Meghan Forbes

Meghan Forbes is the founder and co-editor of harlequin creature, an arts & literary imprint. She is also the sole editor of the volume International Perspectives on Publishing Platforms: Image, Object, Text (Routledge, 2019). She has published her essays, reviews, and translations in venues such as as Hyperallergic, Literary Hub, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Words Without Borders, and the Michigan Quarterly Review. Meghan holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and beginning in September 2019 will join the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at The Metropolitan Museum as a postdoctoral fellow in order to complete her first book manuscript, on the interwar Czech avant-garde and technologies of print.

Lucia in the Spring of Her Discontent

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But Lucia was everywhere in Dessau for me. I have spent time with her posthumously, reading her diaries and letters kept at the Bauhaus archive, and looking through her photographs, which include a series of nude self-portraits she took in 1930 after she was “liberated” from Dessau, the Bauhaus, and László. I have been the voyeur she never intended to be leafing through her life with white gloved hands. I don’t take this privilege (for which I never asked her permission) lightly. Her story is now folded into me as we walk through the streets of Dessau, where she is a ghost, haunting the place in which she longed for the city.

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By Meghan Forbes

Berlin, or Being in the Belly

The Hamburger Bahnhof is not a train station now, and never was in Hamburg. It’s a museum of contemporary art in Berlin. It’s also a good metaphor—in name and in content—for this city where nothing is quite as advertised. Though a very fine layer of general German Ordnung covers everything here, it gives way easily to a jumble of rules without regulation, a mass of juxtaposed and unlikely objects of which I am also, and only, one.