Common Language #15
There are journeys without borders. Some are experienced behind a screen, while others take the paths of memory, creation, or the imagination. Still others pass through a garment, a face, a gesture, an artwork. All share the power to shift our perspective and transform how we inhabit the world.
This fifteenth issue of Common Language was built around this intuition: the most fertile territories are not always those we cross, but also those we invent.
Video game worlds are currently one of the most compelling expressions of this idea. Long viewed merely as entertainment spaces, they have become sites where communities, identities, and new forms of creation are forged. Women occupy a far more significant place in them than lingering representations in the media would suggest. While the toxic behaviors that still run through these universes cannot be ignored, they should not obscure their remarkable capacity for empowerment, experimentation, and self-reinvention.
This notion of transformation resonates throughout these pages.
Through virtual makeup, Ines Alpha questions beauty standards and envisions new ways of occupying one's image. Meanwhile, the collective work Allures dissidentes invites us to journey through the history of appearance, revealing how much clothing and hairstyles tell the story of our societies' evolutions, their resistances, and their metamorphoses.
The trajectories we chose to highlight also tell stories of passages. Tassiana Aït-Tahar brings creation, restoration, and collective memory into dialogue. Constance Guisset, whom we knew as a designer, opens a new chapter in her journey by becoming a writer. Lara Barno blurs the lines between strength and grace, fashion and combat sports. Cassi Namoda, for her part, composes a body of work where the political and the intimate, the real and the sensory, constantly converge. All of them, in their own way, shift the boundaries.
From the virtual to the real, from the past to the present, from fashion to art, from design to literature, this issue is driven by a shared conviction: borders are never just lines of division. They are also spaces of circulation and metamorphosis, where new ideas, unexpected forms, and common languages are born.
That is where the journey begins.
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