What is a magazine? A magazine is an object constructed of wood pulp and glue. An idea. A long email thread. An ecosystem. A gift. A record. A marker of time.
In MOLD Magazine’s final series before we conclude our publishing cycle on Summer Solstice and make our complete transition into Field Meridians, we are taking this moment of transition to meditate on time. As a publication that has always been oriented toward the future, we are taking this space to ask, ‘What is the future?’ and ‘What does it mean to us, now?’
The artist, community activist and lawyer Rasheedah Phillips opens her treatise Dismantling the Master’s Clock: On Race, Space, and Time, questioning time as an objective measurement. She writes, “Experiences of temporality can diverge significantly—even in the course of identical events, where one might perceive its passage as either dilated or accelerated in comparison to another person experiencing the same event.”
That time is subjective is clear when we think about the experiences that contour our living. This innate understanding has led many to shape their ideas, routines, methodologies and forms around temporal relationships that decenter and evade the onward trudging of the clock.
Across this series, MOLD contributors bring us outside of clock time, and in doing so offer new visions for futurity. We kick off the series with a dispatch from MOLD Founder and Editor-in-Chief LinYee Yuan, who shares how tree time has shaped the evolution of the magazine and influenced the development of its next iteration, Field Meridians. Ethnobotanist Mandana Boushee shares a poetic meditation on memory, impermanence and change through the cycles of the solid rock.
Celestine Maddy, a gardener and the founder and publisher of the seminal nature magazine Wilder, speaks with artist and Project Eats founder Linda Goode Bryant about seeding food systems as her greatest durational performance. Co-director of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Sarah Workneh writes about reading the I-Ching, or the Book of Changes, and the shape it gives to cycles of death and life, what she calls “a paper manifestation of world-building”. Arts writer and curator Annette Liu speaks with artist and engineer Xin Liu about her work The Permanent and Insatiable, for which she constructed a scale plastic model of New York City to be metabolized by plastic-eating enzymes.
We round out the series with a conversation between tonal geologist Ryan C. Clarke and Rasheedah Phillips on ecological time, understanding what it means to return to alignment with the earth’s inherent rhythms.
During my tenure as an editor at MOLD, I have often referred to the magazine as a toolbox, with each article designed to serve as a tool for building our collective future in the face of uncertainty. This series, like everything else that we have published at MOLD, is meant to serve as a question, a guide and a friend, for seeding community, solidarity and abundance. We encourage you to return to and use this archive as you see fit.
We close out this chapter of MOLD with incredible gratitude to our community, without whom none of this would be possible. Thank you for sitting with us, for reading with us, for breaking bread with us and for spending time with us.
See you soon,
Isabel Ling
