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Interviewing...Victor Bermúdez, director of Periplo Magazine.
Periplo magazine is a bimonthly digital publication on the humanities, with 19 publications to date. Born of a group of young men and women, who “underlying the linguistically pan Hispanic spirit share a language and a conviction: dreaming and believing in Spanish is in itself a point of departure.” Young Spanish and Latin American essayists, story-tellers, poets, translators and illustrators of distinctive variety collaborate to give shape to Periplo magazine. We spoke to Víctor Bermúdez, its editor.
The Art Boulevard. – Hello, Victor, and thank you for accepting to do the interview. Firstly, could you introduce Periplo to us? How did it all begin? What were the reasons? How did it become a reality?
Víctor Bermúdez.– The idea for Periplo emerged on a train, with Fernando Pittaro. Then it took six months to get a troupe together and to baptize it and another six months to have the first volume finally created in February 2010. Honestly, I don’t remember why it all started; I think we wanted to use our writing to change the world, or at least to score some girls, both equally likely. Perhaps that was our small quota of the perversion that underlies all great projects.
The truth is that it became a reality created various points of the planet thanks to wi-fi connections. It was founded as a proposal with two essential dimensions: creative writing and essay. In addition to this, there was a plurality; we wanted to bring together different disciplines that addressed the same questions from different perspectives and it occurred to us to dress it all up as a chronological and epistemological themed journey. Our sections cover everything from the historical, biographic or etymological essay, to interviews, contemporary literary translations and current literary creation, keeping one eye on the past and the other on the present.
TAB. – You are based in Salamanca, Mexico and Buenos Aires. How did you develop such a network? How do you manage to work remotely and produce the magazine together? What channels do you use to distribute Periplo?
V.B. – To say that we are based in Salamanca is only by way of convention. The truth is that of the fifteen core members of the group –and of more than fifty illustrators involved– there are no more than four or five living in Salamanca. But it’s also true that the great majority was at Salamanca at some point and so the city has left its mark on this project, which, while being local, is eminently international. We like to build bridges to reach people and groups in other countries; we dedicate many hours to management and transversal diffusion; we aim to have a real presence in several places, to present our work and to locate artists from all over Spain and Latin America, and from Italy and France too. From Mexicali (Mexico) to Buenos Aires via Cuzco (Peru) Providence (United States), Lisbon, Madrid or Marseille, the dispersion of the team is a challenge that distinguishes our project in some way.
In Periplo we don’t know each other, or at least, not for real. I have had the opportunity to meet the majority of the team but they only know each other by voice, which –we have discovered– is a very authentic way of meeting and working with someone, and it works as well amongst ourselves as with our collaborators. It is developed in weekly Skype meetings: while in Mexico they are having their morning coffee, while in Buenos Aires they are taking their mate and in Spain their evening tea at 8:00 pm. We like to think that Skype is our bar and Box is our work table.
This way of meeting each other and this way of working in an eminently virtual way are not only a distinctive operational characteristic but something that defines our original editorial concept: When we have the opportunity to do presentations of the magazine, I like to begin with a quote by Octavio Paz who said that “whenever a group of young writers get together, they want to change the world, they want to reach heaven, they want to defend hell, and all they come out with is a magazine”, and Periplo has something of this, of wanting to bring together creators and thinkers that defend the indefensible and propose paths of creation or thought patterns.
But the fact that it didn’t emerge from a group of friends meeting in a bar discussing life and literature defines us completely, it makes us extremely plastic and versatile and differentiates us from the vast majority of magazines of this nature in Spain. We are interdisciplinary and we are unknown, and these two conditions define us.
TAB. – What steps do you follow in publishing an edition of Periplo?
V.B – We are so dispersed and we work in such varied ambits that our principle challenge is to look for the margins of cohesion within the plurality. Therefore we begin by proposing a central theme for each edition: we call out to interested collaborators with the overall idea we want to develop, we add to it a number of concrete proposals and a specific bibliography for each of the sections. This is based on previous research work done by our team to sound out different possible approaches to each theme, but we always allow our collaborators propose a focus on that we had not contemplated in our call to artists. With this information, they contact the editor of the section that interests them and they send us a brief summary of what they want to work on, this editor sends them our style manual and some basic outlines of their section, and so begins the work of writing “shoulder to shoulder” that we believe to be the trademark of the house. A more detailed description of our work dynamic can be found on our “editorial guide”
TAB. – Have you thought about producing Periplo magazine on paper? What are your objectives for 2013? How do you see Periplo magazine in 5 years?
