RAT MAGAZINE Issue 1 Protection (2025)
Created by: Sunniva Hestenes, Eli Eli Eli and Thea Josefin Cedervall
first edition 100 copies
second edition 100 copies
size: 21.59 x 27.94 cm 80 pages
Print: Christensen Grafisk
paper: Multidesign white matte uncoated
typeface: Akzidenx-Grotesk Next
Editors note:
Flickering between care and control, intimacy and isolation – there are many ways to describe protection. Bodies, ideas, and societies are shielded by visible or invisible borders. But who decides what is worth protecting, and why?
To protect is to anticipate harm, thereby revealing what it is we fear. It can be an act of care, a strategy of resistance, or a tool of control. Gentle or violent, it is by all means contradictory.
One might suggest that the act of photography itself is a form of protection. By isolating moments or memories, we hold them close – rendering the world more legible. Yet in this era, the never-ending digital flow of photographic images can just as easily be invasive or disorienting.
For this first issue of Rat Magazine, we wish to explore different takes on the theme of protection. The contributing artists utilize photography in various ways, each engaging with the implications of the word through their own visual language.
The Rat
The rat is undermined and overlooked. Sometimes even discarded.
Whether it's through the western association of plague bringers, cultural sayings like “ratting someone out” or the unfair association of uncleanliness, rats have come to represent betrayal, poverty, decay and disease. Simultaneously, they stand as icons of resistance, revolution and resilience.
The rat is in many ways a mirror, a codependent twin reflecting humanity’s most unfortunate denials. Our trash, our ruin, our wars. We condemn them as vermin, yet benefit from their intelligence, adaptability and communal loyalty. The rat, often scrutinised and despised, reveals more about our fears and insecurities than about its own nature.
In Rat Magazine the selected artists assume the role of the rat: an adaptor, a collector and a witness. Like the rat they commit fully to the act of observation. They engage with the structures and symbols that shape contemporary life.
Regardless of approach and obsession, they embody the rat by working outside the traditional frameworks of photography, they open new ways of seeing and in turn expand the limits of what is shown, understood and told within visual culture.
We (the editors) are not prioritising the reproduction of finished projects instead we wish to intervene. Submitted pieces are therefore scanned, manipulated and transformed, adding layers of texture, distortion and new contexts.
This approach is a response to the increasingly polished, intellectually distanced and sellable world of contemporary photography. We value material presence, imperfection and playfulness. We insist that even finished works are not fixed, they can be handled, altered and re-seen.
Just like the rat.