Context is a fickle beast. It sometimes seems to be the last thing we hold onto after the dust has settled. Things arrive in a state of “is”. It’s the reason it “is” until it “was” or “had been”. And yet context is the ultimate reason for the pattern. 

My earliest experiences of Kirstine Roepstorff’s work were through being an editor for a book she was conceptualizing. But soon my role turned into that of a gonzo anthropologist wading through a forest of imagery with just a flashlight. She had taken the idea of the artist publication, the survey catalogue, the codex, and filtered her entire practice through her own prism: a ladies fashion magazine. 

Entitled "Fleur du Mal" after a volume of poetry by Baudelaire, this was no ordinary exercise in the artist catalogue but rather an immersive experience where Kirstine folded her own world in on itself. Shuffling the cards of a worldbuilder to create an algorithm of new patterns, new opportunities, new energies, new worlds – this is new bread made from old. Bodies of work became runway extravaganzas, aesthetic echo chambers, and throughlines that only made them make more sense: Garden Chic, Touch of Tweed, Black is the new Black.

Letters to the Editor, Where is She now?, Who did she rip off?, Who loves her and Why?, Who Decides Who Decides? She selected favorite classical timeless ads and reused them as readymades as, wait for it, ...as ads. 

It changed the way I thought about what an art publication is, how to create a Rosetta Stone about a language and how a book can convey an experience and maybe trick us into an experience we are predisposed to having. In this case the experience was recursive, a fractal self-replicating within a sea of fractals. A fragment of the world represents that world in its entirety, a synecdoche of experiential design by Pirandello, MC Escher, no, none other than Kirstine Roepstorff. The ladies magazine was a psychedelic labyrinth of pure camouflage. For god’s sakes it even had a vanity shot on the cover, a product sample from Aptiva in the back and a graceful little wrap to let you know this was the special issue within a history of this publication you’ve never seen before but know so well. Step through the looking glass, this is Fleur du Mal.