ETC. Magazine #4 2025 / Comfort Zone

Under the title Comfort Zone, the fourth issue of ETC. Magazine explores all the ways in which we understand comfort and safety as they translate into our ideas of family, love, friendship and community. We’re interested in the myriad ways kinship is formed in families both biological and chosen. From open relationships to throuples, how has the relationship unit changed and what kind of dilemmas does it open? Despite the effort toward body positivity, how difficult is it to feel comfortable in one’s own skin? When homes are lost and communities displaced, how can a zone of comfort be made anew? In parallel to the sphere of human relationships, comfort is packaged and sold, commodified to push products and promised to us in the forms of period pads, streaming platforms and comfort foods. Is materialism an acceptable refuge or is it paralysing us into Wall-E’s post-apocalyptic space humans? Are we not comfortable enough or too much so for our own good? In this issue, we seek to explore comfort and care as struggles for physical, sexual and emotional liberation, as well as the often dangerous consequences of retreating into our comfort zones.

PRESENTED ARTISTS