Spring/Summer 2022 "The Body" Issue

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ELIZA DOUGLAS

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WOLFGANG TILLMANS

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PRECIOUS OKOYOMON & BOBBI MENUEZ

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JESSIE ANDREWS

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MAT+KAT

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AUTRE S/S 2022, Issue 14

JAMES LOVELOCK Access To Gaia 30—33

DANIELE FUMMO, Five London-Based Artists On Their Somatic Practices 44—55

ELIZA DOUGLAS, Interview by ANOHNI 122—147

ANA MENDIETA, A Return to the Maternal Source by Estefania Puerta 56—59

PHOTOPHOBIA, Interview of Lengua by Jordan Richman 148—157 TRULEE HALL & LYDIA MARIA PFEFFER, The Earth As Deity 34—37

AMALGAMATION, Editorial by Antoine Harinthe 60—69

WOLFGANG TILLMANS, Interview by Sasha FrereJones 160—181

JARITA HOLBROOK & TAVARES STRACHAN, Space Race 70—77

CONTENTS

THE BODY IN TROUBLE, Letter From The Editors 29

WHAT ISN'T NATURE?, Editorial

By Mat+Kat 182—195

LUIGI ONTANI, Interview by Ariana Papademetropoulos Photographed in Rome 38—43

BOBBI MENUEZ & PRECIOUS OKOYOMON, Time Outside of Time 196—205 SUFI, Editorial of Whirling Dervishes by Osman Özel 78—103 PANTEHA ABARESHI, A Center for Healing and Abolition 104—109 CASSANDRO EL EXÓTICO, by Fede Reyes and Rachel Israela 110—121

VEGET-ANIMA, Editorial by Naguel Rivero 206—217

JERMAINE FRANCIS, Exploring Sinéad O'Dwyer 252—259

SPENCER PHIPPS, The Great Outdoors 308—329

SANFORD BIGGERS & TREMAINE EMORY, Codeswitch 260—269

COVER 01 ELIZA DOUGLAS photographed

by JACK PIERSON. Interview by ANOHNI. Wearing BALENCIAGA.

ECOSEXUALITY Annie Sprinkle, Beth Stephens, and Kim TallBear in Conversation 218—225 PICTURE IN PICTURE, by Renate Ariadne 270—279

FAITH WILDING, Interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist 330—337

LOUISE BONNET, Interview

by Bill Powers 282—287

IVANA VLADISLAVA by Daniel Roché 226—239 EMILY BARKER & ROBERT MCRUER, Crip Times 240—243 CHRIS WOLSTON, A Material Reality 244—251

MARIANA TRENCH, Editorial

by Thomas Hauser 338—359 FASHION LABEIJA, The Body As A Weapon 288—293

COVER 02 WOLFGANG TILLMANS. Cover by Tillmans and ANDERS CLAUSEN. Interview

by SASHA FRERE-JONES.

THE SKIN WE'RE IN, Editorial

By Scott Gallagher 360—371 WET MEDUSA, Editorial by Alex Huanfa Cheng 372—383 JESSIE ANDREWS, Interview by Oliver Kupper 384—391

BEAUTY REGIME, Editorial

by Daniele Fummo 294—307

STETHOSCOPE TO THE COSMOS, Essay by Lita Albuquerque 392—393

COVER 03 PRECIOUS OKOYOMON and BOBBI SALVÖR MENUEZ. Photograph by NICK SETHI.

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS We are dust, celestial vapor, star matter, molecular code, a cosmic anomaly, infinitely complex software in a soft machine on Spaceship Earth. The human body—much like Earth—is a strange and miraculous vehicle. Between our skin and the distant reaches of the universe, a cosmology of past, present, and future—capital and ecology—desire and magma—exist in a kind of somatic time warp, an invisible collection of double helices and biological programming.

In the 1970s, chemist James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis proposed a theory that has been understood by many Indigenous cultures for centuries and they called it the Gaia hypothesis. This theory states that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet. Not only do all parts of this system work to the benefit of the whole, but they are all equally vital. This issue is an cross-disciplinary exhaustive exploration of our body’s relationship to these systems and what it means for our future here on Earth.

Currently, there is a war being waged on the body and the body is in trouble. From the pandemic to fresh battles for reproductive and gay rights, the climate crisis, racial violence, and now the war in Ukraine, it is important to look to artists, scientists, and futurists about the potentialities of the body in the 21st century and beyond. In this issue, we delve deeply and earnestly into theories about race, gender, class, disability, anthropology, and sexuality. What we learned is that the body is resilient, yet often maladaptive, and survival is about education and communion. Spinoza’s quote, “no one knows what a body can do,” is evident in every single one of these pages. We spoke to Annie Sprinkle, Beth Stephens, and Kim TallBear about ecosexuality and the possibilities of finding a non-binary, interspecies, erotic relationship with the planet. You will also find a conversation between artist Emily Barker and Robert McRuer, who wrote the groundbreaking book, Crip Theory, about cultures of disability and queerness.

And cultural astronomer Jarita Holbrook speaks to artist Tavares Strachan about the myth of the Black monolith. Also, designer Tremaine Emory with Sanford Biggers discuss Black bodies and extractive ecologies. We also speak to photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, who provides us with a special portfolio of images about the power of music as a tool for liberating the body.

We also spoke to James Lovelock himself, who at almost 103 years old wrote to us from his home in Dorset, England about the origins of his Gaia theory. In his latest book, Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence, the curtains of the human age are quickly closing and the age of benevolent, eco-friendly, artificial superintelligence is upon us. He looks to cyborgs not as a threatening force, but as caretakers with whom we cross the climatic threshold into the unknown. As our industries of culture make commitments to becoming more sustainable, as we attempt to hold them to account, and as we question how every individual can do their part, a closer look at our bodies might be a good place to start. Every day, we make choices regarding the ways that we nourish our bodies, medicate our bodies, dress our bodies, employ our bodies, and touch our bodies. They have the power to act as sites of oppression or sites of liberation.

They behave faithfully and reflexively, and they communicate their pleasure and pain without need for metaphor. They speak so clearly, we don’t even need ears to hear them.

— Oliver Kupper and Summer Bowie

spaceship earth AUTRE MAGAZINE 14 The Body Issue

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JAMES LOVELOCK

ACCESS TO Chemist, inventor, scientist, and futurist James Lovelock’s revolutionary Gaia theory, which postulates that the Earth acts as a self-regulating super-organism, or body, single-handedly changed the way we see the world and jump-started the modern environmentalist movement. His invention of the electron capture detector, which exposed trace amounts of pollutants and pesticides in the atmosphere, inspired Rachel Carson to write her groundbreaking book, Silent Spring (1962).

Consequently, we now know the insecticide DDT entered the food chain and into our fatty tissues, causing cancer and generational genetic mutations. Naturally, detractors argued that the Gaia theory didn’t follow Darwin’s principles of natural selection, so Lovelock developed a virtual planet called Daisyworld that orbited a star system much like our sun— white daisies reflected the sunlight while black daisies absorbed it, creating a feedback loop that generated a mathematically perfect balance for life to exist. Philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist, Bruno Latour, considers Galileo and Lovelock the proverbial bookends of modern cosmology, a 300year period that characterizes humanity’s understanding of the way our planet moves and the way we move our planet.

GAIA Interview SUMMER BOWIE Portrait HOMER SYKES 30

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Photograph courtesy of ALAMY

I like to think (and the sooner the better!) of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky.

I like to think (right now, please!) of a cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics where deer stroll peacefully past computers as if they were flowers with spinning blossoms.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace by Richard Brautigan

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ACCESS TO GAIA James Lovelock

SUMMER BOWIE Can you describe the moment that Gaia came to you? Was there a eureka moment?

JAMES LOVELOCK It did not, because it came to the Austrian physicist, [Erwin] Schrödinger, first.

In his book What Is Life?, he defined life as a process that reduces its entropy. For example, when sunlight falls on a green leaf, the leaf emits the gas, oxygen. When dry, the leaf will burn in the oxygen. This is an example of entropy reduction by a living system. Here's an example of entropy reduction by life you can try for yourself.

Purchase an infrared thermometer.

These devices measure the surface temperature of anything they are pointed at. Take it into your garden and point it to the roof of your house on a sunny day. The thermometer will read a temperature of 70°C or higher if the roof is made of dark colored tiles or slats. Then, point the thermometer at the surface of any green plant, for example a tree, or the grass of a lawn.

The thermometer will now read a temperature lower than 22°C. This is an example of Gaia in action, the plants are cooling the Earth. They do so because it takes nearly 600 calories to evaporate a gram of water.

This massive misunderstanding of the workings of the Earth took place because the universities decided, for what seemed to be practical reasons, to separate the teaching of physical science and biology. This allowed the appointment of more professors than before and it also allowed those students who found mathematics difficult to still graduate in a scientific subject, biology.

In the practical world of invention and engineering, the luxury of separated sciences is not allowed.

Engineers and inventors make devices that work in practice. They may or may not require intuition to achieve this.

Whilst working at the JPL, I shared an office with the astronomer, Carl Sagan.

Previously he had been married to Lynn Margulis, whom I did not meet until 1970 at an Earth Science meeting in Princeton. Lynn was appointed rapporteur for this meeting but we had little time for discussions about Gaia.

When I visited her in her laboratory at Boston University, hospitably, Lynn invited me to her home in Newton, Massachusetts. There, we discussed Gaia at length and subsequently published several papers.

My first paper on Gaia was in the popular science journal, New Scientist, in 1975. I shared the authorship with the science writer, Sydney Epton. The first book on Gaia was published by Oxford University Press in 1979, with the title, Gaia, A New Look at Life on Earth.

Earlier, I described the experience with William Golding as we walked together discussing this new idea I had about the detection of life on Mars. I suggested that NASA analyze the chemical composition of Mars and Venus’ atmospheres. The presence of gasses that react with one another, like oxygen and methane, on Earth, suggests the presence of life. The engineers at JPL liked this notion because it would be so easy to implement on the low-power spacecraft available at the time.

Bill Golding also liked the idea and suggested that it should have a proper name. He suggested I call it Gaia. And so I did. I suppose that was a eureka moment for me, as I think it was for him.

SUMMER Can you explain the roles that both you and Lynn Margulis played in formulating the Gaia theory?

LOVELOCK It is important to recognize that Gaia theory, which saw the Earth as a self-regulating system, able to keep its temperature and composition favorable for life, was discussed and established with William Golding and with colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory

several years before there was a chance to discuss the theory with Lynn Margulis.

BOWIE Can you talk about the intuitive mind and the role that it plays in both invention and the evolution of computer programming?

LOVELOCK The intuitive mind.

I certainly have such a mind and I have used it throughout my scientific career to stimulate invention. When Archer Martin, the inventor of gas chromatography, challenged me to invent a sensitive detector for him, I presented him with two entirely novel detectors a mere two weeks after this challenge. The first was the argon detector, which had worldwide sales and put gas chromatography on the map. The second was the electron capture detector, without which the global presence of chlorofluorocarbons in the atmosphere would not have been found. This device could detect CFCs at levels less than parts per trillion. It is important to note that both of these inventions were intuitive and almost immediate. It took me two years to write computer programs that quantitatively explained the use and operation of these detectors.

BOWIE Can you talk a little bit about your latest book, Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence, and what prompted it?

LOVELOCK The idea of this new historic period came into my mind just before I fell ill with a respiratory infection and was unable to write for almost a year. My dear friend, Bryan Appleyard, a talented writer, did his best to put in print my thoughts on the Novacene. But it is unfinished work.

Remember, I will be 103 this July and not as healthy as I would wish.

BOWIE In Novacene, you talk about a number of geoengineering possibilities that cyborgs might employ in order to cool the planet.

These include various techniques from reflecting incoming sunlight back into AUTRE MAGAZINE 14 The Body Issue

space, to broadcasting waste heat to space in the form of microwaves.

Are you leaning toward any of these techniques in particular?

LOVELOCK Geoengineering need not await the appearance of the Novacene. It could be done now. The main objections are political rather than scientific. I love the idea of broadcasting junk television programs using microwaves as a way to help cool the planet.

end

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LYDIA MARIA PFEFFER & TRULEE HALL IN CONVERSATION

THE EARTH AS DEITY Ghosts, monsters and mythological beings thrive in Austrian artist Lydia Maria Pfeffer’s decadent and orgiastic large-scale paintings. Rife with Jungian archetypes, Pfeffer’s benevolent spirits are so gender fluid they practically drip off the canvas.

They wear leather, bondage gear, and festive appurtenances, like veils, ribbons and bunny rabbit thongs, harkening a necrorave in some lost corner of Bosch’s Garden Of Earthly Delights. Born in a small village in Austria, Pfeffer’s artwork is imbued with both the sylvan pastorality of the deep, dark woods and a desire for queer liberation. She cherry picks the allegorical canon to create safe spaces for femme spirits to express themselves at will. Pfeffer, whose solo exhibition Lily Of The Valley will be on view at Ochi Projects, discusses gods, monsters and evolutionary shifts with fellow artist Trulee Hall.

TRULEE HALL I’m really curious about your shamanism and your use of animals. Is that something that you've done since childhood?

Did you really feel like you were related to animals in that way?

LYDIA MARIA PFEFFER Yes. I grew up in a small, 500-person village in Austria and I’ve always had a fascination with animals. It's a small village in the mountains called Annaberg with a history of being very pagan, but also Catholic. A lot of the revered entities are related to nature and animals: the goat, cattle, or even the mountain itself. All of nature, because that's the thing that gives you life. My dad was the person who reinstated the profession of a hunter in Austria. It's similar to a gamekeeper. I've watched him have these indescribable moments with animals that he seems to connect with, that trust him. I also saw a theater production of Reynard the Fox and I had a total crush on this half fox, half human man. So, this anthropomorphizing of animals has always been an obsession of mine. I've experienced quite a bit of trauma in my life and a lot of these things are coping mechanisms for that trauma— to have claws, to have a tail, to be frightening, to be able to fly, or swim, or do whatever you want.

It’s a way of escaping the weakness of being 34

in a human body. It can endure a lot, but we're so limited. The shamanism, it's not just Native American. You can go to the Celts and shamans exist everywhere in the world where you have a culture that connects with its flora and fauna.

They are these magical beings that connect with everything. They go into other realms and bring stories back. That's basically what artists do. Rilke said that about Rodin's work. Your duty as an artist is to go through this little crack into another world and you bring some pieces back. You don't blow the whole door open. That relationship with our Earth was healthier when we revered the female body and its ability to give birth. Earth being the deity that gives birth every day.

HALL Absolutely. My show right now is about all of these same issues. It's fascinating.

It's the missing element that we're all trying to reconnect to. I also had a lot of trauma in my childhood, even being an adult is a little traumatic for me. The fantasy of having something non-human, it's like an opening into another world; a spirit world that doesn't have to follow the rules of human reality, which is limited and seems quite boring. Growing up, I was bored with the normal human stuff, so I would always personify inanimate objects and animals.

To me, that was an opening into a more surreal world where the rules were anything you wanted them to be. I watch a lot of Japanese shows and cartoons; anime.

PFEFFER That was a big influence when I was a kid, as well.

HALL Oh, cool. I didn't find it until I was an adult, but I watch it now, a lot. The Japanese really embrace the spirit world and all the different levels of that. In America, things are kept really on the surface. Everything's cut and dry, so there's no room for imagination.

That's childish. It's not encouraged when you're older. So, I love how you're dealing with these complicated issues of adulthood, but you also have this childlike, playful puppetry. It's a mixture of vulnerability and strength that's very powerful.

PFEFFER The paintings have a queerness that is more than a sexual queerness. It's a queerness of the whole world. It's the upside down, the other. Everything that's not supposed to be ruling rules in these paintings. I like finding strength in the size of these paintings. I want them to be larger than us because we have the tendency to think of ourselves as godlike and all-knowing. We have these delusions of grandeur. Hundreds of years ago, paintings of

Lydia Maria Pfeffer, Reginald (after Elton John), 2019, Oil on canvas, Courtesy of the Artist

35

this size were usually religious iconographies.

So, I want to take these femme spirits that are dismantling the patriarchal lens and put them in a place where they're not paying too much attention to us. They're not reliant on us. They're not asking for our permission. These beings are there, but they're larger than us, and they're bolder, and they're fantastic. They're everything that I wish I could be. It's a childlike innocence.

I grew up in Austria, so a lot of our fairy tales have this darkness to them. Fairy tales are meant to be lessons. They aren't meant to have happy endings. A lot of these things get lost in the Disney machine, where you have all these happy endings. In the real version of The Little Mermaid, she dies because she gives her voice up for a guy and gets tricked by the next lady who comes along. So, she ends up killing herself. She gives away her most powerful thing: her voice.

And then, he doesn't want her anymore. So, a lot of these ideas of giving your power away.

HALL There's also many versions of monsters. Would you consider some of your beings to be good monsters, or happy monsters, or sad monsters?

PFEFFER This goes back to dealing with trauma. In order to defeat a monster, we are often told you have to become just as monstrous.

In the Hindu religion, you have these deities that are absolutely terrifying, but they're meant to be, because they have to keep the most terrifying monsters out. That is definitely something that I can relate to as a woman. There's a lot of issues with messaging, like don't be too tough. Don't be too loud. Don't be too strong. All these double standards. If a man is assertive, it's a great thing.

For a woman, she ends up being cunty, or bitchy, or she's power hungry. So, these women or these monsters that I've created, they are based in narratives, poems, and in epochs of religious backgrounds. I have one painting in the show opening at Ochi Projects called Lily of the Valley, which is about Lilith, the demon goddess.

In the Hebrew text, she was supposedly Adam's first wife, and was made from the same type of clay as Adam. But when she refused to make herself subservient to him, she was cast out, and turned into a demon goddess who snatches babies and causes infertility. Everything terrible you can do to a woman if she doesn't fulfill her duties of motherhood is what they laid upon Lilith, and then, they coupled her up with Morningstar, so she had hundreds of demon children. Then, they obviously made Eve from Adam’s rib, so there wasn't any confusion as to whom Eve belonged. In the old texts, standing up for yourself, finding a voice, was punished by being turned into a monster. Crocodiles are ancient; they never really change, and Lily has these weird, little crocodile feet and tail, but then she's got the raver chick outfit, and the veil, and the stars giving her lilies. Lilies and the veil are usually reserved for purity, the bride, the demure woman, and lily of the valley is the bridal flower, but it’s also highly poisonous. Once again, this 36

duality. I like painting beings that are a little bit ambiguous.

HALL I love painting things that are bigger than me, so it's like I'm part of the world; like I'm entering it. It's not just something I'm imagining. I feel like these are your friends, too.

You're projecting on them, but then also they're projecting on you, and they're protecting you, and you are having fun with them too. I love all the rave culture. It's like they wanna go to the party. Some of them are goth, and some of them are punk, and they have all these tropes with their jewelry and their outfits. It's also a mixture of mythology, art history, and pop culture references.

PFEFFER I moved to London in the ‘90s, and I used to be really into fashion. When I was a teenager, I wanted to go into fashion or advertising. I love opera. I love costumes. I'm indulging myself completely on what I think they should wear. My figures aren’t all skinny and I also have some paintings that deal with aging.

What does that look like? Especially in the US, where we aren't very kind to women getting older and wearing certain things, unless you are the crazy, older artist. I'm about to be forty-six, so the experience of being middle-aged is a little strange. I'm no longer the super hot, young girl, but I'm also not the crazy old lady that goes for it.

So, some of the paintings deal with what aging looks like for a woman. There's definitely a lot of sexuality in there as well. The images I used are from this old photo book [Hans-Michael] Koetzle put out called 1000 Nudes, but most of the nudes are from the turn of the century. It was really lesbian porn, to be honest.

HALL I also try to work with atypical body types that have an empowered sexiness about them. My work talks about sexuality, but it's not meant to be titillating. It's more presenting it from a female-empowered position, rather than trying to titillate the male gaze. And then, also fucking with gender too. Gender is a more fluid thing, and I'm glad we're coming to that now as a society.

PFEFFER The gender roles I play with are also a little ambiguous. Is it femme on femme?

Is it butch on femme? Is it a friendship? Is it a love match? It’s about expressing who you are, whether you are ultra femme, or ultra butch, or non-binary, or somewhere in between, just the beauty of being able to express that. There's still places where it's very hard for non-binary or trans folks to exist, but at least within our world, we can have these expressions and these spectrums. The only thing that will smash this fucking patriarchy is queerness and love.

HALL Your paintings oftentimes have little spirits around. I have a pretty elaborate spiritual relationship with my world, and there's so much else going on that we don't recognize. Just the fact that our stomach is full of all these little bacteria. There's so much going on from the macro to the micro, and we stay in this narrow bandwidth, which is part of our problem as a LYDIA MARIA PFEFFER & TRULEE HALL The Earth As Deity

species. We feel like we're separated from all these other things going on. I love that you bring up nature, and the spirits, and these larger forces that are not just based in the human realm.

PFEFFER I do believe there's a spirit world out there, and I do believe that everything is alive, and I mean that down to the soil. When I make these paintings, they are almost a weird channeling. Of course, it’s my subconscious that creates these images. But, I start painting with some washes or lines, then the figure develops, who then invites the other figure, and they're all grabbing each other and taking each other to the party. I'm almost being told what to do. It takes an openness, and a willingness to trust yourself, and trust the process. Often, I paint the entire thing, and I have no idea what's happening. There's a lot of Jung’s idea of collective unconscious in there, which says that your fears and your desires are predetermined.

These archetypes that we all embody determine what we fear, or revere, or need, or want in order to develop.

HALL I totally relate. I also use the channeling. I get the mood right. I have a canvas, I got my music going, and the rest just unfolds. I don't think it through ahead of time. Sometimes I'll start with one idea or an inspiration, but it's a relationship with the work. In your case, you're very brave, and you're also unapologetic. Your work comes from a very authentic place and it really jumps off the canvas. I don't even think of them as paintings because they just seem to exist. It feels like it flew out of you; like it's supposed to exist.

PFEFFER Thank you, that's great. They exist because they're someone's notion. In this case, my notion of what trust is for femmes who have been demonized, or pushed to the side; they’re for anyone who has been marginalized.

As soon as you create an image of something, or give it a name, a voice, a presence, it exists.

Religions are made up. Religion wouldn't exist without humans. This is a completely codependent, abusive relationship. Especially with the Catholic church. I grew up Catholic, and there's a lot of great things about the church, especially when we get back to helping people in need. For me, the Catholic church is literally the institution. All I can think of is BDSM when I think about the church, this self-inflicted pain, withholding of pleasure, withholding of happiness. If I go back into what the church represents for me, there's a lot of abuse there.

There's a lot of trauma there. There's a lot of refusing to recognize homosexuality or queer love. It's subverting healthy relationships and a lot of these paintings rebel against that. What the church has done to women is so oppressive —making you choose between the Madonna or the whore. There's a lot of that in there too.

Where I grew up, I was an altar girl, and only boys were allowed to serve the priest and bring the wine. Every time there was an official visit from a cardinal or something, all the girls had

a hundred years or even fifty years, do you think we’ll still be experiencing our bodies in the same way? We probably won't be able to stand living in the atmosphere.

HALL I feel like we're at a place where we still have some choices, and I could see things going different ways. For instance, during the pandemic, a lot of people started doing more gardening and baking. We could also start to become more self-sufficient in smaller communities, and that could mean the opposite, where people actually go back to growing their own food and having more of a connection with each other in nature.

PFEFFER I'm a little bit of a fatalist in this sense, which sometimes makes the work harder. We are going to need to have an evolutionary shift, otherwise our bodies will not survive. What that means for art, for physically making work, for us even to look at bodies and experience them, I'm not quite sure.

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Lydia Maria Pfeffer, Intimate, 2021, Oil on canvas, 36 x 28 in, Courtesy of the Artist and OCHI. Photograph by Cary Whittier.

to hide. Gender roles and unhealthy oppression is something that I like to free these characters from. Back to a femme-centric world. That's where these beings come from. They deal with being accused of being the monster and finding love. Not only romantic or sexual love, but finding a community and a safe space. These paintings are safe spaces for love.

HALL Oh, I love that. If I was born hundreds of years ago, I always thought I would be a witch, because I don't really wanna be a whore or a Madonna. The witch is at least an outcast on her own terms, and she's powerful. She creates her own spells and magic. I think of your work almost like a tarot card. There's archetypes and relationships that read as your version of a tarot card. And I love tarot cards, but I like picking the ones I want to look at, rather than relying on chance. It's more of a self-directed way of looking.

You can choose your own future, choose your own reality.

PFEFFER For me, a witch is a healer with intuition, someone that's authentically linked to the Earth, and understands that there are many planes that we refuse to access most of the time. Witches are travelers. They travel through these worlds, and they're here now. You are one of them. That's why you built that massive hut at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery. You are definitely an alchemist and a witch, and it's the best thing ever.

HALL So are you, absolutely. Also, you're talking about your paintings being a space of creating different kinds of love and acceptance, and that's a super proactive way of living and being in the world. It's the same thing with witchcraft. I'm taking advantage of my life and making it what I want it to be, and I’m using really proactive means. It's not like, oh, whatever, just let the world run you over. You have to find your own strength, especially as a woman. No one's gonna give it to you.

PFEFFER Do you approach music the same way as you do visual art, with openness? Did you study music, or did you teach yourself?

HALL A little of both. My mother was a piano teacher when I was little, so I learned when I was a baby. I just absorbed it. And then my family played music. We had a gospel bluegrass band.

I learned mandolin, and banjo, and cello. It's mostly intuitive. I just sit down and start playing.

I don't think about it ahead of time usually.

PFEFFER I'm working with K AlladoMcDowell, who wrote the first AI-generated book [PHARMAKO-AI]. They are writing a book right now about future bodies and transhumanism, and I'm gonna do the illustrations for it. In my opinion, we are going to move past a lot of the physical things. I think we're going to go into a more emotional and mental existence. A lot of things, unfortunately— like sex and eating—will eventually cease to exist because we are already starting this separation of the body with social media. The body eventually will just be this strange host. In

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LUIGI Luigi Ontani does not speak a mortal language and his ethereal, enigmatic speech is reflective of his artwork, which defies categorization. The use of his body in his iconic tableaux vivants of the 1970s, which verged on performance, saw Ontani dressed as a panoply of mythological, folkloric, and literary figures, like Bacchus, Shiva, Saint Sebastian, Dante, and Pinnocchio. Ontani was born in 1943 on the Gothic Line, in Vergato, Italy, during the Nazi defensive. Ontani’s use of masks is also important—his identity shielded, the artist becomes a theatrical mystery, disguised and eternal. Los Angeles-based artist, Ariana Papademetropoulos, visits Ontani at his studio in Rome.

Interview ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS Photography PAOLO DI LUCENTE Stylist HAKAN SOLAK Hair DANILO SPACCA Makeup BEATRICE CONTINO using Gucci Beauty 38

ONTANI

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ARIANA PAPADEMETROPOULOS You personify different characters in mythology, but it feels deeper than an actor in a performance. It feels like you are a deity that embodies different vessels. Why do you use yourself as a medium to become different people?

LUIGI ONTANI Identification and/ or reincarnation without recitation is achieved through a simulacrum pose, accompanied by symbols and/or iconologies. They are allegories, behavior, learning as perception, repetition of the eternal ART ... spontaneously and with an animistic, witty sense.

PAPADEMETROPOULOS When did you start using your body as a medium?

ONTANI At the beginning of the 1960s, while making myself aware of the relative presence led by the desire for adventure in life, I was considering and developing ideal roots in the avant-gardes with mythological legends, with memory ... from archaeology to the present ... as a playful breath.

PAPADEMETROPOULOS Your work explores the realm of the collective unconscious. Is everything you create in direct relation to specific mythology and history, or is it intuitive?

ONTANI Cognitive, exploratory "TRIP" ... IMMOBILITY and NUDE POSING as estrangement ... selecting exceptional clothes.

PAPADEMETROPOULOS Your work is very playful and seductive at first glance, but once you study it further there are so many literary and historical references. Duality seems to be an important part of your work, the meeting of the sacred and the profane.

Is the beauty of your work a gateway to something layered and meaningful?

ONTANI Originally an "improper fable" thinking of Giambattista Vico.

PAPADEMETROPOULOS There seems to be no distinction between you and your work. Is it a balance or a full integration?

ONTANI Artificial naturalness in coherence and resistance ... born on the Gothic line, left during a bombing, then a vegetarian from childhood, a ‘pacifist.’ I never even drank ... I have always thought that an ‘identity card’ would be enough for the world.

PAPADEMETROPOULOS What is your relationship to beauty? The art

world sometimes denounces beauty as banal. But beauty can be so profound to that there is no verbal way to describe my awe. What do you think?

ONTANI Beauty is nominal. I knew a poet, Dario Bellezza, who died prematurely in Rome for excess of beauty.

PAPADEMETROPOULOS My favorite work, something that is charged with magical energy, one of the wonders of the world, is your ceramic bookcase.

Can you tell us about this?

ONTANI Trumeau Alato, a monument to the episteme, is a collection of my favorite ceramic books with ceramic photos, referring to the place on display.

PAPADEMETROPOULOS You’ve said that art is not your job, “I have always tried to avoid the idea of ​​art as a profession.” How do you keep the purity of art without being overwhelmed by the logistics?

ONTANI Self-taught, amateur, meditating.

PAPADEMETROPOULOS Can you tell me about your travels to the East?

You’ve said that the best artists travel the world for their education.

