A warm smile, ever questioning eyes, your fragile hands. Time and time again they combine and seduce with their elegance and intensity.

We haven’t seen each other much in the past few months. Enough though to guess who you are. We sat at the table together. Listened to each other. Sometimes you were very happy. Sometimes severe, when it seemed that we wouldn’t be able to realize a story as we had imagined it. Sometimes very sad. Like when Michael Haneke didn’t answer our pleas.

You are always apparently calm. No raising of the voice, no big gestures. Only that running of your hands through your hair. That’s when, so you told me, a storm is ravaging within you. Your heart is pounding, your bones are in shock and your nervous system is under attack. Only for a moment. Because when fear strikes, you wait patiently. With averted eyes you remain soft and beautiful. Reserved. Always elegant.

Intense contradictions have become the starting-point of this magazine. This A MAGAZINE curated by HAIDER ACKERMANN is not about himself: no interview, no praise, no fashion collection. You seem to be completely absent, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Page after page, this magazine is a mirror of your thoughts, the reflection of your desires, your everyday inspirations. Wellconsidered and volatile, poetic and hard, melancholic and rational, discreet and candid.

All of them paradoxes, inherent in your life, that meet at some point. Mostly in thoughts, invisible, ephemeral. You made an effort to grasp this magical moment. To pour “la rencontre”, as you like to call it, into images.