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New Year, New Me.
We all know the adage. We can decide to make fun of it, despise it, or (why not) just enjoy it. This issue is about challenging what our wishes for future are. Amidst an overall challenging period, we still look forward to SOMETHING. Hoping, maybe. Forecasting, surely. All of us have certainly tried to predict what could come next after what has already been seen. (You maybe came across this meme recently: « when you realise 2022 is pronounced twenty twenty-too!»). For this issue we wanted to look at the creative potential behind forecasting: imagining, devining, foretelling, guessing, predicting. How do we apply these ‘techniques’ to our practices? How do they influence our daily lives? We are happy to share with you some intricate and engaging pieces of work from our
contributors. Like the sound of a wishbone cracking up, we release forecasts out loud in the open air, like millions of dandelions ‘petals’. Floating. Wandering. Wondering. Could this happen? What if? And what if?
Have a nice read!
Louise Gholam, design editor
Dear readers,
What if history is purely conceptual? Can we imagine what the world would look like without the narratives we know and take for granted? The theme of this issues stemmed from an old soviet joke which comments on how history is brushed and controlled in totalitarian regimes. What if we live in a fantasy because of what we don’t know? Speculation about the past can be more than an imagination game when we start to look at history as merely a story, told, interpreted and retold. When technology is used to determine facts, guesses, assumptions and intuitions become futile. However, there is room to fill in the gaps when some realities cannot easily be established.And that is the forecast for the past.
The entries comprised within this issue unveil that people sometimes invent their own tools of determination, despite the truth that is unanimously approved and technologically supported. To challenge future narratives is to also challenge past ones and what better place to do that than in the context of an independent artist run publication. Contributors in this issue question the past through different methods, going from instructions (A Brief Visit), to poems (what do i do now it’s winter / The Foretelling of Us) or scripted poems (Ritual of Rejoin), to longer term research and art projects (Moon 935 / Living in Truth / Plate 47 Topographer). What all these submissions have in common is their critical approach towards the past. As we launch the new issue at the beginning of the new year, we hope that you will engage with it in the same critical manner and reflect upon your own forecast for the past.
Enjoy!
Lera Kelemen, content editor