ONTANI Masked trip from the Commedia dell’arte to the tour in the ethno-anthropological map equals enigmatic.

PAPADEMETROPOULOS I’m wondering about your relationship to fantasy? I feel like your perception of reality is a fantastical one; like mine.

That you find the magic in the everyday, therefore it isn’t fantasy but your reality.

ONTANI Mirage—vivArte

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LUIGI ONTANI Interview by Ariana Papademetropoulos

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FIVE LONDON-BASED ARTISTS ON THEIR SOMATIC PRACTICES

BODYMOVING

Photography DANIELE FUMMO Styling PAOLO ZAGOREO Hair BENJAMIN DAVID (for Matteo Augello)

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ELLIS JAZ is a knitwear designer creating intricately crafted clothing.

After graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2019 with an MA in Fashion Womenswear-Knitwear, Ellis founded her label in 2020.

Working entirely on manual flat-bed knitting machines, each piece is fully-fashioned and handmade. The garments are designed to mold and flex to fit a large variety of bodies, incorporating high-stretch knits with intricate embroidery-like details. Ellis makes garments that feel sensual and confident, but ultimately comfortable; clothes that feel erotically empowered whilst maintaining a prominent consideration of how it feels to exist within them.

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BODYMOVING Five London-Based Artists

All clothing handmade by Ellis Jaz on manual knitting machines using eco viscose made from waste cotton.

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OPPOSITE PAGE (1) ruched armor mesh top with print in collaboration with Remko Van der Auwera, engineered flare with burned watermark print denim, and hybrid upcycled trainers in collaboration with Reiss Dandie, all Marie Lueder.

(2) Gafa collection logo T-shirt, logo mesh tunic, engineered flare with burned watermark print denim, and hybrid upcycled trainers in collaboration with Reiss Dandie, all Marie Lueder

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BODYMOVING Five London-Based Artists

IZAAK BRANDT is a multidisciplinary artist. Using the media of sculpture, drawing, film and performance, Brandt explores the body, extensions of the body, documentation, preservation, and culture.

Through an iterative process, Brandt uses an array of disciplines like a choreographer: each exploration unique in its identity.

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GIANNA T is an Italian artist based in London. His practice investigates the childlike curiosity towards our experience of the world through video, performance, and painting. In every medium, the artist’s body comes into extreme contact with the pictorial surface, and is employed as a brush. A process that aims to bring awareness to the understanding of things beyond information, where the need for real contact and denial of labels are the only path to true awareness.

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BODYMOVING Five London-Based Artists

embroidered shirt and boiler suit by VooDoo

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cutout bra top and briefs in circular knit cotton rib with no side seams, Marie Yat

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BODYMOVING Five London-Based Artists

MADINAH FARHANNAH THOMPSON is a visual artist and writer whose work investigates Black British experiences. She is particularly enraged by the misrepresentation of the Black female body and the projections that are placed on it—namely the extreme polarities imposed on them with the expectation that they be both a hyper-visible Jezebel and the invisible mammy figure at once. Her work is research and text-led, incorporating poetry, memory, and film.

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MATTEO AUGELLO is an academic and artist. Definitions are essential tools in Augello's work, but they are the conclusions of complex journeys rather than their foundations. It is a practice that focuses on acts of exploration and questioning: "I queer my identity as I queer academia. My body is the most immediate research tool. I use it to explore garments, to reanimate past histories, to make sense of the world. My practice centers on embodied cognition: I respond to the dynamic impulses generated by the wearing and bearing of clothes. I perform research and embody history."

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BODYMOVING Five London-Based Artists

THIS PAGE cutout top Preen by Thornton-Bregazzi OPPOSITE PAGE necklace Matteo Augello

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Ana Mendieta, Detail: Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints), 1972 Suite of six color photos, Each: 16 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm) 56

CONCEIVING A HOMELAND: RETURNING TO THE MATERNAL SOURCE

ANA MENDIETA Text ESTEFANIA PUERTA

“I have been carrying out a dialogue between the landscape and the female body. Having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence, I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (Nature). My art is the way I reestablish the bonds that unite me to the Universe. It is a return to the maternal — Ana Mendieta source.”

To write about Ana Mendieta, one has to think of soil, fire, water, grass, smoke, and the fleeting marks made eternal in the land that made Mendieta and that dispossessed her. To think of Mendieta then is not to think about her, but to feel through her, carving a home into the earth, sowing earth back into our bodies.

It is important for me to note that Mendieta was a radical political thinker, devoted to Cuba as her ancestral home, a defiant Latin American and a feminist woman of color who was ambivalent to be labeled as such before being described first and foremost as an artist. I think of Mendieta during the '60s and '70s, torn from her homeland, held in Miami for a stint before being taken to Dubuque, Iowa to a white American foster family where she was the only Latina in her school and was the subject of abhorrent racism. This was all made possible through the Peter Pan Act, a clandestine mass migration of unaccompanied Cuban minors ages six to eighteen to the United States over a two-year span from 1960 to 1962.

Cuban parents worked with US officials to send their children there after fearing that Fidel

Castro and the Communist party were planning to terminate parental rights and place minors in communist indoctrination centers. Ana didn’t see her family for many years and was placed in orphanages and foster families in the US before aging out of the system. As she put it, she was cast out, stripped away from her land and pushed into a world foreign and, in some ways, menacing to her.

I can relate to Mendieta’s complicated stance of both wanting to be contextualized within the politics that have made her who she is while also wanting the work to transcend any political system that separates us from the Earth. Mendieta made the work she made as an act of reclamation and as a spiritual act. To be an immigrant in the “neither here nor there” conditions of identifying with a homeland is to embark on a spiritual journey of abandoning borders and reclaiming the Earth as a place that belongs to all bodies.

Bodies that belong to every inch of this planet, no matter what a document says.

In Iowa, Mendieta found art in spite of it all.

Not only did she find art, she eventually found the earth as her primary medium to express herself. This was not born out of Iowa, but out of her childhood in Cuba: making sand castles and monumental sand people with her sister and cousins. They built oversized breasts on their little cousins buried beneath, laughing, allowing the sea to wash it away, running home after hearing the ring of their abuelita’s bell beckoning them back home for supper. She did however make many of her earthworks in Iowa and returned

there every summer, long after she left, as she had forged a special connection to that land.

When your home becomes demonized and taken from you (and you from it), more complicated questions emerge of how to find your way back, how to make any place a home, how to make your body your homeland, and how to think of your life as boundless once you find your place in a bigger system of earth matter. Yes, it is a celebration. Yes, it is a mourning.

While Mendieta has made a wide collection of works, her earthworks seem to hold a power that transcends their impermanence. It is impossible to look at this work today without having some poignant reflection on how her life was violently cut short, but I also feel this repulsion to dwell on her death when looking at the way she inscribed her life onto this Earth. If anything, Mendieta’s earthworks remind us that grief is complex; it is a cycle, never a conclusion.

Mendieta made her first Silueta in 1973 and only made these works for five years. In this brief time, however, she made over 200 Siluetas in Oaxaca, Cuba, Miami, and Iowa that were mainly documented through film and photography. It was of paramount importance to Mendieta to make these works in the territories that held deep significance for her. Again, I think of Mendieta hiking through rugged landscapes, shovel in hand, digging and composing her works under the hot sun for hours on end, diligently creating forms to the scale of her own body as a measurement of both her power and vision—as a way to “make magic” as she would say.

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In 1981, Mendieta returned to Cuba and created the Esculturas Rupestres, figures carved in limestone grottos in a national park outside Havana where Indigenous peoples once lived.

She named these figures after goddesses from the Taíno and Ciboney cultures. Mendieta meant for these sculptures to be visited for years to come, but many of these works were ultimately destroyed due to erosion and the changing landscape. I believe there are faint traces of her work there today that you can find if you search hard enough. Mendieta had a deep reverence for Santeria and ancient Indigenous cultures whose symbols she used in her work as a way to pay homage to Cuba and its multicultural expressions of spirituality and religion. It also influenced her performance art as a form of ritual in her practice.

Many of her earthworks had an animated, performative act to them. Mendieta filled these forms with blood, fire, pigment, and her own body.

Sometimes, she would record the disappearing act of the ocean washing her inscriptions out to sea. Within each form, there was never a silence, but rather a spoken act echoing back out into the world.

What interests me about these works is her back and forth between reliefs, carved forms, and the use of her own body. This kind of filling up and emptying out that she enacts with the earth itself. There are times that the earth becomes a figure and other times that the earth consumes a form, making a dance between icons and ghosts, what can be held onto and what haunts those empty spaces. Mendieta always gives something back that is more potent than the material she takes away. She seemed insistent on being in a direct encounter with life and death by animating natural landscapes into reverent spaces for the body. How the earth is made flesh and also how the earth is made into a grave makes for the inevitable slipperiness between the body and the grave, both giving form to life and death.

Not only does Mendieta poetically reclaim these political territories that held her politicized body, but she reclaims death through the vibrant material that make us animals who breathe air, eat from the ground, drink water, and eventually turn back into that vibrant material. To put it in her own words, “my works are the irrigation veins to the universal fluid. Through them ascend the ancestral sap, the original beliefs, the primordial accumulations, the unconscious thoughts that animate the world.” (Sulfur magazine) Through Mendieta’s transmutation of earth as a political entity into earth as an eternal life force, the neither here nor there transforms into the always here and everywhere.

It is the ultimate healing act for immigrants in their transfiguration from a mere, politicized body, to vibrant material, uncategorizable and full of liberated potential. The womb becomes the grave becomes the womb. Borders swallowed whole.

This is what makes Mendieta so important and so distinct from many of her land art contemporaries at the time. While many of these artists were creating monumental interventions onto the land that oftentimes relied on large financial backing and a team of assistants, Mendieta’s work was always to scale with her own body and her own material conditions, thus making it relatively small, unimposing, and 58

fleeting. It was not about making a permanent mark on the land, nor an ecological spectacle out of urban malaise; it was truly about spoken acts, about inscribing magic, hope, and liberation back into the Earth. And so what remains is not a landmark you can visit, but an idea, or as Jose Muñoz puts it, an “after-burn” that is beyond place, but so deeply about being.

Since the time Mendieta was making these works, there have been monumental shifts in how we talk about the environment and the body; it truly feels like her work was simultaneously beyond her time and deeply ancient. As our landscapes and climate change even faster than before, what does making a home out of the earth look like right now? Is there a way to honor the changing body of our environments while also fighting for them to remain inhabitable for all the lifeforms it has been supporting? I don’t have answers to these questions, and I won’t attempt to assume what Mendieta would say, but I am left wondering how we adapt Mendieta’s fullness when it comes to finding our place. In the way that she could simultaneously honor and fight for something. How do we reclaim loss?

Instead of thinking of Ana Mendieta’s work as impermanent, as sand dissolving into the sea, never to be returned back to us, it is more appropriate to think of her work as neverending, an act that merges into many acts. Loss that forever gives back. The fires clear out and the smoke turns into signals. The soil erodes and the worms shimmy out. The snow melts and pushes up daisies. The body decomposes and returns to everything. And so to visit Mendieta’s work is to touch the earth as though it is a poem we read through our skin. With that, I do believe that approaching the world around us as Mendieta did, feeling our way through it, knowing ourselves to be it, is absolutely necessary in fighting for it.

May we all be swimming in Mendieta’s work, breathing in its ghostly fires, making a home/land with every breath we take. end

ANA MENDIETA Conceiving A Homeland

FROM LEFT (1) Ana Mendieta, Ocean Bird (Washup), 1974 Super-8mm film transferred to high-definition digital media, color, silent, 4:09 minutes (2) Ana Mendieta, Anima, Silueta de Cohetes (Firework Piece), 1976, Super-8mm film transferred to high-definition digital media, color, silent, 2:23 minutes (3) Ana Mendieta Guanaroca (Esculturas Rupestres), 1981/1993, Black and white photograph, 53.5 x 39.25 inches (135.9 x 99.7 cm)

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Photography ANTOINE HARINTHE Styling ELENA PSALTI

AMALGAMATION

Hair OLIVIER NORAZ @home Makeup TIZIANA RAIMONDO Casting PLUS THREE TWO Models ANDRE MARTINEZ @theclaw, CARLIANE @theclaw, NYAYIENA @Metropolitan 60

MAT+KAT The Last Resort

THIS PAGE bodysuit and gloves Kezako OPPOSITE PAGE kimono Issey Miyake Pleats Please

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ANTOINE HARINTHE Amalgamation

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THIS PAGE briefs XULY.Bët OPPOSITE PAGE top Marta Martino

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top vintage Prada, earrings Tetier Bijoux

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Set Design by ENZO SELVATICI Set Design assistant MARC LAUNAY Production by HOME Photography assistant KÉVIN THÉARD Digitech GABRIEL FABRY @Sheriff Fashion assistant TINA RAMIREZ Photographer agency @HOME Stylist agency @SHOTVIEW 68

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THIS PAGE bodysuit Marta Martino OPPOSITE PAGE kimono dress Issey Miyake Pleats Please

JARITA HOLBROOK & TAVARES STRACHAN IN CONVERSATION

SPACE RACE

In W. E. B. Du Bois’ speculative science fiction short story, The Princess Steel (c. 1908), which many theorists note as a foundational precedent for Afrofuturism, a Black sociologist invents a megascope with which to see across time and space. The Princess Steel is an African queen who encases the killer of her lover, The Lord Of The Golden Way, in a cocoon of her silver hair. Realizing the value of the steel spun from her hair, the Lord purloins it, strand by strand, into a loom of mills that enslaves the princess in “the imprisonment to which her spun hair held her as it stretched across the world.” It is an allegory of the feudal exploits of capitalism, the Middle Passage, and the Black body within extractive economies. Bahamian-American artist Tavares Strachan utilizes a similar megascope in his work that telescopically mines the intersections of science, technology, and exploration. He has traveled to the North Pole, trained as a cosmonaut, and navigates the Black experience through an Afrofuturist speculative lens. Cultural astronomer Jarita Holbrook, a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at The University of Edinburgh, also looks to the stars in search of a communal understanding of the cosmos.

Through anthropological studies of Indigenous celestial navigation, their principle focus is on the relationship between humans and the night sky. Together they discuss the myth of the Black monolith and the fraught ambitions of space colonization.

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JARITA HOLBROOK We were both born on islands. I'm a Kama'āina! I was born in Hawaii and I live in the United Kingdom, which people don't think of as an island, but it's an island.

TAVARES STRACHAN That's something that I've been thinking about a lot recently, the colonial delineation of land and the classification of land as a colonial vehicle. An island as an idea was taught intuitively almost as a small, limiting element. The way the UK is not thought about as an island is at the core of how colonialism works.

HOLBROOK Yes. They situated themselves as a global power such that people didn't think of them as being this small island, which is further emphasized by maps being in the Mercator projection.

I prefer to use the Peters projection, which is the equal area map. The Mercator projection stretches out the Northern Hemisphere. And so you have the optical illusion that Europe is almost as big as Africa, which is completely false. Africa is almost three times the size of Europe.

But the map wasn’t made to emphasize empires. It was made for navigation, because it preserves coastlines better than other projections. It wasn't that they intentionally wanted the Northern Hemisphere to look bigger, it was just a byproduct of being able to navigate better.

STRACHAN That's a phenomenal coincidence.

HOLBROOK Yes. It's an unintentional consequence of a mathematical preference.

STRACHAN I'm doing a lot of research lately on Marcus Garvey, but I’m curious about your thoughts on the philosophy of W.E.B. Du Bois versus Garvey's. They just had radically different approaches.

HOLBROOK Yes, they did. Du Bois, of course, comes from a position of privilege.

So, even though he was African American, he was very much upper middle-class. In some ways, you can say that he's a product of his class, as well as his race. You can't differentiate the two. And as anyone who's part of the middle and upper class, they do a lot of gatekeeping. You have to really actively deprogram yourself from doing gatekeeping. There's this conservative, modest mindset restraining you from being your whole, authentic self, and it 72

becomes a class war. I was reading an article last week by Ebony McGee about a very smart, young woman who went to a predominantly white institution and kept her hair in cornrows. Her physics instructor would not even look at her, couldn't look at her. After a couple of years, she started to dress like the people around her and the same instructor said, “Oh, you look so much better now. You're probably doing much better,” implying that her intelligence was connected to how she performed being a woman.

As an African American woman, my heart breaks.

STRACHAN There's two pieces that I wanna pick up on. One is the idea of Blackness as a monolith, and then I'd like to hear your thoughts on the importance of unlearning.

HOLBROOK It's really hard to unlearn. It's funny because I am African American, but first of all, I'm from California. And then second, I've spent a fair bit of my adult years outside of the US. I used to walk into a room full of African Americans, and when I spoke they would recognize that she's educated, she's upper-middle class, and they would even place me as being from the West Coast.

But that is completely flattened when you're primarily working and living in allwhite environments in the United States.

I got really tired of people assuming that because I was from Los Angeles, I must be from Compton or from Watts.

HOLBROOK Yep. They're completely unaware of the rich Black neighborhoods in Los Angeles, like Baldwin Hills. Not that I came from there, but that whole flattening, like I must not be rich. I must not own property. I must be the first of my generation to do everything. It's like, dude, I'm not even the first professor in my family.

HOLBROOK It's like, did you guys learn anything from Fresh Prince and The Cosby Show? And then you have these talented students of color coming out of the inner city, wonderful STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] majors who do so well that their instructors feel like they should be removed from their community. I once told my PhD advisor, “I'm concerned about becoming so deeply involved in a subject that JARITA HOLBROOK AND TAVARES STRACHAN Space Race

removes me from my community.” And my advisor said, “Isn't that a good thing?”

And I said, “No, it is not a good thing.” Of course my advisor was white and male, because in astrophysics, if you don't have a white, male advisor, you don't have an advisor. But the idea that the African American community is pathological and therefore you should extract; it’s more colonialism. You extract the best out of those neighborhoods, and then protect them from having to go back to those neighborhoods. The same neighborhoods that contain their family and their support system, the same neighborhoods that produced that person. So, how can it be pathological when they're also producing engineers, scientists, and astronauts, et cetera? Going back to Du Bois and Garvey, Garvey would be standing with me. There's nothing wrong with the Black community, and we have the right to express ourselves the way that we want.

I really feel for my sisters who wear hijab, the Muslim veil, because the perception is that you're a second class citizen to men and that you're somehow oppressing yourself. But they don’t see that a lot of these women also happen to be brilliant scientists, engineers, doctors.

STRACHAN I’d like to talk about the Black body and space. Space in terms of our architecture, and then outer space.

And then, the fact that to a certain extent, we're strangers wherever we go.

HOLBROOK I have to, first of all, talk about an unpublished book series that I wrote, which is called Astronaut Tribe. It's an American story about the Heliopause. The Earth is situated in a protective bubble that's created by the sun. This is real physics. The bubble is made by the particles that are put out by the sun. So, we're in our solar system's atmosphere, and then outside is a galactic atmosphere. But the premise of the book is that the Heliopause starts to shrink, and it's basically a space opera. It's an American story because in the process of getting to the Heliopause and figuring out what's going on, everybody turns Black.

So, I get to play with the notion of how everybody deals with Blackness. And then, because it's my fantasy, when they go back to Earth, do they stay Black or do they fade out?

TOP North Pole, Courtesy of the artist, photo by Christopher Hoover, BOTTOM Cosmonaut Training, Courtesy of the artist, photo by Chris Hoover

Birgit

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STRACHAN That makes me think a lot about Marcus Garvey in 1920, and the Black Star Line, and the audaciousness of white folks in America asking whether Black people should be allowed to move freely. To me, it's a testament to the time I’ve spent doing cosmonaut training.

There’s a very interesting reaction when I bring it up in conversation, depending on who's in the room. I come from a long line of explorers and I think the idea of being Black is synonymous with exploration.

You're always traversing a certain level of limitation. So, there’s the poetic piece and then there’s the physics piece.

HOLBROOK You're doing two transgressions. You're trying to be an astronaut and you're trying to do it with our historical enemy.

STRACHAN The way that I found out about Garvey was through reggae music. It goes back to the first thing we talked about with regard to unlearning, because I'd never learned about someone like Garvey in school at all. He was never brought up once in my entire education. But when I went back to the neighborhood, there was this drug dealer who lived across the street and he was listening to this reggae music. Even for my parents, reggae music was something that wasn't accepted in many Caribbean communities in the mid ‘80s. It was seen as a really uncouth genre of music to be involved in. But, I was learning about the River Nile. I was learning about Marcus Garvey, and Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia. I was learning about the Maroons. All this stuff was in the music.

I'm curious how these really important elements of Black history, Black culture, and Black knowledge somehow survive in spite of it all, in things like music.

HOLBROOK Both of my parents are from Mississippi and my father spent all of his adult life doing civil rights activism.

He was with the Urban League, and then he worked for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, but they were very bad at educating us on Black history because they thought we wouldn't need it.

I was born in 1965, a hundred years after the end of slavery. So, they thought we had come far enough, never thinking that America has such a nostalgia for slavery; that myth of free labor. It came at great 74

cost, but they think of it as free labor. And they're continuously trying to replicate these marvels of uneducated free labor.

They go from place to place looking for nearly free labor, and when the people organize and protest, they just pull up and move. But, I think your question was more on the lines of how do you decolonize your mind. I find that it's a somewhat normal path. If you're a young African American in an integrated environment, you really don't notice racism because you're a kid.

But then, as you become a teenager, the world starts to change. For women, there's your life before you have breasts and your life after you have breasts. The way you interact with men completely changes once you have breasts. It’s not dissimilar being African American. Once you become a teenager, you're something else: you're scary, you're criminalized, you must have wrong intentions. So, you start to get an inkling that something's not right in the world. People start assuming you're stupid, and so you start to internalize it, like, what signals am I giving off that they would think that I am dumb? And the answer is, you're not giving off any signals. When you realize I am doing nothing, I am acting exactly the same.

That starts the decolonizing. I got teased when I started my master's program at San Diego State University, I was on the male Frisbee team. I was playing ultimate Frisbee and studying astronomy, and my office mate, who was a huge rugby player, he's like, “You know, you're Black on the outside, but totally blonde on the inside.”

I didn’t really know how to take it, but something about my being both Black and from California created a complexity that made it difficult to be seen in that environment. You address some of that invisibility, I think, in your upcoming exhibition at Marian Goodman.

STRACHAN Yeah, it's a trilogy and one piece is a chapter from the Encyclopedia of Invisibility, which is the work where I made my own encyclopedia. It was a gathering place for all of the things that were left out of the zeitgeist. And so, the title of the show is The Awakening, because the impetus for the exhibition is this backdrop of Marcus Garvey and his story, the UNIA [Universal Negro Improvement Association], the fact that JARITA HOLBROOK AND TAVARES STRACHAN Space Race

they had six million members, the idea that he had this bombastic vision for the Black Star Line, and ultimately he finds this conclusion with J. Edgar Hoover, who's this young and fresh FBI director.

You see J. Edgar Hoover go on to, more or less, erase Black folks, specifically Black men who say anything that is counter to his American narrative.

HOLBROOK There's a great peerreviewed article you should read, which is called “To Unfrock the Charlatans.” It tells the history of how the US government effectively destroyed all the Black Power movements. All the Black radical, not even radical, is it radical to want to have a job, or exist without getting killed by the police?

As a young African American, you don't realize that they will kill you. Like, straight up, they will kill you. And you have to be aware of that. I was the first Black student in my PhD program and when I finished, people from the program would ask me where I wanted to live. So, I would say “I want to live outside the United States, because I get treated better outside the United States. And if I have boys, I have to leave, because there's a war on Black boys in America, and I don't want to have that stress.” And they were like, “You're just paranoid.” Then, twenty years later, we have the whole George Floyd situation and they think this is something new. It's not new, it’s just that the press is better.

We heard about people being lynched and killed all the time, but it just wasn’t news.

STRACHAN The colonization of space is a difficult conversation to have as a man of color, specifically from the Caribbean.

Those of us who have borne the burden of the first round of colonialism are still dealing with the ramifications of it. The impact of the climate on Indigenous cultures, the impact on species, the impact on the ocean, the psychological trauma. It's hard to say we're gonna colonize something and not think of the dark side of it. As someone who has spent a lot of time exploring—metaphorically, physically, artistically—there's a part of exploration that is very conscious. That's the thing that I've learned from going to the North Pole. A huge part of being in a new place is having respect for that place and that space. The traditional narratives about exploration mostly have to do with

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Tavares Strachan, Graduation Day, 2021, 2 panels; oil, enamel, and pigment on acrylic, 60 x 60 x 2 inches, Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. photo by Tom Powel Imaging

exploitation of resources and capital. So, if we're gonna think truly about exploration and do it in a refined sense, we have to think about the Indigenous nature of the place. We have to unlearn all of the bad habits we've developed over the past thousand years.

HOLBROOK Going to the North Pole is a really profound thing to do. It's such a harsh environment that your consciousness has to shift. You realize how the environment is allowing you to be there; that a form of consent is happening.

There's a feminist element that is critiquing and pushing back against this notion of extracting and conquering; the idea of colonizing space. We also need to start having Indigenous voices speak to the issue of space. They are interested in collective benefit. If we're gonna go into space, we want it to benefit as many people as possible. We don't want to do damage and we don't wanna be extractive.

Then there’s the realities of space that you can’t get around. My favorite one is that men go blind in space and women don’t.

So, if you're on a long voyage where you're awake for extended durations, fluids build up in your body. In men, they stay in the upper body, putting pressure on the optical nerve, and eventually they go blind. So essentially, if you’re a man and want to be a lifelong astronaut, you are going to become handicapped. Whereas with women, the fluids stay lower in the body and they don't become blind.

Since men run the space industry, what is their solution: we should have blind astronauts go. It's like, what about just sending women?

STRACHAN Yeah, there's something about these orthostatic tolerances, the way the body responds to the changes of the physical environment that I was always interested in from a logical perspective, but also from a sociological perspective.

I saw my first shooting when I was four, and the environments that I was living in were extreme and hostile. So the idea of being Black in an environment that's constantly reminding you of the fragility of your own existence is commonplace.

When you think about scouting for space exploration, and you think about women, the data is there. From the pain threshold, to the tolerance, the ability to adapt, 76

women outscore men exponentially. If you think about hostile living environments in ways that are actually rational, then ultimately people who've gone through these experiences in ways that are part of their everyday existence are more suited to go on some of these journeys.

HOLBROOK I had a physics talk last week and I had the audacity to say that I’m a product of the triangular trade. I have a British last name, that's my slave last name. And then, I'm African American.

And now, I'm back in the British Isles.

So, I did a reverse triangle trade of myself, but I'm a product of that. I was looking at Strachan, your last name, and I wondered if that's also a British name.

STRACHAN Tavares is a name that made its way to Portugal, but really it’s a West African name that translates to “spirit of old man.” I got that name because my parents fell in love with disco music and The Tavares Brothers were a huge sensation. And then, my last name is obviously a slave name, which is Scottish. If you look at the part of the Caribbean where I'm from, almost everyone there has Scottish last names.

You got Burrows, you got Strachan, you got Davis, and so on.

HOLBROOK In some ways, you exist because of exploration, right? You're not 100% African, you're this mélange. I’m part of a think tank called the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, and there is a woman there named Dr. Désha Osborne who is looking at the colonization of the Caribbean. You can divide up various epochs of immigration and see very clearly when one person had a bunch of money and knew that land was gonna open up, so they recruited all their buddies from certain parts of Scotland to go and build their plantations.

STRACHAN I made this work about Alicia Alonso, who was this phenomenal, blind, Cuban ballerina. It was a work of neon in this pirouette pose with the light traveling through her veins.

HOLBROOK What kind of gas did you use? Was it actually neon?

STRACHAN It was argon.

HOLBROOK So it was reddish, right?

STRACHAN Exactly.

HOLBROOK There's a set of stories, which I call the Blind Navigator Stories, JARITA HOLBROOK AND TAVARES STRACHAN Space Race

where you really find out what is important to a community in terms of being able to navigate. About five years ago, I studied how people around the world still use the stars for navigation, including the United States Navy. But, I wanted to focus mainly on Africa and find people who were still navigating. There are local flavors to these stories, but they’re all about overcoming what was happening. I'll tell you the one that the Navy tells, and that is the story of Captain Bligh, who was not blind, but in a way he was because there was a mutiny on the bounty and they put him adrift in a lifeboat. They did give him his charts, his sextants, and they had paddles. But essentially, he was blind because he was on a lifeboat with nineteen other people, navigating across three thousand miles of ocean. And not only did he navigate, he charted new islands as he went. It's an incredible feat of navigation.

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OPPOSITE PAGE Tavares Strachan, Kojo, 2021,Oil, enamel, and pigment on acrylic, 1 Panel: 58 in. diameter, Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. photo by Tom Powel Imaging THIS PAGE Tavares Strachan, Alicia Alonso (Detail), 2020, Glass, neon, transformers, Figure: Approx. 24 x 18 x 72 in., Transformer box: Approx. 10 x 16 x 40 in., Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. photo by Jurate Veceraite AUTRE MAGAZINE 14 The Body Issue

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Photography OSMAN ÖZEL Styling & Art Direction HAKAN SOLAK

SUFI

Those who turn in the direction of prayer, whirl in both this world and the next.

Pay heed when a circle of friends whirl, circling round and round, the Kaaba is the center.

If you wish a mine of sugar, it is there; and if you wish a fingertip of sugar, it is gratis.

