“Shantih shantih shantih”

This “Karma” issue steps back from a world marked by the often blind and obstinate quest for productivity and efficiency, a world that still pretends it can control everything so as not to call itself into question. Founded on false assurances, capitalist logic pursues its frantic race, while the myths it has engendered collapse a bit more each day, announcing a crisis of disembodied rationality spurred by growing awareness of the effects of climate change.

“We reap what we sow,” warned one of the main laws of karma several millennia ago. However, each period of great upheaval also heralds the dawn of a new era full of possibilities. The one to come, then, could abandon the obsessive pursuit of profitability to seek out instead fulfillment and harmony between humans, the Earth, and all the beings that inhabit it. This, at least, is what Corine Sombrun – who began learning shamanic practices after suddenly entering a trance during a ritual ceremony – dreams of. She considers this Dionysian mental state as a gateway to challenge egocentrism. An aspiration she shares with today’s Radical Faeries, members of a gay movement born in the late 1970s, which drew inspiration from paganism and camp to rebel against patriarchal values and encourage a more ethical relationship to the environment.

This issue also features singer Kali Uchis, actress Agathe Rousselle – the female lead in Titane, winner of the Palme d’Or at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival – and model, actor, and dancer Alton Mason, who discuss their individual relationships to the notion of karma and explain how it drives them to surpass themselves every day. The iconic Béatrice Dalle, interviewed by Canadian director Bruce LaBruce, evokes her unique relationship to Christ, while writer Simon Johannin pens an exclusive short story about the spiritual awakening he experienced over the past few months.   

This theme has also inspired several designers, who deploy esoteric motifs and references in their collections like so many fragments shored against the ruins of a world under construction, to paraphrase the poet T. S. Eliot, whose modernist masterpiece, The Waste Land, finds new resonance today.

The attraction to spirituality is also at the heart of this issue’s photographer, Lee Wei Swee, who attempts to surface a form of collective excitement in each of his shoots by voluntarily abandoning his ego. A collaborative outlook recalling, in part, that of rapper Laylow, whose long and generative collaboration with director Osman Mercan has played a determining role in his exponential success. Virtuous circles that promise good karma?