Janus 23

Présentation
Rédacteur en chef : Nicola Setari
Janus 23

Le 23e numéro de la revue Janus, fondée par Jan Fabre et Dirk Imschoot, comporte une couverture expérimentale d’Olafur Eliasson, des projets spéciaux d’Ivan Moudov, Michael Rakowitz et Alex Cecchetti, ainsi que des textes et des entretiens entre Gabriel Kuri et Katerina Gregos, Anish Kapoor et Jean de Loisy, Edith Dekyndt eet Charlotte Bonduel, Olaf Nicolai et Lorenzo Benedetti, Eric Van Hove et Marleen Wynants.

Le thème de ce numéro joue avec les concepts traditionnels de «white cube» et de «black box», et les remixe en «White Box for a Black Cube».

Editorial de Nicola Setari (en anglais)

«What is Janus about? It is about text and image, the two faces of the same god who has discerned the folds of being since the beginning of time. The more we go in depth into the concept of our magazine, the more we realize that the ultimate struggle upon which it is constructed is that the two faces can shine in their plenitude. No unbalance, no preference. Whoever opens Janus should feel a call both towards reading and regarding, he or she should perceive that both are equally respected and none of the two can advance any claim towards hegemony. Of course the god of passage ways will grant that if your mind is temporarily oriented towards an intuitive, sensorial experience your attention will glide through the magazine capturing the images that most strike you and those that satisfy your impatient roaming, but the god will be waiting for you by the doorway as you must at some point find your road back from the world of images and then he will patiently direct you through the reading, its sacrifices, its disagreements and its intimate pleasures.

We decided to stop guessing which minds would be willing to play this ancestral game: which focus group or public we should stick to. To resist all those concerns for marketing strategies, cultural contexts and so on and so forth, and to call towards us, for however long we could sustain it, those who share the belief that text and image can anywhere, anytime, here and now find their perfect knot anywhere, anytime, here and now. The perfection of which is but an ephemeral and eternal moment, a whisper in the ear that says yes. What a rewarding experience to tie this know, to obey to its liberating logic, to become a meta-magazine, an experimental exercise on the concept of magazine in itself, to learn new ways of storing the present in its advanced textual and visual expressions.

By paying attention to art, to architecture, to philosophy and to religion, one refines his or her faculty of discernment, the ability to grasp the valuable out of the flow of images and the overabundance of texts and to tentatively balance its representations and interconnections into a publication. It is an exercise of hopping around and landing where the different interpretations of the existent unexpectedly converge, oscillating between text and image.

Janus is evolving. The lines and the characters that compose its architecture are changing as the knot is untied and rethought for every issue. Our time frame has also shifted, as now the magazine will appear end of January, the month named after the god of passage ways and beginnings and mid June, the month in which vacation does not seem so far.»