The first cover story features Karla Kaplun, photographed in Mexico City by Luis Corzo in Kuboraum eyewear and Stone Island. In conversation with Caroline Elbaor, Kaplun discusses how her theatrical, baroque-inspired practice…

The first cover story features Karla Kaplun, photographed in Mexico City by Luis Corzo in Kuboraum eyewear and Stone Island. In conversation with Caroline Elbaor, Kaplun discusses how her theatrical, baroque-inspired practice explores memory, power, and identity. Reflecting on cultural assimilation and the politics of desire, she uses the opera Carmen as a lens for examining how femininity and otherness are demonized. As she says, “It sounds like the history of femicide all over the world: I have to kill what you desire.”

Daiga Grantina is the second cover story, photographed wearing Paloma Wool in her Souppes-sur-Loing studio by Benedict Brink. In conversation with Amy Jones, Grantina reflects on the evolving trajectory of her sculptural practice across three exhibitions — from the sprawling “What Eats Around Itself” to the restrained “Temples” and the murky, metal-infused “Leaves.” The artist’s process is grounded in intuition, transformation, and a sense of time as material. She describes her method as spiraling: “When you can feel your heart slowly shrinking, the spiral is a space from which to grow.” The metaphor underscores her exploration of form, feeling, and fragility through shifting materials and poetic gestures.

The third cover story is dedicated to Alexandra Metcalf, photographed by Oscar Foster-Kane at The Perimeter, London, wearing Steve O Smith. Metcalf’s work blends gothic theatricality with piercing feminist critique, exploring themes of madness, diagnosis, and containment. Her layered paintings and sculptures evoke emotional paralysis and systemic oppression through ghostly figures, adolescent angst, and historical references like the “rest cure.” Informed both by feminine craft and masculine technique, her work blurs past and present crises in care. As Kyla McDonald writes, “the process of making is part of the narrative,” underscoring Metcalf’s vulnerability as resistance and creation as catharsis.

By making these emerging voices dialogue with foundational figures, the summer issue does not proposing a linear genealogy. Rather, it tries to trace a series of mutations, misalignments, and aesthetic contaminations. The grotesque is, by nature, unstable; it resists taxonomy and thrives in contradiction, disrupting the clean lines of the images the clarity of the body, the fixity of meaning. 

This issue doesn’t want to define the grotesque — it lets it spill and seep through the cracks.