The new Mousse magazine, art. From Milano, Italy.

"In 2006, the year Mousse Magazine was founded in Milan, a few of us were meandering through 2666, the last novel by Roberto Bolaño, a tour de force across many hundreds of pages and several books that is impossible to summarize or put to a chronology, and yet composing a stunning picture, like the intricate fruit, flower, and vegetable paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo (who features in 2666 as a character). It suggested an act of reading as collective practice: “Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach,” Bolaño says.

We have read a lot while preparing this special issue, a record of twenty years of Mousse. For the occasion, Andrew Berardini penned us a long love letter, reflecting on two decades of endurance, patience, growing together, the necessity of poetry in art writing, and the invisible labor of love that goes into editing. Like his very first piece for us, the letter opens with a few lines from “Autopsychography” (1931) by Fernando Pessoa, a poet, writer and translator whose more than seventy heteronyms were so surprisingly different, with such specific individual lives and voices, that any unified biography of the author proves inadequate. Like ours, of course.

For once, we became the subjects of our Survey column, including both Mousse Magazine, with its ninety-six iterations, and Mousse Publishing, whose catalog comprises more than eight hundred titles: a constellation of books, conversations, monographs, readers, exhibition catalogues, and hybrid editorial projects that have accompanied the work of artists, curators, and writers across many different geographies and generations.

The selection gathered here brings together, in print—because graphic design has shaped Mousse beyond significantly, and because we love printed matter—two hundred scanned pages extracted from the magazine and Mousse books, from 2008 (when the publishing house started its operations) to the present. It’s just one of the possible labyrinthine paths through an editorial history intertwined with the constant transformations of contemporary art. Each title marks a moment within a wider network of exchanges, collaborations, friendships, and conversations that have continuously propelled us forward.

We have hence imagined a fully “incomplete atlas,” an undertaking suspended between the desire to give order to our many worlds and our inevitable failure at it. More than a retrospective or an archive, this is an attempt to move through a living body of work—to return to pages that have opened new lines of research, accompanied practices over time, and created spaces for thought to circulate beyond the temporality of exhibitions. Seen together, we hope they reflect the sedimentation of a shared intellectual landscape built slowly, collectively, and across borders.

The atlas is incomplete, the archive is alive, and the origin story still has one unresolved detail: wonderfully, why Mousse is called Mousse.

Infinite thanks to all the people who have contributed to it, readers included."

Mousse - 2006–2026 A Visual Record #96

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