Zweikommasieben #27

As the team behind zweikommasieben takes its latest edition to ponder the essence of longevity, they arrive at several questions which they have worked through with their featured artists and writers. On the one hand, artistic traditions might be useful to lean on, to conjure an image and an accompanying gut feeling of a recent past. On the other hand, investing in the knowledge of traditions might allow to bend and twist them to explore ones own expression. Whether that is consciously incorporating sounds from the past to evoke historical resonances, as Courtesy did for her most recent album Violence of the Moodboard, or propelling the presentation of music forward into new traditions, such as in the work of Xzavier Stone who has recently started pairing scent with sound during his live performances. In a similar manner, Lateena Plummer proposes new traditions for a dancehall scene which finally makes space for marginalized identities and voices, a purpose directly derived from her experiences in the past, which she openly speaks about in conversation with Anna Froelicher.

When Beatriz de Rijke decided to work under the moniker Bea1991, she did this as a conscious anchoring in time, with the latter part of the name being a direct reference to her year of birth. One can imagine that a birthdate might be one of the only constants in life: one that will forever connect someone to a certain generation, and maybe even to a global cultural zeitgeist. As a self-identified time traveler, artist Lou Lou Sainsbury aspires to transcend such fixed temporalities, creating work in order to unwrite histories. In her visual contribution and accompanying poems, she proposes to think through “trans” as a verb rather than a noun, as an active and social process of world-making.

In the graphic design of this edition, longevity enters into a direct contradiction with its material form. Dorothee Dähler chose a thinner than usual type of paper, that becomes contrasted by the stability of its thicker sleeve. In doing so, this issue of zweikommasieben now becomes an object with a longer lifespan.