20 Seconds, Once a Week: No. 1, with Kalas Liebfried

20PARASECONDS, the collaboration between the Munich-based non-entity PARA and 20 Seconds, for ISSUE 6, is out this November.

Welcome to the first edition of 20 Seconds, Once a Week, on Substack.

Our goal with this new weekly newsletter is to offer a digital vehicle with which to dig deeper into the artists behind and between the pages of 20 Seconds Magazine. Every week, 20 Seconds will present an interview, commentary, spotlight, or excerpt of published and unpublished work from artists part of the magazine’s ever expanding network. More than that, this is a chance to keep supporting the 20 Seconds project financially, beyond purchasing a copy of the biannual print magazine.

Thank you for your support and enjoy the first edition of your new weekly dose of 20 Seconds.

Daniel Melfi

Editor-in-Chief

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With this first edition of 20 Seconds, Once a Week, we’re starting with the magazine’s latest project: ISSUE 6. Our sixth issue is a collaborative experiment with PARA, a non-defined cultural entity—but more like a fluid substance or network of ideas—based in Munich and founded by Anja Lekavski, Jakob Braito and Kalas Liebfried.

I spoke to Liebfried—who is also an editor-at-large at 20 Seconds—over Zoom, connecting Toronto and Munich, about the parasitic cohabitation of 20 Seconds ISSUE 6. Liebfried is also a curator, musician and visual artist and part of Munich’s Rosa Stern Space, a place for free artistic production and presentation.

In this interview, we discuss the foundation of PARA, 20PARASECONDS and the live interpretation of a visual score by Dick Higgins from 1981. The recording of that performance (by Beni Brachtel and Dominik Lekavski) will be available for listening on the 20 Seconds SoundCloud page upon the magazine’s release this November.

Photos by Mathias Reitz Zausinger, for 20 Seconds Issue 6.

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Location: Toronto/Munich

Date: 19/10/2023

Daniel Melfi: Let’s start from the beginning. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about what PARA is and how you would define an entity that is often non-defined.

Kalas Liebfried: That’s the core point: There is no entity. So describing PARA as a non-entity is a bit absurd but, when we take the word PARA, it’s always added to another word, so it is always joining another entity in order to change it, in order to state an in-between. This was the core idea from the very beginning, which started with Jakob Braito and Anja Lekavski a few years ago—to say that we’re not founding a label, we’re not founding a magazine, we’re not founding a radio station, we’re not founding a band, or whatever entity you can create when you want to produce things regarding music, sound, visual arts, transdisciplinary practice and so on. We always want to collaborate with things that already exist that we find interesting and to somehow be parasitic in a positive way, to change a system, to join it and to create something new.