Re-Magazine

collaboration with Jop van Bennekom

Collaboration with Jop van Bennekom 1998 - 2005.

Quoting from press release of exhibition and launch of Re-Magazine #11 at Antiquariat Daniël Buchholz, Köln. January 2004:

In its search for unmediated experiences and alternatives for the devaluation of media images Re-Magazine is constantly reformulating its own critical position. The last three issues of the magazine all had 'magazine about one person' as a subtitle. John (#9), Claudia (#10) and Marcel (#11) present themselves with stories about their lives and are represented in the magazine with pictures shot by renowned photographers. The stories of John, Claudia and Marcel are all very different, but they all share a distinctive and obsessive attitude towards life. Clearly, you won't find people like this in everyday situations, which is not surprising, since John, Claudia and Marcel are fictitious characters. Re-defining the word 'model', they combine visual representation and editorial content in one. At the end of each issue, the editors of Re-Magazine reveal how these characters are both constructed and rooted in reality.

Re-Magazine's development into this format of creating one fictitious person in order to deal with aspects of life in an over-mediated society has gone through various stages. Manic Issue, Boring Issue, Difficult Magazine and Anti-Attitude Issue were some of the magazine's subtitles before it became a magazine about one person. And fictitious elements have been present over a longer period of time. In #7 - the 2007 issue and therefore published as #23 - an anonymous group of people confess how major political, economic or religious changes in world history, from the late 1970s to the year 2007, have affected their personal lives. Talking in the first person plural, from a viewpoint somewhere in the near future, they seem to have given up their individual identities without even questioning it, or explaining it to the readers reading the magazine in the year 2002. This vision of the future is in radical contrast with the content of #5, the Information Trash-can, where an unidentified person starts a monologue: 'Listen, I can explain everything.' What follows is a recollection of all his wasted thoughts in I-speak, unable to break out of his solipsistic mind and unable to find any release from his hyper-awareness caused by the data pipeline called 'media'. The character is stuck in a paradox that is simultaneously a major drive for the magazine in general. Being part of the media landscape itself, Re-Magazine uses a Trojan Horse strategy to come to terms with modern life's hyper-awareness created by the media.

Re-Magazine was founded by graphic designer Jop van Bennekom in 1997. From then on he used the following issues as a platform to establish a collaborative network of editors, artists and photographers, such as Wolfgang Tillmans, Inez van Lamsweerde/Vinoodh Matadin,Terry Richardson, Viviane Sassen and Anuschka Blommers/Niels Schumm. Co-editor Arnoud Holleman, artist and writer/director of screenplays for television joined van Bennekom in 1998. Re-Magazine is now distributed worldwide.