International Settlement, and who, after emigrating to the Australian beach town of Coogee, worked on it for the rest of his life. After 30 years of obscurity, the language was picked up as a communication system for nonverbal children in a small hospital school in Canada, with great promise. This, however, led to acrimony between its creator and its first genuine users, who sought to amend it for their needs—an event which Charles likened to ‘a new Babel of symbols’.

A Cosmology of Bliss reconsiders the histories, forms, and dreams of Bliss and its many contributors. It includes a new picaresque biography of Charles, the chemical engineer, wounded refugee, and amateur semanticist; essays that draw out affinities and resistances, such as with the history of 20c Australian poetry and experimental pedagogy; unpublished material from Bliss’s manuscripts and correspondences, including an extensive selection of the barely-published Blissymbols Picture Book—Charles’s final work; and commissions by some thirty artists and poets who put the symbols to new and unruly use. Together they seek to lodge Bliss into the history of Australian visual art and poetry as a remarkable exception. Against received accounts of a failed auxiliary language or an outmoded therapeutic aid, A Cosmology of Bliss is the first study to insist that Bliss is a poetic project. Taken as such, the symbols begin to speak—silently—of a world of lucky faults, chemical grammars, speechless inscriptions, and untenable, incandescent loves.

with Dr. Charles K. Bliss & his devoted coworkers: Javant Biarujia, Claire Bliss, Christopher Brennan, Melinda Bufton, Alexis Carrel, Brendan Casey, Justin Clark, Mitchel Cumming, Gabriel Curtin, Jesse Darling, Douglas Everingham, Michael Farrell, Elisa Gabbert, Samantha Gorman, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Sam de Groot, Gail Hastings, Julian Huxley, Martin Johnston, Alfred Korzybski, Ruark Lewis, Aodhan Madden, Ern Malley, Rowan McNaught, Shirley McNaughton, Tom Melick, Quenton Miller, Robert Milne, Anthony O’Donnell, Ouyang Yu, Victoria Perin, Oscar Perry, π.O., Lisa Radford, Oliver Reiser, Bertrand Russell, Mark von Schlegell, Imogen Stidworthy, Brian Stride, Ella Sutherland, Sam Szoke-Burke, Elisa Taber, Peter Tyndall, Lucy Van, Ania Walwicz, Margaret Woodward, Tim Woodward, Tom Wright, Xu Bing, Jarrod Zlatic, etc.

Get Rid of Meaning: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Writing is a biannual periodical by Sticky Fingers Publishing, exploring how and where meaning is produced, maintained and distributed. Through its first three issues, Get Rid of Meaning has become a site for interrogating the material conditions and affective systems of meaning-making, and strategies for surviving an intentionally nonsensical political landscape, through experimental non-fiction. This fourth issue builds on this by uncovering forms and methods of fugitive knowledge, from the heat of the land and the vibrations of the night, to the stoney rumblings of rivers and rock.

Featuring contributions from Alberto Álvarez, e v, Florence Hannah Evans, Lucy Petersen, Mark Sauter, mars k margetson & teresa amrita braggs.

LOOK HERE FOR: BLOOD BOILING, WHAT DEBT DOES, SEEING PURPLE, A PING-PONG BALL BENEATH THE RUBBLE, PSYCHOPOLITICS, ALIEN GOO, A ROD UP YOUR ASS, STONE SUMMONING FORTH, A MIRACLE, & THE BEGINNING OF THE END.

For our Summer 2026 issue, amid the latest revival of SPIRITUALITY in culture, Spike asked: what are people reaching for beyond what can be measured? The answers are eclectic, emphatic, and most of all personal: Johanna Hedva’s essay about the human voice’s part in the divine; portraits of mystic artists Lee “Scratch” Perry, Natasha Tontey, and Santiago Yahuarcani by Isis Semaj-Hall, Riar Rizaldi, and Miguel A. López; Jamieson Webster’s psychoanalytic look at Renaissance painting’s body of Christ; a spiritual history of perfumes by Élisabeth de Feydeau; Patrick McGraw’s soulful reading of America’s (perhaps) greatest living author, Joy Williams; queries of Gen Z’s search for God by Lamorna Ash, the disappearance of atheism by Steven Phillips-Horst, and a new form of contemplation by Aodhan Madden; and LIFEMAXXING recommendations to purge the soul, sometimes devilishly. Plus, some backpage words of wisdom from Tea Hačić-Vlahović: “Devotion and humiliation are holy.” 

What began as a project responding to the fiftieth anniversary of the ‘end’ of the Vietnam War became a project of inhabiting the Movement Research Performance Journal (MRPJ) from within the landscape of contemporary Vietnamese performance art. The result, Issue #62, is a window onto a community of insiders who reflect a set of concerns, questions, historical trajectories, and aesthetic legacies that differ from what has more often been foregrounded in our U.S./New York City-centric publication. Like other documents of this kind, which endeavor to portray a performance scene that will be foreign to many readers, the texts from this group of intergenerational, contemporary artists demonstrate a careful navigation of the dialectics of inside and outside, self and other, performer and audience, seeing and being seen, that informs every exchange across cultural difference.

