EDITOR’S NOTE

Although they only fit in a small niche within the larger edifice of discourse, I hope that these works here keep on shining as brightly in their impact and their meaning as the first time they appeared.

If we do our job well, you will see one of them on the cover for this issue: a tall, monumental structure jutting strongly up into a concrete-coloured sky. It’s a monument. Even if you knew nothing about it, seeing it can’t help but conjure the 20th century. It’s modern, gray, imposing, and abstract. Whatever their baggage and their history, here they serve primarily as themselves, we chose to serve them in a context of their aesthetic, thus emphasizing the most powerful thing they give off.

But aside from the aesthetics, they of course have oodles of meaning and reference that they were built upon. Like all monuments. The monument from the cover is dedicated to those that died in the fight against Nazism in World War 2 during the National Liberation War in Yugoslavia. Which is something that of course shouldn’t be forgotten in the presence of their appearance.

In the wake of time they have acquired many new, ever more complicated meanings, but they still radiate them all as strongly as ever. They radiated meaning while being designed by their artists. They radiated meaning while being constructed and placed. They radiated meaning as they crumbled, faded, and were graffitied over. And they would do so while being grown over by algae off the Adriatic coast. They would do so in the cool halls of a museum, or broken on the street. Because, like all art - they radiate meaning no matter what. Through history, through ideologies, through time. Through the internet.

There is long and rich history behind every one of these monuments or Spomeniks as they are called in their mother tongues. This issue’s photographer, Donald Niebyl [LINK!] has produced some great resources about them if you’re curious.

Why this long ramble about these monuments to preface an issue of a literary magazine? As we know from our own time, not all monuments and works are as resilient in the face of change as the Spomeniks. Neither are all structures. However, going through all the works in our issue, I am given hope that they are going to be like the Spomeniks: that they will continue shining as strongly as they do now, that they will keep on radiating meaning, and that they will stand the test of time.

So, I hope you have fun exploring this issue of the magazine, and I would like to thank all our contributors for letting us host their timeless works, at least for a time.

-A