TD 1
MAGNIFIED STREET LIFE Flaneur Magazine presents o
ne street per issue embracing a street’s complexity, layers and fragmented nature through a literary approach. Flaneur creates meaningful correlations among places, people and objects that aren’t necessarily related. It is produced on location with local artists. We speak with its founder and publisher Ricarda Messner and its editors-in-chief Grashina Gabelmann and Fabian Saul as well as Michelle Phillips from Studio Yukiko who looks after art direction and design. words Michael McDermott – Why did you decide to establish Flaneur? Ricarda: The idea for the concept to go with ‘one street per issue’ was a personal tool to reconnect with known territory. I was born in Berlin and spent most of my life there. There was a urge for me to find my own place within the city and to not be too overwhelmed or to avoid not knowing where to start, I started with something that was familiar to me, not knowing what would come out of it. Grashina and Fabian came up with the brilliant editorial framework around this very concrete concept, translating it into an unpredictable but still conceptual approach. So I guess, looking back, it wasn’t so much about the idea of making a magazine but more about establishing this ‘inner journey’ in an artistic, collaborative way that people can associate themselves with. – How do you go about selecting destinations and streets within them? What level of advance research do you undertake? Grashina: We arrive in the chosen city oftentimes without knowing it at all. We might have one or two contacts but we basically start from the position of knowing nothing and no one and just walk. We mostly walk alone, sometimes we walk with locals who we meet somehow and listen to their stories. Mostly though we let our intuition guide us and the street choice is based on a certain feeling, a sense of curiosity we feel or something disturbing or unusual. Once we decide on the street, this can take two days or two weeks, we spend almost every day on the street. Fabian: In collaboration with our contributors, we immerse ourselves into the place beyond what meets the eye and beyond the narratives of positivity that travel magazines perpetuate. We allow multi-voiced pieces that not always form one solid perspective but rather create a fragmented narrative that does not confirm the exciting narratives but allows for contradiction. It is a very psychogeographic approach. The Flaneur is concerned with things that may soon vanish and thus he walks the line between being a melancholic nostalgic but also being able to project into the future and beyond the realm of the visible, an avant-garde figure. Flaneuring is about seeing the plurality of truths in the urban fabric that surrounds us. It is those dark sides flaneuring can lead us to and the plurality of truths that form the literary realm we see the magazine in. Grashina: Our contributors are chosen once we get to know the place and meet people. We like to call it a domino-effect where meeting one person will lead us to meeting three more etc. In Brazil we met 120 people during our time there but, of course, not everyone became a contributor. It’s an organic process where through spending time with people, trusting our intuition and having great dialogues/walks. A contributor may crystalize immediately or take weeks. – Can you give us an idea of the time and resources which is going into the forthcoming issue on Taipei which is out Summer 2019? Grashina: In December 2017, we went on a two week research trip to Taipei which kickstarted our production for Issue 08. In the summer of 2018, we spent a total of three months living in Taipei as artists-inresidence at Treasure Hill Artist Village. In October 2018, we returned to Taipei for another ten days to wrap up some meetings and to give a lecture at a university. We are working with an intern based in Taipei and a Taiwanese curator based in Berlin. We are working almost full time on the issue (and other projects) at Moabit’s ZKU (Zentrum fuer Kunst und Urbanistik) where we are artists-in-residence for the months of November and December. There we are working, on top of the five core members of Flaneur, with a relatively newly hired Project Manager and an intern. Once the content of the issue will be delivered in February 2019 we will begin to work with a Chinese translator and editor as most of the writing will be submitted in Mandarin. In the Spring the design phase will begin for which we will have to work with a Chinese speaking designer to support us with laying out the Chinese texts. Then we are planning to put on a week-long Flaneur festival in Taipei to celebrate the launch of the issue and a weekend-long festival in Berlin some weeks later. The planning for this will begin around the time the issue has been sent to print. – Your design considerations for each issue draw upon location. What are the constants and variables in this regard? Michelle: As every issue is so location specific, the constants are few and the variables are many. Every issue looks and feels completely different because we treat 68