Episode 8: Season One finale with Jesper Lund of Office Magazine Artwork

Abundance Zine

Abundance Zine is a podcast celebrating transformative practices in contemporary culture. Hosted by artist Landon Metz and writer Christopher Schreck, the show features conversations with guests from a wide range of disciplines whose methods speak to contemporary issues while suggesting more rewarding ways of living and working.

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Abundance Zine

Episode 8: Season One finale with Jesper Lund of Office Magazine

March 07, 2023 • Landon Metz and Christopher Schreck • Season 1 • Episode 8

Landon and Christopher wrap up Season One with the help of Jesper Lund, creative director and co-founder of Office Magazine.

Special thanks to Our Legacy for their generous support of this episode! Visit OurLegacy.com and follow @ourlegacy for details on their latest arrivals and projects.

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Christopher Schreck

This episode of the Abundance Zine podcast is brought to you by Our Legacy.

Landon Metz

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Hi, I'm Landon Metz.

And I'm Christopher Schreck. Welcome to the season one finale of the Abundance Zine podcast.

In this episode, we're wrapping up our first season with help from Jesper Lund, the creative director and co-founder of office magazine.

Landon and I are longtime fans of office, and we've each worked with their team in the past, so we're excited to have Jesper with us as the final guest of season one to help reflect on our first round of conversations and look ahead season two.

Thank you to Jesper and office magazine for making this episode possible. Thanks also to our producer Ryan Leahey; to Clement Pascal and Alex Vierra for their photographs; to Kasper Bjorke for providing our theme music; and to all our season one guests and sponsors.

And of course, we'd like to thank all of you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this first season as much as we have. We'll be back shortly with all new episodes, so be sure to follow us on Instagram at @abundancezine for updates.

Ciao!

Hey!

Jesper Lund

Hey Christopher!

Nice to meet you. [laughs] How are you?

Hi Landon. [laughs] Good to see you.

Good to see you too. What's up?

Not much, just at home here in Brooklyn.

What's that painting behind you?

That one? Oh, I strategically placed it there so you could you could see some of my work.

It looks good, dude.

Thanks, man.

Have you been painting at home?

I haven't, no. I'm actually in-between, sort of. I need to find a space. I've been looking. I think we talked about that out in your old space on Morgan Avenue.

Right.

So I've been looking out there, you know. It's just it's impossible to do it at home, at least in my space.

Yeah, one of my friends downstairs here on Canal Street, is looking to spend less. He might be looking for a studio mate, and he's not there very often.

That’d be sick.

You could be my downstairs neighbor!

Yeah, I'd love that. Very convenient, too - close to the office office.

Dude, for sure.

Yeah.

Thanks for doing this, I'm excited. I really appreciate it. I

I'm flattered! You know, this is the finale for season one. I just wanted to ask, how come you do seasons? What is what is the reasoning behind doing seasons?

Well, I think it's a combination of things. On one level, it’s the structure that we originally agreed to with our producer. It’s just a manageable way of approaching starting a series like this. I think one of the other things that we're constantly negotiating is how this project fits in within our lives, and it seemed to us that having it in a segmented form would allow us to learn from the first season, kind of get a sense of what worked and what didn't, and then employ those lessons moving forward. With other podcasts that release episodes all the time, I think there's benefits to that and there's drawbacks to that. This is just what works for us as of right now.

Yeah. I mean, obviously, Christopher and I both have our lives and our work and our careers that are at the forefront of our thought processes on the day-to-day. This project is something that we're both super excited about, but it's not our primary focus in life. So I think having a way to break it up and make it more digestible, and create a schedule that we can learn from and grow from and adapt—having seasons helps us do that.

I know you've worked together for over ten years now. I'm just curious to how you originally met each other. Was it in New York?

Yeah. We met at an art opening in New York in September of 2011. It was actually the same week that I moved to New York. I don’t remember the exhibition, but I do remember being introduced to Landon; we talked really briefly and then decided to meet up the next afternoon at a Vietnamese restaurant that was near his old place in Williamsburg.

