CAST is a semestral magazine which aims to be an indexation of individuals whose presence, work or ideas break, somehow, a rigid matrix which defines whether their identities are recognized by society or not. It hints at the idea of a list but can also mean mold. We desire to reflect a hopeful perspective on the future; our positioning presents facts, but these facts are glimpses of the better days that are to come.
Throughout the issues, CAST represents the different motions of this breakage, by associating each one with a singular meteorological phenomenon. As such, we hope for better weather, for those better days to arrive where individuals can be themselves without constraints, where society’s recognition matrix validates every expression that isn’t harmful or hateful.
In CAST 00, the pilot issue, the reader shall find, in the first section, a contextualization of the concept ground where we stand—BAROMETER—which acts as a meter of the zeitgeist we’re analyzing and explains how an individual is validated or not by society. In the second section—WEATHER FORECAST—a visual narrative accompanied by an audio CD broadens the ideas written in the first part and hints at what the third section—NOCTILUCENT CLOUDS—presents: the individual who starts our cast, the producer SOPHIE, and the universe of references that surround her.
Noctilucent clouds, or night-shining clouds, are Earth’s highest clouds. Unlike normal clouds, these phenomena are generated when ice crystals formed around meteor particles are hit by sunlight. Given that they’re so high up in the Mesosphere—the last layer of the atmosphere where clouds exists—they’re still hit by the light of the sun during astronomical twilight, shining after it set beyond the observer’s horizon, rendering them with a bright blue light that comes from the ozone’s absorption of light in the cloud’s path. They usually happen in summer months, as that’s the time of the year where, counterintuitively, the upper atmosphere is colder (below -120ºC), allowing for the formation of such crystals.
In these overcast days covered in gloomy rain clouds, we shall hope for better weather. In a society framed within strict rules which don’t allow for some bodies to exist, those same bodies still manage to break through this thick layer of grey fog and ascend beyond it, onto clear summer skies, where they shine like noctilucent clouds.