-Rumi

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Photography LEA WINKLER Interview OLIVER KUPPER

PANTEHA ABARESHI Canadian-born, Los-Angeles based multidisciplinary artist Panteha Abareshi makes work that is informed by their early diagnosis of zero beta thalassemia, a genetic blood disorder that causes debilitating chronic pain and bodily degeneration, both of which increase with age. Using their own body in performances, sculptures of medical devices, prostheses, video, and drawing, Abareshi explores the body’s navigation of otherness through not only the lens of disability, but also gender, sexuality, and eroticism. Their work is a startling and vulnerable examination of powerlessness in the face of a weaponized medical system, and the fear and loneliness of a decreased lifespan. Abareshi’s exhibition This Is Not A Body presented by Hunter Shaw Fine Art, features abstracted and disembodied sculptures of medical artifacts, braces, empty vials of pain medication, IV drips, and back braces—the flotsam of a disabled body’s wreckage and impulse for reclamation.

OLIVER KUPPER I want to hear about your ideas regarding disability theory and how it fits into our current ecology. Disability theory is interesting in the context of the Gaia theory, because of the way our bodies act as extractive tools in the Anthropocene.

PANTEHA ABARESHI The idea that humans are a parasite on this celestial body hinges on the body’s ability to tap into the Earth and fully engage in this extraction. It’s the way humans navigate space and the way it’s designed to accommodate them. In the Anthropocene, there's a disabled body-to-cyborgian fabrication pipeline; the idea of the body as something that's fully constructed.

Something that can be totally deconstructed and then fabricated again, and within crip theory, that's a normalized notion already. When you’re disabled, you move through life being dissected, and then there’s this expectation that you're going to strip down and augment your body to achieve an ableist standard of functionality. That means having prostheses, medical implants, and mobility aids. The disabled body can never adhere to the naturalist ideal, and that can be very radicalizing.

In my work, I focus on ways we can destigmatize what is happening to our bodies as a means of survival, but also as a means of creating new critical frameworks around the disabled body that 104

aren't built around notions of good or bad, better or worse. Abstracting the whole idea of being beholden to this anatomical definition of a body is vital in terms of moving forward for everyone.

My work emphasizes that there is no great feat in being human. The able-bodied ideal of the human figure and ability is not attainable for everyone, and many people who are able-bodied don't realize that the medical industry works hand-in-hand with the beauty industry in ways that idealize the way a body performs, and it's just more ostracizing for disabled people. We talk about climate change in this way where we’re like, we're destroying our planet, rather than recognizing that we're destroying our planet’s ability to house humans.

I’m not the only one who finds it immensely comforting to know that humans will inevitably be just a minuscule blip on the life of this gorgeous, celestial babe floating through space.

KUPPER When did you start realizing that you could use your body to explore these themes around disability?

ABARESHI It was very much out of necessity. I was making work and trying to go further in terms of what I could articulate, critically and visually, and dealing in real time with a loss of mobility that was coming on very quickly. It was almost out of sheer desperation. No material felt remotely

appropriate other than my own body, because it was the thing I had the least control over, but it was also the only thing that I could exercise any control over in terms of representing an experience that I was finding undocumented and under-discussed.

This idea of control was very important in my early work. I would fabricate these spaces with sound compositions that are extremely overbearing, and these jarring, highly anatomical visuals. I'm in the space either naked or compromised in some way, and I'm subjecting viewers to this performance in a very uncomfortable way. That was certainly what I needed at the time, but as I grew, made more work, and my illness got worse, I started doing much more critical theory work. Now, I'm in a place that's more complex in how I think about control. You don't need to be in a performing space for the disabled body to be a spectacle; the disabled body is fundamentally a spectacle to the able-bodied viewer all the time.

KUPPER It's interesting, you talk about the idea of an examined body. How does this idea of a pathologized past fit into your work?

ABARESHI The first level of that really comes from the way the disabled body exists in the medical sphere. It is such a dehumanizing experience, where you're flayed in private and then sewn back up and sent to the public. So, I started

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thinking about the idea of the body as this hyperexamined, constantly monitored thing. You enter a dynamic where there's such stark delineations of power. There should never be implicit trust in the person that has explicit power over a body that has been subjected to examination and denied the ability to make decisions for themself.

I have become very fascinated with the autoobjectification of my body, really hyper-objectifying myself, and treating my body as material in my work. It’s a means of talking about vulnerability, and exposure, and discomfort. I think about the privilege of privacy, and how all the affairs of the disabled body are expected to be publicized. People want to know exactly what is wrong with you, to understand how they should be interacting with you, what label they can comfortably be applying to you, how they should be treating you. Everything must be explicated for the placation and comfort of

identity, but as a way of isolating; a way of ablebodied people to see the disabled existence as being over there. This way they can think, I'm so far from it, because I can do these things and I function this way. That's very dangerous. It's dangerous that we're not talking enough about death, we're not talking enough about illness, we're not talking enough about grief in our wider communities. A larger awareness and normalization of the disabled experience, and even a tenderness for it would really facilitate those things. Fear of death has been the root of so many catastrophic, Earth-changing events. We wouldn't have religion if we weren't scared of dying, so it's a hard thing to tackle just through disability theory.

KUPPER Yeah, when we're confronted by it, it becomes an existential quandary. The pandemic, and many other global crises have shown us that.

But you're very transparent about your condition and how that fits into your work.

"We wouldn't have religion if we weren't scared of dying, so it's a hard thing to tackle just through disability theory." the able-bodied society around you. Then, I started thinking about fetishism and sexualization as a result of watching people engage with my work. I have a piece called Natural Disaster where I did an impromptu performance when my first wheelchair was delivered, and I'm just naked, interacting with the wheelchair. Every time I've shown that piece, I get comments along the lines of oh, this piece is so tragic, but your body, I mean, oh my god. It's such a painful, grief-addled piece that I was shocked at first, and then it became amusing.

KUPPER Karen Allison Hammer wrote an essay where she talks about how disability theory often goes into the disintegration of identity, but often overlooks the way disability can build community.

She says, “scars become not only evidence of wounding, but also a new surface on which to form community and intimacy.”

ABARESHI Absolutely, and that's so largely missing from the dialogue happening around disabled theory. You think about the deaf and hard of hearing community that are essentially functioning as a subset of society with their own schools and communities because the world at large, even in its measures of accessibility, is so fundamentally inaccessible. That kind of community also exists for every other form of disability, really just functioning independently. I was very interested in the idea of performance as an act of carving out space for this narrative and representation. There’s a lot to be said about the desire for disability to remain a very solitary affair, because there is so much fear rooted in the way that able-bodied people regard disability.

It represents so many things that people don't want to confront, whether that's their own mortality or their own disability. I’m of the mindset that everyone is disabled and no one is disabled. There is no way to exist as perfectly able-bodied. Obviously, those delineations are very important as they pertain to 106

ABARESHI Yeah, I have sickle cell zero beta thalassemia, and I've had that my whole life. It's degenerative, and it's a rare combination of sickle cell disease and thalassemia disease. Sickle cell developed as a genetic mutation to protect against malaria, and thalassemia developed as a resistance to blood-borne illness in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. My mom's from Jamaica, and my father's from Iran. And this condition is so underexamined because that combination of Jamaican and Iranian genetics is very uncommon. But the illness, first and foremost, causes immense amounts of pain due to my blood cells getting caught because they're shaped like a sickle. They get caught and cause these occlusions that are very painful, which can happen in the bone, it can happen in the muscle, it can happen anywhere.

What makes the degeneration more acute is the long-term effects of having chronically low oxygen.

So now, I'm dealing with a whole slew of new illnesses that are a result of my base condition, like avascular necrosis, which means that due to poor circulation, my blood flow is getting cut off from my joints, and they're necrotizing from the inside out.

They're just rotting, which is really cool in biological terms, but it means that I have to get all my joints replaced over time. For the first fourteen years of my life, I was functioning like a normal kid. Sometimes it would put me in the hospital for two weeks, but then I'd be home and everything was fine. I had meningitis when I was seven, which put me in the hospital for about a year, my legs atrophied, and I had to relearn how to walk. But aside from that, it was a pretty normal childhood in the way that you expect an able-bodied child to function. I just couldn't go on hikes or participate in PE, things like that. But when I turned fourteen, the degenerative nature of the illness really hit. I was in the hospital constantly and stopped being able to go to school. I PANTEHA ABARESHI Interview by Oliver Kupper

had been getting IVs and blood drawn so regularly that they just couldn’t give me IVs anymore, so they put this metal port in my chest. I just remember waking up from that surgery and being so appalled, feeling so invaded and terrified by the idea of this foreign object being a part of my body, and having this scar on my chest. It was the very first time that my illness had been physically marked on my body, but now I love my chest port. I had to go through the same shocking moment when I had my first hip replacement and woke up with a giant scar down my leg. This idea that there’s this ceramic ball and giant metal piece where I used to have bone and flesh.

Now, I look back on those moments with such fond criticality because those reactions are so telling.

The process of getting joints replaced is extremely painful, but this idea of becoming less biological in my anatomy is very fascinating to me.

KUPPER How did that affect your school life?

ABARESHI Until that point, I had been in this intense preparatory high school, fully convinced that I was going to go to medical school and do research in neurology. As my illness progressed, I decided to get my GED and go to art school, and I wouldn’t have discovered that I wanted to have an art practice if I hadn’t been laid up in the hospital. So I did art at USC, and since then, my illness has continued to rapidly deteriorate. It’s difficult to spend a month in the hospital and then have to think about making work that is deconstructing the body. Whenever I give artist talks, I try to talk about that, because disability representation functions very differently from other forms of otherness. The representation of disability hinges upon the individual person being generous enough to share their experience to people that would otherwise have no way of contextualizing it. I’m very open about my illness, but that is never an assumption that should be made about anyone. It’s so easy for institutions to be like, “Panteha Abareshi, the disabled artist who’s gonna speak about her experience as the end-all, be-all poster child of disability,” and I always speak against that because with disabled artists, there is this very difficult side of the practice which is lived, real-time experience. These notions about the body being an abstract thing, and futurist notions of pain and emotionality is integral to my work, but that doesn’t make it any less difficult to go through hospitalizations and to be faced every day with loss of ability. I’m very critical of the way the disabled experience is framed and the way language functions in our understanding of it.

KUPPER The Americans with Disabilities Act was just passed in 1990. It’s so new that scholars are just starting to think about it, and they borrow a lot. The visibility aspect of it borrows a lot from gender studies and critical race studies. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the aspect of gender, critical race, and queer studies, and what you’ve learned through that dialogue into disabled studies.

ABARESHI It’s really difficult to have a crip theory that is completely separated from queer theory. The critical discourse around the aesthetics of the body as it pertains to queer desire and sensuality is fundamental to an examination of the disabled body and autonomy. The autonomy of the disabled body comes back to queer notions of self and also, very interestingly, this unsexing of disabled

bodies, like the castration that happens in parallel to the hypersexualization of the disabled body. It’s extremely fetishized and used as fantasy fulfillment. I’ve been going down these intense amputation porn rabbit holes recently and this research into fetishes that are explicitly about caring for disabled people. There’s this feminization and infantilization of the disabled body, which don’t always work hand-in-hand, but in the dynamics of care that exist around the disabled body, it’s important to look at these things together: notions of weakness, notions of ability, and the dynamics of disabled bodies in relationship to their nonmedical caregivers. There isn’t any healthy, representational language around how those dynamics unfold. Queer theory came out of the AIDS crisis, when queer forms of intimacy, love, and care were separated from sexual engagement. It broke the stereotype of the hypersexed gay man, but it also examined these dynamics that were not exclusive to gay men struggling with AIDS. The new imaging of lesbian dynamics, of hyper-queer dynamics were coming out. Within queer theory, there are vital notions of stripping away preconceived ideas of body function, of redefining sex and pleasure. BDSM functions within queer theory and disability in relationship to pain, control, and submission. I’m very lucky to be friends with Sheree Rose and to hear from her about Bob Flanagan. You look at dynamics like that and the taboo around the disabled body exercising full sexual autonomy. When you’re looking at a queer, disabled, body of color, the act of looking at that body is so charged, and I really think about that in my work. I really am obsessed with the way that multiple gazes and multiple hierarchies are being refracted, and directed, and concentrated onto this body like an ant under a magnifying glass.

KUPPER It is fascinating, as humans, we want to be able to simplify things, but when you give us this Rubik’s Cube of disability theory, it becomes this problem that’s impossible to solve.

ABARESHI Yes, and I think it’s hard for people to hear we’ve set ourselves on a trajectory where utopia is unattainable. Using utopia as theory for idealism is fine, but if we’re thinking about a utopia where disabled people exist, it’s a utopia where everyone is disabled.

KUPPER Can you talk a little bit about your NEW ARTIFACTS series with the pierced pelvises?

ABARESHI I was really thinking about the aesthetics of the body, and representations of mortality, and the memento mori; this idea that the body has to leave a trace. On top of that, really going back to piercing as an integral part of BDSM culture, especially in the '70s and '80s. This body augmentation as a firm reclamation of body autonomy. The pieces are about one-third scale, and they function as these aesthetic, uncanny objects that are representational of the aesthetics of the body. So, piercing them is an examination of pain, but also decoration, and this queering of the trace. All thirteen pieces are pierced, but it starts really light and gets very heavy. We can find the body beautiful while also having an intense desire to continue exercising more autonomy as it’s stripped further away. It’s this need to do more and more to assert control over itself. All of my work is about control. There is a continuous acknowledgment of the futility in that. In this series of work that is capturing the body attempting to assert any form of control over itself, the pieces are then hung AUTRE MAGAZINE 14 The Body Issue

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by hooks in a space. They’re relegated permanently to the space as an aesthetic object to be regarded, and the act of asserting autonomy itself becomes a spectacle of adornment. I am creating work that is less reliant on using my body representationally, while finding ways to still have that in there. Those are 3D models of my pelvis from 3D MRIs that I’ve had, so it’s also this concept of how the disabled self functions, and finding ways to reduce my body to its purest aesthetics. The pelvis, for me, is also a very loaded body part because both of my hips are totally bunk and need to be replaced. My right hip is already replaced, but the pelvis is this womanly body part that I’ve always wanted to play with because I’ve been sterile my whole life. I’m both estrogen and testosterone deficient, so it’s like I’ve never been able to physically or anatomically perform femininity or womanhood, which was difficult as a younger child, but was very genderaffirming as I got older. The pelvis is like this bowl that’s supposed to be able to hold so much meaning, and for me it’s this empty, decrepit thing, and I find that very comforting. Finding ways to appreciate what is proclaimed to be your deficiency, it can wax corny poetic, but it’s very important for your own sanity as a disabled person. I’m working on the next iteration of NEW ARTIFACTS where I’m modeling spinal vertebrae and piercing them. It’s this idea of the pieces being greater than the whole thing. I’m really fascinated with picking pieces and becoming hyper-fixated on them. Almost like when you say a word so many times that it becomes abstract and totally meaningless. It can become anything then.

KUPPER I was just looking at this picture of somebody who had been cremated, but they had so many cyborgian transplants and metal parts attached to their body that what was left was a hip and a bunch of screws in a box.

ABARESHI Yes, that’s super beautiful to me, and again, this idea of trace. Parallel to crip theory, I did a brief look into death studies, and the way in which funerary practices inform the larger notions of what it means to die. People don’t even realize that the cemetery changed from a place of mourning to a place that you go to have a picnic. It’s become a beautiful, pastoral place as opposed to a place of grief. Forest Lawn in Los Angeles was the first cemetery that was designed as leisure space. It generates this feeling that death isn’t so permanent, because people are going to visit your grave forever, and this idea of trace is so important to people.

People are still so beholden to anatomy in trace, and after you’re burned to a crisp, what’s left are the nuts and bolts that were holding you together to adhere to a standard of body. That's all that’s left. I think that’s really beautiful.

KUPPER Can you tell me a little bit about your upcoming show?

ABARESHI I’m working with prosthesis, and I’ve been collecting these prostheses used for polio, for bone correction, for brace support, and a few that have been used on my own body as well. I’m taking them apart and reassembling them. A big part of putting together the pieces was this process of seeing how many anatomical figures I could make from this multitude of parts. The show is called This Is Not A Body and it’s titled after this written

video work I did writing on hospital bracelets. It’s a tongue-in-cheek declaration that, at this point, a body is whatever you want it to be. But also, here are these metal and plastic pieces feigning anatomy, and fundamentally, at the end of the day, failing.

You look at them, and you’re so aware that it’s so close, but never achieving any sort of validation in its corporeality or functionality. So, I'm using all of those pieces to fabricate anatomy and letting that fallacy collapse onto itself through the work.

There’s pieces using braces and orthoses, and then there’s a piece that I’ve made by articulating a wooden crutch, and doing some carpentry, and creating anatomy from antiquated mobility aid.

It’s the first time that I’ve shown a collection of work that doesn’t have me representationally in a very centralized role, and that wasn’t initially intentional, but there has to be an acknowledgment of when that resource has been tapped. It’s really about coming back to examinations of the defunct.

There’s only one small place that my body appears, and it’s not in a recognizable way. It’s close-ups of a performance that I did using the prostheses from the show, strapping myself into these things and doing this really exhaustive durational performance. Reducing it to these close-up shots where it’s almost impossible to recognize that it’s a body in these prostheses. What’s important to capture when I do very taxing, endurance-based performance is the unrecognizable fragments of pain. The pieces are charged with that. My blood is on some of these prostheses. Working sculpturally in this way really runs well with what I’ve been saying in my practice for so long about the body as a fundamentally constructed thing. Everything from our perception, and digestion, and regard of the body is fully constructed. When you take a step back to look at what that means in terms of relationship to self, regarding yourself as piecemeal, it can be really radicalizing and liberating for those bodies that are already existing in the otherness of a nonanatomical body. It can also be extremely terrifying for people who have the luxury of anatomical wholeness.

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Photography FEDE REYES & RACHEL ISRAELA Stylist BILLY LOBOS

CASSANDRO EL EXÓTICO

Cassandro, born Saúl Armendáriz in El Paso, Texas, who spent much of his misfit teenage years in his family’s native Juárez, is the first openly gay luchador. In a sport dominated by raw masculinity, where gay caricatures—called exóticos—are played by straight men who dress in drag, Cassandro is a rare anomaly. Dubbed the "Liberace Of Lucha Libre,” Cassandro’s grandiloquence, glamor, charisma, and flamboyance in the ring made him an icon. He was the first exótico in history to hold a championship in the UWA (Mexican Universal Wrestling Association). In May of last year, Cassandro had an embolism removed from his brain, which affected his speech and mobility. His story is one of survival; a celebration of the body overcoming challenges, and a lesson to triumph through adversity. Currently, there is a film about his life in the works, with Gael García Bernal stepping into the leading role.

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Photography JACK PIERSON Interview ANOHNI

ELIZA DOUGLAS American painter and musician Eliza Douglas is powerfully defiant in her representation of the darkness and nausea that defines our contemporary psyche. Death metal, anime, graphic novels, Disney characters, and other pop cultural iconography are distorted and twisted in paintings that resemble something like bed sheets from a crime scene. Douglas is also an unconventional muse to German artist Anne Imhof with whom she most recently collaborated on a total takeover of the Palais de Tokyo, and Demna Gvasalia (a refugee from Soviet Georgia), who has collaborated with her on countless campaigns and runway presentations for Balenciaga. Formally trained at the esteemed Städelschule art school in Frankfurt, Douglas’s paintings have the power to transform, to shapeshift, to camouflage into the literal and figurative folds of the amygdala of a doomed zeitgeist. In the following interview, Douglas talks to the legendary English-born, New York-based artist and composer, ANOHNI, about friendship, the queer body, painting, and the climate crisis.

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ANOHNI Eliza! We are such close friends. And now I must ask you, where do you come from? Can you share something of what happened to you as a young person? What are your first memories of experiencing engagement with the world around you through creativity?

ELIZA DOUGLAS My mother is a photographer. Not a professional one, but she could have been. She took a lot of photos of her children and the people around her. I think I was struck by how different the photographs felt from the reality of our life. And this embodied the medium with an almost magical power. So, unsurprisingly, the first form of art making that I really engaged with was photography.

And I think all my visual work has utilized photography in some way. My paintings, for instance, always begin with photographs.

ANOHNI When did you first start to feel that your gender identity was becoming an issue?

DOUGLAS I remember when I was around three, I already felt romantic love for women. These are the most vivid memories from my childhood. And then learning that girls are supposed to marry boys was very confusing. I wanted to marry a girl! Then, by the age of five I was much more aware of the gender binary and felt strongly that I wanted to be a boy. I cut my hair and dressed like a boy for the next six years or so. I started getting bullied by my peers quite a bit for this, and so eventually I grew my hair, and tried to dress more femme for a while, to avoid being harassed.

ANOHNI Did you have any role models in your personal life or in culture?

DOUGLAS I really liked my uncle Paulie. He was the first gay person I knew. He was so charming and sweet, and wrapped presents so beautifully. He gave me a pink feather boa when I was four. He had a bunch of Siamese cats and played poker with me, and he had a great singing voice. He was HIV+ and dedicated the last few years of his life to AIDS research.

ANOHNI What were your concerns growing up?

DOUGLAS I was quite preoccupied with knowing I wanted to be with women and living in a world that seemingly didn't allow for that. I remember as a small child thinking that I was going to have to pretend to like men and marry one, which was terrifying and sickening to me. And I was also afraid of going through puberty, the idea of getting my period, and growing breasts. The future terrified me.

ANOHNI What were your earliest aspirations for your life that you can recall?

DOUGLAS My first dream was being a cowboy, and later I wanted to be a professional athlete. By the time I was a teenager I wanted to be a musician. I first met you in the early 2000s, when I was touring with Devendra [Banhart], we played the same festival as you did. I carried a video camera with me everywhere in those days, and I filmed your entire set from the side of the stage.

I could see your face in the reflection of the piano, and that is what I filmed mostly. Later that day I played one of my songs in Devendra’s set and I think after that is when we were first introduced.

You told me my song reminded you of Syd Barret.

ANOHNI I remember that day. You were an anomaly on stage with his band. You had an aura entirely separate from the rest of the group. You were not “freak folk.” You seemed more grounded in an expression of a modern reality. How did you find your way into that crew?

DOUGLAS I got into noise music when I was seventeen and started playing the bass. I was briefly in this wacky band called Bunny Brains, and we opened for Devendra on a US tour he was doing.

This was pretty surreal for me because it was a real fancy tour, a big tour bus with beds in it. I was a big fan of Devendra, and had all his early records. It felt like a dream. After that tour Devendra asked me to play in his band.

ANOHNI I remember later you were a guest artist at CocoRosie’s tea shop art studio in Paris. I had toured with CocoRosie and had been brought into their fold. That was bonkers. I seem AUTRE MAGAZINE 14 The Body Issue

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to remember images from your Paris installation of green wig hair attached to household appliances. And when you arrived, you found that you were obliged to live in a damp basement in Pigalle and serve tea to CocoRosie fans.

DOUGLAS (laughs) Yes. I was collaborating with my friend, an artist named Vlada Benedetti. We pretended to have different names and that we were twins, and pretty much arranged the show around not sleeping in that basement. The only other place to put the bed was in the little gallery space on the ground floor, so we put the bed in there and slept in the gallery, and lounged in bed for a lot of the residency.

A few years later is when I really got to know you. You invited me to be part of your project TURNING, which is one of my most treasured experiences and completely changed my life.

ANOHNI It was the second time we presented TURNING [a documentary film in collaboration with video artist Charles Atlas]. The first time we did it was at Saint Ann’s Warehouse in 2004.

Joie Iacono, Nomi, Connie Girl, Honey Dijon, Joey Gabriel, Kembra Pfahler, Johanna Constantine…. There were thirteen women, one for each song in the concert. Charlie made live video portraits of each person as they stood on a turning platform, and that image was projected on a giant screen behind me as I sang. The first version of TURNING was such a secret New York story. But in 2005, my career became wider in Europe, and I took the opportunity to bring TURNING as a kind of ambassadorial project to other big cities, Paris and London, Madrid, Rome… to share that vision of the burgeoning and un-named trans/feminist urban circle that many of us were a part of in Downtown NYC. DOUGLAS In retrospect, it seemed quite ahead of it's time.

ANOHNI People weren't yet using the word "fem” in an empowering way, in feminism. In that regard, TURNING might have been a predecessor to the moment we are feeling now, with the new respect being offered “fem”

queens, and by association, “fem” women, as crazy as that might sound.

Femininity has long been oppressed and reviled, even within previous modes of feminism. You would be snipered as an essentialist. That’s what happened to us when we did FUTURE FEMINISM. Finally that bullshit is dying off. But

DOUGLAS I am so grateful I was able to go there. I was so creatively paralyzed that I pretty much gave up on becoming an artist and I was studying to become a social worker. The day before my tuition was due I dropped out, but I realized I would regret it for the rest of my life if I didn't really try to do what I wanted to

“My first night sleeping there I had a dream that I was vomiting bright green paint everywhere. That is partially why I started painting.” your role in TURNING was unique, as the only model in the group that was not conventionally a “fem”; your beauty as a “female” model was always tempered and challenged by your expression of gender identity. You insisted on going topless, like a teenage boy. You were so beautiful, like a magical, sullen, teenage boyish trans-spirit inside the female-ish trans body of a silver antelope. And little did I know, you were dealing drugs to all the other girls!

DOUGLAS (laughs) Well yes, at the time I did donate some of my medication to a few of the ladies. I had quite a collection. But interestingly, that trip marked the beginning of the end of my drug use. A pretty significant portion of the cast and crew were actually sober, and I had never met sober people before!

I didn't even know this was a possibility actually. I thought that the only way to get through life was with the aid of drugs and alcohol. It was how I managed my emotions. And I especially didn't think it would be possible to have fun without them. But then, there were these wild and inspiring women on the tour who didn't use any substances. It blew my mind and planted the seed that this could be possible for me too. About a year after the tour I got sober.

ANOHNI Eventually you went off to art school in Germany and you began your journey as a painter. What happened to you at that school? I remember you had sold out your first exhibition before you had even finished the program.

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do. And I was about to turn thirty. So, I made one last ditch attempt and applied to the Städelschule. I got in and moved to Germany a few months later, and when I was there, my only purpose was to make art. My first night sleeping there I had a dream that I was vomiting bright green paint everywhere. That is partially why I started painting. I felt like this was my last chance to make a life for myself that I liked. So, I put everything into it.

ANOHNI I visited you there once and we went to that amazing flea market and I bought a filthy little red rug that I washed and it revealed itself to be this red jewel. Didn't we buy some plastic toys, perhaps a plastic lobster? Lobsters have always been a staple of the 20thcentury avant garde.

DOUGLAS Yes, there was a lobster!

You were in a flea market frenzy! You were working on your big show at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld. I remember early on in our friendship, I expressed my creative paralysis, and you told me about the importance of keeping self-doubt at bay—you illustrated it on the sidewalk by pushing these little sticks away from you.

These talks with you were so important to my being able to overcome my self-doubt.

ANOHNI Yes, I had that idea that if I put all my desire to self-censor, and all my self-shaming, into a stick, then the distance I placed between myself and that stick would define the extent of the creative freedom that I was willing to allow myself. So the question was, where 125

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would I place that stick? Where did you end up placing the stick? How are you experiencing your relationship to your creative output today?

DOUGLAS I still have to battle with those sticks. I have chunks of time when it's really difficult to work because of how my mind can torture itself. It can be like a barbed wire trap in there. I have to make an effort to not let my thoughts run wild and my fear fester. And then, in this social media-dominated time, there are so many mean people out there, it's hard to not be affected by it—especially when you have experienced bullying as a child. I try to shield myself from it as much as possible. I don't read press and I don't go looking through Instagram comments. I have not been brave enough to really engage politically in a public way yet. That is something I admire about you. Ever since I have known you, you have been talking about the climate catastrophe—this was so long before it became a widely acknowledged issue.

What is it like for you that this issue was ignored for so long, despite the evidence of its existence?

ANOHNI The potential for climate collapse started to really feature in certain newspapers in the late '80s. I read the papers in high school, and I just sensed that it was real, and I took it to heart. Life felt wrong. It was like a David Lynch film. Everyone was pretending the bluebirds were singing, but they were really stuffed. It was fake.

There was a lie, a kind of denial, at the root of our Western lives. That lie, that denial, has only become more and more apparent. I think that for queers who grew up during the worst part of the AIDS crisis in the US, it wasn’t as hard to imagine collapse as it might have been for heterosexuals. Bubonic illness was something we watched our teachers and mentors succumb to. Being on the outside looking in can lead you to have a different view of things. Ironically, that becomes a skill set that later on, the broader culture sometimes uses you to access.

DOUGLAS Did you have conversations about this with your friends?

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ANOHNI I attended UC Santa Cruz, a progressive university in California, when I was seventeen, and the after-class conversations about the world veered between climate change, corrupt US military interventions, and AIDS. I grew up attending pagan circles in the Santa Cruz redwood forests as a teenager. I was lucky to have been adopted by a group of Wiccan women who harbored me and introduced me to a more female connection to the Earth and spirituality.

I could always feel that something was deeply wrong with the story I was walking through, but it takes a while to unpack, especially when you walk with some privilege through it. But my gender identity and my queerness soon threw iced water over any denial. That was the great thing about being queer.

