UCLA is the 18th stop on the world tour of the international architecture exhibition “Archizines.” The exhibition, which runs through May 31, opened Friday in the Perloff Gallery and features 90 independent and innovative architecture publications, including magazines and fanzines from more than 20 countries around the world. Daily Bruin’s Andrea Seikaly spoke with Archizines curator Elias Redstone about the UCLA leg of the tour and what visitors can expect to see and experience.
Daily Bruin: What does the UCLA Archizines exhibition consist of?
Elias Redstone: Archizines is a showcase of new, independent publishing about architecture. It started as a personal research project out of my interest in both architecture and printed matter and how architecture is communicated. I started noticing that people were editing and publishing new works about architecture, and I started collecting these and meeting people that were starting their own magazines, starting their own fanzines, all of whom wanted to say something because they felt like their voice or their interests weren’t being represented.
DB: How did you choose which publications to include in the exhibition?
ER: Each of those publications give a taste of their approach to editing, their thoughts on architecture, how they respond to architecture space. I’m very much interested in a contemporary relationship especially as all of these publications have emerged in the digital age in a time when most people think it would be the obvious thing to do something online. It started from finding these publications through art book fairs, zine fairs, zine events and things like that, to doing student visits with architects all over the world who would just hand me something they’d made or a publication that they’d been involved in. For the exhibition, I select publications that I feel are intrinsically independent or alternative in their approach to publishing or writing about architecture.
DB: What is it like to travel the world with this exhibition?
ER: It has been absolutely incredible. For me, the most important thing about the show are the publications and the people, so traveling to the shows allows me to meet the people at the institutions who are passionate about this, meet the people who are editing these publications who are passionate about what they’re doing and connect with them and have conversations.
DB: What type of audience typically comes to see the exhibitions?
ER: One of the things I love about this show is it reaches a really wide audience. It’s not just the people that you’d imagine going to an architecture exhibition. Anyone who’s interested in design, or photography or magazine culture will get something from this exhibition, let alone anyone who’s interested in ideas about architecture in cities and architectural theory and research. There’s a lot of rich content there for people to delve into.