Yeah, kind of close to where you live now, Jesper.

Right. So we met up, and that's where we had what still ranks for me as one of my all-time favorite conversations. It was this really sprawling, several-hour dialogue on topics ranging from Joseph Campbell and John Cage to concrete poetry and contemporary painting and everything beyond. It turned out we also shared a lot in common biographically: we both have family from Chicago, we both grew up playing music in suburban punk rock scenes, things like that. So that conversation is really, for me, where it started—and then from there, I started visiting his studio pretty regularly, and the collaboration developed pretty quickly from there.

Yeah. I mean, we were both twelve, thirteen years younger, both kind of fresh in New York. I’d actually been here a few years by that point, but I was still figuring out what I wanted to do and the type of work that I was comfortable making and sharing. Meeting people like Chris was a really important part of my journey to becoming an artist and understanding how to exist in the ecosystem of New York City. Those early days together were really significant for me; those studio visits really meant a lot. I think for Chris and I, so much of our friendship and our relationship has been motivated by probing each other with questions, just seeing how far we can push the conversation and how much we can learn from each other. It’s definitely baked into the way we hang out, and I think this project kind of felt like a natural extension of that.

Yeah, totally.

So this was still in New York. Christopher, when did you move back to Chicago?

In 2016.

And at the time when you met Landon, were you a critic back then, or were you just getting into writing?

Not at all. I was focused more on photography. I had come from a musical background, and then was doing photography when I moved to New York. When Landon and I first met was right around the time where I hadn't really even decided to be a writer, but I was getting opportunities to write. Actually, one of the first pieces that I wrote was about Landon's work—this monograph for a show he did at Ed Varie with our friend Ethan [Cook]. So I definitely was not a writer at the time, and working with Landon had so much to do with how that side of my life evolved, and the opportunities that I was able to get later on. It had everything to do with it, really.

Also, little-known fact: Christopher and I once photographed some band—I don't remember who it was…

Oh, it was Black Dice!

Yeah, Chris and I took portraits of Black Dice together at the same time in my studio once for a magazine. We were both doing this thing, taking photographs! It was so fun.

Yeah. Ethan was doing the dipped paintings at the time, so we were using his paintings as the backdrop.

Oh my god, yeah. That was funny. That was a really funny era in New York.

And so how did you come up with the with the idea for Abundance Zine?

The project started coming together in the spring of 2020, right as the pandemic hit and we were entering that initial lockdown phase. The idea was originally to have a text-based, conversation-driven publication that lived primarily online, but which could also be periodically translated to print, either as anthologies or as special one-off titles. On an editorial level, the idea has always been the same from the beginning: our interest was in celebrating what we consider to be exciting, timely, and potentially transformative practices across a range of disciplines. So we spoke with some really amazing people throughout that year, Landon and his wife Hannah took some really nice photographs of our guests, and we launched the website, along with that first round of conversations, in December of 2020.

I think we were both really proud of how those initial pieces turned out, but then as time went on, it started to feel like familiar territory, and we got to thinking about how the project could evolve. So midway through 2021, we arrived at the idea of expanding the approach to include audio alongside the text and the photography. We spent the rest of that year putting the pieces together, and then recorded our first episode in early 2022.

That was a really decisive moment, intentionally not move into print. We decided to not become print editors intentionally.

Smart. Smart move. [laughs]

I just feel like there's a lot of coverage in that medium. There's a lot of saturation with people who are doing really great work, and I don't really know how much space there was for us to move into that territory, and whether it needed us. I think this particular medium allows for Christopher and I to maintain a little bit of our humanity and our colloquial nature. With a print-based medium, it can be harder to maintain that character.

So do you divide your work and come up with ideas? Is it just an organic thing, bouncing back ideas and people you’d like to talk to?

