Tristan Bera: Magnificent Obsessions

“How should one live?”, social critic Susan Sontag once asked. This collection of critical, fictional and nonfictional essays is a collage of long-term research and sibylline ‘rêverie’ and an attempt to collate distinct features and fragmented fantasies and reflections on major and minor aesthetic and political topics in a homogenous format. Both personal and collective, part autobiography and part socio-cultural voyeurism, the book will not only gather original texts but also, like an anthology, compile urgent interviews, real and invented stories, an inventory of wild and poetic attitudes, press articles and short excerpts, mixing an amalgam of existential and speculative themes in cooperation with allies, guest artists and thinkers. Within a geographical triangle whose summits are Athens, Berlin and Paris, I propose to create a contextual, non-digital and low-tech thinking experience taking the shape of a literary hedonistic stroll made of thought-forms, obsessions, kinks, slices of chaos or safes of heaven, gleaned here and there via magic IRL encounters. It seeks to create nomadic and versatile conditions for the assemblage of a collection of texts, imaginative and critical in tone, to be read as potential oblique ripostes to the preliminary question.