What do you keep close—in your pocket, hanging around your neck, or passing through your fingers—to feel more safe amidst the mystery and reality of our world; which routines—burrowed in your tread, your thoughts, the sky, in the background—allow you comfort within your wandering mind? Those objects and presences of protection, that render wonder and convince significance, form the fabric of Summa, a new literary journal published by Tabayer jewelry.
Echoing Tabayer’s philosophy to connect the metaphysical and tangible in their designs, Summa delves into ancient materials and contemplates forms of guardianship. The editor’s letter introducing the first issue tells us that summa “was a medieval literary genre that aimed to cover the whole terrain of a subject.” Following this intention, the contemporary journal sets out to publish stories on “the collective imaginary of protection—from the magical properties of amulets and talismans to ancient rites and private divinations.” For its inaugural issue, subtitled “Singularity and a Totality,” eight writers, artists and philosophers share texts and imagery on personal, societal and natural talismans and symbols. Their objects of study and care are rooted in yet transgress the material realm through the words that contextualize them in their personally attributed significance.
Circles, gold, a potato, water, garlic, a symbol, a meteorite, time, and deities, worlds apart, transcend time and space and become the humble protagonists of these pages. Their histories strung together not only through a collective theme, but through the recurring materials in its content, of its pages and binding, and through the generous inserts—on the barely light blue pages—by the editors illuminating certain topics. Together these material and conceptual layers form a connected totality: Summa.
No wonder then that the journal opens with “Primary Spheres” a visual essay by Batia Suter on round shapes as found in archival materials; a preface to the continuity of content that challenges the linearity of turning pages. Circles, as seen in (what appear to be) the eye of a parrot, the back of a child’s head, a cell, a shell, an instruction manual, a planet, and diagrams cover full pages. The images, that otherwise seem to exist independently from one another, cleave together through their found origin and circular forms, also foreboding, visually, how the all contributions subtly touch in language, references or content.
