Sjå magazine is a photo and art magazine, rooted in analog photography, and explores a given theme with the help of photography and text, published twice a year by Mørkerommet photo collective. Mørkerommet photo collective is a student organization in Bergen that practices analog photography and development in darkrooms, in addition to holding exhibitions, publishing pictures in various magazines and documenting images at events.

Social distancing in the city of Bergen had loosened up, small scale meetup and events are allowed to be held. Drastic Social visited Sjå magazine’s launch this month in Bergen where their Issue #3: Senses is published.

It was being held at a small exhibition space in the city centre, VISP, the physical location of this networking organisation for the Visual Arts in Norway. The space is snugged and cosy, visitors came into an indoor grass field and sat down on the floor. Some people took their shoes off, relaxing, looking at some of the photography works on the wall while they converse with one another. Some flip through their newly published magazine while Inish’s sound work was playing in the background with some elements of techno, occasionally vibrant and at times tranquil.

One of the works in the magazine left us with a slight sore in the chest – “Smaken av metall” (The taste of metal) is a poem by Imad Alwahibi, a Palestinian artist who grew up in Syria, and it is written in Norwegian. The artist expressed the feeling of relocating from one place to another, landlord to landlord, key to key, trying to settle in a place where they find it struggling to get a sense of belonging.

A description of the magazine on the publication’s event page describes more of what’s featured in the magazine below,

“In this edition, we have explored the theme of SENSES through analog photography, art, poetry, text and sound. We will get to sense the taste of painful keys together with Imad Alwahibi in the poem The taste of metal. We will get to smell excerpts from Giulia Avella’s collection of prose poems, Cycles, in which she lets us smell her everyday life like it once was. We will get to feel love and closeness in the photo series Do you remember? by Leah Håland Solomons, in which various people lead us into their most intimate memories. We will get to feel the brutal hands that were once gentle and experience how once-loving guests can become violent in the photo series Gentle touch by Cosmo Großbach. We will get to look at the sensory dominance of sight in Erick Trondsson Kjellevold’s text on the favouritism of the eye in architecture through the ages. We will get to listen, a pulsating soundscape by Inish that can change our cognitive experience, through the forest, knife drawer and binaural beats. And finally, we will get to browse through the analog photo album Månebedotten together.”