Your family, your church, the broader heterosexual community, ostracized you completely. In the mid-80s, queer people were considered pariahs. Being queer is the only minority that in many cultures still leaves you like a motherless child, with no religion, no parents, no brothers and sisters. You have to go out and invent the wheel of life all for yourself. In those days, we mostly fled to the big cities. I wanted to move back to London but I couldn't get it together, so I decided to move to New York City. And that is when I felt safe for the first time, walking the streets among the prowlers, dressed as I pleased, performing in clubs late at night, expressing my love and my rage, my brokenness, my dreams. As a New York native, what do you find is the difference between those who were born in NYC and those who have chosen to make it their home?

DOUGLAS I went to rather conservative schools, so the people I encountered were relatively homogeneous. But there must have been people in New York that I would have had more of a connection with, I just didn't get to meet them. Through the TURNING community, I have met so many incredible people who moved to NYC in the '70s and '90s. They are nothing like the people I knew growing up. Some of them, like Joey Gabriel, fled their homes as children and made their ELIZA DOUGLAS Interview by ANOHNI

way to NYC. And Kembra for instance— she is the most non-conformist person I know. You and I have both seen the city change so much, most often not for the better, but there are still these precious radical gems, with whom I once sought refuge, and they are containers of this history. In regards to the climate stuff we were discussing before, I wanted to ask you how you make decisions. How do you navigate life these days when so much of what we do will negatively impact the Earth?

ANOHNI It’s tough. Addressing complicity has been at the core of my work, especially over the last several years. It has left me paralyzed at times, not able to get on a flight, no longer willing to presume that burning so much oil is my birthright. As difficult as that work can be, I think it is a crucial reckoning, and one that I have not resolved. I have become better at being conscious of my own hypocrisy. I think that these problems we face now are the culmination of centuries of illness within our species, born innocently enough out of a desire to be more comfortable, or safe, or feel more free. But it has turned on itself now, and we function as death-bringers in so many respects to the rest of life on Earth.

DOUGLAS Of course, everyone has differing and shifting relationships to their feeling of duty and responsibility in relation to themselves, their human relationships, humanity at large, and the planet. Can you share anything in terms of how you navigate this?

ANOHNI Everyone will meet their maker, and they will need to account to Her at the end of the day. My dream is to just get right with myself and try to listen to the times we are living in as best as I can.

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Eliza Douglas, Untitled, 2020, oil on canvas, aluminium frame, Unique, © photo Marc Domage, Private collection Courtesy the artist and Air de Paris, Romainville

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PHOTOPHOBIA

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JORDAN RICHMAN Can you tell me the story about the first time you picked up a camera?

LENGUA It was my mom’s camera. I was twelve-years-old, and she wouldn't let me borrow anything she owned, as I'd broken everything that I put my hands on. I would sneak out of my house with it to take pictures of my friends, trying to emulate the images I'd see on websites like DeviantArt, or Flickr.

RICHMAN Do you see the camera as a tool, similar to the tools in your work that represent how objects conquered the world?

LENGUA Yeah. Essentially, Photophobia originated with the idea of the Anthropocene about three years ago. Being born, and growing up in the Canary Islands, you have a very specific relationship with nature, even if it is a subconscious one. Most Canary art, whether ancient or contemporary, is a neverending dialogue with the natural world. The camera has always been a vehicle for me to understand my environment and have a language for it. I think when I left at eighteen for Barcelona, I understood really quickly how capitalism in a bigger metropolis has excelled at building this narrative that nature is something you have access to, not something you live within.

This book somehow has become a reflection of that. It is a multilayered body of work that contemplates what it is to be young while forecasting the ultimate destiny of this world.

I’m not necessarily interested in theorizing about the ecocide or climate change through an apocalyptic lens, but rather to give a language to the gap that exists between the poppy flower and heroin.

RICHMAN How did growing up in the Canary Islands influence you?

LENGUA I was a very emotional kid. I felt very alienated growing up, whether it was for my sexuality, or not being able to relate to my most immediate circle in high school. The internet was the only outlet I had to understand what my interests really were in order to relate to like-minded kids. Culture in the Canary Islands can be extremely narrow. There are major efforts from institutions now aiming to change that, but I went to high school in a very touristic area of Gran Canaria, which informed how I navigated nightlife as well. When I was fourteen, my friends and I would party in the same places as American, British, German, and Swedish tourists. There were not that many designated spaces for locals, let alone for a 14-year-old. Navigating the night in this way gave me the notion of an outside world, and that I could potentially have an interest in discovering it. On the other hand, I was always exploring. I'd walk miles and miles above my village towards the mountains just to get a 154

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picture, or go over my roof to photograph the sunrise. I knew I always wanted more for myself when I reached eighteen, but I was aware of the gift that is being from there, which has informed how I relate to the world.

RICHMAN I suppose living on an island must be isolating. The online social world would become even more essential.

LENGUA It definitely was essential to my upbringing, especially for having an active interest in photography. Being self-taught, my family's computer, and later my own, were really my school books.

RICHMAN Where does the title of your book Photophobia come from?

LENGUA The term photophobia first came to my attention when I watched The Others (2001) by Alejandro Amenábar. The kids in this movie had this unspecified disease characterized by photosensitivity, also known as ‘photophobia.’ This always stuck with me for some reason. I find the term corny and overly romantic, but it also easily encapsulates the aesthetics of the series I’m building in my head, and I really connect with that contradiction.

RICHMAN When did you first become interested in folklore and myth?

LENGUA Island culture is based in both folklore and mythology. Since the Guanches (Tenerife's aboriginal people) were conquered

by Jean de Béthencourt who developed the land, all elements surrounding the history of the land are partly built on fiction. Its Spanish colonization influenced how Canary's aboriginal mythology and history became like ghost stories. This colonization also informed the roots of Canary music, as well as food, among other things.

RICHMAN Do you have a favorite myth?

LENGUA The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is one I learned in Latin back in high school, and it really stayed with me. (laughs) RICHMAN The subject of your book is being young during the beginning of the end of the world?

LENGUA Yeah. Essentially, I think it comes down to that.

RICHMAN So, what’s it like?

LENGUA It feels like a diagnosis, which can be comforting because it provides a framework. The lived body is understood as someone's lived connection to the world, and in times of hardship I’m interested in looking closely at the relationship we have with our environment, and the cracks that coexist between capitalism and mysticism.

RICHMAN Do you find intersectionality between capitalism and mysticism?

LENGUA There is a neverending one.

The intersectionality thrives in the natural

world, through language. You know, sugar crystals seep from trees turned into bitter resin, and opioids are extracted from plants.

These binaries and the in-between is what I put my focus on for this first chapter that is Photophobia.

RICHMAN You worked with Meg Superstar Princess as a model for some photographs in the book. I’ve also been on sets with her before. Why is Meg such a perfect subject to shoot?

LENGUA The ideas of this book can seem very inaccessible when I first vocalize them.

To be able to translate this world-building thought process onto images, it was always clear to me that I needed to be working with my most immediate community, people I'm surrounded by that are active signifiers of the current zeitgeist. Like Coco Campbell, who's also a subject in those images—she's amazing. I’m not someone that necessarily has an interest in abstract photography to cater conceptual ideas. For me, the key is to employ the old idea of portraiture to interpret these inventions.

RICHMAN Do you have other dream subjects or people you really want to work with?

LENGUA Probably other artists that have influenced me, and essentially have influenced the ultimate idea of Photophobia. Like my dear friend Lacra, Wolfgang Tillmans, Henry McMaster, Klein, and Arthur Jafa. Also, the people with whom I’m in constant flux, such as my boyfriend Christian [Velasquez], or Taylor Thoroski.

RICHMAN Have you been into Wolfgang for a long time?

LENGUA Yeah. I mean, I sort of consider him the father of contemporary photography.

He was one of the first ones to debunk the myth of the relationship between the camera and the photographer. He has worked with multiple mediums and has never believed in the sovereignty of the “one device.” He really informed my early years.

RICHMAN I love the photograph by Wolfgang of his shirt, shorts, and leg on a beach. It’s one of his first pictures. I think it was taken before he was a photographer, or even thought about becoming a photographer.

It definitely adds to the intrigue of the image.

LENGUA Yeah. I feel like he always knew in a way. He actually told me that he would spend time in Lanzarote when he was younger.

There's a photograph about it.

RICHMAN An object present through the photographs in the book is this wooden anal plug. What is its origin?

LENGUA I obsess over wood as a material, and I've always been interested in the anal AUTRE MAGAZINE 14 The Body Issue

plug as a symbol for a long time. I found these wooden ones on Etsy last year and I just had to buy them. They are sort of the perfect example of that intersection between industrialism and the natural world we were talking about earlier.

A wooden anal plug is not something that you should use, the aftermath can be brutal, but something about the hazard of the material and what a plug represents, is really appealing to me. It has grown to become a symbol of the book, almost like an omen.

RICHMAN Another part of your body of work is the Anonymous Club. How has it been collaborating with the collective?

LENGUA It’s always been a very innate exchange. Since I first came to Hood By Air and met Shayne [Oliver] through Christian, now my boyfriend, who has worked closely with him for many years, we quickly understood that we were aligned in many ways. Hood By Air was also the first real photography commission I ever got, which is insane. I used to place the graphics onto my work when I was eighteen, sort of recreating fake campaigns, dreaming to be part of the house one day. I wasn't there at the conception of the Anonymous Club—I came late into the picture, but I started working with them immediately when I started to hang out with them more frequently. Anonymous has been extremely supportive of my work and I just have gratitude for them.

RICHMAN In the past, you've shown me this image of your dad, undressed, laying on his stomach, and looking into the camera. In a way, this is the origin of the book, right? What was the process of making this photo?

LENGUA This photo was one of the first times I challenged myself. I never carry a camera around with me, most of my work is staged, and pre-conceived, but there was a time when I'd exercise photography in this way. I'd stop people on the streets to take their picture. I was constantly looking to be put in an uncomfortable position. I've grown up away from my father, so there has always been this natural distance. By the time it came down to photographing him, he didn't question it.

There's a vulnerability that had to be cultivated between us, and I feel like we engaged in it within the process.

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WOLFGANG TILLMANS

STAR GAZER Interview SASHA FRERE-JONES Photography PAT MARTIN Portfolio WOLFGANG TILLMANS

Internationally recognized and lauded photographer, musician, and political activist, Wolfgang Tillmans, always keeps his eyes wide open. As a photographer, no other artist has reimagined the potentialities of the medium more than Tillmans. As a result, he is within the pantheon of the most important photographic artists of all time. From human bodies to celestial bodies, Tillmans has been at the forefront of the zeitgeist for the past three decades—from capturing the nightclub scene, for which he is most well known, to his obsession with astronomy, and the poetic minutiae of our life here on Earth. Tillmans is an unbridled and uninhabited witness who has abandoned artifice for truth, superficialities for the profundities of love, desire, and loss; political turmoil, geopolitics, and climate change. His images—whether they are of friends in trees or concrete pouring into rebar—are alive, naked, free, vulnerable. They are nerve endings—exposed, breathable, and airborne. A kiss is not just a kiss, it is resuscitation. Dancing isn’t just somatic kineticism, it is ancestral yearning. As a musical artist, his songs have a similar ambition. From his collaborations with Frank Ocean to his recently released debut album, Moon In Earth Light, which premiered in the form of a listening room at Regen Projects in Los Angeles last fall, Tillmans utilizes field recordings, electronic tempos, and his own voice as an auditory immersion into his psyche as an artist.

This fall, he will take over the 6th floor of the MoMA for his first large-scale museum survey in New York (Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear), which will include over 350 photographs, videos, and multimedia installations. In the following conversation, Tillmans speaks to writer and pop music historian Sasha Frere-Jones about his expansive musical practice. Tillmans has also created a special portfolio of images for our Body Issue.

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SASHA FRERE-JONES How long did it take to make the album?

WOLFGANG TILLMANS The first bits are from the past four years. The lockdown was very productive because the musician I work with, Tim Knapp, his studio is on the same street as mine. So, we were able to use our time very fruitfully.

The eighteen elements that make up the album came full circle to how I started to make music again around 2015, when I had collected an archive of field recordings that I had been doing over the previous five years. I saw them as audio photographs— photographing sound—but I had never really had the time, or peace and quiet, to do something about it. I finally committed time to it, and these different sources, from spoken word, to field recordings and jams, and proper studio productions, culminated in a 100-minute sound and light work at Tate Modern in London, and then I spent some time working more on single song structures, only to this year bring back the different elements, and fuse it into a 53-minute track of sorts.

FRERE-JONES It very much works as one long thing. I’ve listened to it a bunch of times, and I like having it just be one thing. You say the guy you work with, Tim, is on the same street. Where do you guys live?

TILLMANS In Kreuzberg, in Berlin.

FRERE-JONES When you’re making the more song-like structures, what’s your way of composing, or of putting stuff down?

TILLMANS It usually starts with words, a line, and a melody that comes with it.

FRERE-JONES Like “Late For The Webinar”?

TILLMANS Literally! Something like that pops into my head, and instead of discarding it as just a silly idea, I decide that sometimes silly ideas are worth holding onto. For example, “Device Control”—the song that made itself onto Frank Ocean’s Endless album—I recorded the vocals to that in one take on an iPhone one morning while slightly hungover. I had mused about the new technology and the weird shift from living life to broadcasting life for some time, but then, one morning, I had these words, and it just came out. It happens sometimes with sentences that stay with me over decades, like, “we can’t escape into space, we’re in it” and the other line is, “he wants to change but not be seen changing,” and that’s something that

stayed with me all my life. It’s about myself, but it’s about seeing others, and I vary it from he, she, and I. Like many writers, I work with a library of notes that then either come with a particular melody or line, and I don’t always get the verse. Often, they are more hook-only.

FRERE-JONES People don’t have a lot of time now. The hook is all they want.

I figure you’re doing them a service. It’s too bad you didn’t get a song about the metaverse on there, now that Facebook has changed its name.

TILLMANS I don’t want it to get too dark.

FRERE-JONES Yeah, that would get dark. I’m really curious about your whole journey. You started pretty young, if I’m not mistaken.

TILLMANS Yeah, there was a period when I was seventeen to nineteen that was very productive with some songs, which I later put out in 2016, but were never performed, and then I stopped for twentyfive years.

FRERE-JONES What kind of stuff was it?

TILLMANS I guess it was 1985, '86, very electronic, post-punk, new wave type music. Pre-house. This was just before house music hit.

FRERE-JONES Was there somebody you wanted to emulate, or be, or to play with? At that moment, who were your heroes?

TILLMANS Clearly, Soft Cell.

FRERE-JONES Okay. Let’s go, let’s go.

TILLMANS And New Order, and Pet Shop Boys, Psychedelic Furs, like a Northern English sense of electronic melancholy, and emotional yet arty, or experimental. It was also the time of Einstürzende Neubauten and noise, but I always had a strong affinity for more serious, electronic, industrial stuff and on the other hand, Italo disco, which was a genre that is nowadays held in great esteem.

FRERE-JONES Not then. Everything has changed so much, but I’m also curious about where you were when you were hearing this stuff. What was the mood where you were? I don’t know what would’ve been popular in Germany at the time.

TILLMANS In the mid-80s, there was still a very large divide between serious music, guitar-made, handmade music, and electronic music, which was considered AUTRE MAGAZINE 14 The Body Issue

not so serious because it’s easy to make.

Apparently, it’s only pressing a few buttons.

It seems ridiculous nowadays that there were such value systems applied, but I lived in a medium-small, industrial city in the larger area of the Ruhr in Germany, near Cologne and Düsseldorf, which is an area of rich culture, and musical history. Kraftwerk was from Düsseldorf, all sorts of people are from Cologne, and lots of English bands would come through the area to play. I feel really blessed having grown up at that time in that neighborhood where Gerhardt Richter and Sigmar Polke, and lots of great artists were living and working. I was a little bit too young for that. It was only when I left the Rhineland, and moved to Hamburg after school, that I was old enough and close enough to a burgeoning scene, which was an acid house scene, and that marked a tectonic shift in European music, and to a lesser extent all across America, but it had a huge impact in the urban cities of America.

FRERE-JONES When you were into acid house and you were in Hamburg, was that when you made those first recordings?

TILLMANS No, I did them in my hometown. But I was projecting into London.

FRERE-JONES I think we all have our ideal cities. Wherever it is, it’s not where we are. It’s somewhere else.

TILLMANS I once had an assistant in Berlin who was born on Tottenham Court Road in London, the street where I first saw Boy George when I was fifteen, and I thought, wow, so incredible to be born in the West End. Or I had an assistant who was born 200 meters from Alexanderplatz in Berlin, and I found it glamorous in itself, but on the other hand, I don’t envy them because they never had this imaginary space; because they come from a place where other people project their dreams and ambitions.

FRERE-JONES It’s like growing up in Las Vegas. Wait, so you said you stopped.

Why did you stop?

TILLMANS Because my partner, Bert Lessmann, surprisingly, literally left town overnight. There was some personal drama with his girlfriend, and he just left. I didn’t muster up the courage to find somebody else to work with and didn’t want to start again in Hamburg. But then, being in the house scene, I wanted to capture the energy of this newfound solidarity and democracy 163

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on the dance floor. This house movement was like, it doesn’t matter what you wear, t-shirt and jeans, whatever. It had a very egalitarian spirit, and that totally inspired me. I wanted to communicate that, which meant preserving it in pictures. That’s when I took my first editorial photographs.

Before that, photography had a different role because I was making artwork with a black-and-white laser photocopier—at the time a very modern instrument—and I only took photographs really to photocopy.

So, it was the intersection of this much more contemplative work that I made with the photocopier with this extra vivid house music, and then the visuality of the dance floor, and the club lighting. Clubs are very visual for me, which is maybe not surprising.

FRERE-JONES It’s interesting that when you moved to Hamburg, you started taking photographs in a very musical setting; that your response was visual rather than musical.

TILLMANS Yes, and that translation and that fascination with music, that love for music, has lived on in my portraiture of musicians, finding closeness to it through that. But also, for example, in an early group exhibition in Paris, at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, the exhibition called L’Hiver de l’Amour, there’s a huge painting, basically the largest painting in the world, called La Fée Électricité by Raoul Dufy, and it’s in an elliptical-shaped room. I placed a tower of speakers in and behind it, an amp with a cassette player on ultra-reverse, and on the cassette, I had ten of my favorite techno songs. This was in 2014. I then embarked on a project called Playback Room, which was creating rooms for listening to studio music—there are thousands of spaces for live music, but almost zero spaces for listening to recorded music. Twenty years before, I was so infused by this sense of how culturally significant these particular techno tracks were that I convinced the curators to allow me to exhibit, but in reverence, not in submission to them. They were doing something that I couldn’t do at the time, and that’s how I see my work, because I’m also a journalist. When I can use space in publications, when I use gallery space, I feel like I have a responsibility for being given this space, and I like to be an amplifier of ideas, showcasing other people and their ideas.

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FRERE-JONES It’s interesting you say that thing about a listening room. I happen to be writing a piece that touches on listening rooms, as they have them in Japan—a listening environment where you get together and listen to jazz. It’s starting to happen in America, but it’s been going on in Japan for decades. Obviously, the last eighteen months have affected how we experience music.

TILLMANS For the past twenty-five years, I thought, I’m not good enough,

me much further back than I normally remember. I was like four or five. The rest of the album is not terrifying at all.

You use words like “webinar,” which is a very reassuring timestamp of the present moment. It couldn’t have been twenty years ago, and it couldn’t be twenty years from now. It’s reassuring to have that in a record. Somehow, when you timestamp something, like Digital Underground talking about Burger King, it helps ground it. What I was trying to say before is the

“You don’t want to fetishize authenticity because there isn’t such a thing as straightforward authenticity.” that’s not what I’m doing anymore, and there was just a shift when I started doing the Playback Room series. I realized it is actually a deeper calling in me, that I want to do that again.

FRERE-JONES So, that’s the moment you decided that you want to make music again. Did you end up making music for Playback Room?

TILLMANS No, I never had my own music in Playback Room, but here in the exhibition at Regen Projects in LA, I do have a listening and video room where the album is playing.

FRERE-JONES One thing that I really like about the album is that it’s very comfortable. Considering how much music I listen to, I never know what to call music that is experimental.

Especially when you’re dealing with things like field recordings. Maybe that bird wasn’t experimenting. Maybe that bird is a bird. You know what I mean? It’s just the presence of life, but there’s also lots of singing. The Simon & Garfunkel song “El Condor Pasa” is a song from my childhood that I found really terrifying. It always sounded very funereal and dark. I really fucking hated it. It’s obviously very beautiful, but there was something about it. I heard you start singing the words, and I was like, is he singing that song?

TILLMANS And did it terrify you again?

FRERE-JONES No, no, you made it a lot more approachable. It’s an incredible cliché to say that music can trigger a strong emotion, but when I heard it, I was like, that’s the scary song. It brought 166

comfort level you have with a certain kind of undefinable sound, and then back to melody and words. It doesn’t feel particularly forced in any way. When you were working on the album with your friend Tim, did you have a way of speaking about those approaches? Was there a time when you said, “Now we’re going to do a sound piece, and now we’re going to do a song piece,” or did it just happen organically?

TILLMANS The recording with Tim and Bruno, who also works at the studio, came to a pause in late spring, because that was when the lockdowns ended and exhibition activities started picking up again. I realized I was running late with the exhibitions that were happening here in Los Angeles, and I have a touring exhibition on the African continent, and next week I’m going straight on to Vienna, to Mumok.

So, I stepped away from music for a couple of months and had a moment when I came back to realizing, you know what, I don’t want this structure of ten three-to-fiveminute songs. That’s when I came back to this whole variety of different recordings that I love. I threw them together in a single Ableton session and did the mix myself. In the end, there are only four songs that are made with Tim and Bruno on this album, but the other six that are also in that more catchy, pop genre are, I felt, comfortable.

There was suddenly an ease with bringing this together and creating time and space for the listener to not be experiencing a musician pushing ten songs at them, but to be in different spaces, times, and places. People have told me that they get WOLFGANG TILLMANS Star Gazer

a filmic sense from it that needs maybe less structured times and moments, which has been a breakthrough for me that I feel works.

FRERE-JONES It's an album that doesn’t have lots of showy moments.

It begins and takes you calmly through a series of sounds and songs. In terms of the field recordings, I’d love to know how and where you made them. What is your practice with regards to making those recordings?

TILLMANS Just like with my photography, people often assume photography is either 100% found or 100% staged, but in my practice, there are shades from 90/10, to 50/50, to 40/60 of how much I influenced a situation, or how much I let it happen. With sound, for example, this piece called “Rain Gutter” was a drip from a rain spout in Nairobi, which I just noticed behind my seat, and I couldn’t stop fixating on how this rhythm was actually super musical. I recorded it, but I also allowed for some of the voices of my friends to be there, which, if one was absolutely pure, you would have to shut all of that out. I always like pollution, or not always pollution, but bleeding in. Another one was a traffic light with a sound for the visually impaired, which is something that I also focused on in a sound piece called “Sound of Central,” Central being the part of Hong Kong called Central. I walked with my sound recorder between the traffic lights and created a stereo image back and forth. Walking around, people may have thought I was a bit weird, but it then felt performative in itself. Is that only a naked recording, or is it a performance of recording? There is not one rule for how I do this, and when it comes to working with fellow musicians—the two New Yorkers, Jay Pluck and Kyle Combs, plus the Colombian, Juan Pablo Echeverri, and from Rhode Island, Tom Roach—together with Tim, the six of us, we occasionally meet as a band project, and I’ve always recorded everything we do, coming from an observation that I repeatedly have in which musicians seem to say, “Oh, let’s do another take of this,” as if one can just do another take. As a photographer, I know from my experience that there often isn’t another take. I see the jam recordings also as a kind of field recording.

FRERE-JONES Lawrence English does a lot of field recordings, and he

wrote a paper about something he calls “relational listening,” which came to mind when you were talking about recording the stoplights’ sound, and you were doing this performance, because that means when you’re hearing something, you’re not just hearing the sound. You’re hearing the act of that person hearing the sound and recording it. You’re hearing a person hearing. Any act of recording is a little similar to the photographic process, and multiple takes makes you wonder, how can we say that the first take is good but we want to fix something about it? It’s always the balance between execution and concept.

TILLMANS You don’t want to fetishize authenticity because there isn’t such a thing as straightforward authenticity. It’s always a negotiation, but for me, there is something to be said for the moment when something falls into place. The looseness of that moment has a quality that would be lost when it’s put into place.

FRERE-JONES Do you have any interest in playing this stuff live? Do you have a history of doing this kind of thing live?

TILLMANS I’m in this group constellation. We did about five concerts in New York, at Union Pool, or at this sound installation we did at Tate. In 2019, at the Kantine am Berghain, we did this one song called “Kantine” on the album, which was recorded from that concert. I do like it, but it is something that doesn’t fit so easily into my other work. Ongoing life practice is basically what I can do time-wise, so I feel like I’m more drawn to working on a different form of music, visual presentation.

I do like it, but I’m also shy about it.

FRERE-JONES You spoke so strongly about moving into photography with this whole acid house club scene, and being in the club is also a very physical thing. I doubt that anyone experienced acid house and just stood there. We were having a good time in New York too, and dancing was just so important to me when I was younger.

How does that entire practice relate to how you make music now? Is any of that club feeling there for you in the same way, or was that more of a foundational movement?

TILLMANS It’s still a strong reference.

There’s this song, “Can’t Escape Into Space,” that also has a rolling bass in there.

There is something dance buried in it, but instead of pulling it out fully myself and AUTRE MAGAZINE 14 The Body Issue

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developing it, I asked Honey Dijon to remix it, and she did better than I ever could in that department. In the last three years, I found that I don’t need to do the actual club track. The last song on the album, “Give Me a Shadow” also has this beat but without a beat. I find that more interesting nowadays. Not that I’m too old.

FRERE-JONES I know what you mean. You can carry the club with you. The club can manifest in all kinds of ways. It doesn’t have to be normative and obvious.

Have you played this for friends who are both photographers and musicians, and obviously I couldn’t help but wonder, did you play this for Frank [Ocean]?

TILLMANS Yeah. I did send it around and got some very positive feedback from other musicians who have told me this is actually a step forward. That meant a great deal to me.

FRERE-JONES It feels like a very solid, legit piece of work. I hear a lot of stuff that definitely does not hold up the way this does. It also feels like there’s a mood. I don’t want to project, but if there is a mood moving into the next stage of what this pandemic is, I would say there’s a real love of softer things. When I was a kid, there was such a love of aggression. Kids don’t want aggression these days. They really, flat-out, don’t want it. I feel like your album fits into that feeling of intentional health.

You’re not trying to shock, or excite, or stab anybody; it’s very much inviting you in.

People don’t really want extreme forms of anything because we’ve gone through so much extremity in the last few years. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard music that was really interested in energetic catharsis.

There’s no new Jesus Lizard. There’s no new Big Black, or even Nine Inch Nails. I don’t know if that resonates at all for you.

TILLMANS I found for quite some time that it is not clearly predictable what will be successful, or what shines with an audience. In 2016, I had an exhibition in Porto, Portugal, at the Serralves Museum.

The natural thing would’ve been to give them a survey of popular things that I’ve been working on, but I didn’t want to do that. I was working on pictures of air, water, the sky, the different aggregates of water, and basically pictures of borders, horizon lines, and it seemed very relevant to me. When the exhibition happened, young people especially felt completely into it. I still photograph people dancing.

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The subject matter hasn’t really changed, but the key pictures in this exhibition at Regen Projects are studies of concrete being poured; liquid concrete just before it goes solid. So, intricate studies of material, rock, and sand. I didn’t calculate twenty years ago that the sweaty skin of a dancer would resonate with its time, it just felt right. Now, even though there’s no arrow that points at concrete, it is something that I do, and I feel it altogether connects. The exhibition has no clear signifier of hey, this is for young people, this is relevant, this is cool. And yet, I hope that it resonates with people of all ages.

FRERE-JONES I’m in the middle of making a record myself here, where mainly we’re playing on a computer, but otherwise, fairly traditionally. Having been pretty immobile for the past eighteen months, I listen to the recordings and find myself acutely aware of when I was standing up to play. It felt like a massive experiential change. There was a point when that wouldn’t have been a very big deal, and I was wondering if that has any kind of relevance to how you made this music, or if you have a physical relationship to how you record.

TILLMANS That’s fundamentally what inspired me to move back toward using myself as an instrument, rather than the camera—that very sensation of doing something in this very split second. My work is all about the visible world in one way, and on the other hand, as a person, like many of us, I try to do whatever I can to not feel myself, or to escape, or to postpone myself, but the act of singing or making sounds is 100% linked to real time, because there’s no postponement; there’s no further development or post-production.

I mean, there is post-production, but the actual act is in the here and now, and that brings the body into a different perspective for me, like an actual-ness that can’t be negotiated.

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WHAT ISN'T NATURE?

Set Design ADRIAN CRABBS Casting JEMIMA MAGNER FOR IKKI CASTING Hair TSUKI (@Streeters) USING BUMBLE AND BUMBLE Makeup AYAKA NIHEI USING KIMCHI CHIC BEAUTY Nails MAYUMI ABUKU FOR CHANEL LE VERNIS Producer KENDALL THOMPSON Models STEVIE BOYKIN (@Elite Models), MADDUX CALLAWAY (@EliteModels)

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bodysuit Rui, trousers Alexander McQueen at Haut archive, shoes Y Project at Haut archive, earrings Richard Murphy

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bodysuit Ashish by Cloak archive, floral choker Pebble London, shoes Pied a Terre at Haut archive

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THIS PAGE skirt Marshall Columbia, floral bracelet and ring Pebble London, pearl bracelet: Hatton Labs OPPOSITE PAGE full look Ottolinger, earrings and rings Pebble London

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THIS PAGE top Rui, trousers Dsquared2, shoes Y Project at Haut archive OPPOSITE PAGE top & leggings Common Å Communē, shoes BY FAR

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PRECIOUS OKOYOMON & BOBBI MENUEZ IN CONVERSATION

TIME OUTSIDE OF TIME Photography NICK SETHI

In time outside of time, there is no Zoom. There is no war.

