Meet the EIC of new Berlin-based zine, DREAD: Alice Preat
Dread, as defined in Merriam-Webster:
(noun)
1. a. great fear, especially in the face of impending evil
b. extreme uneasiness in the face of a disagreeable prospect
c. (archaic) AWE
I have lived with dread for as long as I can remember. It has manifested in different ways throughout my life, and is an inevitable part of my bipolar disorder, which I have learned to embrace. In a world built for neurotypicals and run by capitalism and consumerism, we are constantly offered "miracle solutions" to problems we didn't know we had. Fix your skin with this probiotic, gratitude journaling to fix your depression, diets, products, life coaches, self-help books... But never are we encouraged to simply sit with our questions, to sit with our feelings and experiences of dread — feelings that seem perfectly reasonable to experience when we are endlessly confronted with the horrors of this world and the struggles of trying to survive within it.
I was born and raised in Paris, which has led me to learn and connect with existentialist writers and thinkers from an early age — Camus and Sartre particularly — and therefore to become interested in the themes and questions raised by them: what does it mean to be truly alive? How do we keep up the eternal dance between life and death? Does any of it mean anything? Through these intellectual endeavors, as well as many other artists and film-makers' work that have deepened my connection to existentialism (Kierkegaard, Kafka, Beckett, Lynch, Bergman, Bourgeois, Hockney etc.) I have developed my own position on the matter: active absurdism. What this means to me is that despite the fundamental belief that everything in this life is absurd and nothing means anything, I still need to search for and create meaning for myself — otherwise, what is the point?
This is where DREAD emanated from: a desire to create a space and community for fellow writers and artists who want to express their own questions and feelings about their own dread. It is, in a sense, a way to fight back against the capitalistic need to "fix", as well as a way to allow emergent voices to publish and showcase their work.
As far as the zine being a physical object, I have been in love with print for many years, and actually started as a magazine culture journalist. There is something impermanent and yet inevitably real about holding these carefully bound pieces of paper, with all sorts of words and minds contained within one's hands. It's almost as if this material object could anchor all of our dreadful feelings to reality, as opposed to letting them float in the ethereal world of ideas.
All in all, I want DREAD to become a community, worldwide, for all those whom it speaks to - and I sincerely hope it will speak to you too!
Stay dreadful,
Alice, EIC of DREAD.
