Update from the Editors

IMAGE FROM STONE & FLESH BY JYOTI ARVEY, ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN LOOKING FOR LENIN, NEILS ACKERMANN AND SÉBASTIEN GOBERT (FUEL PUBLISHING, 2017). PHOTOGRAPH BY NIELS ACKERMANN, TAKEN IN SLOVYANSK, UKRAINE, ON SEPTEMBER 15, 2015.

UPDATE FROM THE EDITORS, May 17, 2022:

Like most deaths, our magazine’s was sudden. Ultimately, no final issue was assembled, but the spirit of creation-alongside-mourning embodied in our final dissolution’s cadaverous prompt (see here) continues to chill our bones, haunting much of the work we do in Dissolve’s current iteration, and elsewhere …

Looking back, we fondly remember the community that emerged around Dissolve: our launch parties, a fundraising event full of artist-made merchandise and giveaways, many late night editing marathons, back-and-forth and in-depth correspondence with artists and writers, and the innumerable insights and creative projects that coalesced through the project.

Dissolve was on an extended hiatus from 2019-2021 and is pleased to return with new projects, offerings, and a fresh digital patina. Take a wander through our website, full of Happenings (news), Musings (essays, interviews, and reviews), a Salon (of offerings), and Past Issues, some of which we have recollected and re-released here. Like the “stone and flesh” of Soviet statuary described in Jyoti Arvey’s piece for the Bureau of Longitudes, we discovered many of our announcements and a few projects that should have been issues but had fallen somewhere offscreen at the time they were created. Our sixth and seventh issues come out of this process of restoration.

The collection of essays found in Issue 6, retitled Pre/histories of Protest, were received with the intention of creating a response to the one-year anniversary of the Women’s March on Washington of 2017. Essays trickled in around the time of the launch, which were posted to Trace, but others took form months later. Reassembled here and assigned their original date, the four pieces constitute a fascinating dive into our thoughts on protest and patriarchy at the end of the first year of a presidency that reoriented our lives and senses of time, urgency, and anger.

Issue 7: The Bureau of Longitudes was established as an offsite “exploratory office” of Dissolve with its own graphic design scheme and a separate website. Functioning as a site for archiving accounts of place, the project was organized by each topic’s degrees of latitude and longitude. This Bureau might be imagined as a cyclical catalog of the globe, or perhaps an encyclopedia in the round. Upon its first volume, the Bureau delved into research on the absurdities and contradictions of globally-organized space with six articles and artist projects that considered the architectures and hierarchies of locales around the globe. In 2021, discovering that its original website had become defunct, our editor Christopher Squier migrated the volume to Dissolve where it has taken its place as our seventh issue.