There is no hunger. In time outside of time, you aren’t even reading these words. So, right now is an ideal moment to take a deep breath into the lowest part of your solar plexus, feel the weight of your body being supported by the ground beneath, and slowly allow your lungs to deflate completely. You can come back to any pressing concerns later, but for now, feel free to put those worries on pause. This is your time to tune into that humble, inner voice that has been quietly asking for your undivided attention. This is your time to ask that voice what it needs most. Be patient in receiving your answer and be open to surprises. It is likely to come in the form of a dream. When you receive your answer, take the time to give your body exactly what it needs. Whether you crave food, sleep, exercise, affection, or any other bodily indulgence, go ahead and make that your first priority. You are now existing in time outside of time, and in this space you are invited to satisfy your every bodily urge. You can carry this space wherever you go and you can share it with whomever you like. Once you feel fully centered and grounded, we invite you to come back to this issue of Autre and read an intimate conversation between artists Precious Okoyomon and Bobbi Salvör Menuez on portable grounding and the future annals of their dreams.

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BOBBI MENUEZ How is your body feeling right now?

PRECIOUS OKOYOMON I feel good. I ran around all day, and it’s been a day of meetings, but I feel semigrounded.

MENUEZ Yeah?

OKOYOMON Half on the floor, half in the air, you know?

MENUEZ I know what you mean.

OKOYOMON How are you?

MENUEZ I’m similar. I’m in a liminal space of not having meant to still be in New York, but then having this extended time, and then watching it gush full of this-and-thats, like trying to ground down to bring that with me somewhere else.

OKOYOMON Yeah. Transference.

Taking grounding with you.

MENUEZ Yeah! Taking grounding with you. How do you move it around?

OKOYOMON Put it in a pocket.

Throw it everywhere.

MENUEZ I know. I feel like I talk about getting grounded as if it’s this root system that can’t move.

OKOYOMON Yeah, I feel like grounding is a constant place of motion.

It’s a movement for me of rituals more than it is a stagnant thing that requires rules or something that can’t be moved.

MENUEZ The key thing I hear that resonates is this connection between grounding through movement versus stasis, which is somewhat contrary to some depictions of groundedness that we are given, even thinking about the Earth. It’s this never-changing thing, but it’s actually an ever-changing, birthing, dying, thing.

OKOYOMON It’s this constant rebirth. I’m always figuring out new ways of grounding. For me, grounding goes so much with dreaming and how I’m allowed to imagine futurities of existing, or imagine myself in a place of rest, which already I feel like I take myself out of time to do that.

MENUEZ I like this difference of not making time for rest but taking yourself out of time in order to rest.

OKOYOMON Yank me out of the Matrixial Borderspace.

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MENUEZ I need it.

OKOYOMON Eject from time.

MENUEZ Eject button. I know, and then I’m also thinking about gravity.

Sometimes the way in which grounding through movement in the body works for me is this thing of feeling the gravity of my own body—not just thinking about the gravity of the bigger body below me, the Earth, but the reality that everything has its own gravity.

OKOYOMON Yeah. I always think about that as trying to make more space for your body. Even for me, it’s been how I physically and spiritually take space for myself in little ways. It’s been small rituals of saying that I deserve this space, this Earth. I’m like, yeah, I’m going to go rest because I deserve this space.

MENUEZ It’s making me think about food, also, which is such a connective force for you and me, but it's also a connective force for all beings, whether they’re in dialogue with that connective quality or not.

Nurture, care, ritual. What else is in there?

OKOYOMON I mean, we love food.

MENUEZ We love. (both laugh) OKOYOMON What’d you eat today?

MENUEZ In the morning, I had two sunny-side eggs, two fucking MorningStar veggie sausages, potatoes, and green beans.

OKOYOMON Love.

MENUEZ And then I had a smoothie.

A red smoothie that had cacao in it also.

OKOYOMON Love a smoothie.

MENUEZ Then, I had a cabbage, noodle, spicy kimchi situation. What about you? You’re like, damn, sounds kinda good.

OKOYOMON That does sound good. I’ve been doing the smoothieevery-day lifestyle, which is really a way I’ve been staying grounded with all the travel. I make my smoothie every morning. It’s spinach, bananas, coconut water, pineapple, sea moss. Every morning. Addicted to this spinach, weird smoothie.

MENUEZ Sounds good.

OKOYOMON Then I had some kale.

I had some kale and lemon. I had some cucumbers. I’m saving up for dinner.

MENUEZ Is that Gravity talking? [dog barks in the background] OKOYOMON Gravity, chill. Hey! It’s okay. He heard a sound he didn’t like.

MENUEZ Animal companions are helpful for grounding.

OKOYOMON Animal companions are very important. It’s such a secret grounding for me in a way where I feel very bonded to my pet, and it feels like a very loving relationship that's beyond language, in a way. I’m always thinking about the limitations of language and how the love I share really deeply with Gravity allows us to express so many needs, and love, and endless conversations of trust without using language. I'm also thinking about the limitless, grand multiplicity of love and how that’s able to translate through so many different forms.

MENUEZ Yeah. Your own personal gravity.

OKOYOMON I got my Gravity here.

Grounded. Grounded with Gravity.

MENUEZ Naughty Gravity.

OKOYOMON Very bad, though.

We went to the Whitney today, and nobody knew that he was in my jacket. (laughter) MENUEZ What have you been dreaming about recently?

OKOYOMON I’ve been dreaming about spaces of rest that I want to create. I really want to make a forest.

Several forests around the world that have specific spaces of healing, and all the plants there are invasive, and lots of weeds, and healing plants, and sculptures, and music that grow, and evolve, and change. I’m obsessed with this, and I’ve been dreaming of archiving a dream library because there is no archive of dreams anywhere—where you could go and listen to everyone’s dreams that have existed throughout the centuries. I really want to make that.

I just want to go somewhere, and sit in a beautiful room, and listen to other people’s dreams.

MENUEZ I love that. I’ve been trying to record my dreams in the mornings more recently.

OKOYOMON It’s so hard! I’ve been trying because the first archive has to start with me. I got this Fitbit.

PRECIOUS OKOYOMON & BOBBI SALVÖR MENUEZ Time Outside Of Time

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PRECIOUS OKOYOMON & BOBBI SALVÖR MENUEZ Time Outside Of Time

Love the Fitbit. Addicted to the Fitbit.

Best invention ever. My Fitbit tells me how much I sleep at night, which is sporadic, but it also helps me for dreaming because now I know I have trash sleep between twelve and two, so I know my real dreaming hours are like three to five. So I wake up, and I’m like, whoa, that was crazy. Now, because I have a small dog who’s addicted to peeing in my house, I have to wake up at six, and then I don’t go back to sleep—unless I do, and then I have crazy morning dreams. It’s that two-hour window between seven and ten, and the dreams are really weird, but those I never remember. I wake up in a sweaty haze like, where am I, what dimension did I just come back from? The archive of dreaming is hard but important. A few weeks ago I had this dream, and it seemed very much like it was real life because I was in my living room, you were there, and SK was there, and I woke up, and it felt like it had happened, and I couldn’t shake off the sense that it had 100% happened in a different world, and I went to tell SK about it and she was like, “Oh yeah, that probably did happen.” What have you been dreaming lately?

MENUEZ Most of my dreams have been very elaborate, and I’ve been remembering them in the morning, but I’ve been feeling like I don’t have the time. I’ll start telling the dream to Quori or recording it, and it just keeps going for so long. There’s a lot of themes of postapocalyptic spaces where one part of the building is super lux, and then some other part of it is just ruins, very much like you open what you think is a closet and then it’s a whole other space. So, it feels like there’s multiple dimensions even within them.

OKOYOMON Parallel portals.

MENUEZ Yeah, parallel portals. I’ve been having a lot of synchronicity with dreams, like having a dream, and then it sort of happens, not totally, but kind of, and it’s funny. I can’t wait to go to your forests.

OKOYOMON I want to make soft resting spaces. The world’s stressful.

I'm trying to make some pockets of escape. Time outside of time.

MENUEZ Time outside of time, I know. Of course, it’s hard to get on a Zoom call at six when we’re trying to make time outside of time. Is there Zoom allowed there, in time outside of time? I don’t think so, unfortunately.

OKOYOMON There is dreaming and collective feeding, a lot of napping, archiving.

MENUEZ It makes me think about questions of the future. I saw one of the questions was about the future of Spiral Theory Test Kitchen and my first thought was just like, there never was a future. There is no future for that project or any project that I do. There’s only the present.

OKOYOMON Constant present in motion, baby. I feel like that project was birthed out of the insanity of us loving to play with each other and eat. We really like having crazy dinner parties, and then it was like, oh, we really like feeding people, and then it was like oh, we just really like fucking with people.

It just kept layering and layering in this beautiful spiral, and I like that it can exist and permeate into other people’s worlds, and other people have been so inspired by it, that it’s morphed into other things, and it exists constantly now in the present even if it doesn’t belong to us because there’s so many different forms of it.

MENUEZ Yeah, I know. It’s such a special project because I feel like it always existed in time outside of time.

It never was supposed to happen or make sense, or be allowed, and it always almost didn’t work. It just followed the Spiral Theory, which is the work itself.

OKOYOMON Spiraling upwards and outwards, constantly falling, making music from the falling and feeding.

MENUEZ Sometimes someone has to fall for someone else to get fed. It’s making me kind of hungry.

OKOYOMON Literally, my food today wasn’t enough.

MENUEZ I know! I thought you were making a cake.

OKOYOMON: You know, it’s happening.

MENUEZ It’s happening in time outside of time.

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OKOYOMON No, I had really ambitious plans to make a three-layer cake, and it’s giving one layer with a lot of whipped cream vibes.

MENUEZ I’ll put a couple of layers of love on top.

OKOYOMON What is a layer, when you think about it?

MENUEZ Or like, two-ply. Three-ply.

Maybe if you stack plates underneath those will count as layers.

OKOYOMON I’m going to get creative.

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Photography NAGUEL RIVERO Stylist MEL BACALONI Art SABRINA BERMUDEZ Production DALMIRA TOBAL Photography assistant FRANCISCO D'ANGELO Talent DIEG NUÑEZ AND CRISTIAN ZAPATA Model FAUSTINA COSMA JUGO Retoucher ALEJANDRA JIMENEZ Special Thanks MARIA LEE, EMILIANO D'ELL ORSI, CHICHO, FLORENCIA MALEM, SUSANA AMBROSINO AND LAS PEÑAS, CORDOBA, ARGENTINA. 206

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ANNIE SPRINKLE, BETH STEPHENS AND KIM TALLBEAR IN CONVERSATION

THE EARTH AS LOVER Photography DAMIEN MALONEY

Can sex save Planet Earth? Ecosexuals—and their allies—imagine a world where it can. Annie Sprinkle, Beth Stephens, and Kim TallBear are feminist pioneers liberating the erotic body from the settler colonial imagination of sex and love in the Information Age. TallBear, a citizen of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate who was raised on a Dakota reservation, is a professor on the Faculty of Native Studies at University of Alberta who studies the colonization of Indigenous sexuality. Sprinkle, a former hardcore pornographic film actress, prostitute, and performance artist, grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles. One of her most radical and legendary performances, Public Cervix Announcement, invited audience members to inspect her cervix with a flashlight and a speculum. Stephens grew up in the supernatural wilds of Appalachia. An artist and professor at UC Santa Cruz, she fell in love with Sprinkle, and in 2008 they married the Earth, thus igniting a global ecosexual revolution. Their recent book, Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth As Lover (University Of Minnesota Press, 2021) is a study of their nearly twenty-year collaboration.

Together, they discuss the multifaceted ecologies of desire.

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BETH STEPHENS We think the Earth is trans.

ANNIE SPRINKLE The word “Gaia” is obviously a female-sounding name, but I like the word “Earth” better because it’s more gender-neutral.

KIM TALLBEAR I agree. Ecofeminists have critiqued this view of nature as a woman, and the extraction, torture, exploitation, and subjugation that it entails. I’ve actually never thought about that in relation to Native people always talking about Mother Earth,

really beautiful theory too, but I still feel it in my body.

SPRINKLE Body, heart, and mind.

My eroticism is very connected to my heart. It always has been. That’s why I was a compassionate prostitute, because if someone touched my heart, I went the extra mile.

STEPHENS I can also experience eroticism just through sight. Visual eroticism.

That's sensual pleasure.

SPRINKLE What’s your definition, Kim?

"The right-wing has accused us of horrible things, from bestiality to fucking full-grown redwoods." but I don’t actually think that’s how it’s talked about in Indigenous languages.

SPRINKLE Earth as whore interests me, or Earth as pimp.

STEPHENS The Earth might even be in a whole other universe beyond sexuality that is not definable.

TALLBEAR In my next book I am going to try to avoid the word “sexuality,” because I don’t want to fetishize what people think sex is. Humans tend to get really stuck on genitals, or certain body parts, when we’re talking about sex, which fetishizes those ways of touch, and connecting, and relating.

That’s a great way to relate if you want to, but it’s not anything so special that I think we need to carve it off from all these other ways of touching and relating. That’s why I like the term “erotic” better, because the erotic can include a lot of these other things that live on the line between sex and not sex. I remember you were talking about this once, Annie, where you said, “I don’t want fast food. I want gourmet food, so I want gourmet sex.”

SPRINKLE I actually like junk food, and junk sex on occasion.

TALLBEAR (laughing) Oh, well that’s different from what you said that day. I was thinking about the food-sex relationship and there’s so many commonalities between the two. That comparison defetishizes genital sex in a really good way, and it gets at the erotic. What is the definition of erotic to you?

STEPHENS Annie has one definition, I have another. I like when my heart starts beating a little faster and I get a little excited, like a little heat happens.

TALLBEAR So, you locate it in your body.

STEPHENS Yeah. I can get turned on by 220

TALLBEAR It’s more like intellectual clarity and transcendence; the moment something clicks. It could be while you’re doing a sport, or maybe finishing a painting, or when you come up with the concluding line of your book. It manifests in this all-over feeling of fullness. It probably does connect to my body, but I hadn’t thought about that until you said that.

STEPHENS People often talk about the Earth, or nature, as being separate from humans. Kim, who was one of my professors, taught me that we’re part of the Earth. We’re made from all the same substances as the Earth. We’re water, we’re calcium, we’re all kinds of different elements. Annie is stardust. And this is part of the Gaia theory, that the Earth is alive.

SPRINKLE So, if we masturbate, aren't we just really pleasuring the Earth?

TALLBEAR I have a piece I wrote where I was lamenting a song lyric. I like the song because I like the singer’s stories, but she has a song about love that goes, “God's love is almighty, but our love is just bones and flesh.” I find that so sad. Bones and flesh are the point. They are part of the Earth and the universe, but it’s the denigration of flesh, which is the denigration of Earth.

That’s where that comes from, and it’s really so devastating to me that people can think like that.

SPRINKLE Ecosex is a lot about eroticizing everything. It’s a taboo to eroticize getting your hair done, or getting your nails done, or being on the beach sunbathing naked.

TALLBEAR I’ve been watching the Olympics, and it must be incredibly erotic to have a ski run like that. To be flying through

the air and land. When the skaters are flying around, can you imagine the feelings going through their bodies when they land a triple Axel? Can you imagine what that feels like when you land?

STEPHENS That’s the zone.

SPRINKLE I was thinking the same thing watching the skaters last night. The energy they have, and the physicality and ecstasy of achieving something so physical like that— that, to me, is sex. A guy I met once in a bar said it’s all about watching the woman’s crotch. He was obsessed with gymnasts and skaters, and how we look at crotches, and people say the face is the prettiest part of the body, not the crotch. Why can’t a vulva be more beautiful than a face? In the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, it was about swingers. I was a part of that swinger world, peripherally; I used to photograph it and partake in Plato’s Retreat and orgies, but I never identified as a swinger.

Then suddenly a lot of people morphed into polyamorous, which was a move in a good direction, but I don’t identify as polyamorous.

Pollen-amorous resonates, but I love what Kim is doing. After Kim's book, I might come out as polyamorous.

TALLBEAR When I give talks to undergrads, I’m often shocked. I thought these youngins were all flexible and nonbinary. They’re still caught up in the dream of monogamy. Their non-monogamy is not like mine, where there's a lot of talking, negotiating agreements. It’s more like, we’re just gonna hook up until we find “the one.” I also talk about asexual polyamorists all the time. They have taught me so much about what it means to be in relation without fetishizing sex. It’s not that they never have sex, but it’s not central to the way that they seek to be intimate. So, when I talk to students, and they notice I defetishize sex, they’re like, “Can I be polyamorous even if I’m only having sex with one person?” I’m like, “Yeah, what does that mean to you? Do you have a friendship that lives on that line between erotic and platonic?” When I was growing up in the homophobic 1980s, I was really comfortable having crushes on boys, but it never would’ve occurred to me that I was having erotic feelings for a girl, and those relationships were always on that line between platonic and sexual.

STEPHENS That idea of “the one” usually means the woman gets one person and the guy still gets everyone he wants, even if it’s a monogamous relationship. I think it’s really important that we’re trying to push the boundaries of what sex is. Friendships can be very erotic, and you get that feeling, whatever it is. It’s a great feeling. We’re erotic

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friends with the Earth. The right-wing has accused us of horrible things, from bestiality to fucking full-grown redwoods.

SPRINKLE I’m noticing a lot of young people grow up with porn. We didn’t. And they don’t like porn. I’m seeing a lot more interest in trauma and consent, rather than pleasure and orgasm.

TALLBEAR I’ve had one major controversy in my “Intro to Indigenous Studies Graduate Theory” seminar. I teach a unit on nonmonogamy and the David Shorter “Sexuality” article, and I have had Indigenous women students who really bristle at me jumping right to sex-positivity and sex as joy. They’re like, “We need to deal with the trauma first.”

I’m like, “Not my class!” You can go anywhere else on this campus, and the only thing you’re going to get in relationship to Indigenous people and sex is trauma. That tells me a lot. Sex gets overlapped with violence. It’s almost a full eclipse, but we should be able to talk about sex as not violence. That should be one option.

SPRINKLE I’m really heartbroken as a person who’s devoted their work to sex for almost fifty years. I showed pornography on college campuses and talked openly about sex for twenty-five years, and I won’t do it anymore because I feel too vulnerable. I don’t want to get into drama. Even the term sexpositive has been taken, and is being defined by anti-sex people. Of course, the Andrea Dworkin-ites are saying, “We were right, we were right!”

STEPHENS Those are the anti-porn feminists.

TALLBEAR Yeah, I don’t like the term sex-positive, but I don't know what else to say.

STEPHENS Part of the problem is that there’s no room for making mistakes. When I was young, I thought I was straight for a few years, and I was often stumbling and making dumb mistakes; navigating spaces of awkwardness. Men make those mistakes too, and I think we need to have some empathy for each other.

SPRINKLE All of our work, the three of us, is about wanting people to have more pleasure, more satisfaction, more love, more touch, if they need it.

STEPHENS Around the time Annie decided not to show porn anymore, I was teaching a class called “Ars Erotica” at UC Santa Cruz. It was a large lecture course for undergraduates. There was no place to learn this anywhere else, and I was showing work about differently-abled people. I was bringing in Pink and White Productions, which is a QPOC porn company. I brought Annie—all

kinds of people were coming in to speak in this class. Then, there was this faction of the class saying, “You can’t teach. That’s why you bring in these visiting artists!” I was bringing in the crème de la crème of the sex world.

TALLBEAR I suspect a lot of them have such shame around sexuality that they genuinely do feel done wrong, because their shame comes out while they’re sitting

guys. When you see them interviewed on the streets, they’re a lot of these right-wing, white supremacist men from the prairies of Canada, and they are so enraged. They can’t explain beyond the usual clichés: we don’t have enough freedom, masking mandates.

They’re homophobic, they’re anti-Semitic, they’re racist, they’re harassing women and people of color, putting anti-Semitic graffiti

"Sex gets overlapped with violence. It’s almost a full eclipse, but we should be able to talk about sex as not violence." there in class. And if their shame is coming from the surface, it must be the fault of the instructor.

STEPHENS But there are also so many students that still come up to me, and they’re like, “that was the best class I ever took.”And I always teach about ecosex, because I want to expand their minds. What is education if you can’t expand people’s minds?

TALLBEAR In Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie (2008), when he was talking about first going on testosterone, he said what just took over his body was this urge to fuck and fight. I thought, oh, you poor thing! I’d hate to feel like that. But I also became more sympathetic of men doing polyamory. There are queer, or more non-binary Native people, who I feel like have had their burdens being queer, but the polyamory politics for them are a little bit less fraught. Straight men of color think it's hard to be out because Black men are already seen as players. Native men get the same reputation, and they said the people who are hardest on them are Black women or Native women. I worried about being out as a polyamorist for other reasons, but I never felt my commitment to feminism and egalitarianism was questioned.

STEPHENS I think that’s where gay men are luckier in some ways, because there’s such a promiscuous nature to the gay culture.

I feel very sorry for non-monogamous straight men.

TALLBEAR They are trying to and are made to fit into this incredibly rigid identity, and it cultivates violence and rage. We’ve got this trucker convoy going on in Canada, but it’s not mostly working truckers, it’s a lot of owner-operators, and petite bourgeoisie behind it. And there’s a lot of money coming in from the right and the US funding these AUTRE MAGAZINE 14 The Body Issue

on things. I wonder how many of these people don’t have real intimacy, caring, and love in their lives. I feel like all of these things would go so far. Good, consensual caring, not the sex that objectifies women, or the sex that’s a power game. If it was power sharing, that would go so far in healing people. I was talking to some undergrads about David Shorter’s idea of sex as sharing power, and this student raised their hand and said, “What do you mean? Power is bad; it’s power over people.”

I said, “That’s only one kind of power. The other kind of power is the power that wells up in us when we feel strong, and we can share that power with our friends, or lovers, or family.” Some days, I feel strong, and some days I feel weak and tired, but it’s never me and my whole circle of people that are feeling weak and tired. Somebody’s got power they can share with me, and sex is a form of power sharing. I shouldn’t have said this, because it was asking a personal question, but I asked, “Have you never had a sexual encounter where you felt like you were sharing power? Was it always a power over?” And this student said, “it’s always power over,” and I was like, “Oh man. I’m so sorry.” Maybe it’s the norm for straight women.

STEPHENS It’s great that you brought that up in your class because that problematizes the whole system of power over.

SPRINKLE Having done sex work for twenty-two years—hands-on with thousands of people—I believe that sex workers are very powerful. There are race and class issues, but as a person who chose sex work and had other options, I know sex workers are kept down because they are powerful. They have this power to heal, and men with money have the power to buy sex. It gets pretty messy, but I can’t believe it’s still illegal in the United 223

States, except for Nevada and a couple other places. After all these years, why? Because of the power they hold. They don’t want them to get wealthy. You can’t walk in a sexy outfit to Wall Street or the men go crazy. It looked like we were going in a direction for a long time in terms of sex-positivity, sex worker rights, trans rights, and there are good things happening, but with this whole bathroom issue, and abortion rights too, I don't know.

There’s a lot of stuff happening regarding the body; birth, sex, and death. Those are big things in our culture that we aren’t addressing, and I think it’s causing those truckers a lot of pain and suffering—they aren’t getting enough pleasure and satisfaction.

STEPHENS There’s that, but I think they’re also being baited by wealthy interests.

And these are the same people that are destroying the Earth. I mean, the military is one of the biggest consumers of oil and extracted minerals. And the United States is still devoting most of its budget to the military, in spite of everything.

TALLBEAR Coming to understand what you two are doing with ecosexuality has been really generative for me because it’s like the New Materialism, or multi-species thinking.

Those are ways of approaching human/ nonhuman relations that non-Indigenous people are using. I think they are good moves towards destabilizing the hierarchies of life that animate science, sexuality, religion, but they’re not the same words and frameworks, and they don’t have the genealogies, or histories, that we do. We always have to engage in translation between these different languages and world views. We have some shared concerns and goals, but always be mindful that we’re coming out of different histories and different languages. Life for us is not organismically defined, so we talk about life as being a burning star. When Indigenous people say we come from the stars, you can take that in all kinds of ways. You can take that in a scientific way. We know that we’re materially related to the stars, but we also have stories of civilizations coming from other planets. Ecosexuality resonates with me; it’s not the language I would use, but it prompts me to think more creatively about the difference in Dakota culture. Why don’t we need ecosexuality? Not everyone has access nor should they have access to Dakota worldviews and ways of being. We are not evangelizers, so we’re happy for other people to have their approaches to dismantling these hierarchies.

STEPHENS It’s so important to be able to collegially have differences. I’m thinking through the kinds of work that I’m doing, and 224

my attraction to Indigenous belief systems.

I grew up in Appalachia, and there was a direct connection to European witchcraft there. Kim, one of the first conversations you and I had was about our belief in ghosts. I’m like, “Oh, I believe in ghosts,” and you said, “My mother can see ghosts, and I can hear ghosts.” You talked about your grandmother’s ghost entering the house that you were in after she passed on, and I’ve had so many encounters with ghosts that I don’t think they’re abnormal or supernatural. I grew up that way, but when I left Appalachia, I had to deny all of that. I had to pretend I was a dumb hillbilly getting schooled. I’ve gone back to not being embarrassed about it all, and seeing it as a connection to my ancestors, as a worldmaking, engaging viewpoint that fits right into ecosexuality too. I’m teaching a course about walking. We’re concentrating on walking, but I’m teaching it as a global engagement course with a class in France, where they’re doing work about ritual. They had us reading Starhawk, who is a witch and theorist of feminist Neopaganism and ecofeminism. Right now, in West Virginia, my sister is fighting against logging above the community where she lives, so we’re going to do a ritual in France and California simultaneously to try to resist this logging effort that’s going on there. How do Indigenous people, who have been so horrifically treated historically, fight these things without caving in to their methodologies and their hatreds?

TALLBEAR Well, this is what we’re seeing with this convoy. It’s very hard to fight violence with nonviolence, and we’re between a rock and a hard place here critiquing the non-response of the Ottawa police. They are not brutalizing these convoys. If it were Indigenous or Black people in there, they would’ve been utterly brutalized. We’re sitting here noticing the double standard, but we don’t want to call for cops brutalizing these guys because that’s just more cops to brutalize Indigenous and Black people. It’s been very difficult, also keeping in mind the violence to the planet. It’s hard to critique if we don’t embrace violence. We’re very hampered in that right now.

SPRINKLE I would just show them my tits. But why don’t we see the sex that’s going on everywhere around us? Beth and I love to think about what our bodies are made of.

There’s some really disgusting creatures in my gut, but I have to love them because they’re keeping me alive. Also my biome cloud, and Beth’s biome cloud, they’re all reproducing with each other. There is sex going on everywhere, and nothing is as it appears, because we are about 70% water,

and our bodies are Earth. Where does our body stop? At our skin? Or is it 100-feet out? We have this capacity for pleasure every second. We just have to say yes to it, and we can bring eroticism into our body. We can turn ourselves on with the click of a switch.

STEPHENS We’re trying to build ecologies of sexuality, and I think that the questions around Indigenous belief systems and ecosexuality—they’re both part of an ecology that requires difference. Otherwise they’re just mono-beigeness, which is not what we’re about at all. All three of us are very colorful people.

TALLBEAR What do you mean by ecologies of sexuality?

STEPHENS Well, that we can have hetereosexuality, asexuality, you can be ecoromantic, you can be polyromantic.

SPRINKLE Or ecocurious, ecosensual, there’s all sorts of things.

STEPHENS There’s so many different ways to engage in this system of sex, sensuality, pleasure. We had a friend helping us with our books. She used to be a sex surrogate.

TALLBEAR What’s a sex surrogate?

STEPHENS Someone who will have sex with someone else as a therapeutic act.

SPRINKLE Therapists can suggest a client hire a sex surrogate they work with.

Say someone’s a 40-year-old virgin, and can’t find a sympathetic sex partner, they can hire a sex surrogate the therapist trusts to be kind and helpful.

STEPHENS Or, if they are a person with disabilities who needs compassionate sexual assistance and expertease.

SPRINKLE It’s a grey area. There haven’t been arrests for sex surrogates, but technically you’re having sex for money.

Ultimately, I think through the work Beth and I have done, we have fallen deeply in love. Our love grew from a twosome, to a community, to the bigger planet. The love has grown for us, and I now finally feel really connected. We wanna make a place in the environmental movement for queerdos and freaks, a place that’s sexy, fun, and diverse; where we can be ourselves. I can be an old whore and dress up.

