The Journal has become The Art Trace
This is not the launch of a new publication and it is not an attempt to erase what came before. The opposite is true. The change became necessary because the Journal itself had changed.
The Journal Had Outgrown Its Original Identity
When the Journal began publishing, its original identity made sense. It was closely connected to writing, research and questions explored through contemporary art.
Over time, however, the archive grew. Hundreds of articles began to accumulate. Interviews appeared alongside criticism, exhibitions alongside politics, feminism, technology, ecology, war, identity and questions of power. Artists returned through different stories, and individual articles gradually became part of a much larger structure.
The Journal also became increasingly international. Most of its writing is now in English, its subjects are global, and many of the artists discussed or interviewed here belong to the international contemporary art scene.
At a certain point, the original identity of the website stopped fully describing what readers were actually finding inside it.
A Question of Perception and Distribution
This matters not only aesthetically, but also in the way a publication is perceived and distributed.
A publication needs an identity capable of communicating what it actually does: criticism, interviews, artist profiles, exhibitions, art movements, political questions and an archive that continues to expand.
The same clarity matters for search engines, discovery platforms and emerging systems through which cultural information is found and interpreted. The identity of a publication, its editorial scope and the way it presents itself need to tell the same story.
As the Journal grows, that alignment becomes increasingly important.
The Art Trace makes the nature of the project clearer: an independent journal of contemporary art and visual culture, developed from a distinct editorial position and built around a continuously expanding archive.
Why The Art Trace?
The name emerged from a recurring question:
What does art leave behind?
We live in a culture obsessed with visibility. Images circulate constantly. Exhibitions open and disappear. Works become viral. Institutions issue statements. Political images move through social media feeds and are replaced hours later by something else.
But visibility and consequence are not the same thing.
Some images are seen by millions and leave almost nothing behind. Others remain marginal, ignored or almost invisible and continue to produce effects years later.
That space between what is seen and what remains has increasingly become one of the central territories of the Journal.
A trace is evidence that something happened. It can be visible or almost impossible to detect. It can survive its source. It can disappear and return. It can be manipulated, forgotten, rediscovered or misunderstood.
The Art Trace therefore describes more than a publication about art. It describes a way of looking at art.
Not simply: What are we looking at?
But: What does it leave behind?
The Transition Is Complete
In September 2026, the Journal completed its transition to The Art Trace and moved to thearttrace.com.
The transition preserved the existing archive, its articles, links, research and editorial history. The Art Trace is therefore not a publication that started from zero, but the continuation and evolution of the Journal that preceded it.
The new identity gives that archive a clearer structure while creating room for the publication to expand beyond the limits of its original format.
What Has Not Changed
The archive has not disappeared. The articles already published remain part of the Journal, together with its editorial independence and critical position.
The subjects also remain open: contemporary art, exhibitions, artists, politics, feminism, technology, ecology, identity, conflict and the structures of power that shape the production and circulation of images.
The change was therefore not about replacing the Journal.
It was about giving the Journal a name capable of describing what it had already become.
No Year Zero
There is no Year Zero.
The Art Trace does not begin with an empty archive. It begins with everything already published here behind it: the articles, the artists, the interviews, the disagreements, the research and the questions that have accumulated over time.
The history of a publication is not something that needs to be erased when its identity changes. It becomes part of the evidence through which that change can be understood.
In that sense, the new name describes the transition particularly well.
Every beginning carries a trace of what came before.