Real Review is a quarterly contemporary culture magazine with the strapline “what it means to live today”. Our agenda focuses on the politics of space, and trying to understand how everyday conditions enforce and reinforce power relations.
The challenges to our species have never been more obvious, yet the required actions have never seemed more impossible. After several decades, Just-in-Time production (only making what you need, only when you need it) has become a generalised model. We now expect everything on demand, from clothing to houses, and food to friends.
The unreal magic by which objects come into being has also changed our relationship with the process of making. Increasingly, we are more interested in the how than the what, with even inferior artisanal and bespoke commanding a premium.
Will we be able to redress social inequality, dampen the effects of global warming and reinvent democracy just in time?
How do we design value? Mariana Mazzucato reviews the metrics of innovation. Poet Emily Toder reviews the movement of the robot, while Toyo Ito reviews medieval light and the symbolism of grief. US-based Jamaican author Garnette Cadogan reviews walking while Black, and Feminist Architecture Collaborative review artificial hymens. Stephen Armstrong reviews Deliveroo’s dark kitchens and Armature Globale review the contemporary European photographic identity, including work by Satoshi Fujiwara.
90-100 pages, softcover, 26 x 11.5 cm, Real Review (London)