ISSUE Nº 10
To happen/To unhappen
Following Reality Check, an exploration of expectation, belief, and the fragmentation of reality into multiple, often conflicting perspectives, System of Situations takes the images from the previous issue as its starting point and throws them into a new set of circumstances. Through collage, these images collide with a myriad of everyday events, absurd situations, and ordinary observations, producing unexpected associations and deviations from their original meanings. This tenth issue is an experiment in progress. Its pages will be cooked over the coming week, allowing chance, interference, and improvisation to shape the final publication. For now, only the front and back covers are available. The complete issue will be released in print and available for purchase once the process is finished.
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ISSUE Nº 9
To believe/To discredit
The ninth issue of THE-ICONOMIST, titled Reality-Check, explores the fragmentation of shared reality in an era of continuous image circulation. Moving from a relatively common visual culture toward a polyculture of personalized information, the issue reflects on how images no longer simply represent the world, but increasingly anticipate, organize, and condition our experience of it. Events arrive through different screens, at different times, producing overlapping yet often incompatible versions of the same reality. The issue unfolds as a provisional assembly of disconnected realities, where every image suggests another possible connection and every act of looking becomes a way of inhabiting the world.
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Nº2 — To wear. THE ICONOMIST’s new thematic dossier is out. At first glance, a fashion magazine, or something other than a style magazine, with models and their looks made of improbable mixtures, speculations around accumulation and consumption. How to wear images? How to wear what’s left of an exhausted world? Artificial armor, mountains of plastic and synthetic fabric. It is impossible to dive, it is impossible to find anything. Use what you have, that’s it. After collecting, it’s time to wear. To assemble a body of materials. To turn the material into an extension of the body and to rely on a possibility of protection. Change everything at any moment. It may look like a fashion magazine, but it is a survival manual. The issue also includes selected excerpts by authors such as Judith Butler, Emanuelle Coccia, and Georges Bataille as well as collages of text made from reviews of fashion shows and news. A process of rethinking the verb to wear in a world in the process of depletion, in terms of image and environment.
44 pages, 21x28cm, saddle-stitch binding, with shipping worldwide.
This zine brings together images captured by Google Street View along the entire route of the Unidos da Tijuca samba school parade during the 2015 Carnival in Marquês de Sapucaí, Rio de Janeiro. That year’s theme, Um encontro marcado no tempo (A rendezvous marked in time), paid tribute to carnival designer Clóvis Bornay. Here, however, Carnival does not appear as a spectacle or an organised celebration. What we see is a party captured by a system that does not recognise choreography, narrative or festive time. Sapucaí is recorded as a road, infrastructure, route. A path to be mapped. Bodies in motion, floats and crowds are fragmented by an automated, intermittent vision, incapable of keeping up with the temporality of Carnival. What should be continuous appears in glitches, jumps and interruptions. Excess becomes noise. The images do not document the parade; they highlight the limitations of a device designed for empty streets, not for bodies in celebration. In this displacement, Carnival is reduced to data, a route, an operational record. There is no choice of framing, no aesthetic intention, only capture. The gaze does not participate, does not interpret, does not celebrate. It operates. The parade ends up becoming an involuntary choreography between popular celebration and mapping technology, revealing how even a collective, local and ephemeral ritual can be absorbed by global recording systems. This zine observes what happens when Carnival is seen through the eyes of someone who doesn’t know how to party.
13x20cm, 84pp., saddle-stitched binding. Shipping worldwide.
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WHY WAR? starts from the question posed in the letter Why War?, exchanged between Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein in 1932: why does war persist, even in the face of all the rationality we have supposedly achieved? The images gathered here do not aim to illustrate the history of conflicts, but to reveal their permanence — as if war, rather than an event, were a structure that reconfigures itself with each generation. According to recent studies by the Peace Research Institute Oslo, 2024 saw the highest number of simultaneous armed conflicts since the end of the Second World War — more than sixty active wars in thirty-six countries. Faced with this repetition, the images speak less of borders and more of a human condition that insists on not ceasing. This zine is, therefore, an archive of the continuity of violence — and an attempt to ask again, with Freud: why?
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