MacGuffin #15, The Stitch
210 x 275 mm, 176 pages
Amsterdam, Netherlands (English language)
Biannual
Editors: Kirsten Algera & Ernst van der Hoeven
Design: Sandra Kassenaar
‘The Life of Things’
A long standing magCulture favourite and one of our most reliable bestsellers, MacGuffin returns with its special 15th issue, coinciding with ten years in print. This time, the team turn their attention to ‘The Stitch’—the tiny loop that mends, binds and sometimes, if not taken care of, falls apart. Building on issue 14, which centred around the divisive ‘Wall’, this edition’s ‘thing’ of choice has decidedly more positive connotations. On the cover, a cable-tie cross-stitch holds together a slash in a car door, testament to the binding strength of the stitch. As the team note, ‘we wanted to explore something that does the opposite of divide—something that brings things and people together, while also slowing things down’.
As ever, the theme is unraveled from myriad angles, featuring everything from a sublimely laid out stitch guide, accompanied by text recording the typical applications of each, to a history of ‘Tatreez’, an Arabic word for the traditional hand embroidery used in Palestinian clothing.
Also covered inside: defiant seamstresses, football player and needlepoint hobbyist Rosey Grier, Japanese kite models, Romanian blouses, bookbinding, Bronze-Age bog patterns, email threads, Margiela’s (in)visible tacked logo, visible seams, Kader Attia’s anti-colonial collages, and the influential Hungarian abstract artist Ilona Keserü on incorporating textiles into her practice, cultural inheritance and tactile memory. With contributions from Tanveer Ahmed, Simona Bortis-Schultz, Rachel Dedman, Olivia Douglas, Nina van de Ven, Rosa Menkman, Masaki Komoto, amongst others.
On the Journal
Our Magazine of the Month review: ‘MacGuffin remains an essential magazine, an ideal riposte to anyone doubting the power of print. As well as being editorially brilliant, it is also, itself, a beautiful Thing. Its size, format and combination of papers making it a lovely object to hold and to flick through’.