ABOUT
ON KUNTENSERVEN MAG.
“I never wanted to build a "body of work," but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.” Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (London: Penguin Random House, 2020), p. 175.
For a few years now, we have both been working on building a body of work that critically examines contemporary (fashion) design structures through the lens of queer subjectivity. We take our queer bodies as a starting point, render it into material, and share its carnality with the world. But: where is the body in this body of work? Time and time again, we stumbled on the limitations of disseminating our embodied perspectives—struggling to find platforms resonating with our views, and yearning for spaces to effectively share our subjectivity.
Kuntenserven Mag. serves to bridge this gap—it aims to preserve all our queer bodies, and all their deviant subjectivity, inside the corpus of fashion and design criticism; creating space for these perspectives in the (critical) fashion discipline and opening this field to queer subjectivity as a method of questioning existing structures within fashion.
The Mag. stands on its own, but is also intrinsically connected to the broader scope of Kuntenserven Inc., in which we desire to provide a platform for diverse forms of published matter and collaborative projects, centered around a—as there is not just one—queer subjective lens. We want to bring the work and embodiments of our queer forebears into the present, learning from the immense political power that they still hold, and making sure that a new audience can get acquainted with this material and subsequently apply it to their practices and work. Kuntenserven Mag. stands as a constant embodiment of the sentiment that:
“[t]he queer body is not alone; [as] queer does not reside in a body or an object, and is dependent on the mutuality of support.”
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 170.
ISSUE ZERO: ON SMUTTY SMUT
In Issue Zero, we aim to pick out three main threads of (fashion) design critique, exploring and following the tension between the subjective and the filtered. How does the queer body and its subjectivity relate to power structures and representation? What does commodified queerness look like, and how can queer subjectivity in turn throw off the yoke of capitalism? And how can the living and breathing queer body become a method to carve out space for other (queer) bodies?
Next to plotting out several theoretical perspectives, we will set out to explore how the work of Iztok Klančar relates to these. Iztok’s artistic practice, where he sublimates himself into the alter ego of Smutty Smut, appears in front of the filter, breaking with commodified notions of queerness and centering subjective experience. By embodying our threads of critique, Smutty Smut carves out a safe space for themselves in a queer world that is fraught with tension: harnessing the power of their difference. The work that Iztok, as Smutty Smut, has put out in the world, gives us a glimpse of what could happen if we allow ourselves—as makers, designers, practitioners, and finally queer subjects—to move back to the “worlds within the world” sketched by Larry Mitchell and Ned Asta. The explorations that might result from this will provide a safe space for queer subjectivity to take hold, and allow other subjectivities to blossom, like it did for Smutty Smut.
Editors & writing: Tjerre Lucas Bijker and Chet Julius Bugter — Contributors: Iztok Klančar (Photography), Özgür Deniz Koldaş (Graphic Design).
Type: softcover — Binding: unbound — Dimensions: 210 mm x 420 mm portrait — Pages: 24 — Release date: April 2025 — Color: full colour — Printer: Print&Bind and homeprinter — Made possible by: Creative Industries Fund NL — Publisher: Kuntenserven Inc.
Official launch coming soon — Get in contact with us here for pre-orders