issue one

Alfred Korzybski said the map is not the territory; René Magritte said ceci n'est pas une pipe. The current issue of Other Terrain is a collection of contemporary interpretations of the abstractions hidden in the territory we navigate, and the way we see what we're looking at.

This territory includes the trail left by the dislocated stranger as he or she moves through the crowded world of crime fiction, lovers who try to preserve their passion and betrayal in secret ways and basement places, and the voices of infamous free spirits who reappear to offer the oldest little kid in the world quirky advice on his love life.

The deception of the map is revealed when a poetically tough prostitute narrates the supposed 'rules' of her territory to the naive new girl on the block. The subtext of a simple exchange on a typical train journey is decoded as poetry that captures 'operatic slurs of the street'.

A young woman's body appears in contrast to Chinese red beans, a symbol of home, festivities, family; yet we see the body dislocated, exposed and alone. Two very different Filipinas' experiences of alterity in English-speaking cultures is painted in candy colours and written into the minute detail of a translated document even as the subject is reimagined, and a young Vietnamese man is exiled in Paris without a language map, offering instead a taxonomy of taste as the text with which he navigates the divided worlds of his existence and memories.

And finally, a few words about our masthead. The terrain in the background is appropriated from a printed landscape. Like Magritte's pipe, it was never a physical terrain, but a representation of one. The hue of blue could be seen as a post-colonial 'othering' of a landscape traditionally rendered in greens and ochres. Or it could be interpreted as an absurdity, poking fun at abstraction.

Like all terrain, it's yours to travel and interpret.