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Nº 8 — AFTER-IMAGE. The eighth issue of THE-ICONOMIST, titled To propose / To recreate, takes as its point of departure Édouard Glissant’s notion of the aprèzan: the present as a living interval between destruction and regeneration. From this idea unfolds a reflection on what it means to create in an era where images multiply endlessly, and where visibility itself has become a form of capture. In a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, every image we share becomes data; analyzed, categorized, and reabsorbed into vast systems of recognition. Within this landscape, the publication suggests a different kind of response: a digital craftsmanship that moves against automation, exploring how the deliberate act of cutting, layering, and reassembling images can function as both creation and camouflage, a way of disrupting the smooth readability demanded by machines. To propose / To recreate unfolds as a moving terrain of visual thought, which is part proposal, part reconstruction. In addition to experimental texts created by THE-ICONOMIST, the edition also features selected excerpts from authors such as Naomi Klein, Thomas Pynchon, Mark Fisher, Olga Tokarczuk, Fernando Birri, among others.
VOL. II — IMAGE BANK (2024-present) The second volume of THE-ICONOMIST, launched in 2024, draws from Scott Watson’s idea that “we are all image banks” to explore the appropriation of digital images as a way of commenting on the world. Its editions are built from collections sourced from image banks, expanding the project’s research on contemporary visual flows and the possibilities of intervention within this vast collective repository.
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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.
Buy in print$20
Buy digital version $2.99
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Memoryscape, a speculative short story by THE-ICONOMIST, investigates the collapse between memory, technology, and subjectivity. A narrator navigates feeds, notifications, algorithms, and system failures in search of himself, finding only residues: echoes, noises, and fragments of a life mediated by devices. Between archived dreams, captcha identities, and emotions translated into data, the book constructs a scenario in which memory no longer belongs to the body and begins to operate in invisible infrastructures. The 99 images that accompany the narrative were appropriated and organized according to the rhythm and recurrences of the text, functioning as visual extensions of its symptoms, flaws, and interruptions. Each reappearance marks a short circuit between experience and record, until the attempt to escape one’s own memory presents itself as an ambiguous gesture: to disappear from the archives in order to continue existing.
145 pages, 11x18cm, brochure, with shipping worldwide
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News from Switzerland: THE.ICONOMIST #issue7 and the zine F is for FRAGILITY were shortlisted for the Rosmarie Tissi Award in graphic design in the MA-g (Museum of Avant-garde) Awards. These publications will now become part of the institution’s contemporary collection.
“We always think of the imagination as the faculty that forms images. On the contrary, it deforms what we perceive; it is, above all, the faculty that frees us from immediate images and changes them. … Imagination is essentially open and elusive. We could say that a stable and completely realized image clips the wings of the imagination. It causes us to fall from the state of dreaming imagination that is not confined to image, and that we may call imageless imagination, just as we speak of imageless thought.”
— Gaston BACHELARD, in Air and Dreams (1943)
28 July 2025, 11:20 AM [PROSE] A DRESS GREW ITSELF
894 WORDS, READING TIME: 4m58s [read]
[INPUT] I TOOK A PHOTO AND I FORGOT TO FEEL.pdf
2025, research for upcoming project, 35p., 1080×1920 each [view]
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1×1 is a meeting place for images. Every moment, two appear—one on the left, one on the right—and form a momentary relationship before disappearing. Nothing repeats itself. The work moves on its own, even without the visitor’s gesture, as if it were breathing. The images cannot be saved, only seen: they remain in the time of the gaze. Between chance and repetition, 1×1 is a machine of ephemeral combinations, where the archive becomes a flow and each encounter is a possibility of meaning.
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“80 per cent of artists are dealing with mother issues.” In this personal interview the internationally praised German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann muses on the magnetic power of women, and shares how he has used art as both escape and therapy. “Make a job out of it and all is lost.” Feldmann does not consider being an artist to be his job, because considering it as such would smother his enthusiasm. Art, he feels, has been discredited by the sky-high sales through auction houses, which is a transaction between investors and collectors – not artists. But art simply should not be put on a pedestal: “Art is an ordinary part of life like sports, food and sleep.” Images of women attract Feldmann, who claims that the majority of artists are dealing with mother issues: “It’s always about women, about mothers, images of women.” As an example, he points out how public toilets for men are similar to ancient caves with their many drawings of vulvas. The repetitive function of collecting pictures is therapeutic to Feldmann, and makes things clear and tangible for him. Many artists use their art as a form of therapy, “as a flight to another world someone from the old world can’t access.” As for Feldmann, who too had mother-issues and grew up during the war and the post-war years, this was also the case: “… the images opened a world to me that was very, very lovely.”
“Taking its name from economist Gilson Schwartz’s 2006 neologism ‘Iconomy’ while also nodding to longstanding news weekly The Economist, THE-ICONOMIST questions our relationship with images in this era of image saturation with each issue using verbs as its themes.”
— MAGCULTURE.com
“THE-ICONOMIST’s latest issue is hectic and “suffocating” in its use of online image banks. The magazine has never really operated within the requirements of a conventional magazine. This isn’t just because the issues don’t have any advertisements or an ISBN number, or even that it doesn’t have a website that can be indexed by Google. The magazine defies a traditional editorial approach at every turn.After its first four issues’ focus on AI-generated visuals, the magazine has returned with its fifth edition — a printed exploration of surveillance in the digital age.”
— ELLIS TREE, It’s Nice That