Europe is not a place, but a feeling. Somewhere between a longing for the faraway and homesickess, it’s pretty contagious. The symptoms are: a yearning for the scent of foreign cities; sometimes feeling foreign in your own country; travelling to a birthday party halfway across a continent; only finding a word in a foreign language.
Who‘s started discovering Europe also starts connecting ‘home’ with an entire continent. This is fuelling the makers of indigo: The magazine is initially appearing in English, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Polish, and Spanish. Same content, different language. Its story and stories tell of the wonderful hurly burly and muddle of languages of this new home.
This goes far further than the usual ‘Europe’ with its union, its treaties, attempts at a constitution, statesmen and -women. Over 100 journalists, photographers, translators, and graphic designers from Spain to Belarus worked at the magazine voluntarily. Their motivation: to turn indigo into a magazine that breaks the boundaries of the usual political paper.
For the occasion, we’ve decided to rewrite the history of the EU: a true family drama. The occasion is the 25th of March, 1957. On that day 50 years ago, six heads of state signed the Treaty of Rome, a crucial step on the EU’s path.
Regrettably, today’s political Europe has lost the lightness with which its people conquered the continent. We’ve packed this thought onto our front page. The collage melds a photo taken in a former warehouse in Berlin with the painting ‘Liberty Leading the People.‘ Delacroix’s masterpiece inspired a statement by German poet Heinrich Heine, which beautifully describes what constitutes the Europe beyond belligerent politics: “A great thought breathes through this picture, one that streams across our faces in wonderful ways.”