Yeah. In terms of how we arrive at guests, he and I are constantly texting back and forth about things we come across, people we think are interesting. We have a shared Google doc that we're always adding to, and then when the time comes, we start whittling the list down and ultimately arrive at people who we think are the right fit—which is to say, people who pique our curiosity, people who occupy a unique place within their community, and also people who we think are going to be open and engaging in conversation. I don't know if we have any strict criteria beyond that, really.

Yeah, totally. For me, being an artist and being alone in my studio, there’s something about having been in New York now for fourteen or fifteen years or whatever. A lot of people that I've that I've known coming up have also done really well, and there's something about being in a place like New York City for a prolonged period of time, where your peers also flourish. I think it can be a lonely endeavor to create things and share them just under your name, but Abundance feels like a way of the collectively celebrating the energy that I feel like is feeding me as a creative person living in New York. In addition to us finding these people interesting or fascinating, or hoping that they'll be good conversationalists, I also think it's a form of celebrating—hence the name. It's celebrating the abundance of possibility that I'm not the only person that cares about these things, that's doing these things, and that it's a shared experience in a city like New York, and we can celebrate each other's success.

Definitely. As far as “abundance” goes, what really interests me about that term is its multiplicity: the way that word has been used by different groups of people to different ends. On one level, it's gained a lot of traction within the mainstream wellness industry, where it's being used in a kind of superficial way—and I think that in itself speaks to an ongoing theme in the conversations that we've had for the project, where we're raising questions around authenticity, appropriation, and so on. But then, at the same time, the word “abundance” can take on more earnest and meaningful connotations, right? Like, I think of the way someone like Adrienne Marie Brown might frame it within her writing—this notion of transforming individual and collective mindsets, of exploring new strategies and manifesting change on whatever given level. These are ideas that I think Landon and I both take seriously. So it's a loaded word to begin with, but then as we started having these conversations back in 2020, we found this idea of abundance being addressed time and again, and so it seemed like an appropriate umbrella term for framing the overall project, which I think in a lot of ways is about looking at what's in front of us and deciding what can be kept, but also what could be reimagined.

And then as far as the word “zine,” I think a lot of it goes back to what I mentioned earlier about Landon and I having both grown up in punk scenes. Initially, when we started the project, we went back and forth and how to position it. We threw around terms like “journal,” “magazine,” et cetera, but none of those really fit. Eventually, we arrived at this notion of a “zine.” I feel like for both of us growing up, zines were exciting for a lot of different reasons: they were these heartfelt, handmade documents of people's enthusiasms; they confirmed communities while also allowing people to take an active role in how media is created and consumed. I think we both like to think of Abundance as a project in similar terms. I do also feel like, as Landon was saying, a big part of what motivates us in working on the project is that it gives us the opportunity to speak with people we truly admire, and to delve into ideas that interest us as individuals and that inform our respective practices. So anyway, we put these two words together—Abundance Zine— and I do feel like they embody a lot of the ideas behind what we're doing.

Like, all the baggage aside from both those words, I think it’s just like, we both grew up in scenes, having fun with our friends and having a community of creative people that supported each other, and to me, both of these words kind of embody that in different ways. I think there's something colloquial and casual and unbuttoned and unfettered about a zine. It’s slightly unconcerned, but it's also enthusiastic. It's earnest, actually. At the end of the day, it's meaningful because it's about something or someone that you’re not just curious about the output, but you have some sort of personal investment in the humanity and the people and the culture that's creating that work. I think the same applies for me the word “abundance” in this particular case, which is really just about reveling and celebrating this creative ecosystem we’re operating in. In a place like New York City, it's very visceral. It's very easy to feel that when you walk outside. You and I know that very well, being on Canal and Broadway day to day. It's like, you want to hang out with someone cool? Stay on the corner for like ten minutes, and who knows who’s going to walk by. It's great, you know. It’s fun. It's one of the best parts of New York City, just walking around and running into friends. But being a part of these communities has been more than just a small part of my life, and more than just a reason to make things. It's the life force that that keeps it all going; it creates energy that I feel like I need, and it creates this larger theatrical stage for the context for what I'm doing up here alone in the studio. And so all these people that we respect and appreciate and really believe in what they're doing—it's not just the way we're celebrating them. We admire them, but we're also trying to find a really rich connection with these people as well.

