gg place is an independent multilingual folding magazine about everything human: where research blends with creative expression and where inspiring ideas can thrive.
Where gg means good game, grave groove, generation global, growing gardens and glowing guide.
The publication consists of a single 3.8-meters long folded photo-paper. This unique design is inspired by traditional manuscript folding techniques, such as orihon in Japan and pustaha in Indonesia. By combining the past knowledge with novel printing techniques, this double-sided accordion format creates an absorbing reading experience.
The curation process is inspired by the practice of cultural anthropology. gg place aims to utilize the therapeutic potential of this dicipline, with each issue following a specific theme, responsive to the needs of this troubled world that we all share.The scroll features impactful stories from all around the planet, in collaboration with writers, journalists, artists, and translators.
The magazine was created in 2026 as a direct response to the collective anxieties that we feel right now, as the future is uncertain, caught between geopolitical tensions and rapid climate crisis escalation. The way out of this leads us back to each other, to compassion, cooperation, curiosity, learning, and unity in our shared struggles.
In the era of blue-light, we decided to go physical. gg place is a publication that travels across independent stores and culture centres around the world, carried by a distribution community.
Our goal is to make it to your favourite bookshop!
Dorota Olsavska, a nomadic anthropologist, journalist, and writer. She studied social and cultural anthropology at Leiden University, Sungkyunkwan University, and the University of Amsterdam. Along her journey, she found interest in marginal knowledge, poetics of translation, and combining academia with creative expression. She started gg place to connect with inspiring people, and explore the intriguing layers of life.
Get in touch
You can support the launch and buy Issue 1 here.
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KVK 96300930
ISSN 3118-1392
The pilot issue of gg place magazine presents writers, virtual avatars and field reporters, on-air from ateliers and warzones. In 8 features, they answer the call to explore the meaning of touch today – this new contact in creativity, heritage, daily cultures and the globalised world: from unlikely meetings to the dreams of reunion.
Selected features are available in Arabic, Korean, Japanese and Ukrainian.
Cover photos by Olsdee Photography @olsdee
Introduction
On Getting in Touch
Welcome to the first issue of gg place, the independent folding magazine made to document and comfort a troubled world.
This is a safe place for those who feel paralyzed by the state of things. The lost and searching souls who find themselves in between worlds. The curious ones and those who want to do something meaningful (even if unsure what that would be yet) to make "the game" we play more compassionate.
"Old friends at the beach talk without words" is the photo that was chosen for the cover of this issue. It captures an eternal moment between two beings and the ocean. Looking at it, you can almost feel the breeze ruffle through your hair and hot sand brush against your fingertips. The moment is here to remind us of something we keep forgetting in this speedy era: the need for touch.
No matter where on this planet you were born, we all meet in times of rising isolation, limited access to resources, anxieties about futures and blurry identity paths – able to catch up in a single click and somehow drifting further apart. We can place the beginnings of our disconnection in between the first rising skyscrapers and the pixels that spill from our screens. The greedy stranger's desire for eternal growth severed deep bonds that used to exist between our ecosystems and our minds. Yet, in real time, we are witnesses to a new kind of growth sprouting from these wounds. It reaches further than ever before and forms unheard-of ways of connecting.
Closeness is the perfect theme to open a print publication. As a pageless strip of paper, the shape of gg place is an ode to the history of human relationship with thought and material, in other words, all the things that happen between a limb, a paint, and a surface. Swiping through invites us to recall the faint memory of leporelos, the folding books from our childhood that, back then, seemed endless. By balancing this scroll on your palm, you are entering that realm once again.
When was the last time that you saw something in the news that made you smile? Buried deep under the daily global news of destruction lie the hidden and forgotten deeds of good, the tales of dedication, hard work, and efforts towards brighter tomorrows. Anti-insanity Ritual is a virtual project, assembling the good news into chronicles of hope for humanity.
Written by tt.
A thinker who writes rather than a writer who thinks, drawn to the terrain between disciplines. Where the humanities, science, literature, art, and mathematics refuse to exist separately. Where the past continues to speak inside the present. There is a particular reverence for the dead here, not as relics but as quiet collaborators in the ongoing work of the living. The past is studied closely; the present met with discernment. Thought is kept nourished; language, attentive, not just a carrier of information, but part of the composition. Inquiry remains restless, as curiosity maps the ground mindful of those who walked it first.
Accompanying art by gl1tc4_s0n. A glitch artist and techspressionist from Kharkiv, Ukraine.
This is a story woven through skin. For centuries, Ryukyuan women, indigenous to the Okinawa islands, wore intricate hand tattoos, called ‘Hajichi’. However, this sacred practice, along with their lives, was heavily burdened by colonial oppression. During the preparation for this article, we received feedback from the Ryukyu community to always include an indigenous creator. So, Tereza, the author of this article, reached out to Mim, the owner of a tattoo studio in Okinawa, to tell us more.
