BIBBY, Gerry; CHIRIAC, Mihaela; DIETRICH, Nikola; EBNER, Martin; MÜLLER, Ariane; OLESEN, Henrik (eds.)
Starship #19 – Spring 2020: apokolypse of the praktikal moment

It’s been a year since we printed an issue of the magazine. The last, #18, was the “20 Years of Starship issue.” A lot can happen in such a time span, not to mention that Berlin is not the world!

But now 2020. We’ve made it to #19. Obviously there's a mis-match, but time and the numbers given it do slip about—the magazine sure explores some leaps through time. This can provoke knots that are difficult to encounter. We try to not be afraid of either welcoming knots or attempting to unravel some either. In English, this year’s elegant echo, its form, its repetition—20 / 20—describes good eyesight numerically (strange enough in itself), and we might expect such clarity of vision would translate well to understanding. But the two are not the same. Mistranslations and displacements resound throughout the pages. Some respond to slippages in language and its applications with experiments in the potential of dismantling the hierarchies inherent to words, while others are about the consequences of power in the context of disinformation. Thankfully, threads from places and minds and times not entirely consumed by the insistence of the latter’s eye-sores look elsewhere; attempt to dodge the thriving of those particular political machinations. We have a new editor to help us consider all this, Mihaela Chiriac, along with some new columnists, not to mention all those that have been contributing to Starship for years.
However much previous iterations may have joyfully detoured, escaping the suggestion of an introduced preoccupation, slipping into other orbits, we did not enter into this issue with a central theme. Nº 19’s prefered entry into this nominally new decade is with a de-centred face—including a slight shift / glitch in our format that’s been around since Henrik and Nikola set re-start on the magazine. Borrowed from the new or old, or projecting an altogether non-face, this might be a mask if we’re to take Jack Smith’s lead. If it has organs that better sense the world around it differently, these might be submerged, sensing other spaces, as Nora Schultz’s cover and contribution reminds us. Swimming throughout these pages, fragments of surfacing whales make contact with a conversation between women who talk about women; confront the social deviations of a (dis)behaving inside outsider; locate the violence of a cage designed for a worker’s optimized productivity from a distance… & even sense a lamenting allegory about dogs in a desert without language. Before returning to what lies beneath the surface, leaving it for the activities of painters and poets.

We send this into the next decade of Starship, and project onto a future, for you. So stay with us and try us: Art will be the main driving force of, and best paid activity in society, and will be replacing sports, once (in the near future) people will have found out that you actually lose more calories in a museum than on the cricket field. And the light is more flattering (this still has to be worked on). The weather will be terribly oppressive in a lot of places, but in Museums, this won’t be an issue.

The ongoing attempt to erase noses from faces, not only in representation but also through plastic surgery will peak in the next ten years, eliminating noses from collective memory. Until one day, a person of no specific gender; an on-site barber of wigs named Yakovlevich, discovers a long dead lawmaker’s nose in a compressed vegetable product resembling a rare yet still existing prehistoric crustacean. Bodies will change as well, arms will get longer.

The attempt by filmmakers to counter Themyscira (where Wonder Woman lives), and Wakanda (home country of Black Panther), and depict an all white male Utopia, where white males live just amongst themselves, let’s call it Apokolypse, will have failed spectacularly! They will have, to paraphrase María Galindo, grabbed each other in a duel to the death!

—Gerry Bibby, Mihaela Chiriac, Nikola Dietrich, Martin Ebner, Ariane Müller, Henrik Olesen.

With contributions by Nora Schultz, John Boskovich, Nong Shoahua, Rosa Aiello, Jack Smith, Eric D. Clark, Mihaela Chiriac, Stephan Janitzky, Paul B. Preciado, Lars Bang Larsen, Jakob Kolding, Vera Palme, Tenzing Barshee, Jay Chung, Karl Holmqvist, Mercedes Bunz, Haytham El-Wardany, Yuki Kimura, Simon Denny, Florian Zeyfang, Gerry Bibby, Julian Göthe, Mark van Yetter…

Published by Starship, 2020
Design by Dan Solbach and Starship
Periodicals / Scenes / Artists' Writings