In Hermann Hesse's Demian. there is a half-holv. half-evil bird-like divinity called Abraxas. Flving above our lonely planet. he reminds us every day that no one is purely good or bad. Nuances. influences, and beliefs shape every living soul. Delusion and Grace are equally infused into our lives.

Dedicated to these seemingly antagonistic states of being. Tide issue 8 unfolds with Erwin Wurm opening the door to an in-between reality. where the lightness of the absurd confronts the depth of the existential; Julie Kegel brings together bright colours and everyday experiences to sketch grace with fluidity; Jewel Ham ventures into the limbos of Substack because she "loves a good rabbit hole"; Mac Collins and Emilie Laystary search for the roots of their fragmented identities in the veins of wood and in the lost taste of fried rice; Yasmina Hilal devises a poetic and prophetic way to measure pain; Mohammad Ghazali, Guillaume Blanc-Marianne, and Ithai Schori question whether truth can still be found in photography; Elizabeth Heltoft transforms everyday passions into holy altars: Crista Leonard captures a juvenile stroll as a distant echo: while Laura Sicouri follows a cast of eclectic characters. consumed by the news and suspended in screen captures.

I once had a dream of a garden at night. I'm alone. and every detail of the surrounding nature eerilv shimmers beneath the moon's rays. Amongst the dark and humid grass lies this beautiful and wild bouquet of purple flowers. One stands out: a fantastical, luminous, perfectly blooming creature. As I see it, I feel an instant attraction, a yearning to touch it. My hand nears, close enough to pick it and feel its magical power on my skin, when a violent thought comes to mind: this flower is death. The yearning fades and fear sets in. I step back and iust stare at it, unable to take it or leave.Then the dream shifts, carrying me into another - equally wild - adventure.

When reflecting on this new issue's theme, Safety and Desire, I remembered that dream, which revealed the questions and contradictions of desire itself. Where does it start? Where does it end? How can one have control over it? Is it a vital force. or a fatal threat? Maybe both.

Desire. iust like this flower, resists being owned, or ending. It's made of immortal blood - a dark yet vivid fuchsia blood - that, with time and wisdom, might one day mute into a softer tone.

For this sixth issue of Tide, we'd like to explore the ambivalence between the extreme comfort of Western lifestyles and the raw sensation of truly being alive - experiencing, sensing, and feeling. I first began reflecting on the impact of a simple GPS navigation system on our daily lives. We've integrated it as seamlessly and imperceptibly as a computer chip under our skin, yet this magic potion-like technology seeps in drop by drop, gradually dulling our awareness.

We lose the thrill of risk, the challenge of finding our way through memory or intuition, and the opportunity to connect with others - elements that define our uniquely human experience. I rapidly came to this conclusion: without effort, there is no reward. No sense of accomplishment, no chance encounters, no unexpected discoveries. It's worth reflecting on how our daily comforts - the conveniences we rely on - can sometimes become unspoken barriers to truly feeling, numbing rather than enriching us.

Particularly drawn to the duality of this theme - its theoretical depths and its tangible, physical expressions - we felt compelled to further explore and revisit it with our contributors. From painter Nathanaëlle Herbelin to fashion designer Collina Strada, artists Scheltens & Abbenes, poet Browzan, and researcher Janna Van Grunsven, the interpretations of Comfort and Sensation grew ever more poignant.

A Charade as Editorial

In order of apparences: A body as a landscape, writing talks, thoughts and dreams, sorority and resilience, the sound of cinema, candles and colors, life dressed in an antique drape, a tender fern in no man's land, swan and faces, last fire - first dance, Miss Grey, images as answers, Loyalties, fashion as a collective passion, a mirror in the could the bleu-eyed sho.

Documented by the talented Osma Harvilahti and Marie Haustein. Coco Capitan and Anne Bourrassé, Bettina Pittaluga, Zahra Tavassoli Zea, Rachelle Cunningham, Janneke van der Hagen and Monika Tatalovic, Alexandre Guirkinger, Fabien Giraud and Marie Auger, Crista Leonard, Assia Turquier-Zauberman and Némo Flouret, Angèle Chatenet and Shayna Arnold, Lise Dua, Nicolas di Felice and Pauline Marie Malier Laura Marie Cieplik, Javier de Pardo and Lenio Kaklea, Roni Horn and Giorgia Basch.

Love and nostalgia feel like two sides of one mountain, two sides of one coin, two mingling bodies, dancing one passionate waltz. Seldom are these entities illuminated simultaneously. Yet rivalry also emerges from this unity, as both sides constantly pull it to life, the second waits impatiently for the moment when, through a metaphysical rotation, it too can come alive.

Love generates joy and, as such, can be likened to happiness. But happiness is hard work, “it is an act of courage that consists in keeping melancholy at bay”.* At times sweet, at times bitter, nostalgia looks for the crumbled regrets that love has left behind.