Talks with Minami Shimoji * Mim Drawing
Written and translated from Japanese by Tereza Kovalská
Born and raised in Okinawa, Minami is a body artist, occupational therapist and a musician. Daily, she deepens her learning about Okinawan (Ryukyu) history and culture, Hajichi and the spirituality of her ancestors.
Tereza. An aspiring writer and graduate of East Asian Studies. She is currently working on her debut novel “Lost Among Salarymen” which she hopes will serve as a guide to anyone wishing to live and work in Japan.
From vinyl, tapes and CDs to worn-out soles and then back again. The sudden connection of the 21st century opened access to a wide range of sounds and places that we otherwise would have only dreamed of visiting, including the efforts of alternative currents from around the world. Looking beyond the tall towers of K-Pop, this visual reflection on a student's research captures fragments of the fluid underground music scene in Seoul.
Photo-Essay by Iba Swan
A theoretical lighthouse keeper, writer, traveler, documentary maker and eternal apprentice.
She is interested in the meaning of fairy tales, most notably the overlap between urban legends and reality. Her work is focused on making anthropology more human and honouring ordinary rebellions.
the Horse
What if we interpreted a 50 years old Soviet animated fairy tale with a modern twist? We might find out that a forest full of danger is no different from the world wide web we're plugged into.
Norstein’s Hedgehog in the Fog (1975) becomes a small parable about touch in a mediated age: awe, dread, anonymous grace, then the awkward return to tea, jam and a friend.
Written by Tom Sanders * Speak Weird Words
A writer and sometime a performer whose work drifts through surveillance, memory and myth. He’s written a play in which statues speak, a story about a zoo with no exits, and journalism that tastes faintly of iron and ash.
His fiction and essays circle the eerie, the civic, and the unresolved. He reports from the fog but tries not to live in it.
A personal reflection on craftsmanship, cultural identity, and passion in the age of inhuman efficiency. As the creative world becomes increasingly reliant on the production of fast–paced digital matter, Chaerin's words focus on the artist's life and the slow touch of the material.
Written by Im Chaerin
An experimental filmmaker from South Korea. With the use of craftsmanship and distinctive materials, she explores gender issues and sexual imagery. By combining and experimenting with analog and digital print techniques, she makes new visual languages that challenge conventional norms of gender and sex.
Translated by Kim Jun-Yop.
On memory, belonging, and the internet beyond capitalism. 'Preserving Worlds' is a documentary series about aging social virtual worlds, intriguing online spaces that have been active since as early as the 90s, and the vibrant online communities built around them. Using an ethnographic approach, this duo of filmmakers noclip between the delicate environments to capture how people form bonds and spend time there. Welcome on board of the expedition.
Talks with Derek Murphy and Mitchell Zemil
Derek works as a public librarian in Boston, Massachusetts, but does film work in his spare time. Mitchell is a professional animator and adjunct professor in Brooklyn, New York. Together, they are a pair of filmmakers who have been working together ever since they started filming urban exploration trips in their hometown of Sarasota, Florida. That footage became the basis of an experimental documentary, Sarasota Half in Dream.
Following closely along the old railway network that connected neighbours to neighbours, Jwan's essay traces the past organic coherence of the West Asia* region and its violent colonial disruption, challenging the imperial lens and offering a dream of shared futures.
*This term has been favoured among scholars, notably Nawal El Saadawi, to replace 'Middle East', due to the Eurocentric nature of the latter term: as it refers to the proximity of this area from the British colonial empire, instead of viewing it as a center of its own.
Written and translated to Arabic by Jwan Zreiq
A Palestinian writer based in Amman, Jordan, writing from the perspective of the diaspora. Her work explores identity, memory, and language as tools of anti-colonial reclaiming, situating the struggle for a free Palestine within broader movements for liberation across the Global South, Indigenous communities, and marginalized peoples worldwide.
Vincent, one of the few masters of the sarangi and the only player of an amplified version of this instrument in the world, takes us on a walk along his music career. The sarangi, a rare Indian bowed instrument, becomes an intriguing case of a living heritage, where touch helped to revive a nearly forgotten sound. Now, it sails on experimental tides, towards neoteric shores.
Talks with Vincent Swierstra
A musician based in Amsterdam. He likes to combine the raw, mystic sound of the sarangi with electronic music. In 2021, Vincent released his first EP, The Sarangi Sessions Vol. 1, a collaboration with four hip-hop producers. In March 2025, he released a second Sarangi Sessions EP, this time working with techno producers. Recently, he finished a master's at Amsterdam University in Cultural and Social Anthropology. He wrote his thesis about the past, present, and future of the sarangi.
