Studio Safar

Two issues ago, underwent a major shift in format. We reduced the physical size of the publication and invited to rethink the cover template, beginning with Issue 8. The cover was reimagined as an object instead of a surface: the full list of contributors runs along the spine in very small type, while select elements from previous covers were retained to maintain continuity.

Another significant update to the magazine’s template is the treatment of Arabic article titles. All titles are hand-lettered by Khalil Majed, scanned, and placed as-is. Some contain irregularities and minor mistakes, but we rarely intervene in the work of a calligrapher whose practice spans five to six decades, the hand carries its own authority.

SWERVE: Exquisite Co**se
Vol. I

A limited-edition box set of 150, conceived by and in collaboration with Julie Mehretu, , , and Lawrence Chua, bringing together wine, art, and publication as a single, integrated work.

Each box set includes three wine bottles by Antica Terra, original artwork by Julie, Jessica, and Paul, alongside SWERVE: Exquisite Co**se, Vol. I, a publication conceived as part of the edition.

The cuvées were developed by Julie, Jessica, and Paul in collaboration with Antica Terra winemaker Maggie Harrison, and in dialogue with their original artworks, which later became the bottle labels. A fourth bottle, produced alongside but not included in the box set, unites the three cuvées and bears the combined drawings as an exquisite co**se.

Beginning from the inside out, featured here are the four bottles.

“…this real joy of encountering something unexpected in that process that I think we—as a group of friends, collaborators, q***r family—continue to surprise each other and also take each other’s thinking to new, unexpected places. And then the other thing that just came up in talking to Maya and Mia [of Studio Safar] is how the whole process of assembling this from the tasting and mixing of the wine to thinking through the concept and producing the actual edition also has been about an exquisite co**se, or exquisite corpsing. I like that we’re thinking of that term as a verb. And maybe that’s what we’re giving back to the Surrealists is this idea that it doesn’t necessarily resolve in an object, in a dead object, but that it is a process. A living process. I think this edition is an encapsulation of that, in that there is something living in these boxes—the wine, the ideas, the images…”
—Lawrence Chua

Designed by Studio Safar
Photos by for Antica Terra