On the creation of the issue
We hope this issue, created, in the gray no-man’s land between November and December, finds you in good health.
The journalist Arno Widmann, born in Frankfurt am Main in 1946, knows the theater only from the audience and from interviews he has time and again conducted with actors. Talking to 18 people over three weeks and having them tell him what was on their minds in this Covid section of world history was one of the best endeavours of his life. He was thrilled by his interviewees, who questioned themselves and the world with melancholy and relish at the same time.
The experience of technical connections with their possibilities and shortcomings gave the photographer Esra Rothoff the idea of depicting the special interview situation for this issue. After all, Arno Widmann conducted most of the interviews through a computer. So it made sense to depict the interviewees with their self-selected backgrounds in precisely this ambivalent digital space, including its errors, the glitches that have accompanied so many of us since the beginning of the pandemic.
