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I began to encounter more kinds of eroticism. I also became aware that we are all traveling and living from city to city, so we’re not really based in one place. I imagined the magazine as a kind of ‘soft city’. I first started to talk about it with friends and they told me all about their erotic escapades. But in the end, we wanted to bring it back to the creative world. This is how we came up with the format for our interviews examining how dance, film, architecture, and fine art express the erotic.

I find men who smoke very erotic. I think smoking is very sensual as a gesture. Because there’s so much restriction around smoking nowadays, even if you know it’s unhealthy, it feels like a form of resistance; of being a liberated mind –which is also the erotic, of course. Sometimes it’s in the space between two people who are physically close together. There’s this electricity between them, and their gestures and movements are so are so expressive.

I think it’s actually the equivalent of freedom.

Pornography is all in the act; it’s all about sex. Our culture publicly accepts pornography, and there are no secrets, which is perhaps why it works. But erotica is still very hidden. There’s always an in-betweenness to eroticism. It’s like the shimmering of a beautiful, dark blue sky giving way to the sun –it’s the movement from night to day or from day to night.

Someone once said that the magazine felt honest. I think honesty an important aspect of the erotic, just as much as having fun and having a sense of humor is a part of the erotic. Especially in terms of fetishes, if you have a fetish and it turns you on, and you’re going to be ironic about it, then the whole magic of the fetish disappears. With a fetish, it’s about openly and honestly sharing it with someone. Which is much like the shared experience of reading a magazine –for the reader to share with the artists they’re reading about and also with a community of readers. The subject matter doesn’t have to turn them on. The essence of it is more about acknowledging this expressiveness and encouraging readers to find their own ways of expressing themselves.

I listen to a lot of Yo La Tengo, Blonde Redhead, and How To Dress Well. In film, I deeply admire Carlos Reygadas, a Mexican director who is extremely interesting. He has explicit sex scenes, but his eroticism isn’t about the exposure of sexuality. It’s about finding new realities in reality, of finding the erotic in everyday life. Another huge inspiration was Warhol’s original Interview Magazine. That kind of writing really inspired me; the mixture of high quality writing presented in an informal style. I also love The Whole Earth Catalog from the 70s. It seems to have nothing to do with eroticism, but it has to do with how you conceptualize life on this planet, and how you interact with other people. The Whole Earth Catalog was like a pre-Wikipedia and they had a lot of entertaining writing on utilities. I think it’s all about finding yourself in a certain time and connecting with other people are looking for the same things. For them it was utilities and ecology, for us it’s the erotic.

Creating a print publication is very significant at this time. That said, we are in the midst of developing a stronger online platform to really hone in on this in-between identity. We want to participate in the ‘erotic online,’ as opposed to the preeminence of internet pornography.
In our print issues, our pages are made of rough material –not glossy– and produced in a small size. The flow of the magazine is very important to us, in terms of how each page flows, as well as the flow of stories, colors, typography and images on each page. If you are a shy person, I think tactility is very important. A magazine is also a very special gift to give to someone, whereas shared internet links disappear rapidly. Creating print in a digital era is just more permanent.

I think that you can really fall in love with a radio voice. It allows you to tune into a person. There’s a mystery there because you don’t know or see who he or she is, but the element of the invisible voice has a lot of eroticism in it. Personally, a voice can really touch me, even without really listening to what someone is saying. Just the intonation is erotic; it inspires a feeling and touches the senses.

I’m very proud to be working with a young, new photographer, Andi Gáldi Vinkó. She’s from Hungary and she lives in London. For our next issue, we’re going to feature an interview with a Chinese artist, Tianzhuo Chen, who is deeply embedded in the gay world. He’s interested in religious iconography, and showcases a new element of the erotic for us. We’ll also be featuring very beautiful writer, Alejandro Zambra, from Chile, and an interview with Alasdair Gray, a Scottish writer and a painter, who is known as the James Joyce of Glasgow. It’s a beautiful thing to discover all of these creators through the lens of the erotic.

The magazine will eventually become an intermediary between our online site and our live presentations in Rotterdam, which include reading stories and poetry, screening films, and presenting live music.

We need to rediscover what’s ‘new’ again. I think this is due to a fear of vulnerability, of being vulnerable in public. Either you hide it or you are very expressive, as in pornography. Ideally, the private and public can be reconciled in erotica, and we can access vulnerability and take more risks personally and creatively.

I want people to feel completely free. I want them to feel warm, friendly, and more open to one another.
Openness is an erotic gesture, but it can be threatening. I’ve found that some people are very hesitant to interact with open people. They think, ‘oh, they must want something from me!’ They overlook that this person is just curious, they want to tell a story, or share something intimate. If you are into the erotic, you can’t have an aversion to openness.