STUCK MAGAZINE: EDITORIAL LETTER

STUCK Magazine is a Berlin-based magazine seeking to understand how and why artists create. With a focus on underground subcultures and alternative disciplines, STUCK is an independent print publication devoted to the experience of reading and digesting content, as opposed to the digitised media landscape of today.

ISSUE 001: BORN OF ODD CIRCUMSTANCES

Across the world, we find ourselves in a common landscape that, barely a year ago – only a few scientists and science-fiction enthusiasts could have imagined. Our reality is the stuff of post-apocalyptic fantasy, except there has been no apocalypse, and there is no 'post’. We are living through precedented unprecedented times, the stuff we had relegated to fiercely-repressed history, only for it to emerge chaotic amid a new strain of technology, travel and international transportation. When years of global expansion concertina into the four walls of our too-frequently unstable homes within weeks, where to our minds go? Our bodies can stay trapped at home: that much is, if not relatively easy, relatively enforceable. But our minds, our creativity, and our ever-expansive imaginations, cannot.

STUCK Magazine was envisioned before this radical shift of our realities, yet came to birth in the midst of it. The aim – to create a physical, print publication which serves as a platform for underrepresented, underrecognized, and underground artists – is a valuable one regardless, but one which serves a more profound purpose in this new era. We are a community for modern culture, a catalyst for the exploration of unheard realities. We believe in an aesthetic of truth, without boundaries, geographies, or cultural limitations. STUCK proposes a new way into the varied artistic dialects of the imagination, one that is simultaneously expansive and tangible. Print is still alive. And while these last few months have taught us to fear touch, it has also brought with it a craving for the material: for proof that art, and we, exist.

ISSUE 002: ALL THAT IS NEW IS WELL-FORGOTTEN OLD

As I write this, I’m sitting in my childhood bedroom for the final time, helping my mother to pack up three decades of life before she sells our family house. This is the last time I will be in the house I was born in. Endings like this have a way of provoking nostalgia that seeps through the roots of our senses: the sound of the door unlocking, the creak of the third step on the stairs, the way a certain patch of carpet would get warm in the afternoon sunlight. As Milan Kundera wrote, ‘in the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.’

The nostalgic is intensely personal. No one else will feel the same twinge of sentimentality at the sight of the hand-worn marks on the banister, or the homely smell of the kitchen – not even, perhaps, my brother, the only other person in the world to have grown up in this house. The experience of nostalgia remains trapped within the realm of my own experiencing, caught inside a kind of glass bubble of remembrance. But in writing about this current nostalgia of mine, perhaps you, the reader of STUCK, are triggered to consider the shadows and sounds of your own remembered reimagining.

In this triggering and transcendence of nostalgic feeling, we are somehow communing over a shared, separate moment or experience. We are participating in mutual, disparate memories. This is the conflict and the crux of nostalgia, in my mind: you will never experience that which I have experienced; your nostalgia will never be the same as mine, but in the transformation of nostalgic feeling into any form of art, we are watching, for a moment, the setting of the same sunset.

Your reimaginings may be akin to mine, and their difference may generate a sense of memories loss. And so nostalgia becomes both a separation and a uniting expression or emotion. It both enjoins and distances, and reminds us, always, of the ephemerality of the eternally remembered moment. By which I mean, in memory – in the light of nostalgia – something experienced once may be relived for decades, and something experienced for decades might be experienced for the final time. Here comes the illuminating sunset.

Pockets of nostalgia are present throughout our days. But periods of prolonged nostalgia may arise in certain times of our lies: around milestone birthdays perhaps, or a house move. Although, what actually makes us nostalgic tends to be hyper-individualised. But in this collective exploration of nostalgia, we aim to wrestle with the idea that my nostalgia might just invoke your nostalgia, too.

It’s a nebulous concept, at once a feeling and an idea, both a symptom and a sensation. Born from personal experience, it paradoxically cannot exist without some kind of collective understanding. As a theme, something of an enigma then, being simultaneously cryptically personal and existentially universal. So, we ask – what role does nostalgia play in the artist’s conception of themselves, their work, and that which they conceive? How can the ephemeral be represented?

The content and artists featured within this issue have been personally chosen by the creators and makers of STUCK to reflect, in some way, their own perception of nostalgia – and, to potentially trigger the contemplation of nostalgia, be it in contemplation or experience, in you, the reader. Why is nostalgia a provocative subject for so many? In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the exiled Czechoslovakian author Milan Kundera wrote, ‘nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.’ Is it nostalgia’s impossibility of satisfaction that haunts us, the hopelessness of unfulfilled desire? In this understanding, nostalgia exists a a ghostly spirit, threatening to sporadically loom large and dismantle any fragile sense of present wellbeing.

Or, if nostalgia is evoked – or provoked – by certain kinds of stimuli, then is it not another flavour of our sensory experience? The chirping of crickets; the wafting scent of a freshly-baked madeline; the echo of heels clattering on a stone floor; the crisp rush of chill when stepping out into the season’s first snowfall. That which provokes the nostalgic rushing forth of memory, the transportive moment of both cross-sensory and cross-temporal movement, is all sensation.

So perhaps nostalgia is best experienced, rather than defined. Shown, rather than explained. Hence, this issue. By gathering together this disparate collection of artists, we are trying to serve up a kind of experiential-nostalgic soup, a blending of consciousnesses, a scattering of inter-sensualities. By making nostalgia the material of our lens, we’re not only trying to get you to look back, but forwards, too.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: Marius Thielmann

ART DIRECTION: Jacopo Borrini

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS/EDITORS: Rebecca Took, Miriam Partington