DOWNLOAD PDF OF TELEPORTER: A QUARTERLY INDEPENDENT, SPRING 2025

Welcome to a space we cannot see and can barely describe. We don’t know this space because it is for you. It will come to be as you make it, as we make it. We are artists, essayists, poets, parents, children, survivors, machinists, baristas and more. We are the readers and contributors of Teleporter and we come to this project to create a space. We need this space for critical and intellectually rigorous art writing in Philadelphia, especially to amplify and give visibility to the city’s rich and robust overlapping art scenes. Two major art schools (the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the University of the Arts) closed in 2024 and in January, 2025, the neo-conservative government accelerated its threats to freedom of expression and expanded its nationalist anti-intellectual and anti-artistic actions. Teleporter is a means, however local, to push back against censorship and galvanize intersecting creative and intellectual communities.

Perhaps more importantly, Teleporter is not just here to create a space, but to get to it, now, in real time. That is, teleporters are not primarily about space, but about hyper-fast movement. One moves to and from, out and back, there and here. We must take a step away in order to bring back capacity for change. Teleporter is not about escapism or speaking on issues without praxis. It is about going to a space for that speech, in order that we might return well-armed. For that reason, Teleporter has one mission: to spread unheard voices and provide a space away from government and corporate messaging that seems bent on hurting us, particularly in Philadelphia. Teleporter arrives to provide, here, a space away.

Within these pages you will find analysis and interpretation of all arts twinned with the very practice of those arts. That is, you will find interviews, critical essays, music and book reviews, emerging from Philadelphia’s rich art worlds. But you will also find direct experience with visual and linguistic arts; explore the wonderful submissions of poetry or fiction, of studio art represented in 2D and let yourself be immersed in your neighbors’ practice. Let Teleporter be a space for leisure, beauty, reflection and contemplation.

CONTENTS:

PHILADELPHIA ART MUSEUMS