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Perennially popular at the magCulture shop, this ingeniously formatted magazine concerns architecture (and life) in its broadest sense: ‘What it means to live today’. This is an especially stark issue of Real Review—for the first time since the magazine’s inception, there is no orange face drawn by Nishant Choksi on the front cover—the tone contextualised by the team in light of the ongoing siege of Gaza and the Palestinian people: ‘There are two popular ideas about the meaning of the absurd. The first argues that absurdity occurs when tragedy is so acute it flips into comedy (as when extreme physical pain is experienced as numbness). The absurd is the humour of suffering... It isn’t the representation of violence in the Gaza Strip that is so disturbing; it is the absence of representation. The grief and despair of a child is penetratingly real. The extreme realism of these events has now driven a wedge between our realities, material and social. The scale and speed of this suffering has destroyed our ability to sustain any belief in the symbolic values of “the international community” and “human rights”. We can no longer even pretend these ideas correlate to any form of reality. This issue of Real Review is dedicated to the current mood, the Phantom of Liberty.’ On the Journal:Founder Jack Self shares the strategy behind the magazine’s cover designs. READ MORE. real-review.org
