A New Publication Culls Outtakes From the Archives of Jean-Luc Godard, Precious Okoyomon, and Jonas Mekas

An artist’s archive is awash in potential—a mess of clues and discoveries. The third edition of the annual art journal Magma, titled “Archive of the Future,” aims to capture this sense of wonder by bringing together more than 100 previously unpublished works and texts. The treasures range from a series of voice memos made by artist Charles Ray at dawn during his daily walks in Los Angeles to seven Polaroids taken by Jonas Mekas during a 1971 Fluxus dinner where Yoko Ono and John Lennon improvised drawings and performances. 

Crafted as a nod to Paris’s great 20th-century revues d’art, the publication examines contributions from filmmakers, artists, musicians, and writers at various moments of political and social upheaval. Curator and critic Hans Ulrich Obrist, who wrote the edition’s foreword, notes: “Magma is an extraordinary collection of artistic archives that helps us invent the future. These archives are not places of certainty, but tools—prototypes for future action and for the world as it could be.”

Under the direction of Editor-in-Chief Paul Olivennes, the Bottega Veneta-backed journal blends new and never-before-seen work and veers more into coffee-table-book territory than a typical flip-through magazine. As Olivennes explains, “The archive is the space through which a society decides what it wishes to see, what it chooses to believe, and what it prefers to silence.”

The 388-page volume, published Oct. 19, also includes selections from the archive of Jean-Luc Godard alongside a text from Patti Smith, a horticultural insert from Precious Okoyomon, a new series from artist Pol Taburet, and a QR code that launches a rendition of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler.

“Archive of the Future” will be released in conjunction with an exhibition opening Oct. 13 at Tramps gallery in London dedicated to photographer Merry Alpern, whose photographs of an underground Wall Street strip club from 1995—republished in Magma—sparked controversy, and a cult following. A group show at Forma in Paris, on view from Oct. 19 to Nov. 19, will present other original works featured in the publication. Of course, we here at CULTURED believe the best of art can be kept as a print keepsake, but we’ll be amongst the fray at these shows to see Magma transcend the page. 

Exhibition Magma No. 3 Archive of the Future. Photography by Nicolas Brasseur and courtesy of Magma.

Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, Interior, 2025 Die Vier von der Tankstelle, 2023. Photography by Fabrice Schneider and courtesy of the artists.

Merry Alpern, Dirty Windows #12, 1994. Image courtesy of Galerie Miranda.

Stanislava Kovalčíková, Contes illustrés, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist.

Pol Taburet, Untitled, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM.

Pol Taburet, Leleco‘s walk, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM.