Behind the scenes: Krass journal

A visually and culturally radical magazine from Australia, Krass journal is a biannual title that focuses on politics, philosophy, art and literature.

The second issue is on shelves now, featuring Noam Chomsky, Hans Ulrich Obrist and a lot of very beautiful typography. So I caught up with Sanja Grozdanić (above left, with co-founder Tess Martin) to find out more about the magazine, the ideas it advocates and the creative process that drives it forward.

Could you start by telling me how Krass came to be?
My co-founder, Tess Martin, and I both studied journalism and worked as freelance writers, and we’d always write these little pieces purely for pleasure’s sake that didn’t really fit anywhere. But we’d share them with each other, and eventually we decided to put the pieces together in our own magazine. That’s how Krass was born.

Later, our designers Simon Pearce and Kirby Manning came on board and made it all look good, and it’s just continued since then. We’re just about to move into an office space this week so it’s starting to really take shape. And importantly we’re still having a lot of fun.

What’s the process of putting each issue together?
The fact that Krass is biannual means we can take things slowly and let all the ideas and different interview subjects come together. We usually start out with a sense of a theme, but it’s very broad and becomes more defined as the issue takes shape.

We often seem to begin with a number of larger interviews, like with Noam Chomsky and Hans Ulrich Obrist in this issue. It’s hard to say whether we’re attracted to those people at the time because of their ideas, or if those people shape our ideas, but it ends up kind of falling together. It’s only in hindsight that we really see the patterns. In the end, Krass is a medley of everyone we’re interested in and their ideas over the space of six months.

It’s quite a political magazine – which issues do you feel particularly invested in?
Where to begin? I was born in Yugoslavia and my family and I came to Australia when I was five, so I’m hugely interested and invested in the refugee crisis. Australia has a really horrible detention centre policy so we included a photo series by Marko Risović in this issue that touches upon that.

Noam Chomsky, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Etel Adnan… you’ve got some big names in this issue. Other than your personal admiration, what do the personalities you feature have in common?
I’m very humbled by the people dedicating their time to us. Other than the fact that they’re incredibly accomplished, intelligent and driven, they’re also really good people. Whenever you read interviews with Hans Ulrich Obrist, for example, you get a sense of this inherent kindness or goodness.

In this issue the theme is this idea of rebellion, and that we’re all in it – whatever that is – together. You might ask what Noam Chomsky and Audrey Wollen have in common, and at first glance maybe not so much, but I think that when you look at it a bit deeper they’re both radical in their own way and both have a lot of passion and determination that goes into their life and work. I think that’s something characterising a lot of the personalities we’re drawn to.

Another piece in the second issue is on filmmakers Charlotte Mars and Maya Newell, who released an incredible documentary in Australia called Gayby Baby, which follows children of same-sex parents. It became a really big thing in Australia and got a lot of controversy in major media.

What’s your approach to interviewing?
The kind of interviews I really love as a reader are of the Paris Review nature. I think one of my favourite interviews is one they did with Michel Houellebecq, whose books I’m not necessarily that into, but the interview is absolutely beautiful. It goes from talking about his career to big ideas of love and the soul.

I really like going at it from a personal perspective. One of my favourite interviews I did was for issue one with Australian director Amiel Courtin-Wilson. We ended up talking for an hour about all sorts of things.

Who’s the typical Krass reader, or rather who do you imagine them to be?
Well, who they are and who I imagine them to be is actually quite different. I always imagine a woman and actually our cover texts speak directly to women. But we’ve been really pleasantly surprised that we have a lot of male readers.

We’ve taken part in a lot of book fairs recently and we were just at the Sydney Book Fair, and our first purchase came from a 40-year-old man. It’s a really lovely surprise that there’s a wider demographic than we imagined there would be. 

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