At its core, the archive is driven by a kind of fever—a compulsion to gather, record, and secure knowledge—yet this very impulse also threatens to obscure, distort, or repress what it claims to preserve. The archive, then, is always haunted: by what it excludes, by the future it anticipates, and by the desire for origins it can never fully satisfy.

We think of Borge’s insatiated Aleph, the monarch in his fictional world, who was so obsessed with precision that he commissions cartographers to create a map so exact that it balloons to the size of the territory it represents. Initially seen as a triumph of scientific rigor, the map eventually becomes useless—its scale makes it indistinguishable from the real world, engulfing the land it was plotted on.

In this issue we present works that archive, arrange, and give form to the slippery debris of thought, memory, and matter. When we start seeing the archive as an active entity fundamentally shaping the fictional narrative of the real, how do we reconcile with the internet as the largest ever mnemonic device, the advent of the digital twin, and the meta-sediments of memory?

September Magazine is a bi-annual contemporary art magazine started by three artists with the desire to grapple with a contemporary landscape of images so vast it covers the earth many times over. This first issue of September Magazine is dedicated to the critical, resilient, poetic ways in which artists, writers, and curators engage, extract, and reflect this ocean of images to create their own realities. Our first issue, Map of Maps.

Andrea, Caleb, Rain
Editors in Chief