Interview between Maria Lind and Regina (Maria) Möller
Maria Lind (ML)
What is it about the format of the women’s fashion magazine that interests you?
Regina (Maria) Möller (RM):
The format magazine interests me in general. You can have a variety of subjects discussed in a tiny space. It also allows you many different reading levels, by providing different layouts for each individual style of writing. I think it can be compared to the structure of comics. You’ve got images and text and in the way you link them with each individual essay you can create a complex narrative. But still one can enjoy just one article in the magazine. Besides the reading habit of turning pages implies past, present and future. And what has passed turns up again.
ML
What makes regina a women’s fashion magazine?
RM
My work is focusing on gender politics and looking at the market of the women’s fashion magazine, specifically in Germany with „Brigitte“ and „Petra“, I adopted the idea of using my name. In contrast I am present as Regina Möller in every work aspect of regina magazine, including asking the questions for working out problems. I am not pretending I am the reader’s best friend. I don’t give tips or advice. regina is not about the life style. It includes all kinds of social, political and cultural themes. And, I want to entertain as well. What the format of the magazine allows me to do is to propose parallels in a small space and to create a platform for different voices. I collage and any collage is a shifting scale.
ML
Although you say that it is not about the life style there are certain elements, which you also find in life style magazines, like some of the headlines you use. Would you say that it is not particularly about life style but that life style is interwoven in the whole?
RM
It is more about the mess of life – not complaining, rather real and com(ment)ic. The look of the cover already implies this. I am always on the cover and I don’t include any accessories or clothes on purpose because I don’t want to give the impression that the magazine is about the newest trends. I aging and when I am maybe 70 years old and still publishing regina, I am going to work with that age, both in the content and in the portrait on the cover.
ML
I find your time frame with regina interesting. Before regina comes out in Sweden the magazine has appeared as three issues, and another one is being published in Germany this year. They have come out irregularly and now you project that you may do one when are 70 years old. This long continuity is a major difference from women’s and life style magazines which operate on the basis of the moment, of endless and regular supply: a clear capitalist logic. Even with more serous cultural journals it is often considered a problem if the same editor works too long, that he or she „burns out“ and can not come up with fresh ideas. Here you have the possibility of doing it over time and this is possible exactly because regina is irregular.
RM
The un-periodical appearance of regina allows you to reflect on time and subjects in quite different ways than market oriented magazines. It’s like my head has certain amount of drawers with issues of regina and I open one of the drawers when the right time comes. For example I publish or re-print articles or essays that have appeared already. They would be included regina present issue. And I work with different teams who challenge me again and again. They prevent me from being caught in a routine.
ML
Despite the time gap and different production context regina is indeed identifiable. And at the same time as you adopt the format of the women’s fashion magazine you also experiment with it on a formal level. The „role prose“ (Rollen Prosa) is one example, another is that you often use unusually long articles. Ambiguity is a word that comes to mind looking at the various issues. What role does ambiguity play for you?
RM
The look. Maybe it’s ambiguous that I work within rules to shift or break them.
ML
How do you see regina in relation to your other art work?
RM
regina shows, reflects and opens my method of working. I don’t like my work to be categorized. My job hasn’t been invented yet. I focus on a subject and work on a concept or demo with which I go to various professionals or producers. I look into which media carries the information best. Sometimes I play different roles, depending on the character of work I want to develop. There it is – my voice. Production and distribution are important aspects of my work. For instance, institutions shouldn’t be just showrooms.
ML
This is of course also a challenge to the idea that the activities of a museum, be they display or production, do not have to happen within the walls of the museum building. regina could potentially be distributed all over the world. I like to think about your work, as well as that of some of your contemporaries, as a new type of institutional criticism, a constructive institutional critique. Today the white cube has been conquered and it is time to take one more step. I think this is what you have done by offering a parallel, something else, which is very refreshing and which includes pleasure.
RM
There are times I miss(ed) humour, the good, black humour in the art.
ML
Would you say that you use a guerilla strategy with regina, smuggling edgy stuff into the mainstream?
RM
I would tend to call it under-covered. I am addicted to secret agent and detective stories. You are caught as a reader in a story and discovering the crime is (set for) You – because you are looking for it. Somewhat like that which has to do with rules. Only when you know the rules you can break them. And regina involves a team of professionals from various areas. We work together, but also experiment with the set of rules to shift, bridge, extend or even to break them. This creates curiosity.
ML
The theme for regina in Sweden is “her-stories”. What does this imply?
RM
I refer to the well-known word game between “his-story” and “her-story” History implies a story. And a story has an intention and, for example constructs its games. And He is used to set the rules. But rules are no games. What is history?
regina in Sweden is me coming from outside working with persons from inside. I chose, as I did for the regina, no. 3 in Northern England, to do interviews. I looked especially for women in different ages and generations and men working in gender-politics, not literally but nearly, or fields that are cultivated or projected to a female sphere. But I also invited Swedish women authors to write about subjects we discussed in terms of cross-connected topics mentioned above.
ML
How was regina developed over the issues?
RM
T me they are all individuals. One obvious difference is that the last two issues were published abroad and are based more on interviews than are the German issues. I learn about the foreign country and the atmosphere through the interview partners. The style I use for editing the interviewees sometimes is close to “Rollen Prosa” in German (role prose). It means that you write / edit the interviews in the first person. You as the interviewer remember, experience the atmosphere, everything around, which is part of speaking, and not those things spoken out in words but in all kinds of other ways of communication. For me this is very important and com(ment)ic.
ML
Apart from the recurring headlines fashion, work, partnership, animals, entertainment and travel there is one thing which is present in all issues, a presentation of the label “embodiment”.
RM
“embodiment” is my label outside of print-media regina. It stands n for my work that deals with art and functionality – a comic again. It is furniture and not furniture, it is clothes and not clothes, it is interior design and it is not, it is … it is embodiment. You live with it.