Vivian Westwood and Wolfgang Tillmans are among 100 artists who have contributed art and articles to a new magazine LIMBO created especially to help colleagues who are out of work and to capture the world during lockdown.
Responding to increasingly urgent calls from the high-profile sector, Britain announced on Sunday it would invest nearly $2 billion in cultural institutions and the arts to help an industry crippled by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Due to be published on Tuesday, LIMBO was born of a desire to capture the world in a unique moment in history and to help each other in a time of crisis, its creators said. The magazine upends the traditional publishing model by sharing all revenue equally between the team.
“In the very first week of lockdown I thought to myself ‘I’d love to see inside everyone’s minds and everyone’s home right now,” publisher of LIMBO, Nick Chapin, told Reuters.
“All these fantastic creative people, writers, filmmakers. How are they channelling this energy? So I almost saw it as like a hundred windows on the minds and homes of people around the world.”
Fifty A-list artists and creatives – from Oscar-winner Andrea Arnold, to Miranda July – waived their fees, allowing funds raised to go to the 50 contributors most in need.
“I wasn’t able to get any help from the government when my business fell through. So we definitely felt like we had to do something ourselves. We had to find a way to support our community from the ground up,” Chapin said.
The magazine is being sold in an honour system at three different prices, £9 ($11.25) for concessions, £14 at normal price and £19 for readers who want to contribute more.