Do you want to talk about the logo design and the font choices? I love it so much. It’s very playful. It's funny, Landon, because as person you’re very warm and funny, but your art can seem a little bit, just from an outside perspective, very clean and minimal, and doesn't necessarily have a lot of emotion to it at first glance. Can you talk a little bit about that the visuals? And the gong! I love the gong. [laughs]

The three of us—Chris and I and Ryan, our producer—have done our best to allow each one of us to flourish wherever possible within the collaboration of this project, and we all have our own unique skill sets. For the identity, I just kind of ran with something that felt silly. I drew the logo; the word “Abundance” was a drawing that I did, and then I refined it digitally. We were just kind of fucking around. This was at the height of the pandemic, when I was not in my studio very much and I had a lot of time to think about this. Then Chris and I were like, “What if the website has hours, so you can only visit it at certain periods of the day!” [laughs]

Which it did.

Which it did! Yeah, when we first launched the thing, you could only visit it during daylight hours. It knew when the sun had set, and then you couldn't check it out. You couldn’t read it. And then the icons were these floating butterflies, and the navigation was really discreet. Overall, I think the visual language that I was interested in was from these hippie pamphlets, maybe like a menu at a restaurant from a cult like vegan restaurant. There was one I used to go to all the time in Greenpoint. Just kind of these ephemeral little sleeves that you would get growing up and just be like,” Wow, look at this weird drawing!” So I wanted the visual language to embody that, and I think keeping it a little bit disjointed was part of that. So I drew the like the main typeface and then, in my downtime, I would just search for the worst fonts I could find. [laughs] The ugliest header fonts I could find, the most illegible fonts in existence, and somehow, they just synched together. Together, they form their own funny language. We use this off-white background color consistently, which is kind of mirroring a natural paper stock, and it's all this really, really dark green that almost looks black, which again, I think kind of feels like a silk screen or a risograph or something. So it's all mirroring a kind of tossed-together zine aesthetic, but really it’s just me having fun, looking for dumb shit on internet.

And what about the gong?

Well, you need a gong. [laughs]

You need a gong! [laughs] I was wondering, looking back at season one, is there something that defined the conversations? Is there something that, looking back, kind of summed it up, the overall theme of the first season?

I think there were several sub-themes, if you want to think of it that way, that went across the conversations. But in terms of overarching themes, the one that stood out to me was this idea of questioning what is and isn't “art,” quote-unquote—you know, kind of promoting a more expanded view of what a creative practice can look like, and challenging oneself (as well as one's audience) to forgo preconceptions and see things from a different angle. I feel like each person that we've spoken to does this in their own way, but all these different practices that we’re highlighting ultimately confirm the benefits of following one’s intuition and exploring unfamiliar territory, in art as well as in life.

I mean, I think obviously we're like dancing around something with the podcast in general, and I think explicitly trying to nail what that thing is down is potentially counterintuitive, because so much of what I'm interested in is learning from our guests. I think there have been a lot of consistent themes in the conversations that we've had, and whether that’s a selection thing or there's a subconsciousness thing that's happening between us and our subjects, I'm not totally sure, but there's been a lot of parallels in conversation. I think everything that we've said about choosing the name, and the general spirit of the project, embodies it enough, you know? I think leaving that space for it to evolve through conversation is more interesting to me. There's some earnestness there, but we also know that it's loaded, and I think we're just kind of letting it do what it does.

For sure. I mean, I do think there are recurring themes: of taking different approaches to collaboration, or what it is to establish businesses while coming from an artistic background and approaching businesses like conceptual artworks. These are ideas that I feel like come up time and again. I don't think they're by design, necessarily; I feel like they're just in keeping with the kind of people that we're choosing to speak with, and the kind of people that each of us are.

