Ricarda Messner was born in Berlin-Charlottenburg in 1989, three weeks before the Wall came down. After studying communication at the Berlin University of Arts, she moved to New York, where the plan — and the first serious love — fell apart. She returned to Berlin directionless, spending a year too unsteady to work for anyone else. She needed to make something of her own. Inspired by films like Hiroshima Mon Amour and Rear Window — and by the Baudelairean idea of the flâneur, the attentive urban wanderer — she created a magazine built on a radical constraint: one street per issue. In June 2013, at twenty-three, she published the first edition, devoted to the Kantstraße in her own neighbourhood. The soup-splattered first copy still lives at Lon-Men’s Noodle House on that very street.
Co-editors Grashina Gabelmann and Fabian Saul — she bringing journalistic rigour, he a philosophical and literary sensibility — joined Messner to form the editorial core, with art direction by Studio Y-U-K-I-K-O (Michelle Phillips and Johannes Conrad). For each issue, the team moves to the chosen city, spends weeks or months on the street in question, talks to its residents, photographs its details, and builds a portrait of place that is intimate, layered, and impossible to replicate through any other editorial format. Georg-Schwarz-Straße in Leipzig. Rue Bernard in Montreal. Corso Vittorio Emanuele II in Rome. Streets in Athens, Moscow, São Paulo.
The awards came quickly: D&AD London for Best Entire Magazine, Type Directors Club NYC for Typographic Excellence, LeadAwards Gold for Best Independent Publisher. Forbes named Messner to their 30 Under 30 Europe media list in 2016. At twenty-six, she launched a second publication, Sofa, bridging high and low culture in a glossy, stapled format that costs six euros — a deliberate counterpoint to Flaneur’s lavish production. But the original magazine remains her most singular achievement: proof that the closer you look at a single place, the more you see of the entire world.
<a href="https://www.flaneurmagazine.com/">Visit Flaneur