Dear readers,
What is a magazine? A group of people who write and read and talk and think and imagine and meet and discuss and argue and make peace and fall in love and often out of love with naturecultural matters, among many others. Instead of an enclosed territory, we could think of it as a soft shore, a murky intertidal zone, where wet and dry, together with their multiple inhabitants, meet periodically and constantly reshape one another. “For no two successive days is the shoreline precisely the same,” writes Rachel Carson regarding the sea’s edge. Its future patterns are difficult to forecast, mostly because our predictive models are based on data that reflect not the actual present, but the recent past—the blindest of blind spots, as Walter Benjamin once pointed out.
After the Feral Atlas, we could also describe a magazine as a patch, “a unit of relative homogeneity compared to its surroundings,” characterized by an ecology of relations, exchanges, and concentrations of resources, whose shape-shifting structure becomes more evident when compared to and connected with others. In order to map patches, “field-based observation and historical analysis are more necessary than ever.” It takes some time.
A magazine’s job is to do language—to make room for the multiplicity of language and to multiply discourses. We are trying to “track changes,” as our current favorite Handbook for Art Criticism, edited by Mira Dayal and Josephine Heston (Paper Monument, 2023), invites editors and writers to do, by questioning which agendas they operate under, and in accordance with which forms of solidarity, thereby expanding “who holds the power to tell stories, examining whose stories we tell, and sharing how we tell those stories.”
We are at work, and we will bloom in the spring with a new issue.
Looking forward to seeing you then.
Thank you,
Mousse
Mousse Magazine
Barbara Casavecchia
Chiara Moioli, Madeleine Paré, Giulia Celuppi, Marta Raffa
Mousse Publishing
Ilaria Bombelli
Micola Clara Brambilla, Agnese Cantelmi, Emma Passarella
Art Department
Francesco Valtolina
Matteo Gualandris, Massimiliano Pace, Anna Azzali, Gloria Favaro, Alessandro Schino
Marketing and Communications
Laura Salvo
Corinne Cortinovis, Marcello Bertolani
Distribution and Logistics
Silvia Ponzoni
Gionata Armenes, Andrea Migotto
Administration
Sara Capussela, Antonio Cerminara
Sole Director
Domenico Insinga
*Image above: Dessane Lopez Cassell, “Word Choice: Who’s Your Audience Here?,” in Track Changes: A Handbook for Art Criticism, ed. Mira Dayal and Josephine Heston (New York: Paper Monument, 2023), 187.