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.
F IS FOR FRAGILITY (OF DIGITAL IMAGES). When data is corrupted, the image also takes on a new life. They have lost their original functions, their sharpness, and often any possibility of literal reading. What remains are fragments, noises, spectra. In December 2024, one of our hard drives containing thousands of reference images and project files was damaged, but the recovery process gave us the images we present in this zine. Closer to the idea of a ruin than a document, these images now operate as traces of something that can no longer be reconstructed, only reinvented. F is for FRAGILITY proposes a reflection on the instability of digital memory, the limits of technological preservation and the aesthetic potential of error. Rather than restoring, the project chooses to highlight failure as a form, welcoming impermanence and fragility as an inherent part of the digital creation and archiving process.
13x20cm, 60 pages, brochure. Shipping worldwide.
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At what scale should we consider the lives of Black Americans? For more than thirty years—starting while he worked as a cinematographer—Jafa has sought to answer that question, compiling notebooks with clippings from magazines, newspapers, and advertisements. Images of Mickey Mouse and Sojourner Truth intermingle with pictures of insects and astronomical phenomena; Black athletes, musicians, and artists; skulls and mutilated bodies. While each image stands alone, together they convey the shared vocabularies and collaborative practices the artist considers central to Black cultural production. Jafa’s notebooks, copies of which are presented here, testify to the complexity and beauty of Black life in the United States.