We are delighted to announce the collective Viscose as the recipient of the second Between Bridges Residency. Viscose is a publishing unit for fashion criticism launched in Berlin and Copenhagen in 2021. The irregular periodical stages exhibitions and publishes critical writing by authors from the worlds of art, fashion, literature, and academia. We warmly welcome Jeppe Ugelvig, Camila Palomino, Filip Berg, Cheuk NG and Laura Silke from July onwards in our residency space at Keithstraße.

Viscose is the resident at Between Bridges Foundation in the period July – December 2023. Responding to the upcoming issue theme of RETAIL, the publishing collective has activated the residency storefront—located on an old antique street in the shadow of Berlin’s oldest department store, KaDeWe—through events and exhibitions. During this time, they will produce their upcoming issue while activating the residency storefront, through events and exhibitions.

Upcoming projects presented by Viscose:

Magazine launch: Viscose Journal Issue 05 = Retail

Thursday, 7 December, 6–9pm

Between Bridges Residency Space

Keithstraße 15, 10787 Berlin

The fifth issue of Viscose Journal explores fashion’s multifaceted retail spaces and cultures. With the evolution of shopping in the 20th and 21st centuries as its focus, the issue looks at the shop as a central nexus where communities and identities are continuously produced and re-imagined through commerce. With a special attention to the role of fashion retail within urban spatial politics, we seek out histories of projects—often developed with or by artists—that have embraced the shop as a medium of both possibility and contestation. 

The print issue design evokes the ubiquitous shop receipt—with a paper cover that will similarly curl and materially register its reader as it’s used. The receipt is an official proof of a commodity’s acquisition and value, an artefact of a kind of in-person consumption that is often narrated as rapidly heading to extinction. Viscose’s 5th issue invites readers to use their purchased item and inscribe it with their own wear (we are a journal for criticism and research, after all).

Featuring: Canal Street Research Association, Dennis Brzek, Ana Howe Bukowski, Michael Bullock, Felix Burrichter, Noah Dillon, Harun Farocki, Anna Franceschini, Ignacio Gatica , Christian Hincapié, Juje Hsiung, Jessica Kwok, Rhonda Lieberman, Matthew Linde, Vésma Mcquillan, Marge Monko, Museum Of Modern Shopping, Cheuk Ng, Luis Ortega, Camila Palomino, Andreas Petrossiants, Leah Pires, Rose Salane, Alice Sarmiento, Jeppe Ugelvig, Sean Vegezzi, Post Vsop, Evie Ward, Leah Weirer

With Guest Co-Editor: Camila Palomino
Editor-in-Chief: Jeppe Ugelvig
Assistant Editor: Cheuk Ng
Creative Director: Filip Samuel Berg 
Art Director: Laura Silke
Fashion Director: Juje Hsiung
Interns: Aurora Gerini & Marley Wendt
 

Published in partnership with Storefront for Art and Architecture and International Library of Fashion Research. With the generous support of Between Bridges.
 
Distribution available via Bierke Books, KD Presse, Public Knowledge Books, twelvebooks, Post Poetics, and National Book Network.

Past projects presented by Viscose:

Viscose Journal is delighted to present The Theatre and Its Double, a solo show by London-based artist and winner of the Camden Art Centre Emerging Artist Prize at Frieze 2023 Jack O’Brien. 

Performed by: Bryony Dawson, Giulia Ottavia Frattini, Kurt Fritsche, Mathilde Heuliez, Jonathan Lubasch, George Macbeth, and Kristina Stallvik

'Non-Productive Readers: a performance’ explores the body of a reader as a site of conflicting desires and drifting attention, where multiple texts converge, and notions of individual selfhood dissolve. 

Collaboratively conceived and enacted by members of ‘Non Productive Readers’ -- a reading group initiated by Bryony Dawson in 2022 -- this performance draws from texts discussed last winter in Berlin. Named after Josef Strau’s essay ‘the non-productive attitude,’ the reading group is a loose investigation of reading as a creative activity, testing distinctions between theory and practice, talking and making, publication and exhibition. 

