Issue 1

For the cover of our very first issue, we asked the artist to create a graphic to represent their interpretation of a rhizome. Here are their thoughts:

I really liked BTS’s instructional poem for the ongoing do it exhibition by Hans Unlrich Obrist, Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries:

Connect one dot with another.
Draw a line, create a plane. 
Beyond the boundaries of time and space,
“You” and “I” become “We.”
Our future is a beautiful image.”

BTS, ‘do it (around the world)’ 

 And I thought it sat nicely with this description of a rhizome:

If any part of the rhizome is separated from the main system, it may live on and sprout a new plant.”

“About – Why Rhizomes?”

So I’ve reinterpreted it as forms of connections! I’ve swapped people with plants, or more specifically Kokedamas (the term Kokedama refers to a Japanese art of growing plants that allows the plant to live outside a pot so that the roots aren’t hidden). I felt the bus stop was the perfect kind of in-between place where the relationship between BTS and ARMY blurs and the two can connect and how bonding over BTS can create relationships between an ARMY x ARMY too. A meeting place of strangers on different paths and journeys. It was also a little way of paying homage to the You Never Walk Alone era, which is a phrase I think feels very reassuring to hear! The phone booth is what their music feels like to me; whether you have a good or a bad day, turning on their music can seem to have an effect of experiencing a direct line to a safe space. It feels like they have written words for you and you alone, yet the words are  something that bonds millions of people together. Existing apart but having the capabilities to be a massive force of good together as a whole which is very apt in this chaotic 2020.