MANY OF THEM - Issue #11

“MANY OF THEM DEMANDS: WE MUST BE ILLEGIBLE!” In our previous volume, the scholar JACK HALBERSTAM proposed the “illegibility” as a way to resist the dominant order that demands everyone be legible in terms of binary systems. Instead, he demands we should enter into a murkier, fugitive state. Inspired by his vision, this concept guides Issue #11 of MANY OF THEM, leading us to explore new undetermined spaces and images that deny exactitude and that refuse to pin embodiment to instantly recognizable shapes. During a time when, especially in popular culture, visibility is often misunderstood as participation but in reality constitutes an exploitative condition, MANY OF THEM envisions silence and invisibility as a much more threatening and interesting position to take up. Infinite images result from trying to encapsulate this notion: the hybrid, the interspecies, the blur, the fantasy, the dream. Its exploration takes up a variety of themes around image-making, character-building, labor, AI, artistry, and the everyday that demonstrate that to be capable of radical change requires refusing to be perfectly accounted for by existing languages or images. The opaque and the obscure are the provisional and the not-yet-arrived. As the artist PIPPA GARNER declares of our collective future, “Life on Earth won’t be called human, it will probably have a new name.” In this way, the illegibility becomes an opportunity to reroute habitual thinking or form a window onto awe-inspiring and imminent patterns of reality. Plus, in this issue multiple interviews and fashion stories were created in collaboration with, JORDAN WOLFSON, BLOMMERS/SCHUMM, EUN-ME AHN, MCKENZIE WARK, RAPHAEL BLISS, TAKASHI HOMMA, DIEGO MARCON, ALESSIO BOLZONI, THOMAS LOHR, TORSO, ANTHEA HAMILTON, ANTONIO MACARRO, PETER FUNCH, DEA KULUMBEGASHVILI, ARI VERSLUIS, PIPPA GARNER, GRANT JAMES-THOMAS, P. STAFF, and PUPPIES PUPPIES.