The voyage of this Starship started with some thoughts about community, and solidarity. Calla Henkel, one of our conversation partners throughout this issue had called it: The C-word. We didn’t bring up this term, we had noticed it, and an ensuing discussion evolved about conversations we had followed, and exhibitions we had seen. It had made us think about the aims of a magazine. Is it in itself building up a community? And is it possible to build up a supportive environment with a magazine? Walter Benjamin writes that self-reflection can always be asked for, when one publishes, and within this notion of self-reflection, Starship has perhaps understood itself more like a landscape than as an arrow. As an artist run magazine, self-reflection is also about our—the editor’s, the artist’s invited, the author’s—individual thoughts, energies, and work. We editors therefore firstly want to thank everyone who has contributed, for theirs.
Starship has existed for twenty years now. It has produced magazine issues, exhibitions, books, concerts, parties, and other errands. And it has hopefully also produced discussions, thoughts, and art. We close the work on every Starship issue with the feeling of having produced the most beautiful Starship ever, and then we add; again. So we hope that you will find something in the work of these very different voices, present in every issue, as if appearing and sounding-out in a landscape, maybe one like the utopian island Mark von Schlegell has depicted:
Are there communities?
Are there ghosts?
Get tested!
