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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Nº1 — To collect. We are happy to present the first thematic dossier of THE ICONOMIST. We explore the world of collecting and the people who do it. We look at the phenomenon of collecting from a variety of perspectives. All images in the issue were generated through artificial intelligence, as well as some texts, interviews, and short stories. The issue also includes selected texts by Susan Sontag, Emmanuel Levinas and Sergei Eisenstein. What are the limits of a collection? From garbage collectors to art collectors, from compulsive hoarders to collectors of weapons of mass destruction, the accumulators of power. The informal collectors, the professional collectors.
48 pages, 21x28cm, saddle-stitch binding, with shipping worldwide.
XXXSpace shares with Thomas Pynchon’s novel the intuition that military technology is never limited to its military function. In the universe of the book, the V-2 missile is both an object of mathematical precision and an erotic and mystical fetish, an “arc” that crosses the sky as a symbol of desire and death. The zine revisits this same imagery, bringing to light the clash between clinical detail—ranges, speeds, diagrams—and the symbolic weight of a world obsessed with the spectacle of destruction. Just as Pynchon transforms the missile into a metaphor for cultural collapse, XXXSpace confronts the contemporary saturation of explosive and phallic images, shifting the gaze to the tension between pornography, space conquest, and war. If the 1973 novel recorded the transition to the nuclear age, the zine collects fragments of the present as testimony to another historical threshold: the moment when technical violence becomes naturalized on the screen, and the missile ceases to be just a weapon to become language, spectacle, and a promise of transcendence.
13x20cm, 84 pp., 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.