The heart is where both these feelings reside. It uses no reasoning, it senses. With the same humility as those who rely on the stars and the heavens, the heart knows of sunshine and it’s all gone, reborn into something new. To sense, in French, translates as “ressentir”. It means to sense twice. Or a sense that repeats itself. Occasionally, our feelings – or our innermost thoughts – appear on the margins of such a repetition. “The feelings, and they are such sad things.”* But I believe that the most profound feeling grows on this fertile soil of habit and familiarity: nostalgia, serene exaltation, eternal love.

This fourth issue of Tide Magazine is an ode to this pendulum, source of life and creation. The artists contribute with their own plastic, formal and intuitive interpretations. Answers are given with an open heart. This quest for authenticity is Tide’s lifeblood, and I hope it will inspire you too.

The intimate is to universality what grounds are to coffee. Hidden in the depth of the ordinary – of this warm, opaque liquid – lies the mystery of uniqueness. Sipped in the four corners of the world, this thousand-year-old drink is prepared and consumed in a myriad of ways. Cultures and rituals are instilled in it. If grounds had a core pattern, it would be found at the root of the container. But to catch a glimpse of its final, intimate imprint, you would have to wait a little longer. It unfolds only with time, “mute among the deaf”, to quote the Afghan author Mahmud Nasimi. Intimacy, with oneself and with the Other, resembles this motif. It is self-sufficient, fading and recreating itself continuously. This new issue’s photographs are a reflection of who we are: our personal spaces, our daily habits, our fantasised selves, our imaginary worlds with its anamorphic nature and unexpected architectures. These images are fragments of us, of you, small snippets of universal truths.

While skimming through our repertoire of contrasting words, the concepts of fullness and emptiness appeared as the most evocative of this period. They crystallise on their own the paradoxes of lives, full of wandering and in-door explorations, of auspicious moments for self-reflection; yet empty of human contact, of cultural activities. Pleasure stood out, more than ever, for its absence.

We realised that this increasingly present desire to slow down was difficult to achieve; our lives needed to be filled in a different way. It is this conflicting yet enriching journey that Tide wants to tell. Rebekka Deubner dives into the intimacy of Fukushima with a series of portraits and decisive moments in a search for separation and reconstruction; Gonzalo C. García’s microfiction explores millennial boredom and the distance that separates one individual from another. This separation can also be political, as expressed by artists and curators living in post-Brexit Britain, or cultural, as experienced by Iranian creators and intellectuals that recount their multi-layered identities.

Marcelo Gomes’s camera interrogates the meanings of fullness and emptiness through saturation and desaturation techniques, the use of micro and macro levels, and by training our eye to see the whole before the detail. As if to prove that wholeness is a matter of scale. In a more realistic way, the photographer Joséphine Löchen follows a young woman, moving between “the outside and the inside”, between determination and daydreaming. Film heroines throughout the history of cinema make us question our modern societies’ representations of pregnancy and maternity.

Deo Suveera and Pamela Dimitrov fill our pages with forms and colours taken from the streets of Bangkok, where they wanted to transcend the ordinary. We find this same passion and enthusiasm in the fashion of Alphonse Maitrepierre, in the “weird and utopian quest” of the art collector Antoine de Galbert, and in the hybrid jewellery designs of Juliette Teste and Rosemarie Auberson.

At the beginning of Tide, there is a shared passion for Images. Every publication is a field of experimentations. Ours has the desire to show the work of a new generation of talents: photographers, video makers, visual artists, or sound designers in whom we believe. Tide was built over time on conversations, long meetings, doubts, and creative impulses. Our contributors’ trust transformed this abstract project into a concrete object.

It was necessary for us to anchor this creation in the present, so that it could be a means to question various issues, be they social, environmental or related to the fashion and luxury industry. Hoping, always, to shift the lines. A bi-annual publication, with each issue built around two notions that are opposed, yet complementary. A duality ever present, like tidal movements in the sea.

For this first issue, we chose Discretion and Curiosity, a theme that allows us to explore a captivating dimension of our modern age. In our pages, the readers will become travelers, discovering the elegance of a Japan fluctuating between past and present, or wanderers, obsessed about the unsuspected beauty of Bucharest’s interiors and architecture. They will turn into observers, watching the lustful acting of a Rohmerian heroine, before witnessing the metamorphosis of objects whose functions are switched. They will meet a documentary filmmaker who works in anonymous ambivalence, a former urban in search of meaning, and an anthropologist shedding light, through her research, on the opacity of the fashion world. They will then discover a faceless and sexting society, unveiling the tensions of our conflicted identities. Lastly, they will be listeners of a cosmic and electric musical mix, which accompanies these stories.