Famous for my Dinner Parties - Issue 003

Mousse celebrates its 90th issue with a collectible edition, with a special design and format, entirely focused on fiction.

Bringing together a cohort of writers and artists, Mousse #90 – The Fiction Issue stems from the eponymous Fiction column that has dwelled in our pages for five years, and expands its scope. It was developed together with Rosanna McLaughlin, Skye Arundhati Thomas, and Izabella Scott, who collectively coedited the art and literature quarterly The White Review between 2021 and 2023.

Here you'll find reprints from both Mousse and The White Review as well as new stories and translations we have jointly commissioned. Seven interludes, intended to open up other worlds through images, feature portfolios of drawings by Atelier dell'Errore, Michael E. Smith, Camille Henrot, Michael Landy, Simone Forti, Adelaide Cioni, and Evelyn Taocheng Wang.

The platform, free speech and contempt

Once more, an astonishing issue of OEI – a thrilling, compelling, stimulating feast of ideas regarding publishing and the book: the perfect big companion to read and hug in bed while the virus spreads outside.

Bringing together contributions from circa 130 publishing structures, publishing communities, magazines, small press endeavors, artists, poets, writers, editors, theoreticians, curators, scholars, and art bookstores, OEI # 86–87 reflects upon the challenges, pressures and possibilities of publishing and creating publics in different contexts and places in a time of far-reaching – economical, medial, political, social, technological – transformations.

The potential and the versatility of publishing open it to a diversity of practices and approaches in the arts, but as an eminently social form of art, a collective or micro-collective work with shared responsibilities, it is also a never-ending process of “crafting a variegated approach to how you create, publish, distribute, and build a social ecosystem around your efforts”, of trying to “build up and strengthen the community around these printed forms” (Temporary Services).

It is the conviction of OEI #86–87 that print has the power to play an important part in the construction of social spaces, of a social world. As Benjamin Thorel puts it in one of the essays in the issue, “conceiving of the dynamics of publishing as making publics as well as making things public is not a pun – insofar as the artists/publishers encompass, beyond the book itself, its possible ‘lives’, imagining the different spaces, and the different people, amongst whom a publication will circulate.” This is what Michael Warner has called “a public [as] poetic worldmaking”, implying “that all discourse or performance addressed to a public must characterize the world in which it attempts to circulate, projecting for that world a concrete and livable shape, and attempting to realize that world through address.”

This is also, as stressed by Annette Gilbert and others, what can make publishing such an active force, a force co-constituting texts and publications and publics. Indeed, with Michalis Pichler, it is tempting to say that in publishing as practice – perhaps more than in any other art field – “artists have been able to assert the aesthetic value of their own socio-politically informed concerns and to engage, often under precarious conditions, in cultural activities fully aligned with their political values.”

OEI #86–87 also includes sections on and with contemporary poetry from Canada; Fluxus publishing; Krister Brandt/Astrid Gogglesworth; Kalas på BORD (Öyvind Fahlström); Lars Fredrikson; Claude Royet-Journoud’s poetry magazines; Carl Einstein; Gail Scott; Ållebergshändelser; OEI #79: edit/publish/distribute!; “det offentligas försvinnande” and many many other things. [publisher’s note]

Design by Konst & Teknik

"Journal Safar's 9th issue is Protests. To protest is a fundamental human act against injustice. It takes many forms: the defiant act of existing, the organized resistance of multitudes, armed struggles, and the disruption of systems through speech, action, and refusal in person, in prints and slogans online, or on the streets. Some forms of protest require symbols, flags, and specific attire, while others are carried out through non-verbal communication, secret dissemination, and ideological discipline. Yet all of them need cultural carriers–our bodies, our stories, and our marks to hold what can be remembered and learned from. Whether explicit or invisible, in communities or in solitude, this issue explores why we protest, and how, in the hopes of sparking solace, solidarity, and action. 

In this issue: Maya Saikali sits down with Gérard Paris-Clavel, a co-founder of the pioneering Grapus Collective, to talk political image-making and the life of the image. Gérard delves into his own work and where it survives, “I don’t do exhibitions, I do demonstrations.” An illustrated Toolkit for Actions by Palestine Action makes direct action tactics accessible to anyone ready to confront the international system complicit in the Palestinian genocide. Two conversations by Maya Moumne: with Adbusters Magazine founder Kalle Lasn on the power of artists in revolutions, and with Ahmad Swaid, editor of Dazed MENA and former Editor-in-Chief of GQ Middle East, on censorship, identity, and building new cultural platforms across the region. While Audrey Tseng and Chong Gu write on Red Canary Song, a grassroots collective of Asian and migrant sex workers, massage workers, and allies of the Asian diaspora, that resist policing through notions of homemaking. 

These highlights sit alongside stellar contributions by Alina Lupu, Ahmad Zaghmouri, Muhannad Hariri, Elias Erkan, Bettina Nagler, Rasha Dakkak, Yaa Adae, and Nihal ElAasar. And for the first time: another magazine inside this magazine: Design Drafts #3, a collaboration with Nieuwe Instituut, on protest and design with contributions by Tala Abdalhadi, Myriam Amri, Shruti Hussain, Candice Jensen, and Alice Wan on the theme of protest and design."

The new publication triangulates between geopoetics, geopolitics, and cultural geography; a 464 page issue with some 50 contributors as well as a large section on Swedish philosophical geographer Gunnar Olsson.