Next, we had the opportunity to visit Julia Marti at her collective publishing house, Edition Moderne. We were introduced to Julia by Simone Zueger; the two of them are the head creatives of the Zurich branch of ‘Ladies, Wine and Design’. Both of Julia’s contributions, in ‘Edition Moderne’ publishing house and ‘Ladies, Wine and Design’ community, value and respect open-mindedness and inclusion. Through her works in Edition Moderne, she holds a highly political role as to make marginalized content and people visible. Moreover, in the ‘Ladies, Wine and Design’ community, they hold a bi-monthly casual meetup amongst a small group of creative women, where they discuss topics relating to creativity, business, and life.
Our visit to her publishing house and atelier, brought up moments of storytelling through Julia’s experiences in her contributions and what she had learned from it all, or essentially where she situated herself after experiencing everything. At first, she vulnerably shared with us how the success of the community of ‘Ladies, Wine and Design’ was mostly creditable by the fact that it is already a well established, international, community; in which they were lucky enough to integrate it within the Swiss, Zurich, design community. She appreciates the openness, and networking aspects of the community and emphasized how much you could learn from one another who has faced similar obstacles in their daily life as a professional creative woman. However, she commented on the reach and exclusiveness of their small gatherings and shared with us her fascination with the democratic work dynamics of the local ‘Republik’ magazine. Julia excitedly introduced us to the ways of democratic content publishing and the overall business model. In ‘Republik’, they reclaim journalism as a profession and place their readers at the center. The digital magazine launched in 2018, is reader owned and ad free. To reinforce democratic approaches to the publishing world, they propose and practice open-source cooperation, where they value sharing of knowledge, software and business insights with others with journalism projects. Julia took this to her own practices in her circle of the local publishing community, where they meet almost weekly and share a newsletter of their discussions with one another. She proposed and we ideated a way in which to integrate this similar practice within our community-building plans. As a result, the idea of a community-sharing website or digital platform came to mind.