Photography by BELLA LIEBERBERG
DEAR FRIENDS OF SLEEK,
There is a question I have been asking myself repeatedly over the past months: when did we stop playing? Not: when did we stop playing games. But when did we stop treating life the way a child treats an afternoon – without a predetermined outcome, without a metric at the end, without knowing where it leads? I think it happens gradually. First we optimise a little. Then we monetise. Then we measure. Until every impulse becomes a strategy and every instinct a KPI. What remains is efficiency. What is lost is everything else. This issue is a response to that. Not as nostalgia – we have no interest in returning to the kids room. But as a serious claim: play is not the opposite of taking things seriously. It is its highest form.
FEDOR HOLZ started playing poker at fifteen. With friends, because it was fun. Not out of ambition, out of curiosity. Over fifty million dollars in tournament winnings later, he stopped – not because the game had defeated him, but because it had stopped feeling like one. He says: “I hardly ever had to discipline myself. When that changed, I stopped.” In a world determined to convert every drive into productivity, that is the most radical sentence I have heard in a long time.
KENNY MOORE II did not start playing football until his final year of high school. Basketball, soccer, track – everything except what would make him famous. When I met him in Berlin, where he played with the Colts against the Falcons in 2025, I asked him what it felt like to have arrived somewhere he never expected to be. He said: “I believe God makes no mistakes. I just walk my path.” Moore II is not in the NFL despite his varied athletic history – he is there because of it. Because he never played towards a destination. Only towards the next game.
And then there is CAO FEI. The Chinese artist whose work exists between real and imagined cities, between documentary and speculation, between a present she dissects and a future not yet built. Cao Fei does not play with ideas. She plays with the assumptions on which ideas rest. That is the purest form of play: not within the rules – but with them. These three people made this issue for me. Not because they all spoke about play – but because they all live it. With exactly that seriousness Nietzsche had in mind when he wrote: “The mature man has rediscovered the seriousness which he had as a child at play.” Play is not a light subject. It is the heaviest one I know.
Because it demands what we have forgotten most completely: to let go without knowing where you will land. Play hard. Create harder.
CHRISTIAN BRACHT
Publisher & CEO, SLEEK