The texts are also not monolithic, suggesting a range of relations to the Vietnam of the past and present, from within Vietnam’s national borders and among the diaspora. Especially for contributors living and working in Vietnam, writing has also been a practice of choreographing words within a political landscape where to speak publicly, in itself, is a performance of negotiated risk. Embracing the complexities of these differing positions has been the focus of our editorial process—one that has asked the editorial team to embrace the limits of our own knowledge, to recognize we will not be able to recognize all valences others may discover in these texts, and not to edit these layers out of the works that follows.

Reportage, photography, and art from Palestine and Lebanon. Contributors include Alaa Mansour, Fady Joudah, Farah Silvana-Kanaan, Fatima Joumaa, Fouad Elkoury, Hadi Afif, Islam Al-Khatib, Philippa Dahrouj, Rawad Wehbe, Sakir Khader, and Wassila Abboud.

INTERVIEWS Dave Eggers by Jim James Jun Kaneko by Mark Mack Lotus L. Kang by Lara Mimosa Montes Reverend Joyce McDonald by Katherine Cheairs Rodney McMillian by Dave McKenzie Ruth Ozeki by Hannah Tinti Samora Pinderhughes by Jason Moran Debra Priestly by Nancy Grossman Elaine Reichek by Sabrina Gschwandtner

FICTION Isabelle Fang, Yuri Herrera, Claire Vaye Watkins
NONFICTION Shaan Sachdev
POETRY Adedayo Agarau, Elena Alexander, Kelsey Day
PORTFOLIO Shraddha Ramani and William Villalongo
COMIC Margaret Barry
EDITOR’S CHOICE Reflections on new works from Horse Lords, Valeria Luiselli, Nicolás Pereda, Julian Radlmaier, and Paul Yoon and a monograph on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

On the cover: Detail of Rodney McMillian, shaft, 2021–22, latex, acrylic, Flashe, ink, and paper on canvas, six panels, 80 × 4 feet diameter. Photo by Jason Mandella. Courtesy of the artist, Vielmetter Los Angeles, and Petzel, New York City.

BOMB Magazine is a quarterly of artists in conversation begun in 1981 in New York. BOMB publishes interviews across disciplines like visual art, literature, performance, music, dance, film, and is founded on mission of delivering the artist's voice. Publishing print seasonally, BOMB also publishes interviews, flash fiction, studio visits, excerpts, and essays five times a week on our website. 

Art in the digital age. 

Go on, admit it. There's no longer a meaningful distinction between "real life" and life online, up to and including sitting around in the park. So why shouldn't art reflect the furious, melancholic, psychedelic sensation that, even when we make our screens dark, we've all been permanently logged on? A new era deserves new aesthetics, but also fables, values, and protocols. Everything is interwoven. Everything's computer.

Featuring Brian Droitcour on lore and NFTs; Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo on exocapitalism; the godmother of internet girlhood, Ann Hirsch; locating the tech-feminist to tech-fascist spectrum with Anan Fries; Anika Meier on the post-artist; a visual essay by Ruba Al-Sweel & Al Hassan Elwan (POSTPOSTPOST); a defense of useless images by Gideon Jacobs; the second life of memes by Dena Yago; a prophecy of a neo-oral age by Günseli Yalcinkaya; a primer on internet cinema with Dana Dawud; Gary Zhexi Zhang's guide to Shenzhen, "China's Silicon Valley"; and the never-miss backpage from Tea Hačić-Vlahović: "Underground communities prevail against odds. Like rats and nuclear bombs." Plus! Our new lifestyle section, LIFEMAXXING.

How can we define and document our present? 

Postmortem is a sensitive yet critical metaphor for a world suspended between collapse and reinvention—a diary of the now. Drawing together writers and artists from Europe and the SWANA region, this issue locates areas of tension that define our era. Far from a mere dialogue between regions, it exposes the inner and outer fractures of Western hegemony, unearthing shared emotions. 

From reclaiming histories and narratives in the Arab world to deconstructing digital spaces as arenas of control and resistance—even exposing systemic exclusions embedded in blood donation policies—contributors reveal these tensions as a fertile terrain for dialogue and reflection. 

Through critical essays, narrative writing, poetry, interviews, and contemporary art, the concept of Postmortem unfolds an in-between state where death and rebirth occur simultaneously. Across three interwoven chapters—Metaconnexion, Dissociation, and Fragmentation—the issue engages radically with body politics, othering, post-orientalism, surveillance, decoloniality, freedom, and resistance. 

Both a chronicle and a hybrid object where text, design, and image interact, Postmortem archives a world in flux. Rather than prognosticate, it dissects the present as the essential site for reimagining our future. 

Contributors : Sara El-Jazara, François Peyroux, Nadine Makarem, Soukaina Melhaoui, Louise Mervelet, Manon Schaefle, Marina Mardas, Irina Breitenstein, Amer Al-Dakar

The independent British film journal Afterimage published thirteen issues between 1970 and 1987. International in scope, it surveyed the many forms of radical cinema during an extraordinary period of film history. Having emerged in the wake of post-1968 cultural and political change, Afterimage charted contemporary developments with special issues on themes such as the avant-garde, Latin American cinema and visionary animation, and also looked back at early film pioneers. It published many of the leading critics of the period and vitally provided a forum for filmmakers’ writings and manifestos.