Yeah. I think one of the most interesting consistent narratives throughout the first season—and I'm positive it will continue to translate through subsequent seasons—is just this notion of breaking down the structural hierarchies within culture. Like, “Is this a brand, or is it also kind of functioning as an artwork?” Or even the way that you can think about creating pop music as a form of air sculpture. I think it's reflective of a semi-urgent narrative within our greater culture, which is that I think over the last decade, information has really flattened and it's been hard to singularly define much of anything, and I think that has had implications for creative output. I feel it in my studio, and I feel it in the conversations I'm having, just in my day-to-day life. So I think this idea that what it means to be an artist or whatever—a clothing designer, or a musician, or an actor—is that it's a little bit less defined than it once was, and the way that the cross-pollination process is happening organically, it seems to be a consistent theme. I think it’s ultimately one of the most contemporary and urgent narratives that we're dealing with.

Any favorite moments from season one?

I mean, meeting Laraaji was pretty epic.

Yeah, I was going to say that. For me, it’s not even a single moment, but his involvement has been such a big deal for me. He was the show's first guest, but he also performed at our launch party and then allowed us to release the audio from that show as an episode. He was really a central character throughout the first season, and as someone who has listened to his music for so many years and has so much respect for him, it was a thrill and genuinely an honor. It was also just a pleasure to spend time with him—like after the launch party, he came to dinner with us at Fanelli Cafe, and he's just such a good guy, and he's so funny. He's just the greatest. So yeah, that was really a pleasure for me.

Yeah. I mean, just spending time, and the little bits of conversation and communication with him.

He's just a very inspiring and open and curious and genuinely available human in a way that is super, super refreshing. It’s very uplifting to be around someone like that, in however small a capacity. My life feels improved from just kind of vaguely brushing up against him—and that keeps happening. We keep hanging out or whatever, dealing with each other, and it's great. Bringing people like that closer to our lives has been huge, huge plus.

Right. I listened to the episode the other day, with his performance, and it's just so beautiful.

Yeah, that was really special.

I think doing a magazine or a podcast, you get these opportunities to engage with people you admire, inviting them into your studio and even just getting to hang out with them, having dinner with them. I see that running a magazine, and that's something where there's not necessarily a monetary value. I think it's really labor of love, and I guess it answers your question a little bit of like, why are you doing this? it's just to meet these people that you've admired for years and get to spend time with them.

Totally. It's just all love. It's cool to have a reason to reach out to someone. It's cool to get to know someone a little bit more and spend some time together. It’s lots of good stuff all around.

Season two is coming up soon. What are you guys thinking?

I mean, more and better! I don’t know. More of the same, but better mics. [laughs]

Yeah. We’re in the process now of deciding on potential guests, speaking with potential sponsors, and thinking about what will carry over from season one and what will change. If nothing else, as we were saying, I'm just excited to keep expanding this little constellation that we've built of interesting people and exciting practices, because whether it's in overt or offhand way, it does feel to me like we're cultivating a kind of community through the project, which is really nice. That's the part I’d most like to see continue.

Totally—and to that end, I think there's room to engage with community in different ways through the project. I think about hosting dinners or events and things like that. As the constellation continues to evolve, season to season, and that group grows, I think it’s about bringing people back into the inner circle and engaging with people in new and different ways. Whatever we do—public talks, or host some sort of events, or whatever—nourishing this community through the project seems to be the singular goal. I can't wait to see where it goes.

Yeah, absolutely. I really like the idea of Abundance evolving as a platform and being able to take on different shapes: a podcast, certainly, but then, as Landon was saying, maybe sometimes also a print publication, or an event series, or a band, or a product design studio, or a mutual aid facilitator or whatever else. I just like the idea that this can be a malleable entity that grows and changes to reflect our ideas and our interests and our circumstances.

The Abundance Zine podcast is produced by Ryan Leahey. Our theme music is by Kasper Bjorke.

You can read and listen to all of our conversations at abundancezine.com. Follow us on Instagram at @abundancezine and be sure to like and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

Thanks for listening.

People on this episode

Landon Metz and Christopher Schreck

Host