Modern Matter Compendium, When I Was Seventeen
220 x 295 mm, 608 pages (plus cassette tape, in cardboard box)
London, UK
Creative director: Olu Michael Odukoya
A chunky, special edition project from Modern Matter retaining the magazine's experimental streak and highly physical quality, while constructing a fictional narrative of being 17. Presented in a white cardboard box, it opens to reveal a hand-labelled cassette tape embedded into the cover and first 150 pages of the publication itself (all blank until that point, a move reprised from an earlier edition of the magazine.)
It's not a compendium of Modern Matter per se, rather a punk-ish mixed media reflection of creative director Olu Michael Odukoya's interests in data collection, nostalgia and fiction: there's a Civilization-eqsue archive of a decades' worth of Google Alerts, a photomontage pairing Odukoya's bronze sculptures with newspaper clippings to create an imaginary ‘Class of 76’, plus words from Philippa Snow, Hans Ulrich Obrist and others.
From the Journal, Olu Michael Odukoya in February 2019:
‘In the current age of everything feeling homogenous, I wanted to exaggerate the concept of what is deemed best practice in relation to magazine covers.
'I’m not interested in having the ‘face’ of the moment, or worse still a subject who has a huge social following. Our readers are less interested in these measures of social acceptance. I’ve previously created a bumper 600 page issue where 50% was made up of blank pages… [one recent] issue repeats the content twice over with the repeat content printed in an offbeat colour profile. Our previous issue titled ‘Mother’ was packaged alongside a mini version we named ‘Child’.
'Subtle but significant nuances are what I think provide the emotional connection with the magazine that our readers love...’ READ MORE