Back to serve you a major glow up, Issue 02 braves a bold front as part of a new art direction by LIBA Studio, that bleeds through the pages. Within an editorial capacity, a capacious theme was selected, allowing for inventive reconstructions as well as explorations of the mundane.
Favouring contributions with a criticality, we seek to dissect the engagements between the living and the inanimate. In an essay titled ‘Defamiliarising the Architectural Object’, Rocky Howe explores the possibilities of interpreting everyday architectural objects, such as the fence in different, more encompassing ways, than just a divider. We also have Taking Pleasure in the Game, a piece by Food Anthropologist Jeanne Kessira, detailing how the process of eating within Ferran Adrià’s Molecular Gastronomy transcends mere consumption.
The ‘object' here is not restricted to the physical or the material. This is most evidently exemplified in Soft Happiness, a mixture between prose and poetry by Lara Conrad, as well as Object of Desire, a photography series by Nicole Ngai (pictured on the front over). Lara touches on the 24/7 performativity of functioning like the right girl, the right woman; while Nicole addresses the portrayal of female bodies, within practices of the visual, as objects to be gazed upon, taking inspiration from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. Despite their distinctive approaches, the two works are similarly centred on the duality of the body, as both subject and object.
Confronting the binary relationship between subjectivity and objecthood, the 20 articles featured in this issue in one way or another redistributes these established roles.
180 pp, perfect bound.
Published by STAPLE, 2017
18.5 x 25.5 cm
English
