Editorial #17

…it makes me think about dependency and interaction over long periods of time, like how two and more species become symbiotically or parasitically entangled. And how that scale is of life, not a scale of something like lifespan or a scale of “a” life. Maybe there are words and tenses in German that show this in similar or different ways?

Are there? Park McArthur was responding here to our thought that Starship would become a “carrier” for her contribution, Studs. It’s maybe too knotted to begin with “translation,” but if we’re to think of “scales of life,” language too is a carrier, right?, and in the case of this Starship issue, this printed magazine becomes something of a body…

I would say the German word “Umfang,” or “Zeitspanne” would be a term, though only if we were to take a bigger picture into account, or when speaking of a larger time span. In terms of Starship time, as soon as we start thinking about possible subjects for the next issue, they seem to form themselves, albeit around specific chronologies of life, around densities and necessities that make things happen. From there nets are built that refer to subjects addressed by other invited contributors. There is a general feeling of the importance of speaking, and taking a closer look into these preoccupations in this moment, asking questions in order to acquaint ourselves with forms of knowledge, and what possible courses of action there may be for making changes.

Indeed… and often our own interests are intercepted or interrupted by our invited contributors, but also by the regulars. This is the 20th year of Starship—quite a “scale,” maybe there should be an anniversary issue?—and although the magazine retains some of the traces of its and other pasts, it always attempts to be responsive to the moment. It’s somehow interesting that the second series of Park McArthur’s questions on the previous page, refer to topics like color and shape in relation to structures around the body—her own body—because it turned out that “fashion” became a thread that runs through the issue. How does, or can the body appear and behave in space, and what are the things with which we dress it up?

Hans-Christian Dany’s column—co-founder of Starship and contributor ever since—has become something of a fashion column seen through an art world lens, and in this issue you’ll find a number of contributions that interrogate fashion. Rather than simply focusing on surfaces, in retrospect, these trains of thought resonate with others herein because they cast their gaze on socialities that produce not only the singular body, but collective forms of body. Antek Walczak breaks it down with his study of data and its role in the recording of, but also its demands on the making of “current bodies.”

Luzie Meyer digests and disassembles a religious story about female desire. Marie Angeletti tries to reconcile being foreign in Berlin through historical signifiers she happened upon while making art here, and Dunja Herzog travels outside of her geographical borders and gives us a glimpse of something not at all Berlin.

These are to name just a few. You’ll find a lot of “face” in the first half of the magazine. This gives way to landscapes and structures, all of which have been punctured by our own choosing, a hole has been driven through the collected efforts printed here, and we stand by the tensions we’ve invited because we make this in and for a landscape that we’re ever so involved in. The next few pages you’ll look at resemble advertisement pages that many an art mag print, but for us they’re the platforms we support—our Freundschaftsanzeigen—that in turn, contribute to the making of our every days…