Erotica Papers

Erotica Papers Exhibition
Madrid Design Festival
6—16 Feb 20

The Magazine Club Madrid welcomes you to Erotica Papers, our very first magazine exhibition, which gathers more than 15 indie mags about filthy, dirty, adult pleasure, to try to delve into what Plato said in his Symposium, that eros makes every man a poet. Or maybe, an indie magazine editor, we may suggest. The exhibition belongs to the Festival OFF program by Madrid Design Festival 2020. We decided to join the program in our own way, through graphic design and editorial suggestions —some of these hard to find in Spain—even if we’re lucky enough to count also on magazines such as Kink, Morena and Odiseo, our national heroes.

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For this exhibition we’ve been gathering a varied collection of international erotic magazines offering a range of different perspectives. Far from being exhaustive, our investigation tries to show why we should forget about Playboy and think, instead, of Robert Mapplethorpe, Egon Schiele or Keith Haring—renowned artists exhibited in worldwide museums and galleries. The wide selection of indie mags and zines published since 2005 explores the various ways in which the magazine format can be used as an experimental space for the research on eroticism: meditations on male and female bodies, explicit sexual behaviors, joyful photography investigations and unexpected art reflections will give a picture of what sex in magazine can be nowadays. “We should have more sexual education” claims the first page of POV paper’s 1st issue; maybe this is the reason why so many magazines about sexuality have sprung up lately.

The 21st century has seen the ever-expanding debate about sexuality been fully accepted, and the boundaries between pornography and art have been blurred thanks also to a flourishing of independent paper publications. This exhibition follows the present scene of erotic representation among various publications. Erotica Papers is curated by Margherita Visentini and Gema Navarro.

Titles included
Carcy, France
Extra Extra, The Netherlands
Fac Simile, Spain
Fukt. The Sex Issue, Germany
Hot Sauce, UK
Jacques, USA
Kink, Spain
Mal, UK
Matto, France
Morena, Spain
Odiseo, Spain
Ossì, Italy
Phile, USA/Canada/Germany
P Magazine, Mexico
POV paper, Switzerland