V.B.– Periplo is now beginning the fourth year of its journey, in 5 years time we see ourselves as still being bold with the sin of hubris, but yes we have some objectives for 2013, three, in particular. The first is to progressively include more science writers. We believe that a strictly humanist approach cannot ignore the enormous wealth of views provided by the pure sciences. Locating and coordinating with scientists is almost a complicated as with the artists, but it is the next step that we want to take.
The second is to consolidate a music team for our Audiotrayectos podcasts, where we try to give a sonic dimension to the literary texts published in the magazine. Each text from the sections (Free Quills, Micro-journeys, Cast Away Papers, and living languages) is recorded orally and then, with that recording, a musician, a bassist for example, plays a scale to accompany the text and capture its mood in a musical dimension. This is a process that is new and fascinating for us. Working with artistic subjectivity as if it were a physical thing puts you in contact with the inexhaustible elasticity of creation: in the text, the graphic design and now the melody, the essence of the artistic intention survives, but along the way it mutates so much that it is a real challenge to bring cohesion to the whole.
The third objective – on which we are now working but with help from others – is a prototype of Periplo on epub, so that the magazine is completely compatible with tablets and mobile phones. The idea is to offer a specialized platform (videos and interviews on Vimeo, illustrations on Flickr, podcasts on Soundcloud, the blog, etc.). We would love to know how many of our readers would really want to experience Periplo in these formats. And this brings me to answer your question about a paper version: we are not obsessed with celluloid, our project was born, grew and sustains itself in the digital sphere, which is where people navigate our words, but we also believe that they are not mutually exclusive. We would like to have the opportunity to offer the formats that potentiate the magazine in all its dimensions; we want to reach all media and defend the indefensible, and that includes paper. The objective is that Periplo experiments as much on the train as on the beach or when cycling bikes.
TAB. – What would you need in order to distribute the magazine more widely?
V.B. – To unite forces. To create more solid circuits with other cultural initiatives and academics and to empower the creation and the flow on both sides of the Atlantic. It is the creators that give meaning to these platforms of messages. On June 2012 we had the opportunity to exhibit, in the Centre for Contemporary Art in Salamanca DA2, a show of more than 150 illustrations of our first 14 volumes. We would love to repeat the operation and conquest other spaces with the experience that we have earned; it would be great to find another opportunity to exhibit a gallery of our graphic artist’s efforts, who work ad honorem as we all do in Periplo.
TAB. – Do you need collaborators? What are you looking for? Can you introduce to us some of the magazine’s collaborators?
V.B. – If you write, you illustrate or play an instrument, we have a paddle for everyone who is interested. Naturally a screening process exists, as in any project that is aware of itself, but our collaborators know that we take their work very seriously. At the moment we are particularly looking out for theatre writers, science writers, literary translators, art critics, language graduates and photographers, but also illustrators and musicians with a desire to form part of a complex but gratifying project. They should know that all the work is pro bono, but with good exchanges made both sides of the pond.
TAB. – What is different about Periplo ?
V.B. – Nothing, it is not essentially any different from other proposals. Periplo defends the written word, on the antique and the contemporary way. Then it endows these ideas and metaphors with images that enrich the words and arrive elsewhere and, after that, with sounds that enhance our perception of them. At Periplo we believe that in this way valid reflections are generated and that they help us to experiment and understand the world and culture with all the senses. Perhaps its voluntary ingenuity is what differentiates it, a trait that should never be confused with a naïve spirit, but rather with a shy-but-convincing way of thinking and perceiving the world, which we didn’t manage to change but we do perceive it differently.
TAB. – What advice would you give to those who would like to publish an artistic magazine?
V.B. – They should knock on doors. And if none deign to open, they should create their own. The main engagement of an artist is with their own work, with their evolution. I know that this seems obvious but it isn’t so obvious. When you work modulating artistic and literary creation you get in touch with humble creators who are open to different perspectives and advice –they learn with each step and make an effort to do it better with each opportunity– and also with artists that have a deep conviction about what they do. I think that both positions might be valid and that there are spaces, platforms, magazines and galleries for every type of voice. If you can’t find them, you should create them. For me it’s very important to underline that those who create should be aware that we are immersed in a continuous process in which the most solid certainties can become, at some point, the worst virus of a work. But that is a personal opinion, of course.
TAB. – Thank you very much, Víctor, for your time.
V.B. – Thanks to you, for allowing us to anchor on your street.
