20 (PARA) Seconds, Issue 9 – The Archive

20 Seconds is a print-only magazine for experimental music and art. It’s built by and for designers, writers and photographers who feel they’re not being challenged enough by what they’re reading and seeing.

But more importantly, 20 Seconds is about engaging with what’s relevant to us. As a community, we’re intrinsically wired to discuss, debate and share. Inspired by other publications proving that print is not dead and neither are honesty or independence, 20 Seconds Magazine is about documenting those expressions.

It’s also a dialogue, founded on fluidity. And the conversation is something we feel can last as long as the ink on the pages.

In response to the mundane programming, sponsored-content-dependent, stock-photo-generated presentations to which we all suffer, we propose a solution. Published twice annually, 20 Seconds will be a collection of original photography, longform journalism, poetry, interviews and more.

20 Seconds is not interested in stories for stories’ sake. Or in the same headshot flooding your devices in involuntarily advertised form. It is interested in bold art, fearless music and the real people behind it.

As a publication, we’re independent of major advertising corporations and click-bait titles, but not of our readers. Without the financial support of our community, we cannot produce the type of quality, independent journalism and design that we want to contribute to our cultural landscape.

Adventurous music and art take risk; they can be wonderfully inclusive. That’s why we’re collaborating with our favourite photographers, poets, musicians, DJs and artists of all dispositions to articulate our perspective.

Together, we can succeed in exploring work that continues to intrigue and resist.

As a collection it will last a while, individually a lifetime. But definitely more than 20 Seconds.

In this issue:

20 Seconds Issue 9: The Archive details the stories of individual archives all over the world. It is in the archive that we fight to reclaim histories and to act as allies to those who no longer have the means to do so, often as a result of colonial violence. It is in the archive that power balances must be destroyed and built back up again in new, more just distributions. For all our questions about how we ended up here—with multiple genocides supported and/or funded by the “democratic” West—we can find the root of that racist, xenophobic oppression and ideology in archives, historiography and museology.

There is a method to this archival inquiry, and it is not armed resistance. That is our privilege. It centres on an idea put forward by Italian historians like Giovanni Levi and Carlo Ginzburg, called microhistory. Scholars like Ginzburg posited that by shifting our focus from larger historical canons to smaller anomalous characters and the lives they lived, we might not only be able to validate their stories as worthy of being told, but we might also learn something more representative of events as they played out on a larger scale.

20 Seconds Issue 9 is a reminder that archives are contentious places, worthy of our attention and action. They are reflections of a very basic concept: To forget is a privilege, and a grave error.

Featuring:

GAUNG

Pwani Twapes

Journey into the Blue Dimension

Marcela Paniak

Wandering Translators

Dónal Foreman

Giorno Poetry Systems

Archivio dei Movimenti di via Avesella

A Fidai Film

204 pages. Perfect bound. Softcover.