With Lunch 14, the editors of Lunch Journal wondered if they could use the frontier story itself to decenter its power.
The journal is divided into 4 sections. Edges explores the form and possibilities of the edge itself, and unravels the hard binary condition of the frontier. Wild flips the narrative around, picking apart established categorisations of wild and tame to deny their separate-ness. Metrics examines methods of observing and quantifying themselves as tools for gaining new understandings: the map creates 'the frontier' so to change the way we map or measure is to change the frontier itself. And finally, Culture takes on the 'us' and 'them' of the frontier, shifting our perception of this as a binary divide to a growing rhizomatic network of beings: where the meeting of cultures does not mean appropriation, erasure and dominance but a hope for generative complexity.
The promised land lies just over the horizon; that's what we told ourselves. This great unknown, the frontier, has taken many forms throughout history: the silk road, the wild west, the space race, the human genome project. Anywhere unknown was hostile, yet full of promise. That romantic notion of the frontier persists, but the undiscovered open land, waiting to be claimed – it's already discovered, already occupied. The frontier of the past doesn't care – its skies are wide and its memory narrow.