With text fragments from Tiqqun, Lisa Robertson, Julien Bismuth, David Antin, and Tan Lin, 'Non-Productive Readers: a performance' unfolds as a stream of borrowed, remixed and disembodied language, tracing questions of authorship, agency, distraction, submission, and the ambient pleasures of reading. 

The performance is presented as part of the expanded exhibition, Slow Leak, curated by Kristina Stallvik at the bookshop and event space, a.p.. Building on a Deleuzian argument for ‘haptic’ rather than ‘optic’ seeing, the series explores the physical demands of books, an experimental understanding of the somatic, and the confluence of material and immaterial experiences in reading.

Viscose Journal is delighted to present Prices Realized, a solo show by Berlin-based artist Christian Alborz Oldham. The exhibition brings together the artist’s series of past PDF-based clothing re-selling e-mail campaigns for the first time, drawing stock from Oldham’s perennially revolving wardrobe, intermittently realized and circulated amongst friends, friends of friends, and colleagues over the last decade. All-encompassing in their precision and rigor, Oldham’s virtual market triples as a retail-based social sculpture and Herculean effort of systematically archiving the momentary act of shopping.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a text by artist and collaborator Davora Lindner.
https://viscosejournal.com/PRICES_REALIZED  

In the week from 11 – 17 September 2023, Lior Shamriz & Matt Polzin worked at Viscose studio @ Between Bridges. 

Reminiscing on his fantasies of late 1990s and early 2000s high fashion while living in the East Mediterranean, Shamriz revisits the hi-8 tapes and visual materials they recorded two decades ago of queer Mizrahi army drop-outs fantasizing about an unreachable Berlin. The mundane footage includes navel-gazing dance experiments in front of the mirror accompanied by Marlene Dietrich and Ryoji Ikeda, folding laundry to David Bowie, Tekken battles on PlayStation, and Gucci magazine spreads. Shamriz considers both the naivety of this anti-nationalist queer urban past as well as the endearing promises of their dreams about Foucault and Balenciaga.

Writing fiction, Matt Polzin researches how rural geographies are utilized by coastal U.S. artists as a canvas for fantasizing escape. He reflects on the aesthetics of past utopian land projects in the Midwest, including artist colonies, hippie communes, and queer separatists, and pulls from his own experiments with rural living in his early twenties. Probing the competing narratives of the Great Lakes region as climate refuge and conservative backwater, he explores the romanticization of rural poverty as a condition of capitalist expansion. 

Whether you're window shopping or looking for a new product to bring home, join us for an evening of retail therapy. 
In collaboration with our Berlin network of artists, designers, and collectors, we’re launching a summer pop-up this Friday, August 18th. 
Come along and discover exclusive fashion and homeware pieces by @bless_service, vintage fashion from @solastseason and @flowerplanetberlin, books from @bierkebooks, artist merch from @lukivondergracht, and rare past Viscose copies at delicious prices!
Also on display will be a new site-specific window installation by architect @texxeen – responding to our monolithic next-door neighbor, KaDeWe. 

Beers will be served. Bring a friend and credit card!

“However, there was little time for dangerous day-dreams in her daily working life. In the shop, worn out as they were by thirteen hours’ work, there was little opportunity to think about love between salesmen and saleswomen. If the constant battle for money had not already wiped out the difference between the sexes, the endless jostle of the crowd, which kept their minds busy and made their bodies ache, would have been enough to kill all desire. Very few love-affairs were known to have taken place in the midst of the hostilities and friendships between men and women, the relentless competition between departments. They were all nothing but cogs, caught up in the workings of the machine, surrendering their personalities, merely adding their strength to the mighty common whole of the phalanstery. It was only outside that they could resume their individual lives, with the sudden flame of reawakening passions.” (Excerpt from Emilie Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames, 1883.)

Curated by Jeppe Ugelvig