ANNIE SPRINKLE, BETH STEPHENS & KIM TALLBEAR The Earth As Lover

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Photography DANIEL ROCHÉ Styling MAX JOLIVET

AMALGAMATION

Makeup IVANA VLADISLAVA (Mac Cosmetics) Hair RUBY HOWES Production LAURA HOWES Post Production NITTY GRITTY BERLIN 226

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OPPOSITE PAGE cape Lanvin, blouse Sia Arnika, overskirt Emanuel Ungaro haute couture (archive), shorts Marni, tights Falke, shoes Camper, earrings Bimba Y Lola THIS PAGE cape Lanvin, top Jean Paul Gaultier (archive), skirt stylist’s own, tights Falke, boots Bolingier Poland, earrings Bimba Y Lola

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DANIEL ROCHÉ Ivana Vladislava

Berlin-based artist and fashion icon, Ivana Vladislava is the living embodiment of what gender theorist Paul B. Preciado calls the pharmacopornographic era—a living representation of potentia gaudendi, or the body’s inherent potential for pleasure—as outlined in Testo Junkie (2008). Vladislava began her fascinating and beautiful transition early and uses fashion to explore feminine tropes. Strutting around Berlin, she becomes the blonde bimbo, the fashion victim, the scorned harlot, the diva, the public meltdown, the alimony queen in vintage Versace. Her body is a one-woman power plant, an electrified fence sending white-hot alternating currents into heteronormative preconceptions of gender roles. Vladislava is a cyborgian vision of the future, when binaries will be shattered like a cocaine mirror at a burning discoteque.

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kimono Pleats Please by Issey Miyake (archive), earrings Bimba Y Lola

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DANIEL ROCHÉ Ivana Vladislava

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JERMAINE FRANCIS Artificial Selection

THIS PAGE blazer Chanel, trousers Ivana’s own, gloves Ivana’s own, slippers Abra OPPOSITE PAGE pajama set Vetements earrings Bimba Y Lola, shoes Abra

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THIS PAGE headscarf Sia Arnika, sweater Dries Van Noten, skirt Nicowa, mules Fuss Italy, earrings Bimba Y Lola bag Balenciaga OPPOSITE PAGE dress Bimba Y Lola jewelry Pearl Octopuss.Y, tights Falke, boots Abra

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DANIEL ROCHÉ Ivana Vladislava

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jumper Hermès (archive), trousers Mil Tec, tights Falke, shoes Fuss Italy

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EMILY BARKER AND ROBERT MCRUER IN CONVERSATION

BEYOND REACH Photography LEA WINKLER

Los Angeles-based Emily Barker is an artist and agitator whose work testifies to the harsh restrictions of our built environments as they relate to our physical abilities. Standardized kitchens, city sidewalks, and even overly steep wheelchair ramps are markers of the social violence that renders disability invisible. But while these works are artifacts of a disabled reality, they are also a stark reminder of the humanity lost in the ghosting of othered bodies. There is a longing to be seen, to survive, but also a demand for the same access and basic rights as ablebodied persons. In queer and disability theorist Robert McRuer’s book Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (NYU Press, 2006), he explores capitalism's neoliberal machinations that have both produced this erasure, and the hegemonic compulsion to posit abledness as the standard, or what he calls compulsory able-bodiedness. Barker, who will be included in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, and McRuer discuss this reality and desire for access.

ROBERT McRUER Maybe we can talk about your exhibition, Built To Scale, that you did at Murmurs a few years ago.

EMILY BARKER It was my first solo exhibition. It was about the ableism inherent in the standardization of the built environment and how the mass production of the industrial revolution reinforced ableism and created a world in which the disabled body has an incredibly difficult time surviving and navigating through spaces that are built by other human beings. Things as mundane as kitchen cabinets, which are standardized to be for the average height of the US male at fivefoot-eight, keep disabled people from being able to do something as simple as washing their dishes or cooking.

McRUER What I like about your work is the attentiveness to various moments in capitalism.

You are really savvy about neoliberal capitalism especially. Neoliberalism has spectacularized some disabled people, but it has left the vast majority behind, or shut out of our culture. Some people have called it inclusionism, which is really a facade.

BARKER Even the people that it's spectacularized, though, it refuses to make necessary accommodations or compensate for their labor, or even provide the most basic human needs. It’s even more insidious than capitalism.

At least I know where people stand. But if I'm retreating to cities from bigoted small towns in order to receive the community that I deserve, or the care that I need, or to be included, and find out that it's a facade, that to me is more insidious than knowing that someone hates me in the first place,

or doesn't think my life is worth living. It's much more confusing for me to navigate being a token for other people's vanity projects.

McRUER Insidious is really a keyword. I think that a lot of ableist machinations are insidious.

And I think spectacularization of a few sometimes means a very few, but those very few can be pretty prominent. I'm thinking of Greg Abbott in Texas or Madison Cawthorn in Congress, where a really particularly high-profile person is put forward as a representative of what it means to be a disabled person. And actually in Texas, the policies he's putting in place are horrible for disabled people.

BARKER Greg Abbott and Madison Cawthorn are perfect examples of not having a certain experience. We have to look at their access to capital throughout their lives and their privileges: white men within a system that has upheld them for very shallow reasons throughout hundreds of years now, in the US. They're doing everything to make disabled people, trans people, and people of color's lives more difficult in every single way, even though they also know that nothing is wheelchair accessible. It’s like Stockholm syndrome with the society that they live in. Facing austerity and receiving half-a-million-dollar medical bills has left me deeply enlightened about the economic place that we find ourselves in as people with bodies that are very prone to illness and disability.

Then we platform bigots who just happen to have the right identity to tokenize. It's been entertaining being alive right now.

McRUER You're sort of describing what I have named ‘crip times,’ where a logic of austerity is sedimented globally. And yet we don't talk or

theorize about the ways in which disabled people are central to that logic of austerity. And so ‘crip times’ means really bleak times, harsh times, austere times. And this is speaking to you as an artist, ‘crip times’ is a phrase of possibility. Crip art has generated ways of thinking differently and ways of resisting austerity. Some of the most exciting responses to the horrors of our age are coming from disabled artists, and I suppose your art has that as a motive behind it.

BARKER It's just my life. It's just what I experience. And it's just an area where I think a lot of people are ignorant. It’s interesting that we don't question this world that we're brought into.

We don't question why things are built the way that they are. We naively accept things when we're raised in a certain society or culture. It's very scary for people to begin to question. And it's weird because people are willing to do this with conspiracy theories. They wanna come up with these wild assumptions to make sense of the world, instead of just thinking about these very obvious things, right in front of their face.

Ideology is so powerful in the way that it keeps you from actually interrogating the way things work.

Anyone could make the work that I make. I find it really odd that people have told me that they're jealous of my experience with my body, because I have this breadth of inspiration and material to work from, and I'm like, okay, what about the healthcare industrial complex, the pharmaceutical industrial complex?

McRUER What about pain?

BARKER All of these things that are so universal to me, I find it so odd that it would be 241

so extreme for other people to understand. Before my accident, I was spending most of my time in school. When I wasn't at school, I was working.

When I wasn't working, I was in the studio. The average working-class person doesn’t have time to interrogate these things at all. So, I use my experience with these concepts to create a forced perspective for other people to see into these systems that are just fascinating and terrifying when you start thinking about them, and living through them. I can barely survive this system at all. My experiences and my body are constantly tokenized and appropriated to create capital for these neoliberal companies for advertising. I see the society of the spectacle happening in real time.

McRUER Because the system of compulsory able-bodiedness that we live in is so demanding

it’s really key to note that no matter who we are, we're subject to those systems. Compulsory heterosexuality still has this overarching force.

And it doesn't matter how disabled one is, compulsory able-bodiedness—as you're suggesting with this push to work, work, work—is governing all of our lives. I think the pandemic has made that clear. The pandemic happens, okay, let's all take a breather, let's work a little less. But the opposite has happened. It's like, okay, now that you have all this time, produce more, do more, think more, generate more.

BARKER I think compulsory able-bodiedness, and compulsory heterosexuality, is a symptom of the nuclear family that was developed simply to create the labor necessary to drive our economic system—to make women's labor free. I would say compulsory able-bodiedness is also a symptom

“We've really diluted ourselves with false concepts, like thinking that Darwinism is every man for himself when it’s really about the community strength that enables a species to evolve and adapt.” that we are pulled in all these directions at all moments. The vast majority of people don't have time to sort out these issues and think through how they might be changed.

BARKER I'm fascinated by this relentless incapacity to produce change in society, even if it’s a small design change that can easily be made, like curb cuts, or more gradual ramps, or shorter countertops, or, you know, Medicare—actually having medical treatment available for people in any capacity, which we really don't have. Western medicine is just so useless at this point. It's punishing—the systems that we have.

McRUER I like to think about what disability art and disability activism might do. As a writer, I'm incredibly pessimistic about the world we live in, but then hopeful when I look at the amazing crip resistance and crip activism and crip art that is happening globally.

BARKER The only reason I'm making art is because I can’t work a job, and I'm not allowed to make any money, or I lose my Medicaid, and my care-giving. I wish people would question their place within these systems because privilege doesn't mean that you're not suffering. It just means that you have an upper hand. I'm tired of people who have really dealt with the brunt of these things not being able to talk about their experiences. If you talk about capitalism, and if you talk about austerity, and forced poverty, people think that you are complaining or that you're victimizing yourself, instead of recognizing it as a critique of a system that, if it were improved, would enable all of us to have better lives, and to be able to actually thrive, which disabled people are hardly able to do without certain economic privileges.

McRUER We inhabit complex identities that are multifaceted. The fact that you have some privilege doesn't mean that the oppression is not still there. Talking about compulsory ablebodiedness, like compulsory heterosexuality— 242

of capitalism in that way. I do not choose to work this much. I do not choose to struggle this hard to survive. All of this is forced upon me. I do not consent to having to model to make more money than my art practice, because art is not sustainable for one to be able to afford rent, or healthcare, or wheelchairs that cost $30,000 to $60,000 for the custom models. People work so much out of fear that they will lack monetary support. I like reading. I like sitting around and watching films.

I like listening to old records. I like gardening. But those sorts of things don't provide me the ability to survive.

McRUER So let me ask you about forms of solidarity that actually might generate even slightly to resisting these systems. As an artist, as a thinker, as a person, how do we build forms of solidarity that can actually generate real change, incremental or more than incremental?

BARKER Solidarity would be people questioning their support, and not sitting idly by while disabled people die from being denied the care that they need on a daily basis. I don't even know at this point if we can get solidarity, or if that would produce significant change, because I've often seen able-bodied people capitalize off the suffering of disabled people. I see that happening within every single movement. I also see a disintegration of solidarity between movements that are really intertwined with each other: ableism within the queer community and other marginalized communities, as it becomes harder to survive the material realities that we face with climate catastrophe, with natural disasters, with war. How are disabled people supposed to have a revolution if we can't eat? Even with the disability rights movement, there are laws that aren't even effective in the long run. There's so many loopholes with the ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990]. I'm grateful to be born in 1992 and for my accident to happen later. I live EMILY BARKER Interview by Robert McRuer

on a street where I can't use the sidewalks. I can't use public transit.

McRUER The architects of a disability justice movement, mainly queer, people of color who are disabled, Indigenous, Black—this formation of a disability justice movement in the 21st century has tried to be more intersectional, has tried to be actively anti-capitalist, has tried to say, look, we can't just focus on laws. We have to focus on the system, on interdependency.

BARKER Well it's about power. Your intent can be great, but if you don't have the power to change these things, it’s not creating any material changes for people with disabilities. There's a bill on the table for marriage equality for people with disabilities, and that’s great. The language is great, but in some cases, people hide behind it. We see this with the words that we use, like revolutionary. It means nothing now. There's not enough general support on behalf of everyone else because people who can pass as able-bodied benefit from the systems. I see this a lot in LA with the housing crisis and homelessness, where people will throw tax money at a problem, but not solve it. All of these wealthy people can just sit idly as thousands of people are homeless on the streets of LA. It has a lot to do with ableism.

A majority of homeless people are disabled in some way and cannot survive within the confines of capitalism. We have this idea ingrained in us that if you can't survive capitalism, it's your fault.

This is what I've seen and experienced personally in the decade that I've been chronically ill and a paraplegic who uses a wheelchair. This is all power dynamics—people want to feel like good people.

So they'll use all the right language. Whatever makes someone happy, but I need to be able to exist in the built environment and the economic systems. And right now, that is not the case. I don't feel like there's enough power for the exchange to happen.

McRUER Based on what you're saying, you're really quite aligned with proponents of disability justice in that disability justice, as a framework, is about the language, and the discursive is not enough for material change to happen. We can't only think about a single issue. We have to think about all these issues together, and how they function systemically. Your artistic practice is very aligned with that emphasis on the discursive and the material together.

BARKER Oh, for sure. I just know identity isn't enough. I know that words aren't enough. I find it so interesting that any time someone is able to function within the system, they forget about all the people who can't. I think back to this idea of communities, and the body, and the Earth— when animals get sick, I see a lot more care and compassion between them. We've really diluted ourselves with false concepts, like thinking that Darwinism is every man for himself when it’s really about the community strength that enables a species to evolve and adapt. As we face climate catastrophe, disabled people will be the ones dying first. We'll be unable to escape the wildfires that happen in California.

McRUER Katrina is a prime example of that, where the people who were left behind were in hospitals and nursing homes.

BARKER Yeah. There needs to be some kind of awareness that is developed and true empathy.

Disability is so much on the outskirts. So, I hope that with my work and with my discussions on this, disabled people are allowed to talk without being punished. That’s a big thing I worry about with my politics. And with me talking about these things on my Instagram. Is this going to keep me from getting an ad campaign that I need to survive? How am I going to navigate forced poverty laws, and austerity, and get the money I need for my wheelchair while also maintaining that I'm still poor enough to receive Medicaid, and have a caregiver allowance? I think people just don't really want to think that other people have it harder than them because everyone is struggling so much to survive.

McRUER James Charlton wrote a book called Nothing about Us Without Us (1988), which is the sort of global watch phrase of the disability movement. Not just the disability rights movement, but also the global disability movement. One of the theses in his book is that disability is marginalized everywhere. It's materially marginalized through the built environment, through architecture, through neighborhoods and so forth. There are so many things built into our culture that keep people from realizing it.

BARKER Why would they? When you're adding these layers of an inability to participate in structures of society and community, you won't ever see us. Disabled people can't participate or attend the schools that they're going to, or even go to most voting stations, or get into the building where they hold the city hall meetings. It's a circular loop of inability for disabled people to participate in the same community as everyone else. Or we just don't have the immune systems to show up to support because we're not living with the care to have the energy to participate in that sort of change.

McRUER In the context of students and universities, there is also this ideological push on everybody to not identify as disabled. So one thing that happens in many disabilities studies classrooms is like, “Oh, I've never really thought about myself in relation to disability because the culture says, don't think about yourself in that way.” The universities are inaccessible and many people are not getting in, but then people who are already there are encouraged not to think of themselves as disabled. And that too is part of the problem.

BARKER When discussions of disability are centered on the people with the least amount of care-giving needs, it leaves out the people with the most needs. I don't get to choose my identity.

I don't get to choose to participate in these discussions. I live this every day. I have to worry about being criminalized within the system for surviving. It's kind of like a snake eating its own tail all the time—it’s just self-reinforcing compulsory able-bodiedness.

McRUER It brings us back to the indispensable topic of solidarity.

BARKER I feel very blessed for my friend group and the people who support my work. But I don't think within the disability community there’s a general solidarity. I don't think people are willing

to put aside their own moralistic values of other people. Even people I don't agree with, like Trump supporters, I still empathize with their struggles.

I still understand why they think the way they do.

I actually don't blame them for their ignorance. I blame the system that has created that. Anyone who supports a system that wants me dead, I don't think that they're bad people. I think they're trying to survive in the same way I am. Solidarity would mean people having to put their ego aside. There's less willingness for true understanding when everything is about this spectacle—everything is about judgments of value in Western culture.

Within some Indigenous cultures, the term disability doesn't even exist. I have a lot of hope, but there would have to be a major surrender and willingness on the part of more people to listen and consider the world outside of themselves.

McRUER I really love that. That's a beautiful definition of solidarity, it really underscores how difficult it is for us all.

BARKER We used to have more of that.

We wouldn't have any disability rights without the Black Panther party—without multiple movements showing up for each other and understanding the needs of a bunch of people in wheelchairs getting bladder infections. Disabled people are still making cents on the dollar as compared to able-bodied people. It would take a true humbling even within the disability community to no longer participate in the violence of these structures. I'm very excited to create safety and community and the possibilities of futures in which disabled people can thrive. But, you know, I can't believe we're having this discussion in 2022 when we only have a few years left before it gets too hot to sustain the crops we need to eat and to live. And if this is how we see disabled people treated now during the crisis in Ukraine and in Palestine and in any natural disaster, what does that say about what's going to come? People need to ask themselves whether it's worth losing their humanity to be complacent within these systems.

ABOVE At My Limit, 2019, 3D printed articulated hand, electrical wires, miscellaneous hardware, 20 lb. weight. Courtesy of the artist and Murmurs. Photo by Josh Schaedel BELOW Untitled (Ramp), 2019., Thermoformed PETG plastic, rivets, wood, broken wheelchair. Courtesy of the artist and Murmurs. Photo by Josh Schaedel

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AN INTERVIEW OF CHRIS WOLSTON

A MATERIAL REALITY WEAVING THE BODY ELECTRIC An orgy of covetous limbs, pouting lips, and raunchy haunches with a host of gratifyingly variegated textures people the works of designer Chris Wolston. A consummate master of material, the Medellín-based artist employs a local, profitsharing cooperative of weavers to create works that effectuate ancient techniques upheld by generational transference. These fanciful forms of wicker, sandcast aluminum, bronze, copper, bouclé, and scrap fur coyly suggest you come hither and allow yourself to be sensually spellbound by a story of corporeal substance. Each piece is a forniphilic memoir from the City of Eternal Spring.

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SUMMER BOWIE There's this obvious whimsy to your work aesthetically, but in practice, you make a lot of choices that are very ethically grounded. Can you talk about how you negotiate that balance?

CHRIS WOLSTON My practice is really based around material investigation and craft, and that involves working with a lot of other people. So, for the wicker, we work with a team of artisans, and we've developed this special relationship that involves pushing the material to its limits while telling a story beyond the whimsical forms. This last year, I've been putting together a documentary of the weavers we work with that pulls together all of the information that I'm looking at here in the studio beyond just the thing. For pieces that enter into museum collections, or are exhibited in other contexts, the video is part of those collections. One of the things that's been so interesting working with the weavers is that, within the material culture of the city, there isn't a market for eccentric wicker forms that really maximize their capabilities. I introduced the Nalgona chairs back in 2019, and that has turned into this entire wicker collection. Part of the force behind that has been working with this team of people who are material masters. For example, the Supermodel chair, with the wild squiggly arms is about exploring forms where the team is really able to push their understanding of weaving.

BOWIE Are most of their other projects a lot more commercial; very traditional forms and shapes?

WOLSTON It's like big blocky sofas for next to people's pools. And they're really well done, but when we start to look at furniture forms, I think of the forms as relational sculptures; these pieces that explore material investigations and present material in a way that can be physically interacted with in an unpretentious way. Furniture is a medium that everyone is familiar with. They have an understanding of it without even thinking about it.

BOWIE The familiarity that comes with functional objects makes the interpreting of them less intimidating. What's the role that sensuality plays in your practice?

WOLSTON Well, I think that people have very intimate relationships with their furniture. The body motif entered into my work when I was working at the aluminum foundry and I felt that the sand-cast aluminum had this very fleshy quality to it. It was very puffy, and when it's sand-cast in an open-face mold, it has this beautiful surface.

So, I decided to do a series of aluminum tables that brought in body forms as a way 246

of playing up the relevance of that materiality with the human form. Right now, we're working on a series of donut chairs that are pushing that sensuality, because the chairs originally started as these funny gestures.

They all have butts, and feet, and hands, but that only goes so far. I'm constantly exploring that element and it's not always very obvious, but it's definitely an underlying energy in the work.

BOWIE You've talked about how the dominating forms of your work are less premeditated, like the hands and such, they tend to come out as you're creating the work.

Were you at all surprised to see the butt come up so prominently in these pieces?

WOLSTON One of the things working with the Future Perfect is that some of the pieces are auditioned. When I was at Design Miami in December, I went over to a client's house who had bought a chair a couple years ago, and the butt was so understated. It made me realize that these body parts keep getting more and more pronounced over time, and the chairs at this point have these huge asses. Every time we remake a piece for an edition, it's ultimately perfected, or there's elements that are sort of embellished. We're working right now on one of the Madonna tables that are cast in bronze with the breasts and various body parts. It's been really interesting when the cast bronze comes back to the studio, because we draw the different details on it, and then we have to look at it and ask, “How can we perfect this nipple?”

Or, “How can this roll be thicker?” It's this funny duality of sensuality with material, and also with the actual imagery.

BOWIE I read once that Tom of Finland was more of an ass man, but his fans were so into the thick, veiny dicks that he would really push into that for them. That aesthetic development over time is interesting because the work becomes a very intimate dialogue between artist and collector regarding their collective desires.

WOLSTON Yeah, back in 2018, I did a coffee table. It was called the Chicharrón table and it's all the body parts. I had made one that the gallery put in a show apartment and it was never really seen. Then all of a sudden, I started getting all these orders for the table, which is definitely the raunchiest out of all the tables, and each time we recast it, it just gets raunchier and raunchier.

BOWIE I love that.

WOLSTON The human body has always been present in art, but at the moment, it seems like the raunch level is getting turned up.

BOWIE: Right. It feels like the pandemic has been calling all this attention to our collective sexual repression. Sexuality in the Western world feels like such an inextricable combination of liberation and shame, but the more that we give each other permission to let it all go, the easier it is to decouple that shame from the whole equation.

WOLSTON Yeah, and I think that combining the whimsical with the deep, material reality provides an entry point for people with my work. During the pandemic, there has just been an explosive reaction to these pieces that are either humorous or sexual, and people are eating it up. It's just this human urge and desire that's been the result of being in isolation.

BOWIE (laughs) I like that they're eating up all the freshly embellished asses you're serving. There's this phenomenon called facial pareidolia where we see faces in everyday objects. But you tend to see the human body when you look at a landscape, which you then represent in everyday objects.

Has this always been a dominant aspect of your practice?

WOLSTON Well, I've always been deeply inspired by nature, but it wasn't something that I realized until this past collection. As a kid, I always loved doing things outside.

I went to farm camp, was a Boy Scout, and would go backpacking, but with the last collection, in the midst of isolation, it became an obsession. Right before the pandemic, I had been in Barcelona touring [Antoni] Gaudí's buildings, and did a lot more reading on Gaudí than I had previously, and I didn't realize that he had actually been so influenced by nature. My house in Medellín is up the mountain from the studio, and I have this immense mountain range as my view from the front. When the world shut down, I had just flown to New York to do an install, and I got stuck in the States for six months. So, I ended up going to New Hampshire and spending a lot of time at a cabin that had a mountain range on a lake.

I was making connections between these two locations that were so different and became really interested in exploring nonlinear volumes. Looking at that landscape, thinking about abstraction and past motifs became a way of developing abstraction that was also tied into the body forms; the forms of the flowers, and fruits, and leaves that I'd used in previous collections.

BOWIE The influence of Spanish modernists, like [Joan] Miró have come up a lot in reference to your work, but your metallurgy feels very influenced by the Japanese practice of kintsugi, and I was

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Dream Weavers

Jose Luis Álvarez (36) is from Tolima, Colombia. He started repairing furniture at 18 with a small wicker shop.

Norbey Gomez (40) is from Tolima, Colombia. He is the owner of the wicker studio. The studio is a profit-sharing cooperative that works with 12 different weavers. The weavers photographed the core team that work exclusively with the cooperative. Norbey moved to Medellín 20 years ago to work in thatching (straw roofing). The owner of the roofing business also had a wicker furniture shop where Norbey worked on weekends to learn how to weave. He eventually transitioned to weaving full time and opened his own business in 2014, where 12 artisans work full time. Norbey runs the studio and continues to weave.

Daniel Arango (28) is from Medellin, Colombia. He started weaving 7 years ago, learning from Norbey at the wicker studio.

He started with boxy furniture and dining chairs, and has started taking on more challenging projects with Chris’s sculptural forms.

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Fernando Lopera (53) is from Medellín, Colombia. He started weaving at a very young age, learning alongside his father.

As a boy, he would help his father, making lamps and other simple pieces, moving on to larger objects, a wider range of materials, and always looking for new skills and challenges.

He is also the carpenter at the wicker shop, constructing wooden frames for the wicker furniture. Fernando is a master weaver. He has woven works that are in museums around the world.

Yeison Mendez (21) comes from Cúcuta, Colombia. His stepfather started teaching him how to weave when he was 12.

He developed his skilset by watching other weavers and has been weaving full time for 4 years.

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Chris Wolston, Body mirror, 2021, mirrored glass, woven Colombian mimbre (wicker). Courtesy of The Future Perfect

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CHRIS WOLSTON A Material Reality

curious if that tradition or any others played a role in these explorations.

WOLSTON Right. When I enter into creating new work, I'll have a sketch, we'll go and make it, and sometimes there's major mistakes that happen. The sand-cast aluminum and wicker vessels were forms that I had originally intended as a huge, castaluminum vessel. But the thing is so big that parts of it don't fill with aluminum in the casting process, which leaves these holes.

So I thought of the kintsugi technique, and the way you can fill a crack in ceramic with a pine resin and gold leaf it, or you can fill it entirely with gold, and that led me to playing up these errors that are part of these vessels.

Those are sometimes the most interesting elements to discover. In the case of the bronze and copper table, I had actually gone to my foundry and I had said, “I want you to cast this table in bronze.” But when I went back, the bronze looked awfully red. And they were like, “Oh yeah, we messed up. We cast it in copper by accident.” After having the pieces around and watching it start to patina, I thought, this is great because we can actually weld these different metals together.

We're working on a series of tables now that are cast bronze and are treated with different acid patinas, where the surface is really aggravated and grotesque, but the pairing of these finishes is actually quite beautiful.

BOWIE For Temperature's Rising, you worked with a lot of manufacturers to make use of their scrap materials. How did you go about finding those partners, and do you have plans to continue those working relationships?

WOLSTON I first came to Medellín on a Fulbright grant, and I was looking at materials that are used in everyday applications; colloquial materials that have a wide-spanning presence in the culture. One of the things that exists here are sand-cast aluminum items for the home. Back in 2013, or so, I found this sand-cast, aluminum hot chocolate pitcher, which was being sold at a dollar store and thought it was incredible.

This is a cast-metal object that has hand tooling, it's spun on the outside, and it has a sand cast interior on the inside. So much work went into making this thing, and it's so everyday. So, I ended up tracking down the foundry that had made the pitcher, and through that, I got set up with the foundry that I work with today … and all these foundries are using recycled materials. It's melted down motorcycle engines, and truck rims, and it's so sustainable. Out of all the metals, aluminum is the one that can be reused the most.

BOWIE That's interesting, because aluminum is often regarded as a lowerquality metal, but it's used for so many things, and we’re completely dependent upon it. You also work with scrap textiles, like fox fur and bouclé yarns.

WOLSTON With Temperature's Rising, I wanted to go beyond metal, and wicker, and the ceramic elements, and explore upholstery. And I searched for so long to find the right upholstery. I wanted to use a bouclé just because I like bouclé. The one that I used has an extremely rich texture, and I wanted to find a material that could complement that texture and push it, in a sense. So, I also found this couture fur manufacturer in Greece, where this guy goes around collecting all the scraps and he sews them together into panels. So, in terms of the values of the studio, it seemed very appropriate to use this recycled material. It's also an interesting commentary on value, using this castaway luxury material that's reapplied in a frenetic, confetti-like pattern.

BOWIE There's something nice about knowing that they can't be mass produced.

Each one is inherently unique.

WOLSTON It's true, and because the couture industry is so based on trends, when you look at the panels and you see different colorways, they are reflective of moments in time when those colorways were in vogue.

That's not obvious in looking at the work, but I like that whenever we make these pieces, they act as a record of a point in time.

BOWIE You've been experimenting with color in a very new way with this body of work. What drew you to the colors that you chose with pieces like the Nalgona chairs and the pool pieces?

WOLSTON With the Nalgona chairs, I wanted to introduce color, but I didn't want it to be an applied color or painted wicker, so the wire that was woven with the wicker comes from a florist supplier in Bogotá. They make this colored wire to be incorporated in bouquets. It seemed like an appropriate way to continue exploring the materiality of weaving while introducing these elements of color. With the pool pieces, I wanted to create a conversation within the garden environment. In a place like Beverly Hills, you have your green lawn and hedges, your blue pool, and then there's some stone element and a tree trunk. So, that was the palette that I'd been looking at when considering how to engage with that space.

BOWIE What advice would you give to young and emerging designers who are seeking to work in ways that are both economically and ecologically sustainable?

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WOLSTON: When you're getting started, it's so important to be in an environment where you feel inspired, and you can use that energy to create your work. When I graduated from RISD, I don't think I would've imagined moving to Colombia and having a studio here, but I found this place that continues to inspire me. Medellín is a wonderful place because it's an industrial city with so many materials available, and a lot of industrial processes like these smallscale foundries and wicker weavers; it's a lot of beautiful artists and traditions that are thankfully still intact.

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Photography JERMAINE FRANCIS Concept & Styling BETH FENTON

SINÉAD O'DWYER

Dublin-born, London-based designer Sinéad O'Dwyer is smashing the dysmorphia-inducing notion that bodies need to fit fashion’s one-size-fits-all mentality. O’Dwyer’s criticallyacclaimed 2018 RCA [Royal College of Art] graduate collection included silicone-molded lifecasts of friends and muses that were then turned into corsets. Working as a nanny inspired O’Dwyer’s Spring Summer 2022 collection, which is an ode to the domestic worker. She immersed herself in Bishopsgate Institute’s expansive LGBTQ+ erotica and pornography library, and drew inspiration from hand-drawn pamphlets depicting the fetishization of domestic workers, namely nannies coddling adult babies. The result is stretchy bodysuits, bibs, bloomers with evocative cutouts, waistcoats, and clasped aprons. For O’Dwyer, “clothes become learnt patterns of beauty and desirability.”

