Following its
collaboration with the Centre Pompidou for the centenary of Surrealism (2024), Magma continues its poetic cartography of the contemporary world—in an object at the crossroads of art publishing, aesthetic manifesto, and living archive.
Hans Ulrich Obrist, who wrote the foreword to this edition, captures the spirit of the project as follows "Magma is an extraordinary collection of artist archives that helps us invent the future. These archives are not places of certainty, but tools—prototypes for future action and for the world as it could be."
In a world devoid of promise—where history seems dislocated and the future uncertain— Magma questions the capacity of artistic forms to anticipate the world to come.
"The archive is is the space through which a society decides what it wishes to see, what it chooses to believe, and what it prefers to silence. In this sense, the archive is political. But its truth lies elsewhere, in what goes beyond the rule, in what opens a breach. That is what makes it poetic." explains Paul Olivennes, founder and creative director of Magma, before adding: "To choose what we preserve is to choose how we see." It is within this unstable space that another temporality emerges: an archaeology of the future, where the works of yesterday and today become the foundation for the world to come.
This third edition brings together over one hundred previously unpublished works and texts. In a recent series of portraits, American painter
Elizabeth Peyton continues her metaphysical exploration of the face. She concentrates the entire history of painting into that minute and inexhaustible territory that is the figure of the other, where the enigma of presence is replayed each time anew. Nigerian-American artist Precious Okoyomon contributes an original piece in the form of an insert: a sachet of cosmos seeds, accompanied by a selection of poems. Stephan Crasneanscki unveils the cinematic and personal archives of
Jean-Luc Godard, alongside a text by Patti Smith. At the age of eighty, the filmmaker chose to part with the entirety of his archives. Whether a testamentary gesture or one of creation, this renunciation was not an ending but a radical act of lucidity—a way of reclaiming his own chaos, putting it in order before disappearing. American sculptor CHARLES RAY publishes five audio recordings made at dawn during his daily walks in Los Angeles. Combining introspection, memory, and conceptual drift, these monologues form a hallucinatory oral work. In a series titled Ultra Half Negro Symbolism, french artist POL TABURET turns to black. The space of a voice rediscovered. A primal black— not a color, but a syntax. Across these pages, through drawings, charcoal works, and handwritten poems, and with a rigorous economy of means, a new language unfolds. MAGMA republishes Dirty Windows by Merry Alpern thirty years after the controversy in the United States. From the window of a loft, the American photographer captured the illicit transactions of an underground Wall Street strip club. A guilty archive, now cult.
Seven Polaroids by
Jonas Mekas, taken during a 1971 Fluxus dinner where
Yoko Ono and John Lennon improvised drawings, readings, and performances, are presented alongside a cross-reading of Still Life and Chardin by
Francis Ponge (1946), and a curated selection of paintings.
Michelangelo Pistoletto presents two previously unseen mirror paintings, reproduced on mirrored pages. Additional unexpected dialogues emerge: a fictional text by
Théo Casciani in response to images from Jonathan Glazer's short film Strasbourg 1518; a visual correspondence between
Jill Mulleady and
Mike Kelley, framed as a re-reading of
Lautréamont's Maldoror and the figure of the hermaphrodite; the mythological visions of Slovak artist Stanislava Kovalčíková, placed in dialogue with the convulsive writing of
Henri Michaux in Fables des Origines. Magma also hosts the German shepherd mannequins of
Jos De Gruyter & Harald Thys, from their Die Vier von der Tankstelle series—an absurd sequence of images evoking a fantasized Central Europe, accompanied by a QR code playing Beethoven's Seventh Symphony conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. The volume closes with a complete reproduction of La Guillotine (Trap for a Capital Execution), a major 1971 installation by
Michel Journiac. A radical gesture that resonates eerily today, in an era haunted by death and scenes of ultimate violence.
An olfactory bookmark, designed by artist and researcher Sissel Tolaas, also accompanies the publication.
