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Goran Stefanovski
The Conserve Impressions by Goran Stefanovski is collection of
short-short stories that represent the best Macedonian dramatic
author in one new light.
Without too much psychology, rhetoric or decoration (something
which, unfortunaly, is characteristic for the Macedonian prose) The
Conserve Impressions are texts where responsibility for the written
words is essential poetic principle.
Visual Culture
In this issue, we translated three texts: Advertising
commercial: rhetorical imperative by Malcolm Barnard; The Fantastic
Confusion! The Pop before Pop by Dick Hebdige; Dreams for the Reich:
The Ritual Horror and the Bodies in Shells by Justin J. Lorentzen.
Metodi Angelov
An artist who experiments with computer graphic. His exhibition
If it wasn't was part of the project Confluent Margins.
Susan Sontag
In this Margina we represent her text The Torture of Others.
Susan Sontag is one of America's best-known and most admired
writers. She was born in New York City in 1933, grew up in Tucson,
Arizona, and attended high school in Los Angeles. She received her
B.A. from the College of the University of Chicago and did graduate
work in philosophy, literature, and theology at Harvard University
and Saint Anne's College, Oxford.
Giorgio Agamben
Giorgio Agamben is a professor of aesthetics at the University
of Verona, Italy and teaches philosophy at the Collčge International
de Philosophie in Paris and at the University of Macerata in Italy.
Agamben’s book Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (1992)
is a blend of philology, medieval physics and psychology, the
psychoanalysis of toys, and contemporary linguistics and philosophy.
In this work, Agamben attempts to reconfigure the epistemological
foundation of Western culture. He rereads Freud and Saussure to
discover the impossibility of metalanguage and of synthesis that
could be reflected in the transparency of signs. There is no
„superior language“ that can read the obscure scenes of the
unconscious, and the „symbol“ is always the return of the repressed
in an improper signifier.
Swiss Architecture
In this issue, we represent some of the most important
architects who built the identity of Swiss architecture in the
second half of the 20th century.
Vane Kosturanov
„For a quarter of a century Vane Kosturanov has been leaning on
the windowsill; that’s why he is not able to see his own house“, is
written in Vane Kosturanov’s catalogue from his latest exhibition, A
house scarcely bigger than a planet. He is one of the most talented
young artists, coming from Strumica. We present 16 color pages. In
the frames of the project Confluent Margins, we presented him for
the first time in Skopje (Cultural Center Tochka), in Struga,
Gostivar and in Strumica.
Charles Bukowski
3 short stories, 13 poems and few sentences from the writer who
believed that his books are photographs of life.
The Brains Trust
The Brains Trust is a satirical on-line netpaper published every
two weeks. The Brains Trust is considered to be the best satirical
magazine in Britain. This magazine is some kind of European answer
of American magazine The Onion. In this edition of Margina we have
translated few texts in which some very popular icons as Nostradamus,
Bush, Tony Blair, actual events at the Middle East and, most of all,
too serious media are mocked.
Leopold Kohr
The philosopher and national economist Leopold Kohr was born on
5 October 1909 in Oberndorf in the Austrian province of Salzburg. He
is the creator of the slogan „Small is beautiful“, that was
formulated by Kohr’s pupil Friedrich Schumacher in 1973 in his
famous book with the same title. Even back in the 50s and 60s, when
everybody thought that continued growth of the economy can solve all
the problems, Kohr was against it. He wanted people to go back to
the human measure of things. Kohr and his theory provided many ideas
for the later emergence of Green and Ecologist organisations. His
most important works were issued in English, Spanish, French,
Italian, Japanese and Welsh. In September 1941 there was an article
by Kohr issued in the New York magazine The Commonweal. This was the
first time he wrote against the national megalomania and for a
Europe of cantons. Kohr’s model was Switzerland, consisting of
cantons, where Italian, French, German and Raetoroman speaking Swiss
live together in relative harmony. According to Kohr the reason for
this lies in the a high measure of local decentral autonomy.
Otherwise these ethnic groups would have joined the - in Kohr’s
point of view - sick nationalism of their big national brothers.
Kohr saw that the national unification process dures in the past had
only brought about imperial super powers which fought against each
other. At the beginning of the 50s Kohr completed his main work: The
Breakdown of Nations. The book however was published in 1957 in
London which is prove that Kohr’s ideas pointed far into the future.
Nikola Gelevski
From the recent book of Nikola Gelevski, Contrapunkt 2001-2004;
principles for a different politics, we represent few texts.
In the foreword of his latest book, Nikola Gelevski writes: „In the
midst of columnist inflatia and tendency to take the role of ‘media
intellectual’ too easily, I’ve decided to obtain a more serious
approach towards public engagement, an approach which has
pretentions to be of educational nature.
The famous Lichtenberg once said: „It is not important what someone
thinks, but what the thinking does to him.“ Walter Benjamin agrees
with this, arguing that it is important what someone thinks, but the
most important function of public thinking is giving useful
guidelines to other thinkers. He concludes: „The writer who doesn’t
educate other writers doesn’t educate anybody.“
Igor Toshevski
Beside his recognizable and subtle signature, Toshevski shows in
this work his rather refined political awareness that grows like
magma from within the volcanic abyss of the meanings, as every grand
and deep artistic practice should. With his attempt to contribute
towards a unique approach of mapping the environment that surrounds
him, or in fact – towards its re-conceptualization, Toshevski also
succeeds in mapping out himself in a most precise manner. He maps
out his own work across that huge postcolonial, Borhesian,
free-to-draw-out-for-everyone map for which Clifford Geertz almost
strategically writes: “What we are witnessing isn’t just a new
demarcation of the cultural map – shifting some problematic borders
or depicting picturesque mountain lakes, but an alteration in the
very process of mapping. Something is happening with the way we
think about the way we think”. The exhibition was a part of a
project Confluent Margins.
Robert Jankulovski
Ten photographs (special technique - gumbichromate) from the eminent
Macedonian photographer dedicated to the avantgarde artist Nam June
Paik.
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