PUBLIC RETREAT Explorer - a newspaper! and The magazine FIRE
Photo by Maya Nagano Holm
Photo by Maya Nagano Holm
2025
As cities grow and densify, public spaces and places that once offered solace—our shared urban oases for rest—disappear. PUBLIC RETREAT EXPLORER encourages you to reflect on how we live in our cities and consider whether we can transform urban spaces into places for rest—public retreats—by attentive listening.
The newspaper is a kind of archive—a condensed and subjective collection of collective and personal memories, both real and imagined stories, illustrations, essays, poems, and testimonies from more-than-human beings, city dwellers, and realms of mystery. This archive weaves speculative journalism with imaginative storytelling and much more.
PUBLIC RETREAT EXPLORER and FIRE asks, dear readers and urban explorers, who should decide how the future is built? And how are we, humans and non-humans, doing in our cities, really?
The sound installation at Platform Stockholm - Pretend to retreat in public - a multichannel sound piece (duration 28:54 min) consisting of taxidermied animals, real and fake leaves, locally sourced trash, a bench, a seating arrangement, FIRE magazine, and PUBLIC RETREAT Explorer – a newspaper! (edition 2000 copies).
In the words of curator and writer Jasmine Hinks (Of Public Interest (OPI) Lab and Index):
“The newspaper you are reading now is a collage of speculative narratives, poems, interviews, scores for rituals. It presents new work together with material produced for PUBLIC RETREAT Radio, and so builds on research, recordings, and writing developed during residencies, exhibitions and workshops in Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen, Helsinki and at SoundArtLab in Struer, Denmark.
How can this publication offer a PUBLIC RETREAT? What does it mean to retreat in public? Can this newspaper offer a reprieve, a break from everyday life? Does it crystallize the
debate around the culture pages of a daily broadsheet, and the luxury of reading for pleasure, or to expand knowledge for one’s own interest? Or could it simply be something to hide behind, while sitting on a public bench? It gives a reason, or even an excuse, to rest in public. To sit on a bench, uninterrupted and without apology, and close one’s eyes. Being present, listening and bearing witness to that which swirls around us, often unnoticed, every day?”
Almost every piece has a sound counterpart—accessible by scanning the QR codes.
Contact us for info on where to read (and listen) the printed newspaper and magazine, or read them digitally on issuu>>