Magma — No. 2

In celebration of the centenary of Surrealism and the museum’s major retrospective, Magma Journal and the Centre Pompidou have revived surrealist inquiries in a special edition of the publication.

This special edition newspaper brings together over 150 artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, photographers, designers, and academics from around the world. These unpublished contributions echo the original responses of the Surrealists.

Between 1919 and 1957, the Surrealists conducted twenty-two inquiries among hundreds of their contemporaries, covering topics ranging from art to sexuality. Often overlooked by posterity, these inquiries are nonetheless an integral part of the movement, embodying its ambition to gather "the greatest possible number of experimental data" on reality, to interpret it, and thereby transform it. Four emblematic questions from these inquiries have been revi- sited by 150 contemporary voices: writers, filmmakers, intellectuals, and artists, both French and international. Their responses could take the form of a text, ranging from a sentence to a paragraph, or an artwork — painted, drawn, photographed — created for the occasion.

The project is led by Magma Journal together with both curators of the Surrealist exhibition, Didier Ottinger and Marie Sarré, and Jean-Max Colard, head of the museum’s Service de la Parole, with the Service de la Parole team.