Editorial

Last spring we brainstormed ideas to find a new theme for the second season of Mnemozine. After many unsatisfying leads, the term ‘the third’ was cast into the room out of comic necessity. Why not skip the second issue and concentrate on what really matters: the third issue! However, this joke, like a die unexpectedly landing on one of its edges, slowly shifted into an attractive proposal and gave form and matter to our hitherto abstract deliberations.

It is almost as if the initial joke (skip the second, focus on the third) carried with it the clarity of a general truth: the access ( from a starting point, the one ) to any thing ( the second ) seems be intercepted by a constitutive distorting layer ( the third ) which, paradoxically, gives the second its shape. After all, how are we to discuss that which revolves around the number two (dualism, balance, opposition, conflict, intersubjectivity, sequence, …) without some reference to a third, mediating element: the relation between the first and the second? Against all sequential logic, the third seems prior to the second, the relation before the related.

Focussing on this threefold structure, our second season will thus attempt to delve into the disorienting noise of ‘the third’ as that which stands between, subverts, shifts and reshapes, welcomes in, acts as a threshold and creates transformative openings from one towards another.

We are inviting philosophers, writers, artists and musicians from diverse backgrounds to explore these questions based on their own research and practice and to relate it to notions of identity, politics, art, phenomenology and embodiment, sensory experience, sound studies, perception, reality, psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, sociology, architecture/urbanism, ecology, etc. in order to reflect upon the rogue element or inherent outsider that is the number three. The result of this research will be published in September 2023.

In the context of the new season, we are also launching Mnemosonic, a subproject investigating relationality through sound and music.

Throughout the entire year, we will collaborate with partners to host events which will further unravel this season’s theme and seek to offer a public framework for dialogue (trialogue?), experimentation and collective creation.︎

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