Printed Matters: Flaneur

Photo: Diana Pfammatter

By Sara Bellini

To relaunch our series on physical magazines, we started from the city where, for very obvious reasons, we have spent almost the entirety of the past few months. At the same time we wanted to reach out to the world, to emphasise what has become particularly evident since the beginning of the pandemic: How local and global are connected. Flaneur is a Berlin-based publication that aims at exploring this connection by centering each issue on a single street in all its details, and on how the details that build the individuality of a place also fit in a universal framework. 

Flaneur has a multidisciplinary and collective approach to its subject. This translates into physically exploring a place while collaborating with local creatives and stretching the artistic possibilities across different fields and beyond a predefinite structure. The launch of the Taipei issue in summer 2019 was a twenty-hour festival at HKW in Berlin, merging performance, exhibition, readings and music, to transcend the medium of the magazine and highlight the social fabric at the base of the publication.

While Covid has delayed their production process, we caught up with Flaneur publisher Ricarda Messner and editors in chief Fabian Saul and Grashina Gabelmann.

What are the goals and motivations behind your publication and why did you choose the physical magazine as a form?

Ricarda: The idea for the concept to go with “one street per issue“ was a personal tool to reconnect with known territory. I was born in Berlin and spent most of my life here. There was an urge for me to find my own place within the city without being too overwhelmed, so I started with something that was familiar to me, not knowing what would come out of it. Grashina and Fabian came up with the brilliant editorial framework around this very concrete concept, translating it into an unpredictable but still conceptual approach. So I guess, looking back, it wasn’t so much about the idea of making a magazine but more about establishing this “inner journey“ in an artistic, collaborative way that people can associate themselves with.

You define your creative process as “collaborative, impulsive and unconventional” - what do you mean by that?

Grashina: Since we often arrive at a place without knowing the city, its inhabitants or the street we will choose, having no flat-plan, editorial plan, or financial structure, we consider our method to be quite impulsive and unconventional. I think any magazine is collaborative but we emphasise this point as the content isn't written by us about artists but is made by artists specifically for the magazine and its concept.

How do you pick a place and what makes a place?

Grashina: We arrive in the chosen city oftentimes without knowing it at all. We might have one or two contacts but we basically start from the position of knowing nothing and no one and just walk. We mostly walk alone, sometimes with locals who we meet somehow and listen to their stories. Mostly though we let our intuition guide us and the street choice is based on a certain feeling, a sense of curiosity we feel or something disturbing or something for us unusual. Once we decide on the street - and this can take two days or two weeks - we spend almost every day there [for a couple of months].

Fabian: In collaboration with our contributors, we immerse ourselves into the place beyond what meets the eye and beyond the narratives of positivity that travel magazines perpetuate. We allow multi-voiced pieces that not always form one solid perspective but rather create a fragmented image that does not confirm [standard] exciting narratives but allows for contradiction. It is a very psychogeographic approach. The flaneur is concerned with things that may soon vanish and thus he walks the line between being a melancholic nostalgic but also being able to project into the future and beyond the realm of the visible, an avantgarde figure. Flaneuring is about seeing the plurality of truths in the urban fabric that surrounds us. It is those dark sides flaneuring can lead us to and the plurality of truths that form the literary realm we see the magazine in.

Photo: Diana Pfammatter

What’s your relationship with the creative scene of the cities you feature?

Grashina: Our contributors are chosen once we get to know the place and meet people. We like to call it a domino-effect where meeting one person will lead us to meeting three more etc. In Brazil we met 120 people during our time there but of course not everyone became a contributor - that crystalizes sometimes immediately and sometimes after weeks, through an organic process based on spending time with people, trusting our intuition and having great dialogues/walks.

You are about to launch a podcast - what are your plans for it and what’s its relationship with the magazine?

Grashina: Each season will feature a street we have already worked with. Season 1 will revisit Kantstrasse [in Berlin]. The podcast - though it's almost more like an audio play - does not simply regurgitate the content that one can find in the magazine, but approaches those themes in new ways. The audio format allows us to experiment with storytelling in a different way than the magazine does. What stays the same is that the content of the podcast, like the magazine, is fragmented, literary, subjective and experimental. We performed a sneak preview of Episode 1 on the rooftop of HKW this summer. We wanted to experiment with what a live collective listening session could be. There were four performers and three musicians performing and two voices that had been pre-recorded. We intend to keep experimenting with bringing the podcast into different spaces for audiences. 

What are your plans for the next issue and how has Covid changed them?

Grashina: We were meant to start production in Paris for Issue 09 this Spring but Covid obviously delayed this. We are now back to speaking with the Goethe Institut in Paris, establishing new timelines and funding opportunities and plan to continue production this fall. Six months after lock-down began in Berlin, we feel a bit more able to assess the situation and will see this as an opportunity to challenge our own approach and come up with new methodologies.

Find out where you can purchase Flaneur in your city or order it online. Support independent bookshops and publishers!