Makeup JENNY COOMBS @TheWallGroup Hair JADE O'BELLE All Clothing SINÉAD O'DWYER SS22 & AW21 Models SINÉAD O'DWYER & Artist JADE O'BELLE Photographed in SEVEN SISTERS, NORTH LONDON 252

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JERMAINE FRANCIS Sinéad O'Dwyer

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JERMAINE FRANCIS Sinéad O'Dwyer

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JERMAINE FRANCIS Sinéad O'Dwyer

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SANFORD BIGGERS & TREMAINE EMORY IN CONVERSATION

CODESWITCH

Code-switching, a term coined by sociolinguist Einar Haugen in 1954, is the switching of two or more languages, or language varieties, based on the context of a social situation. For the African diaspora living in a white world, code-switching became the modus operandi for survival. Codes of Blackness, the Black experience, and the Black body are traversed with powerful interpretations by both artist Sanford Biggers and designer Tremaine Emory. Biggers' Codex series, which includes remixed pre1900 quilts is a shoutout to these cabalistic lingual variations. Quilts with intricately patterned cryptography and mnemonic devices were utilized by Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman as she used the North Star to free slaves. Stars, stripes, astronomical motifs, and fluffy white clouds resembling cotton are repeated with patchwork or spray paint in Biggers' quilts, a medium that harkens back to his graffiti days growing up in Los Angeles. For Emory, the founder of Denim Tears and creative incubator No Vacancy Inn, who was most recently named creative director of Supreme, cotton also becomes a recurring motif and a symbol of enslavement in the Americas. In one apparel graphic, Jesus, as he is usually depicted in Anglo iconography with white features is unchanged except for Black skin and a crown of cotton replaces a crown of thorns. Together, Biggers and Emory discuss the symbolic motifs of each other's work.

Sanford Biggers, Overstood, 2017, Sequins, canvas, fabric, tar, polystyrene, aquaresin, 144 x 96 x 50 in.

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SANFORD BIGGERS You can't separate ecology from race. Some of the seeds of the current climate crisis were planted in the plantations of the American South.

TREMAINE EMORY I agree. Pollution started with colonialism and also was exacerbated by it.

And you can keep going, sexism was exacerbated by colonialism. But really, colonialism, the largest enslavement and movement of humans in all of history, it all stems from the agricultural revolution, and the Europeans having a surplus of food, creating armies, and then seeking to expand their empire. You know, greed, which is capitalism. That's where the lack of humanity began. Humans started to lose their humanity; to enslave and dehumanize. And to enslave someone on that level, you have to dehumanize yourself first by creating up myths about these people's worth and their intelligence. If you can enslave a person and hurt a person, what do you care about the Earth? George Floyd is a popular example of what’s happened to thousands of Black men and women in America, which is directly connected to slavery. But that doesn't get talked about in the media; that the dehumanization of African Americans is why a person could sit with their knee on someone's neck when they're supposed to be a police officer. That’s what started that feeling of: this person is an object. This person doesn't count. This person is less than, and I can get away with this. All that started with slavery.

And it hasn't stopped.

BIGGERS In some ways I think it's human nature. Slavery is not relegated strictly to Europeans on the continent of Africa. There was Intra-African slavery, just like there was Intra-European slavery, and so on—conquering and then exploitation. I think where it gets really

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murky, particularly when we're talking about African American culture, history, and bodies is that the othering of Africans and then African Americans has been very easy to sidebar on so many other issues. The moment you start to make a point that is much larger than the specificity of just African Americans, and incorporate the environment, which affects everybody, people get a little scared. It's much easier to silo it into a very specific place. Then you talk about economics or about the demographics of where people live and how they ended up there. There's myriad offshoots from that original sin that we never seem to get back to the bigger conversation without pointing fingers in the process. That division serves the capitalist majority, because obviously there are Black Americans, white Americans, and many other types of Americans that are all living together at every class level. So, it all comes down to economics. And when you start getting into those specific economic brackets, you find the division, even amongst those brackets, it serves to keep somebody feeling more powerful and to subjugate another person. Especially when there’s a history of law enforcement that has always oppressed the darker skin. With that being the backbone of our cultural heritage in this country, it just perpetuates itself. Once we start talking about the environment, somebody else will say, “Well, that sounds like a Black issue, and you're not talking about the larger environment, which is my environment.” It's a capitalist Ponzi scheme saying, just don't get left holding the bag.

And those who are richer are hoping they can find a way to absolve or remove themselves when things get too chaotic.

EMORY Totally. Because if you're not living in unison with everyone, you're kind of flip

SANFORD BIGGERS & TREMAINE EMORY In Conversation

flopping, right? If we were living in a world where people were actually united, which we aren't, then it's like any problem is everyone's problem.

Whether it's the ozone layer, or George Floyd, it's everyone's problem, but we don't live in a world like that, unfortunately. It's a wider conversation about the human condition. African Americans aren't the only people to be enslaved. And sometimes, it becomes a pain competition with different cultures, instead of speaking about the human condition as a whole, and everyone having compassion, empathy. It’s about seeing the parts we play in it and the parts we don't play in it.

BIGGERS Then it gets into issues of access, exposure, and mobility. What kind of mobility does a person have to better their circumstances, and what oppositions will they be met with when trying to better their circumstances? We need to collectively realize this for the betterment of everyone and their ability to upgrade their status. That's one of the things I try to do with my artwork. I don't intend for it to feel didactic, or from one specific point of view. I like to combine several points of view and to transubstantiate that into an object that provokes thought and dialogue. Each person who reads any given work can only gaze that work based on their level of exposure or experience. Everyone's levels are individualistic and different, but if they have a conversation about those works and those issues, they can come to different conclusions, maybe find some type of similar understanding, or call for action from a more diffused view of argument conditions.

EMORY That's interesting, you bring this up about your own work, because I’m currently reading this Darby English book, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness. It asks if art by a

TOP Converse X Denim Tears Air Hammons 70 Hi inspired

by Jamaican political activist Marcus Garvey’s Pan-African flag and artist David Hammons’ 1990 work “African-American Flag," BOTTOM Denim Tears Crown Made Of Cotton Graphic AUTRE MAGAZINE 14 The Body Issue

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THIS PAGE Portrait of Sanford Biggers by Steven Yatsko OPPOSITE PAGE Sanford Biggers, Caniggula, 2020, White marble on custom cedar plinth, 77 1/8 x 33 x 32 7/8 in., Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen. © Sanford Biggers. Photo by Lance Brewer

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Black artist should be seen for its form and style rather than its level of Blackness. I’m curious which side you land on?

BIGGERS I've always seen that as a moving target. I've cycled through a few different opinions about this notion over the last few decades, and there was a point when myself and many of my contemporaries were, to some degree, skeptical of being called Black artists, because as Darby's implying, it’s this ghettoization and compartmentalizing of the possibilities, or the issues that the work is discussing. It just causes some viewers to shut down—somehow they feel othered and they don't engage with the work. Conversely, I felt a certain degree of pride being a Black artist due to the long history and synchronization of our cultural output with the Black Power and related diasporic movements.

We found ways to engage in that work and say, “Okay, well let me figure all this stuff out.” This is one of the reasons I work in so many different mediums. There's some work that you can say, “that feels like it's a Black theme,” or “that seems like it might be done by a Black person,” or “oh, I didn't know this person was Black at all.” I actually consider that a matter of tone.

I'm very influenced by musicians, who on any given album, are playing with different tones and different voices. Or throughout the bibliography of a writer, you have works written from different points of view that deal with different themes.

I approach making art the very same way, as opposed to just making one specific project and riding that project for many, many years. I'm not devaluing that, but I've been very interested in that relationship between a body of work and the viewers it touches, and the dialogue it sparks amongst them.

EMORY Yeah, I agree with both parts. It's a moving target. In one sense, as an artist, designer, whatever you are, you don't want to be put in a box. But, you also don't want to alienate a community or a culture that you come from that hasn't been exposed to the art world. And the art world is very closed off and elitist. To give you an example: my good friend was in town. I've known him since I was like twenty. He's about forty-eight. He's an amazing human being. He’s spent about ten years or so of his life on drugs. He grew up near South Side, Jamaica, Queens. His mother died when he was eight weeks old. Shot in the head. He's never met his father and there’s a litany of things he's been through. He’s raising a beautiful daughter. I took him to the Shattered Glass art show that Jeffrey Deitch did and he was drawn to a painting of a Black man and his daughter. He just went over to it, and it’s the first time he saw himself represented in this context.

Myself, I wasn't against that painting or for it. I'm just more drawn to stuff like SoiL Thornton, or some of the more abstracted things that you’re doing, but for him, the life he's lived, he was so taken aback in an amazing way to see his life as a Black father. It's a happy Black daughter 266

represented in a painting, in a gallery. That just never really existed in the history of the art world. So, I agree with you. It’s a moving target. I don't think I have the right to discredit someone who sticks to making Black art. It might seem like this thing happening now in culture where everything's Black, but it's still only a drop of olive oil in a gallon of water.

BIGGERS Think about Miles Davis when he stopped playing “the blues.” And you can argue that all jazz is the blues at some point, but there was a point when he decided that he couldn’t play the blues anymore, or even look at the audience anymore, because there's a certain type of framework or association made with that type of music being played by that man. He left his accolades aside and did experimental stuff that got boohoohooed for years, until finally it ends up influencing the next thirty years of music.

There was a show called Freestyle at the Studio Museum that ushered in a “post-Black” approach to making art, which wasn't leaving anything Black behind, but it wasn't necessarily working strictly within a very tight stricture of what Black representation or Black production could look like either. That really broke walls down and introduced us to a different dialogue. Yet, here we are, almost twenty-five years later, and many more Black people are just now getting to see representations of themselves and our artwork in more museum and gallery contexts. But when they are now presented with “post-Black” work, how does that affect them? Now that we have become more used to seeing ourselves in these spaces, what else do we have to say?

EMORY I made this sweater that is referencing two things. One, it's referencing a [Ralph] Lauren sweater that has the American flag on it, and I combine that with a David Hammons flag in the Marcus Garvey colors. So I'm combining Ralph Lauren, David Hammons, Marcus Garvey, Americana, the Black gaze, and the white gaze.

A friend of mine who's well-known bought the sweater and I saw her at a Knicks game sitting in the front row with her guy. And I just write in DM, “Date night. Right?” And she laughs like, “Yeah, it's date night. I wanted to wear your sweater, but someone told me as a white lady, I shouldn't wear it.” I find that interesting because I don't know the race of the person that told her this, but whether it's a white person or Black, or a Mexican person, do you want white people at the protest protesting? Do you want white jurors to be impartial when they're trying a Black person for a crime? Do you want white police officers to be impartial when they're policing us? Do you appreciate the Jewish kids from New York that came down and got bullets in the back of their heads in Mississippi? I'm ready to critique a human being at any moment, white or otherwise.

White people are not above critique, but can a white person not see the beauty, the plight, the glory? And no, they’ll never truly understand what it is to be Black, but they could understand what SANFORD BIGGERS & TREMAINE EMORY In Conversation

it is to be human. Or maybe they're like, “Hey, I'm this person of this status, this means something to me, and I know that wearing this might awaken some other white folk.” Do we wanna just say, “No, you can't wear that. You can't do that. You can't paint that because you're not Black”? As the feminist writer Audre Lorde said, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

Isn’t that what we’ve been told as Black people?

What we can't do, what we shouldn't do, how we shouldn't represent ourselves?

BIGGERS I disagree with the view that only certain people should wear or express themselves in a certain way. If the intent is malicious, or uninformed, or uneducated strictly for shock or for fashion, then yeah, it's problematic.

But if there's some understanding of what's conceptually happening, I actually see the other side. What better messaging? It's very interesting and provocative to see this white woman wearing that flag, especially if she has knowledge of what that flag is, because she’s saying, “Yeah, I'm on board with the program, this is our country and I'm down with representing it this way.” I did a piece years ago that was a lot more controversial than I thought it would be. I did a portrait of a beautiful blonde woman; blue eyes, blond, hair, wearing a Morehouse [College] t-shirt, and she's got her hands up and she's smiling. Now, I went to Morehouse, so I feel like I can own that piece. And the model in the piece was my studio manager at the time. She's like a little sister to me. She's been in my life for over a decade. We take care of each other. Always have. She grew up competing in pageants and she hated it. I thought, well, why don't we work through that?

We took a trip to Staten Island, went to the mall, and we took some Glamour Shots. But you got all these people like, "This is an abomination. How could you possibly do it?” The piece raised more questions than any one question can give. For example, Morehouse College was not founded by a bunch of Black men, it was founded by a bunch of white men. If that white founder’s great, great, great grandkids were to wear a Morehouse shirt, would that be wrong, or would that be showing pride in what their granddad did? What if the woman in the picture was a teacher and she taught at a school that had several different races, and it's college season, so she wears shirts from different colleges every day to promote all those schools, to show these kids what's possible? She could wear Yale one day, and Pepperdine another day, and Howard, and whatever. Is that wrong?

Or what if her mixed kid goes to Morehouse and sends her a Morehouse shirt? There's so many ways to look at it, but people were unwilling to think about the spectrum of circumstances that would allow that to happen. That's one of those moments when I was challenging the way we see things.

Sanford Biggers, Untitled 2020, c-print 20 x 24 in. Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen. © Sanford Biggers

EMORY I love that. I love the right things in the supposed wrong place. I play with the Black Jesus motif and I'll see comments on Instagram like, “You’re using my savior.” And my Black Jesus motif is really hysterical because I'm not changing his features. I'm just Blackwashing him.

And that's the whole point, because scientifically, if he existed, Jesus was a Palestinian Jew. He wasn't white nor Black. But my whole thing is about the use of religion as an opiate for the slaves during those times. You know, an all-Black church with a white picture of Jesus, that always astounded me. So, this is my graffiti. If I was just about representing Jesus and how he looked according to history, he would look Arabic, like a Middle Eastern man. The funny thing about art is that you can have your little plaque next to your piece, or your copy written up on the website, and it's like people see less power possibilities instead of sitting and ruminating on why did he make this? Or more importantly, how does this make me feel? When someone's saying you shouldn't paint that, they're not saying how it makes them feel. And that's work. The real critique is when you go internally into how something's making you feel.

BIGGERS Part of our job as visual people, whether it be wearable or on a wall, is to make people stop and think about what they’re seeing.

When I first started showing in New York, I would categorize most of the work I was showing as largely Buddhist and cosmological. I had just returned from living in Japan for three years and I was using a lot of mandala imagery. I made a large-scale red, black and green mandala floorpiece and filmed breakdancers performing on it from above. So, you see all these beautiful circles that they're doing in their motion and how the circles echo the circles on the mandala. One of the questions in the back of my mind is, is this a Black piece of art? Because without seeing my face or knowing anything about me, how would people perceive that? I don't think they would assume that it was Black art by those very strict definitions. But, as an artist, I've also reserved the right to use Black imagery when I want to, and sometimes not. I don't think I should be limited to one form in that way. I don't think visual language even works that way.

EMORY David Hammons has this book, Blizaard Ball Sale where he says, “I'm Black, so any art I make is Black.” That's why you don't need to call it Black art, or gay art, or female art. It's like, if you're a woman shooting male bodybuilders, your perspective as a woman is gonna come out.

BIGGERS When you think about the color field artists—like Mark Rothko—he started doing those color field pieces and people were feeling some kind of way about it because there was no direct representation. But it was his distillation of a lot of phenomenological things that happened with light and landscape. Initially, people were like, “I don't know what to grab onto,” and that's the point. He was pushing our ability to AUTRE MAGAZINE 14 The Body Issue

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contemplate these things. Knowing what his inspiration might've been, the end result might not look so much like it, but if you're able to go there, through that process, it allows the viewer to expand their comprehension. That's really the goal for any of us who are trying to push the envelope in our craft. Both of our crafts have thousands of years of history and elitism. And there's always the elitist view of those things we make, and then there's people who are on the ground, making things with their hands that are considered “low” versus “high.” I like to conflate all that. You're doing that too.

EMORY Straight up though, right? Because someone will call this folk art, but this is just art. It's just so loaded. This is streetwear, this is fashion. Let's take the titles out and say, “this is art and these are the materials used to make the art.” It’s the same thing with fashion. It's like, you used beading and hand-embroidery, so this is couture, or this is ready-to-wear. Just more and more boxes. You gotta think about who these boxes serve.

BIGGERS It goes back to our original premise: our inability to see our collective involvement with the condition of the world we live in. We're still putting people in boxes, because it's easier to say, “That's not me. I'm not in that box. So, I don't have to pay attention to it.” What’s more interesting than being stuck in a box is how many boxes you can check with what you make.

EMORY Right, because if you're able to check this box, that box, that box, then you're really out of the box. I’m not saying if I do something that's just Black and street that that's wrong, but if I'm always hitting those notes, that can be boring too. I sometimes romanticize the idea of having a uniform. We romanticize Steve jobs wearing the New Balances, and the 501s, and the Issey Miyake turtleneck. But for me, that's boring.

BIGGERS I started these paintings that I've been doing on quilts that I call the Codex series. I grew up in a household where my mom was very into fashion and would take me to the fabric store.

So, I was used to seeing patterns and interesting combinations of things. But as an artist, it's not necessarily my inclination to use that material.

But then, I was trying to find a way to get out of painting and the tons of decisions that one has to make confronting a white canvas. Not just the technical decisions, but the material decisions: is it framed? Is it unframed? Is it cured? In a weird way, the quilt and those clashing of patterns came back because it was a dance that now I have to do with these materials that already exist, that even have had hands on them, have been used, and try to create a composition. Some compositions are harmonious, some are not harmonious, some are discordant, some are calm, some are vibrant and wild, some are refined, some are rough. It just widens my palette. Like when you're talking about streetwear versus couture, these are all things you have in your palette. That's how our genres speak to each other, because the pursuit 268

is aligned. It's not the end result, it's the process and the knowledge of where they come from, and what they can create when put together.

EMORY As far as being Black, I’m happy to say I’ve eradicated this thought, but I’ve wondered if this is gonna get old talking about being Black. Then, I had to check myself and realize the only thing getting old is the application of the ideas. But if we're just looking at fashion, how many people are talking about the glory, and the plight, and the weirdo zany parts of the Black experience? You really sound like an artist that’s just doing what you feel, and you're staying away from the validation index, but I wanted to hear your feeling on that.

BIGGERS I've had the same ruminations for decades. I needed to make certain bodies of work to validate some thoughts and questions I had for myself. But as you mentioned, I'm working in a very codified, elitist, and sometimes non-welcoming industry. That's why people sometimes don't feel comfortable going to museums and galleries. So, I know that that's coded. But there's no reason not to take the same license and interject Black code, or urban code, or youth code, or other codes in there. We're all speaking in codes. That's a way of complicating how the work is perceived, but I needed to create that palette, to create works that go in unforeseeable directions. They're not making one statement, and not every work is successful.

The goal of experimentation is to be able to put it all together. In terms of visual literacy, we're seeing more and more, especially with people stuck on screens all day. I'm not doing it just for shock or to provoke. There's intent and there's context. That Morehouse piece does one thing in a New York gallery, but it's gonna do something different in a Southern gallery, and it's gonna do something different in a European gallery. I'm interested in how that same piece can translate in so many different ways, because all that really says is it's not one opinion, and there's no right or wrong to this.

EMORY Now, what's your next show?

BIGGERS I'll be presenting new work in Hong Kong in a couple of months—hybrid marble pieces I've been making with traditional and neoclassical European sculpture mixed with sculptures from various parts of Africa, Asia, and South America. I fuse it all together to make these pieces that I call Chimeras. Marble evokes different responses on its own. It has been used almost as a propaganda device. You see a white marble piece and you think one thing, and then you see a wooden African bust and you feel a different thing. Well, if you take an African bust, what happens when you make it in marble? Also, my show Codeswitch is traveling to the Speed Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. That series started when I went to the Kentucky Derby for the first time and I was looking at seersucker fabric, which has a long history, coming from India during the British colonial period before SANFORD BIGGERS & TREMAINE EMORY In Conversation

it went Stateside. Enslavers loved it because it was lightweight and they could wear it through the warm seasons down South. Do you still inject some of these codes we're talking about?

EMORY Currently, I'm putting out my second collection in collaboration with Levi's. The first collaboration was about the iconography of the cotton wreath, which adorned the jeans. I created this cotton wreath because I wanted to return to what built this country, which was cotton. In my second collection, I'm talking about the indigo trade and the slaves in the Carolinas that made it. Indigo was popular for very arbitrary reasons back in the UK, just because of the color blue. So, they were the number one buyer. The slaves were harvesting this indigo and doing this very toxic, dirty work. It’s vaguely inspired by a movie called Daughters of the Dust, by Julie Dash. In the film, the matriarch character, even though she's no longer a slave, her hands are still blue from all those years making the indigo. And she doesn’t want to leave the islands, but she ends up going, because all her kids wanted to matriculate into the modern Western world.

BIGGERS You know who was involved in that film?

EMORY Arthur Jafa. You know Arthur?

BIGGERS Yes. And you know, he brought in Kerry James Marshall to work with him as a production designer.

EMORY Wow. He also told me they borrowed these glass sculptures from David Hammons.

The scary part, but also beautiful part, is that it was the first major Hollywood film made by a Black woman. And that was 1991.

BIGGERS I used to show that film to my students when I was teaching.

EMORY Wow, great film. So yeah, working with Levi's, and then I took on some new work outside of Denim Tears. Making more clothes, telling more stories.

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LOUISE BONNET

piSSing in tHe wInd Interview BILL POWERS Portraits MAGNUS UNNAR Clothing KWAIDAN EDITIONS

What would Sigmund Freud say about the figures in Louise Bonnet’s paintings? Pink, flesh-toned bodies levitate and gravitate, in a demented dreamscape like sleep paralysis demons with blond bobs. Bodies urinate, lactate, and spill blood from hidden arteries of the unconscious, submerged in the blue waters of psychosexual and libidinous tableaux, and erogenous zones are pushed to the physiological limits. Born in Geneva where she attended the Haute école d’art et de design, she moved to Los Angeles in 1994 and never left. Borrowing from the Old Masters and Surrealists, Bonnet has created a painterly vernacular that is entirely her own. On the day of our interview, Bonnet was announced as one of the 213 artists included in the 2022 Venice Biennial, curated by Cecilia Alemani, which will explore the connection between bodies and the Earth.

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BILL POWERS In an interview with Josh Smith, he once lamented to me how disappointing it is that you can’t just be an artist anymore. You have to be an entertainer, too. You need the personality to go along with your paintings.

LOUISE BONNET I don’t know about being an entertainer. I was never very good at articulating what I was doing.

When I started, in fact, I couldn’t do it at all. But I didn’t feel like I owed that

There’s no moral or lesson that she had to learn, or even linear exposition.

POWERS Why did that movie resonate so deeply with you?

BONNET To see a woman depicted in this way is rare. Especially in a movie from the '80s. When dealing with a “bad” woman, the narrative is usually pretty paternalistic.

POWERS I don’t want to analyze you, but is the appeal that you can be

"I’m very interested in shame and the body in my paintings, and bodily functions bring extra shame and embarrassment." to anyone, either. Over time, I got better at explaining what I was thinking, even to myself, and where the ideas in the work came from beyond the obvious of oh, that’s a foot, and realized that it was actually important.

POWERS Remind me the name of the movie that inspired your last show in Los Angeles.

BONNET Vagabond (1986) by Agnès Varda, which I saw when I was fifteen years old and then again after the filmmaker died in 2019. As a teenager, the movie floored me. I didn’t really understand why it had such an impact. When you’re fifteen, you get caught up in the drama of the narrative. The main character is someone who was close to my own age and was not reacting to the way things happen to her in the way I’d imagine. She is a young, homeless girl who is walking around the South of France in the offseason—it’s kind of bleak and cold. The character is not trying to be likable and isn’t trading off of any of the tricks young girls sometimes feel like they have to do. The first thing you see in the movie is that she has died. Then the movie is flashbacks, more like ellipses that don’t try to explain or justify what happened.

When I saw it again, being older, the fact that the director is not trying to justify her behavior or decisions, however unlikeable, I found quite liberating. It’s not a way that women are usually portrayed in films.

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unlikeable, and never explain yourself, and still have these main character moments?

BONNET She’s only the main character because the movie is about her. There’s none of the trappings of the focus being on her. If anything, she’s more elusive and enigmatic as the movie unfolds. I was raised in an era when you always had to apologize, and be polite, and be careful of hierarchies. It’s compelling to watch someone drop those societal conventions.

POWERS When you have some blue bodies, or blue body parts underwater in your paintings, are you thinking about Picasso?

BONNET Actually, I try to not think about Picasso. Or really anyone that is already embedded in my psyche.

POWERS I ask because a few years ago you did cite Picasso’s The Weeping Woman as a reference point for your figures with tears.

BONNET The blue bodies were me responding to more hidden aspects, like the part of the iceberg that you can’t see from the surface. I guess I was also thinking of dead Christ paintings too, with the sores and discoloration, the “othering” of the body.

POWERS Is the distancing from Picasso because you don’t want to be too influenced by him?

BONNET It’s not just Picasso. I really try to not compare what I am doing to LOUISE BONNET Pissing In The Wind

anyone else, at least in my own head. You become paralyzed if you do. But obviously, there’s a lot of influences ingrained in my psyche.

POWERS Do you feel more comfortable in your universe creation at this point?

BONNET It’s like I hit a vein because I kept poking around for so long. Now I can access it because it’s there.

POWERS I see an ancient Egyptian influence recurring in your paintings the last few years. Am I making that up?

BONNET I like the idea of something so old that it becomes a receptacle for something I don’t understand, that I don’t know the meaning of, something that feels eternal. Like a mummy holding its mysteries in a terrifying but somehow relatable way. Recently, they found one where the fetus was still in its womb, pickled.

POWERS The last time I visited your studio, I saw a painting in progress, where it appeared like a woman was peeing golden light. Is there some art historical precedent for such a scene?

BONNET Urine is used in interesting ways in art. There’s a painting by Lorenzo Lotto at The Met of Cupid peeing on Venus [Venus and Cupid, 1520s], which I believe was given as a wedding gift for good luck getting pregnant. I guess they couldn’t depict semen, but the default is to replace it with urine. In a way, we are much more prudish now than people were in the 1500s about certain things.

There’s a fresco of an angel peeing on a crucified Christ in the Basilica of St Francis of Assisi in Assisi, for example, so that must be a good thing, I assume. I’m very interested in shame and the body in my paintings, and bodily functions bring extra shame and embarrassment.

POWERS Do you see that as a sexist thing, or that we all have embarrassment about our bodily fluids.

BONNET Both. I paint these characters that are sometimes empowered and in charge of it, and sometimes not. I have this whole thing with control and constraint.

POWERS Are there mythological forces at work in your paintings?

Louise Bonnet, Veiled Nude, Bloated Belly, 2019, oil on linen, 66 x 56 inches, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Max Hetzler/Gagosian

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LOUISE BONNET Pissing In The Wind

BONNET When I read the myth of the Gorgon, I was struck by the part where once Perseus cut off her [Medusa] head, he threw her body in the water, and her blood created coral, because coral is alive and colorful when hidden under water, but petrifies above it, where it can be seen.

There was a painting in my Paris show at Max Hetzler that hints at the scene.

POWERS Today it was announced that you are included in the 59th Venice Biennale. How did you react when you got the news?

BONNET Just incredible. It was fantastic meeting Cecilia Alemani who curating the Biennale, she really made me feel like we understood each other. I think I heard Nathaniel Mary Quinn say this once, too, that as an artist you are basically alone in your studio, constantly terrified. You spend your time feeling as if you are about to jump off the high board.

So, when something happens where you feel that it is being rewarded, that you are doing something right and you can just keep doing the work, then that’s a big relief.

POWERS Why do you have to panic at all?

BONNET I don’t think you can make good work that is advancing what you are trying to communicate without being scared. I really would like to know who can make art without being scared. And then, I have some questions for them.

Feeling accepted removes a huge weight.

It means a lot.

POWERS Is it hard being married to an artist? Everyone has egos, and I would imagine that you being in the Venice Biennale could make things complicated at home, the competitive aspect…

BONNET Adam [Silverman] is a ceramic artist with a very different practice. We don’t really compete in the same arenas. I am the one, in any case, who would get very upset, he’s much more zen than I am. But he has work and a project at LACMA—a ceramic project using clay, ash, and water from all fifty states and the territories. He is ambitious and super accomplished, it’s not really something that figures in our lives.

POWERS The only painting of yours I saw hanging in your house in Silver Lake is an older work that has a face with eyes. Why did you end up reducing facial features from your figures?

BONNET I started painting more faces lately, actually, because I started feeling that whenever it’s a bit ambivalent, whether the woman I am painting is doing something or something is being done to her, she might need more agency; an identity or something. Otherwise, eyes

BONNET I wonder what she would think of this term! She was more into full psychoanalysis and really drew from that, but I think our work draws from a similar well.

POWERS Famously, any time you see a spider in Louise Bourgeois’ work, it’s a stand-in for her mother. So, are the sentries in your paintings your children?

