Editorial /
Iftach Aloni, Carmella Jacoby Volk

What do you need a magazine for?
I must confess, I have some mysterious affection for magazines. Not that I read them thoroughly, or in some scholarly manner. It's enough for me to have my eyes wander through words and images, stopping here and there for a brief, energetic voyage.
More than anything, I think of a magazine as an assemblage of thoughts, a composition of ideas. I believe in thinking, thinking as doing, thinking as mode of action; because thinking is what confronts us with the "outside", namely, with what lies outside the concepts that we have already acquired and internalized; whatever outside the subjectivity that we are, and "outside" the material reality that we already know. Because there is something in this world that forces us to think.
For me Block Magazine is an urban voyage in the broad sense of the urban space. It is a voyage allowing loss of direction. It calls to leave the concepts outside their usual mode of crystallization, outside their traditional systems, outside the methodological constructions capturing and placing them into the familiar, into the already known. I would like the Block to be an experimental voyage of thought, not seeking to answer the question "is it real", but rather seducing into new reflections, new sensations, new openings in the body. I would like it to intentionally blur the boundaries between consciousness and its surrounding reality, as I believe the virtual is not an exception of reality, but an essential part of it.
I remember a phrase which I cannot recall its source: "the common sense indicates that the earthly existence is merely vague, while the actual reality exists no where but in our dreams." I perceive space as paradoxical by nature, dual and full of contradictions. I do not see these contradictions as opposite, but as complementary; contradictions that reflect the essential beauty and intricacy of space - a fluid space, projected onto the spectator as images and compositions. And if it is a voyage, then it should be all the more local, projecting and reflecting the local; because in the Israeli space events take place in a unique, rhythmic and restless beat. The Israeli space possesses some uniqueness, in which centre and periphery merge and render physical distance and chronology unnecessary. I hope that the Block would reflect this space without posing any limits; that it would capture and express its schizophrenic, kicking beat.
Beyond any magazine there is a poetic thought attempting to articulate it.
Block is aggressiveness as well as immobility. It is a corner stone or a brick in the wall. Block marks no territory and defends nothing. Block is one layer in a logical system, or a burden one needs to shatter in order to touch the chaos, to grasp the dual order of things. It never gets any clearer, only alters its seducing appearance. Block is a language of limitless observation, a way to perceive, organize and comprehend reality by consciousness and imagination alike.
Magazines attest to the cultural richness of places. There can never be too many.

Iftach Aloni


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The view from the virtual and actual panorama towards the inter- and multi-disciplinary magazines in various global centers is sensual and seductive; it stimulates knowledge, raises questions, ascends and removes local and global heroes.
A magazine is a space for discussion through unique representation, maintaining dialogues with hidden and manifested networks and narratives. At times, magazines resemble books, at other times - shining catalogs; sometimes a magazine may look like a curational collections, and sometimes - like a subversive tabloid.
Block magazine seeks to open a window to the local discourse, to gain the freedom to be anything you can when you are contemporary. But where, if at all, is the multidisciplinary discourse in Israel? It may be floating in space with no gravity among isolated deflated capsules; between a self-centered publication-obsessed academia to low-budget associations, commercialized magazines fighting to survive and daily practice of entrepreneurs measuring success by saving.
Block Magazine is a product of the modern architectural block. We inquire how the same concrete brick may be deconstructed by a system of combinations endowing it with new meaning; "Block #01 / C.T.", "Block #02 / Patrol", "Block #03 / Occasional" comprise the assemblage for 2005-2006. The first volume raises the issue of body and space through multiple concepts flaneuring freely between the medical body, the urban body, the nomadic body, the biological body and their hybridization.
The magazine's body is a two-dimensional architectural space expressing and representing the assemblage of ideas. As editors we move on the continuum between the traditional editorial role and the curator's role, setting up a collection according to a certain thesis; on Walter Banjamin's continuum, it is the motion between the surgeon and the magician, the invasive act and the invisible cuddle. Thereby the magazine presents renowned authors and local writers seeking to breach the predetermined cycle, moving freely among the local capsules and allowing space to the inter- and multi-disciplinary event. Our curative choices stress the notion of nonlinear time in the critical process. Texts in the hermeneutic sense, constituting turning points and milestones, offering insights and comments, philosophical, descriptive, systematic and random, all deconstruct the block into another time. The magazine's time is the future anterior. Past is open for a future rewriting.
The work of critic and theorist Susan Sontag has been going with me for years. Her premature death reminds me of the concluding sentence in her 1964 essay "against interpretation": "in place of hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art".

Carmella Jacoby Volk

Editorial - Block #3