Movement is an exhale, a waving flag, a step into the unknown...
The second issue of gg place magazine channels the kinetic energy of our speedy worlds–from the pathways in our bodies and minds to those we walk and shape. Observing discussions between pilgrims who crossed mountains to reach a better life and astronauts navigating the way back home. Keeping up with cheetahs sprinting towards finishing lines and reaching behind barricades to hold hands with protesters who are left with no choice but to throw fireworks.
Selected features will be available in Vietnamese, French, Czech and Korean. More translations are in preparation.
Introduction
For Movement is Us,
and We Make the Waves
Join us for a ride through frosty mountains and buzzing streets, on the way to Oslo, Prague and Ho Chi Minh City, along the shores of Jeju Island and through the asphalt glades of Los Angeles. You’ll wake up all dizzy and sore, and we’ll breakfast on vending-machine espresso and discount croissants.
The first three Bourne films: Identity (2002), Supremacy (2004), and Ultimatum (2007) are basically an American power trip, following CIA agents making a mess around the world while trying and failing to capture an ex-assassin of theirs (Jason Bourne), who has suffered amnesia and is uncovering his past. I decided to open this issue with a dynamic reflection on this aged spy thriller series, because somehow, in the background of the action scenes, the films capture the essence of transnational identity in a raw feeling, that I, quite frankly, rarely see recreated. Let me explain.
Being an immigrant Euro-kid, I learned from a young age to find comfort in long rides. Cars, trams, buses, trains. Headlights reflecting on navigation boards, shoes off, watching racing raindrops. When I was seven, my mom and I would take an overnight express from Prague (where I grew up and where the Zurich scenes in The Bourne Identity were actually filmed) to a village in easternmost Slovakia, just by the Ukrainian border. There, I'd stay with my grandparents for a few summer weeks. Train stations meant warm evenings, peanut candy, and the calls of doves in poplar trees. When I layer this memory over Jason’s train escape to Moscow, the coloniser’s den and the source of suffering for my people and land, I get a picture where identical concrete blocks of flats rise from the ground and where the faces of extras and kin look alike.
I'm all grown up now, and the motion remains. Train stations in the cities I’ve called home each carry their own set of beeps, chimes and calls. They mean returning to peace after a busy day. As time passes, new trajectories emerge, and so does the motion sickness. Like there on the third pendulum car trip, when I was transporting random stuff from Prague to Rotterdam, passing liminal German gas stations with the aftertaste of black coffee and chewing gum stuck in my mouth. My beloved voluntary exile. No agents were chasing me, and yet I kept going. Perhaps you’ve been there before, touching the moist, blurry ghost layer that forms on the windows from the inside. FM radio playing songs you’ve heard too many times or will never hear again in a language you abandoned in high school. Or perhaps that’s the fourth language you mastered to build the life your parents dreamed up for you? Or the broken language you used to chat with the market owner on the corner?
Yes, I recognise you. We've met before, standing in the immigration line. In all lifetimes, we've remained united in our seeking. Was it an 11-hour flight or a month-long journey across war-torn lands and restless seas? On both occasions, a single piece of paper stretched into a border between hope and detention. We keep two passports in the drawer, along with a residence permit, a student card from another place and a couple of travel passes from elsewhere, not because we’re wanted criminal masterminds—although they like to portray us as such—but because in a way, we belong to all of these places and to none of them at the same time. Amnesia is the culprit, after all, as if we've forgotten a part of who we are somewhere and keep venturing out to retrieve it.
In reality, every day, as we navigate the universe, we are actively materialising it. By shaking the atoms in and around, we can shape movement into a spell that has the potential to turn a stranger into a friend, the foreign into the familiar, and reshape structures of power. Jason didn’t take it that far—his story is surprisingly self-conscious in its portrayal of harm, yet fails to deliver an actual condemnation of those who cause it—but I believe we can. As we find ourselves surrounded by efforts to weaponise and restrict human movement with artificial lines, honouring the eternal nature of passage, voyage, and escape becomes more important than ever. Think about this the next time you find your consciousness in a transitory state, perhaps on a tram one sunny Tuesday, passing a busy crowd.
For Movement is Us,
and We Make the Waves.
TEASERS COMING SOON!
What have our dreams become?
The third issue of gg place magazine challenges us to dive into the deeper parts of our subconscious minds, drifting between saturated, peaceful lands where the inner child resides and the dark woods of uncertainty, from which we crawl forward.
Submissions are open. Doors are open for pieces exploring dreaming: the nostalgia for the past, the creation of futures, the science behind human brains, and the nature of the realms we visit when asleep.
We accept essay, reflection, review, reportage, poetry, prose, and more.