GLEAN - Issue 6 (ENG edition)

It is a particularly unlovely time to be thinking about romance. The heart can be fickle, indulgent, its matters distracting, impractical. But in the heavy boots of our undesirable present, seized by colliding catastrophes, we ask: how do we get out of here? Can the simple math of desire plus futurity break us free? Or is this just a barely veiled expression of our longing for avoidance? When we declare that love is the answer, we often forget the ambivalence of which psychoanalysis warns: love emerges in tandem with hate. It is neither the antidote to aggression nor the basis of a coherent social order. 

As a narrative structure, romance insists on the future. Whether it's with a new lover hoping to break the repetition of bad patterns, in emotional growth born of the analytic couple, or inside the tremulous energy of an insurgent crowd that makes yesterday seem historically distinct from tomorrow, romance threads time with the texture of meaning. Perhaps delusional, perhaps heroic in this audacious promise, romance must also always be a fantasy, an imagined structure that has not yet met its match in the present. While this fantasy is vital to our attachment to the world and each other, it can also provide the fuel for self-serving denial and disavowal. When we say that the youth are not fucking and that they don’t care about politics, these separate charges obscure the nature of their common cause. As the world attempts to disavow the death of the earth and the removal of its peoples, our sense of continuity flees; the receding horizon is not an open road, but a vanishing point. Whither romance? 

Dependent. Detached. Trauma Bonded. The Incest Lobby. Revolution Against Romance. Reading for Love and Labor. Surrealist Bedfellows. Mad Love. Essays by Nadia Bou Ali, hannah baer, Moon Charania, Davey Davis, Kaleem Hawa, Anna Kornbluh, Thomas Ogden, and more.

Mousse celebrates its 90th issue with a collectible edition, with a special design and format, entirely focused on fiction.

Bringing together a cohort of writers and artists, Mousse #90 – The Fiction Issue stems from the eponymous Fiction column that has dwelled in our pages for five years, and expands its scope. It was developed together with Rosanna McLaughlin, Skye Arundhati Thomas, and Izabella Scott, who collectively coedited the art and literature quarterly The White Review between 2021 and 2023.

Here you'll find reprints from both Mousse and The White Review as well as new stories and translations we have jointly commissioned. Seven interludes, intended to open up other worlds through images, feature portfolios of drawings by Atelier dell'Errore, Michael E. Smith, Camille Henrot, Michael Landy, Simone Forti, Adelaide Cioni, and Evelyn Taocheng Wang.

Do we always have to be nice, kind and communicate respectfully? Wouldn't it sometimes be better to change our tone, to use force or even violence? We often want to act in a spirit of “care” and benevolence, but how do we know if we're really being altruistic and sympathetic? Vol.5 asks the question: Nice?

With contributions from :
Muf architecture/art, Mélanie Mazet, Bui Quy Son, Paul-Antoine Lucas, Armelle Breuil, Annabelle Vaillant, Napsugár Trömböczky, Alessandro Di Egidio,
Elsa Muller, Clara Lenoir, Léo Jacqmin, Clem Koren, Pola Noury, Grève cœur and Cassiane C. Pfund

This publication is edited by the Woman Cave collective founded by Leticia Chanliau and Chloé Macary-Carney.

318 black & white pages, brown cover
Micro edition of 700, printed in Aubervilliers by Isiprint.

Last year, on a summer night in Marseille, someone, within all the hungry people I am meeting during my dinners, specifically set her attention on my projects. Later during the fall I received a call from Austė ZDANČIŪTĖ, the cultural attache at the Lithuanian embassy in France, who introduced me to Kamilè Krasauskaitè. Since that fall, we kept on exchanging and making future plans in France where she would have a residency. The more we chatted, the closest we began. Kamilè is a almost-thirty-years-old Lithuanian artist that has been including sourdough bread in her work and builds a poetic and mesmerising world around that dimension of food, fermentation, senses, environment, rituals...Through our communication I decided to share that encounter that we managed to welcome in Marseille. We kneaded some bread together, shared it in a forest of Marseillais sunflowers, walked the streets, met people, questioned and compared artists' lives in Europe. This issue might be an excerpt of all the long conversations we had, it was hot and sunny in Marseille, it was in June.

published commonly, no no no expounds an experimental poetic offering, both text & art.

each issue features a limited edition artwork. which can be tacked or framed or stored in a drawer.

celestial in nature, no no no takes the form required, and necessary.