FAST(e) - MOTS #5

FAST(e) - MOTS #5
Author: -
Publisher:
Language: French - English
Pages:
Size: 34 x 24 cm
Weight: 170 g
Binding: Softcover
ISBN:
Price: €50.00
Product Description

Mots#5: A Chronotope

The 2018 edition, “Fast(e)”, have a reflective dimension in that the theme is in contradiction with the very name of the magazine, Mots Slow. At its origin, the ambigram sought to amusingly situate the project into the philosophy of slowing down, as only one issue was planned for each year, nevertheless seeking to be well thought out and refined down to the smallest details. Yet if the maturation of an issue is slow, other rhythms accelerate, superimpose themselves: graphic conception and printing unfolds rapidly within a few weeks. This period, charged with emotion, imposes rapid decision-making. It is with this sustained tempo that the coming edition of Mots is contending, weaving a connection to the Book of Fasti of Ovid, the poetic calendar composed to commemorate the Roman feast days. A genuine chronotope placing time in space, it indicates the favourable days for all public enterprises (legal proceedings, wars, religious sacrifices, launching of a magazine) and private ones (commercial negotiations, marriages, putting the full stop in a magazine article). The days do not all have the same judicial status; they are marked with obligations and interdictions (feast days – fasti dies – from the Latin fas, permission of the Gods ; and néfastes (French), inauspicious, days forbidden by the Gods, in other words, of bad omen). Before the creation of the Julian calendar, in 46 AD, it is the Pontifex Maximus (high priest) who was tasked with establishing the calendar (from calare, proclaim) assigning the inauspicious days, for example the Nones (5th or 7th day of the month) and the day following. Nones, impracticable days, in Latin Nonis, comes from non is, « do not go ».
Time is subject to human dictates and constant metamorphosis as Ovid, master of the topic, was aware, and its value and duration is fully relative to how it is segmented. Originally Romulus’ Calendar (- 400 BC) comprised 9 months, modeled after the term of human gestation to birth. And Montaigne wrote, ironically: “Pope Gregory XIII, noticing that a faulty calculation of eleven minutes had produced an extra ten days, subtracted these ten days from the year 1582; so that instead of the 5th of October that year, counting recommenced at day 15”. Governed by such a pontifical editor, the timing for the magazine is also fully malleable.