“It’s a 50/50 shared project,” says Nat Marcus, founder of Tabloid Press. “Collaboration and all ideas are shared equally, and also all effort and resources. It’s a good time right now to practice solidarity on such a high level.”

Berlin zine Tabloid Press was founded by Marcus in 2014 with Zoe Darsee, “as a means of inundating our social community with a lyric and a kind of poetics that we thought is often thought to be highbrow or elitist, or overly academic.”

For this SELF PUBLISHED project, Berlin publisher Gloria Glitzer joined forces with Tabloid Press to create their one off digital zine. Founded in 2007 by Moritz Grünke and Franziska Brandt, Gloria Glitzer publish art books and zines, often publishing their own artworks alongside those they admire.

WHO THEY ARE

Moritz Grünke: “Gloria Glitzer is a publisher but also an avatar of Franziska Brandt and myself Moritz Grünke. We founded it in 2007. We develop, create and publish art into artists’ books or book works. In most cases, it’s our own work we publish in those books. So we understand a publication as an art piece itself. We understand publishing as taking responsibility, taking care of the whole process by ourselves as much as possible, from doing the layout, taking care of the printing, the binding process, but also just the distribution. To be independent from everything around us. We understand our books, it’s how we define our own values and social communities. And what we do.”

Nat Marcus: “The name of our publishing project is Tabloid because this is the size, the format of the newsprint that we use, a large A3. But it’s also like a celebrity gossip magazine filled with a lot of bullshit. We thought that we can bullshit in our poems, we can gossip in our poems, and we can throw wrenches into the order of our social community for good and for worse, through our poems. That was the idea. And since then, it’s really developed. From the get-go it’s always been about a certain kind of sociability, of poetry and lyric. And in that sense, central to the whole project is always a collaboration between me and Zoe, or a facilitation of collaboration in our community.”

HOW POETRY AND FASHION INSPIRED THEM

Moritz Grünke: “What was interesting to us is that fashion, in general, is mass-produced products, that is somehow converted into something different by the person who wears it. This happens through the individuality of the human being, of the gender, of the shape of the body, and of the personality. They use fashion as a canvas, these products become decontextualized.”

Nat Marcus: “We wanted to use poetry in this tabloid kind of spirit. We have no qualms with using poems as advertisement. We don’t think that poetry is in a sphere that is above or beyond such a thing. But at the same time, what is powerful about poetry is that whatever kind of fixed message or interpretation or image you would like to read out of it, when you write a poem, I think a good poem will always evade and slip out of that fixed definition.”

HOW BERLIN INFORMS WHAT THEY DO

Nat Marcus: “Tabloid really came out of the clubs here, me and Zoe always spending a lot of time going out dancing. But I think it also developed when we were taking breaks and talking and bullshitting and gossiping, what have you. More and more, the club scene here in Berlin is turning into a consumer experience, and it’s becoming more and more commercialised. What continuously inspires me here is what’s going on in noninstitutional clubs, on smaller scale, on kind of more underground level of people who, who are just who are really just trying to sweat and dance. There’s a musical element always running through poetry. So for us there’s always been a really vital connection between music, graphics, text, and so on. Of course, people will be like ‘Berlin is over’ but they don’t know shit, obviously. So that’s what inspires me for sure. My family here.”