BONNET Yes, they could be, metaphorically. But also, why would your kids need to be sentries? I haven’t explored

Lorenzo Lotto, Venus and Cupid, 1520s, oil on canvas, 36 3/8 x 43 7/8 in. Purchase, Mrs. Charles Wrightsman Gift, in honor of Marietta Tree, 1986, Courtesy the The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

or faces suck up too much attention from the rest of the painting. You try to read too much into their expressions. There’s a Matisse painting with three women and a little turtle, their faces are done very quickly and are mysterious, abstract, and sculptural. I wanted that kind of energy.

POWERS You seem to be working at a bigger scale these days.

BONNET I think women should take up more physical space, if they want.

Especially in the art world. I always liked that Louise Bourgeois made huge things. You can be in the world and take space.

POWERS Louise Bourgeois almost feels like your spirit animal.

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all those layers yet. Maybe they act as a buffer against the oblivion, protecting you against your own mortality. They are also very much a team. We are a team.

POWERS Do you ever pose in front of a mirror for a certain angle of an elbow?

The loose skin around your elbow that I believe is called your “weenus.”

BONNET I just listened to that book Alive about the Uruguayan rugby team who crashed in the Andes and resorted to cannibalism. In one part, they make socks out of the skin from a dead teammates’ elbows. In the end, you could wind up being someone else’s socks. end

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Photography PEGAH FARAHMAND Styling MARISSA BAKLAYAN Creative Director ALEC CHARLIP

FASHION LABEIJA A society unfettered by the power of its bodies would have no reason to control them.

For Fashion LaBeija, a New York member of the venerable house vogue and drag, taking control over her body—and over those who employ her to do so—is a reclamation of the very power that society is constantly asking her to cede in the name of their comfort.

However, LaBeija is not beholden to anybody's comfort. She is a translator of the ancient codes that affirm her divinity.

SUMMER BOWIE What is the nature of your work?

FASHION LABEIJA I’m a DJ, designer, sometimes dominatrix, high-key dilletante, doll—meaning a transsexual woman. Transsexual is an outdated term but I ironically reclaim it as I think it speaks to my experience, since being trans is actually a gender identity, not sexuality. However, in contemporary society we are often treated as sexual objects; experiments.

Everything I do is imbued with sexual, gendered undertones. I guess it’s just my way of interpreting my everyday experience. It’s also about redefining the erotic as intimacy, rather than perversion.

It's a self-reclamation of my humanity when I feel so often exploited, objectified, and dehumanized.

BOWIE Your Instagram bio says, “Not just an aberration of nature.” What do you mean by that?

LABEIJA I‘m actually not a freak.

BOWIE You use your body as a source of strength and liberation. When did you realize that your body held an inherent power?

LABEIJA When I began exploring sexuality and gender as a young teenager and was extremely punished for simply existing in a way that contradicted 288

what I was supposed to be and how I was supposed to be. From that point I realized my expression by means of body had the potential to actively offend—to provoke. This is what cemented the idea that my body was a weapon.

BOWIE Is there an ancestral connection in your musical and bodily practice?

LABEIJA I am a colonized body.

My parents immigrated to America and assimilated into Mormon, white bread, Jell-O culture. I grew up going to Asia but without the ability to speak Cantonese and Mandarin—an ability my parents withheld—learning about my respective cultures through visual cues, such as symbols in art, has always been a more accessible way of interpreting this major part of my identity.

BOWIE Paul Preciado says that only a few bodies exist according to society: white, male and hetero, the rest are “reservoirs of labor.” How does your body exist and function in such a society?

LABEIJA My body is a weapon. Often people want to simultaneously fuck me, kill me, and be me because I represent something subversive. My existence goes against the rules that govern our current social structure and wholly calls them into question. In turn, I become

taboo, a fetish—and people's entitlement to you, especially in terms of sexuality, is outlandish. It’s egregious, the amount of unwarranted sexual contact and aggression I experience just existing as my true self in this world. It’s giving sex bomb, actually.

BOWIE Is there a larger message that you want to impart upon the world?

LABEIJA Be yourself, do what you want to do as long as it’s not harming others. Think for yourself. Peace, love, unity, respect, consent, compassion, empathy, forgiveness, gratitude.

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Photography ROMAN GOEBEL Styling TIM HEYDUCK

PHIPPS

Fashion designer, survivalist, and environmentalist, Spencer Phipps abides by the rugged rules of the great outdoors. His eponymous label, founded in 2018, follows the same principles of ecological responsibility with a distinct eye for the counterculture, proving that the closer you get to the edge, the closer you are with nature. Each collection is a love letter to the natural world that challenges the extractive excesses of the fashion industry. PHIPPS’ Fall Winter 2020-21 season was a poetic paean to trees and conservation of the world’s forests, utilizing materials like Piñatex (pineapple leaf leather trims) and recycled feather down. The collection also ushered in PHIPPS Gold Label, an experiment in repurposing vintage and deadstock garments. For Autumn Winter 2021-22, instead of showing on the runway, PHIPPS premiered a tongue-in-cheek fashion film inspired by Werner Herzog and the adventures of explorer Ernest Shackleton, which was shot on Europe’s largest glacier in Skaftafellsjökull, Iceland. Partnering with Oceanic Global, the collection shined a light on the world’s disappearing polar ice caps. The Spring Summer 2022 collection, entitled It Starts Now, which is featured in the following pages, is an anthropological and sociological dive into the rituals of manhood. Crystal-embellished basketball jerseys collide with patchwork denim and camouflage, old bike tires are fashioned into belts, and a ghillie suit (typically used for hunters) made of old potato sacks is an unorthodox foray into womenswear, proving that masculinity is an ancient concept with the potential for new ideals and new horizons.

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OLIVER KUPPER You grew up in San Francisco where there's an abundance of nature only a stone’s throw away. When and how did you become connected to the natural world?

SPENCER PHIPPS It was almost an opposite process. I was always in it. I was going to Yosemite on vacation before I could remember. We used to go up to Tahoe every summer, and we would go skiing there in the winter. My dad was very sports-oriented, always running around outside, going sailing and camping, and I think it wasn't until I was a teenager, and especially when I went to New York that I realized how big a part of my life that was. And then it made me fall in love with it again, because I thought everywhere was like this. I thought that life was part-time on a mountain. In high school, we used to spend time in Muir Woods smoking weed and hanging out.

KUPPER That's where kids go to smoke weed, is nature.

PHIPPS I don't think of it as experiencing Mother Earth, but that's where parents aren't gonna bother you.

KUPPER When did your thoughts about nature as something we need to protect really start?

PHIPPS It was during my time in New York—once I started making my own decisions, living on my own, and grocery shopping for myself—as my career started in the world. Your buying power as a consumer makes you start questioning that process: what am I buying? Where is it coming from?

KUPPER Which is so uniquely embedded into your brand.

PHIPPS When I started the brand, it wasn't even something that was like, oh, wouldn't it be nice? It was like, this is the only logical way that I could make this happen.

KUPPER Right. It’s an incredibly urgent imperative. What is it about rock climbing and outdoor sports in general that you find so thrilling?

PHIPPS Rock climbing came later, probably in my late twenties. I got into that through my little sister. She was a very lazy teenager, and then she went to Evergreen [State College] and became a total hippie.

She started making sourdough bread and wearing Chacos, and learned how to rock climb. It was a great bonding moment with her. It's a nice thing to spend time in nature, doing a thing, versus sitting there and looking at it. I learned how to ski very young and then switched to snowboarding as a teenager, and I still do it. It was nice to have a summer alternative to that.

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KUPPER There's a participatory aspect with rock climbing. It's actually being connected to nature in a really unique way.

PHIPPS You're touching things aggressively.

KUPPER And you’re from Northern California, which is the birthplace of mountain biking. Do you mountain bike ?

PHIPPS I don't really mountain bike, but my best friend from high school's dad is Gary Fisher.

KUPPER When did the brand officially start? Because you went to school, you worked for Marc Jacobs, and then you worked for Dries Van Noten.

PHIPPS It was after I finished with Dries and I was figuring out my next move.

I got a couple offers from houses that I was mildly interested in, at best. The whole thing sounded repetitive, and I had to really determine my end goal so that I could get excited about fashion again. I started thinking abstractly and, by default, came up with the backbone of what is now the brand: environmentalism and sport culture, and all the shit that I like, which seems to be absent, at least in my own world. It just made sense to try and do it alone because it was an investment in my own future.

KUPPER Was there a sense that if you continued working with a house, you would burn out in the fashion world?

PHIPPS Yeah, and you're always at the disposal of somebody else's whim.

KUPPER Marc Jacobs and Dries are two very disparate aesthetics, and obviously the design between New York and Antwerp is so different. How do those things meld together to create both your work ethic and your aesthetic? Was there anything you learned from those brands that you applied to the PHIPPS brand later?

PHIPPS They're so wildly different that they were valuable in their own ways. On the one hand, it was really interesting to observe how these businesses operate. Even still, when I work on a collaboration, I get a little glimpse into somebody else's business and how they get things done in their own vision.

Marc is much more about a moment and a character, and there's not so much interest in being business savvy. It's more the look, the character, and surrounding himself with fabulous people. It's this dramatic, quintessentially fashion experience, whereas with Dries, it's more textile-based. He's more business-oriented. He's looking at fabric, talking about his customers, making sure that every buyer has something, and every price point is hit. He's very knowledgeable about all of that, his concepts can be much SPENCER PHIPPS The Great Outdoors

more abstract, and sometimes, not even really known. It's a lot more haphazard than people think.

KUPPER But he has a distinct connection to the natural world as well. He has that massive garden.

PHIPPS He has four rose gardens.

KUPPER That Antwerp school of fashion is very specific. What you've created with the PHIPPS brand is totally unique in the sense that it's very of-the-moment. Not only in fashion, but also the counterculture, which is a big part of the brand's ethos. It's interesting to create a new language. How have people responded to that language, not only in Europe, but also in the US and Asian markets? Do they get it?

PHIPPS It depends. The people who do, really get it, and are quite moved. But it is still quite a niche thing. It's taken us time to figure out how to communicate it, because it is such a different operating beast. We do really well with people in LA, for example. They just get it. People in the UK and Japan seem to get it, and then there's some people who just see it as white noise.

KUPPER LA is interesting because we have this big hiking culture, and there's the whole gorpcore thing going on.

PHIPPS It's gorpcore, it's vintage, it's Americana, but countercultural Americana.

It's very LA. People in Berlin get it. French people get it, I think, because we've gotten most of our press in France, since we're based there.

KUPPER You use the worlds of athleticism, survivalism, and counterculture to break it down in this really interesting way where it all works together. What is your messaging with regard to people's reaction to fashion and its relationship to the excesses that have contributed to the climate crisis?

PHIPPS I look at it as trying to do better.

What does it mean to do better business?

That can evolve and it can reflect the times that we're in. But the questions now have to do with how you make things more useful, make them more responsibly, make them in a way that has a deeper or educational meaning? It's changing all the time, but there is this general trajectory of trying to improve.

KUPPER Survivalism is interesting, the potential of the human body. Why is that so resonant in your work and in your outlook ?

PHIPPS It's the way that I approach everything. I'm a bit of a survivalist myself.

It's an interesting thing to push yourself to the limits of every capacity and see what happens; see what sticks. Try a million different sports. You don't know, you might be the most incredible golfer in the world. So,

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why don't you try it in an intense way and see what happens? If it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen, but at least you've experienced that.

I think that's one of the most interesting parts of life.

KUPPER There’s a professor of social anthropology at University College London named Allen Abramson who studies extreme, death-defying sports. He talks about the way that extreme sports contribute to a rewilding of culture. What you're doing is really interesting in that context.

PHIPPS Yeah. Especially if you're in a city or you're not particularly athletic at all.

A lot of people aren’t that interested in going skiing or even hiking. They just want to stay in the city and watch a BBC documentary about penguins, which is fine. You don't necessarily have to live that lifestyle, and you can show that you're interested in it just by wearing Arc'teryx.

KUPPER Are your clothes made with the intention that they could be functional in an athletic context, and do you wear them yourself when you are engaged in outdoor activities?

PHIPPS Personally, I have a very lowtech approach to sports in general. I wear a lot of our t-shirts and hoodies when I hike, or workout, for example. And I use a lot of our work wear items for durability—for example, we made a pair of cargo pants one season specifically for me to use when I climb with Velcro pockets at a specific angle for my gear.

The functionality of a PHIPPS piece is very important to me and our products are made for a range of activities. That said, we are not a high-tech sportswear company (although we are currently working on a collab with a big high-performance sports company, but I can’t really say more at this time). In a way, my goal with PHIPPS is to build the complete wardrobe around the outdoor lifestyle—from performance athletics to suits, and everything in between.

KUPPER Your logo is really interesting.

Can you talk about the iconography you use in your brand?

PHIPPS Our main brand logo is the star.

That came from an anecdote I read about this amateur astronomer who was looking at the Milky Way, turned it on its side, and noticed that it makes this X in the middle.

He wrote to NASA and was like, “Did you guys know that it was an X?” And they were like, “No, actually, we've never thought about turning the Milky Way on its side before.”

It was maybe twenty years ago that they discovered this.

KUPPER That's really fascinating. It forms almost an asterisk.

PHIPPS Yeah, exactly. What I liked about that story was that it was an amateur guy who discovered it on his own and haphazardly created an entirely new perspective.

KUPPER You also like to use educational infographics, like the migration of humans and the Great Rift.

PHIPPS Yeah. We have an ongoing series of educational graphics. It's everything from diagrams of human migration over millennia, to Eastern philosophy and Ram Dass, and then there's things like the t-shirt with a guide to help you survive if you're lost in the woods. How to determine the speed of the setting sun, how to survive a snake bite, and ways to build homes. We also did a t-shirt that was about ways to build fires.

KUPPER And not start a forest fire.

PHIPPS Exactly. It was part of our partnership with Smokey Bear. We made Smokey Bear's official fire safety guide t-shirt.

KUPPER Smokey Bear is an interesting California icon.

PHIPPS He's such a weird character.

Like, is he possibly LGBT or something?

This shirtless bear who lives in the woods, his best friends are Bambi and a little raccoon.

There's something queer about him. When you license the material, you get access to this entire archive of ads and ephemera from the last seventy-five years. You go through it, and you're like, Smokey's done some weird shit.

KUPPER Who created Smokey?

PHIPPS He was created by the USDA Forest Service. The first campaign was this image of Bambi in a forest fire, burning alive.

The campaign went so well that they wanted to use it again, but Disney was like, “No, we own Bambi, you gotta pay for it.” So, they had to make their own character, and they came up with this hunky forest ranger that was a bear. It was also inspired by a bear that they had rescued in a fire named Smokey. It's all kinds of things, and there were a million campaigns in magazines and on TV. There's some from the ‘70s that are so weird. For his 50th anniversary he does a rap video. It's so odd.

KUPPER It's quintessential Americana.

PHIPPS It is, but it's a very specific and odd one, which I like. It's always these things that we try and pick up on that are maybe not the most obvious, and it's funny because in the US everyone's like, “Oh yeah, that's Smokey Bear,” and in Paris they're like, “Oh, this cute bear.”

KUPPER Other countries also have their own version of Smokey Bear. Australia had Sam the Koala.

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PHIPPS Right. In France, the Metro has its pink safety rabbit that they all know about.

KUPPER Speaking of Smokey being queer, you explore gender roles and masculinity in your work, and your latest collection has the Dennis Rodman jersey, who’s a quintessential example of somebody that played with gender roles very publicly in a decidedly masculine sport. I wonder if you could talk about the exploration of masculinity through your work?

PHIPPS Yeah. For this particular collection, it was a big question, looking at masculine archetypes, rituals, and passages of manhood. We don't have these rituals anymore in contemporary culture, but we do have coming-of-age moments, and there are certain people who have experimented with them in interesting ways. Dennis Rodman is a good example of someone who was ahead of his time. I think he's more relevant now than he was then, and he was such a big deal.

But you look at him now and he’s the modern archetype of what a lot of guys are thinking about: painting their nails, changing their pronouns, and doing whatever the fuck they want.

KUPPER He was way ahead of his time, and also fodder for a lot of jokes. And in sports, people still aren't coming out. It's still very taboo. You have these huge scars on your palms and you’re missing half of one of your pinkies. Is there a story behind that?

PHIPPS It was on a mountain bike. I don't mountain bike as a result, but yeah, it was caught in the spokes. I don't know if you can see, but there's a scar all the way down the back. A tendon basically ripped and opened the skin.

KUPPER That must have been unspeakably painful.

PHIPPS I don't really remember it, to be honest. I was young, and my body went into shock.

KUPPER Each one of your collections has a theme to it. In your latest collection, there's this super experimental piece that’s like a camouflage hunting suit.

PHIPPS It's called a ghillie suit. The thing that looks like Chewbacca. This was having a bit of fun, honestly, and pushing the envelope with that survivalism idea; tools of survival. It was about building something that's gonna blend you into the background. They're traditionally used for hunting or snipers, because you can just hide in foliage. You normally make them out of whatever you're gonna blend into, so if you're in a pine forest, you maybe cover yourself in pine leaves. Because we were filming it in XR, in a psychedelic rainbow forest, it 313

was a psychedelic rainbow version of that.

We call this part of the brand PHIPPS Lab, which is artisanally upcycled things. That took probably forty or fifty hours to make. It was old potato sacks that we pulled apart, redyed, and then we stitched them. It's basically a hooded jacket and drawstring pants that are completely covered in rainbow fringe.

KUPPER So there are four divisions of the brand: the main collection, fundamentals, PHIPPS Lab, and vintage. How do they relate to one another?

PHIPPS It's a scale, in a sense. They're all part of the same project, we just differentiate between them because the processes that we use are a little bit different. They’re all different versions of responsible manufacturing. The base of them being responsibly-sourced textiles that we can make in bulk, like a traditional fashion brand. That's t-shirts, hoodies, work wear—things like suits, and as we build, accessories and such. A lot of that is either deadstock, or organic cotton, recycled nylons; whatever experimental textiles we happen to come across on the way that are responsibility-focused. Organic cotton is a complicated fabric because it uses a lot of water, and I realized that I had never bought a new flannel shirt in my entire life.

KUPPER They're better when they're vintage.

PHIPPS Yeah. They're just nicer. So why not just find them? I didn't know it would work logistically, but I built a little capsule of vintage things that fit the theme of the show, put it in the showroom, and people really liked it. So, we started doing that.

KUPPER It's really great. You also collaborate with brands like Woolrich.

PHIPPS Yeah. We worked with them on sourcing Woolrich vintage, and I'm going to keep sourcing with them and put a rack of stuff in their stores.

KUPPER These heritage brands have such big archives and so much deadstock. If there's a new designer with a vision for the current zeitgeist, why not dive into these archives and repurpose them?

PHIPPS It's something I wanna be clear about with the vintage stuff. It's not nostalgic.

It's always brought into the context of the moment and the way people are dressing now. There’s some vintage stores that really romanticize styles from the ‘50s, but you just look like you're wearing a costume from the ‘50s, even if it's a nice one. So maybe you can take a jacket from the ‘50s and pair it with a pair of motocross pants, and some funky, weird ‘70s turtleneck, and that's a cool outfit.

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KUPPER We don't have greasers anymore and that car culture isn't as big now. There’s a totally different vibe of what people do.

PHIPPS Exactly. So, that was the vintage thing, which has been gaining a lot of traction.

And then, we started customizing things and playing with upcycling as an in-between. So, you have the main line, then you have the vintage, then you have the grey area where it's using found things to make new stuff. Things as simple as the Dennis Rodman jersey, which we embroider and add things on top of, or cutting things apart; making belts out of bike tires, or Ghillie suits. They get more and more funky as we sit around.

KUPPER Can you talk about the short film you made for the Endurance collection in Iceland?

PHIPPS The film came about because with COVID and fashion week being canceled, there was no reason to do a fashion show. One of my assistants comes from a cinema background and I thought it was a really great way for us—as this brand that's so focused on nature, survivalism and facing yourself against the planet—to go somewhere insane and do crazy shit outside. The first one we did in Spain, because we had already started a collection that had this Americana Western theme, and there’s this weird part of the south of Spain that looks like the Grand Canyon.

KUPPER It really does look like the American West.

PHIPPS It's crazy. It's near Málaga. It’s where they filmed all the Spaghetti Westerns, and even parts of Star Wars and Lawrence of Arabia. For the next season, we wanted something wintry and Iceland made sense.

With this one, we talk about the melting ice caps and the general ocean situation. So, we partnered with Oceanic Global, which is a great organization that works on increasing awareness around the melting ice caps and cleaning up the ocean. We made a big push in the collection by using sea plastic, and made all these graphics about saving the whales and offering donations. So, keeping this activism through consumerism. It was a great opportunity to show the brand in what I would consider its natural habitat, charging through icebergs and hanging out in caves.

KUPPER It seems more exhilarating than a fashion show, even though they are so important for the machinery of a brand.

You can't really bring a lot of buyers for these department stores to Iceland and have them chug through the ice.

PHIPPS No, although I would love to, honestly. I would really, really love to. It's a SPENCER PHIPPS The Great Outdoors

dream of mine to make an editor from Vogue hike a mountain.

KUPPER The pandemic has really changed the way a lot of fashion brands, especially brands that started shortly before the pandemic, started looking at the industry.

PHIPPS We're definitely one of those brands. We were very quick to say we're not doing a fashion show, and it's led me to a lot of personal realizations about the way that I'm doing the business, and why I'm doing it, and how to make it better in the long term. This year, we've gone off the calendar and haven’t shown anything yet. We're restructuring the whole business to operate on our own calendar and we’ll show our next season in May. We've got all these collabs coming out, and we’re scaling it down to figure out exactly what the DNA is. We want to perfect these things and return to our core cells.

KUPPER How do you see your brand evolving in the future, especially as the climate gets worse?

PHIPPS We'll continue finding the best possible solutions and being the example of what that means. Eventually, people will catch up to where we are now, and we'll be that much further ahead. I don't know what that looks like yet. We're out here with a dose of realism.

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Makeup CYNTHIA BALIGAN, Hair PHILIPPE BALIGAN, photographer's assistants ANTON RONTZ and ABDELRAHMAN DARWISH, stylist's assistant SIMON CARLE, casting WHITE CASTING, models BERNARD DONFACK, JOHAN, DEVON, DANIEL, JULIAN, and ALEX 329

FAITH WILDING Interview HANS ULRICH OBRIST

The work of pioneering ecofeminist painter, sculptor, and activist Faith Wilding addresses the psychic and sociopolitical history of the body. Wilding, who grew up in a pacifist commune in Paraguay, began her artistic career during the revolutionary West Coast feminist art movement of the 1960s alongside artists like Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Womanhouse, the first female-centered public art exhibition of its kind with over twenty female artists represented. It included paintings, performance, and installations, like Wilding’s “Womb Room,” a crocheted environment that enveloped the viewer like a spider web. Wilding is also known for her intricate drawings, which are tributes to spirituality, womanhood, and the natural world. Folds of flower petals become flesh and flesh becomes abstract fractals of supernatural geometry. They are delicate, but dichotomously powerful erotic ciphers of feminine power.

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Faith Wilding, Angel of History, 2018, Watercolor on paper, framed, 21 1/2 x 17 1/2 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles

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HANS ULRICH OBRIST I wanted to ask you how it all began, because you grew up in a pacifist commune in Paraguay alongside German Jewish and European war refugees driven out of Germany by the Nazis. In this commune, how did you come to art, or how did art come to you?

FAITH WILDING That’s a long story. (laughs) So, the Bruderhof [an evangelical Christian pacifist movement founded in 1920] fled Germany because of the Nazi occupation in 1938, and they went to England. My parents were English, and my father—who was a conscientious objector [of World War II]—heard of this anti-war commune. So, he joined and so did my mother, to whom he was engaged.

Two months after they joined, which was in early 1941, the whole commune was thrown out by the British. The only country that would take them and allow them to continue their way of life, and worship, was Paraguay. So, all of these Europeans went to Paraguay and they bought a big piece of land there. Most of them were academics—they knew nothing about agriculture, or living off the land. But they learned fast. Everything was done by hand and they grew all their food. I was born in 1943—a war baby. I grew up there and went to school there. We were trilingual: Spanish, English and German, which is also a huge advantage. I had this really interesting international upbringing in the middle of Paraguay. And most of us immigrated to the United States in 1961. So then, I started going to college there, and I left the commune. I became very involved in the anti-war movement. I had been actually planning to leave the commune for a long time because it was too confining for me. I was always extremely interested in making art. Although, we did a lot of craft in the commune. I can make clothes and I can weave mats. We used a lot of materials that were just growing there—palm leaves and banana leaves. I was very stimulated by the environment and I was a very big reader as a child.

HUO I wanted to ask you about the reading, because you grew up in this religious community, and at the same time there were books. Early on, you found your heroines, mostly women like Virginia Woolf and George Sand.

FW I think my mother was a good model for me too, because she was really kind of a feminist. Although, you know, she had to hide it. I was always struggling against the very stern, very male religious things that went on.

I was interested in bodies. So, when I came to the States, I made a lot of friends in college and most of them were women. After I got married, we moved to Fresno and I met Suzanne Lacy.

By that time, it was the late '60s. Suzanne and I started a feminist group in Fresno at the university. It grew from two people at the 332

beginning to about fifty people. We had done a lot of research on whatever feminist material we could find. We were also doing consciousness raising. That's when Judy Chicago decided to come to Fresno. She didn't know us, but she wanted to start some kind of feminist art program at the university. So, somebody sent her to me. I introduced it to Suzanne right away too. I worked with her on organizing the first feminist, all-women class at the university. And we found our own space, which was a huge, old warehouse that had been a community theater.

We all had little studios in there, and a large area where we could do performance. It was an incredible kind of freedom because we felt safe.

We were encouraging each other, and we were excited. We had some open house events where lots of women came from San Francisco, and even some from Los Angeles.

HUO I wanted to hear about Virginia Woolf because I think a lot of what came after in your work, and all these pioneering feminist works, and Womanhouse, I think it all began somehow with your childhood—with Virginia Woolf.

FW I guess what drew me to Virginia Woolf is her language. A Room Of One's Own, of course, was super important politically—this idea that we have to have our own space. I had experienced this with the feminist program in Fresno. And it was particularly important for me because of growing up in the commune, where I never had my own space. I always had to share the room with three or four other people, and everything we did in the commune was done in a group. It was frowned upon to go off in a corner and do your own thing. You were always supposed to be with the community. I was very jealous of Virginia Woolf because I felt that she had a kind of freedom. I read a great deal of British literature, and adventure stories, but mostly it was about women, and women's lives, and women's novels. I was just very drawn to that as a child because I was trying to figure out what my life was going to be. Because here I was in Paraguay, going to college in the capital city of Asunción, but I only went through one year of college there because the commune decided to move everybody to America. In the US, they sent me to high school, and I was totally bummed out because I was nineteen and I was already going to college. I ended up in the home ec room because they thought I was dumb. I'm like, “This is what you do at school—you learn how to clean your clothes and bake bread?”

HUO Jane Eyre was also important for you, no?

FW I know that book forward and backward.

It’s extremely romantic, right? She was an orphan and she made her own way. She was so extremely convinced of what she had to do.

That impressed me so much. Mr. Rochester FAITH WILDING Interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist

was extremely romantic to me too. Of course, I read up on the Brontë sisters, and they led really amazing and—in many ways—tragic lives, but these were models for me, models of very productive writers and thinkers. Even though they were in very difficult circumstances, they were really out of their time too, in a certain way. They were in the middle of nowhere, but they managed to get a view of the world and of their own independence. That had a very deep influence on me—that you could be independent, because that was not what I learned in the commune.

HUO And this independence, of course, leads us to another woman who inspired you a lot, and who I've been studying—the one and only 12th-century Benedictine abbess, Hildegard von Bingen from Germany. She was many things: a scientist, a composer, she was of course a religious figure, a mystic, a healer—she was also a philosopher. She had these epiphanies and these incredible visions. I think more and more, in terms of the extinction crisis and the environmental crisis, she's being revisited as one of the earliest environmentalists. I know that she has inspired your drawings. When did you come across her? Did this also start in your childhood?

FW In the commune, yes. Somewhere there was a book that was called Mystik deutscher Frauen im Mittelalter (1929). It's about a lot of these mystics, like Hildegard von Bingen.

I have done my pilgrimage to Hildegard's nunnery, which is just across the Rhine. I have spoken to her nuns. She had this thing about greenness—she calls it viriditas, “the green power.” The greenness that is basically life. In the 12th-century, she's talking about how nature is dying; nature is being overcome by human greed, and we have to protect nature. She was a fighter for nature. She also composed music. I've made artwork inspired by her.

HUO And also a radio play. Can you talk about that?

FW My ex-husband was working a lot in public radio at the time. And so I made a radio play, where I basically visit Hildegard von Bingen and have a conversation with her—with me as a young child and her as a wise woman. I wove the way I grew up in South America with how she grew up, which was very different, but we are united in our love of nature and our very fierce desire to help nature; to work with nature rather than destroy it. It was produced in Cologne. It was broadcast a couple of times, and then I did it in English on public radio here in the USA. HUO You also made paintings, like Woman clothed in the sun (1985), which is a portrait of Hildegard von Bingen.

FW Yes, what fascinated me was that she knew so much about the female body. She even

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Faith Wilding, Leaf Goddess, 1976, Mixed media on paper, framed, 41 1/2 x 53 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles

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(1) Faith Wilding, Flesh Petals, 1971, Graphite on paper, framed, 42 x 27 3/4 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles (2) Faith Wilding, Leaf Goddess: Snake Cactus, 1976, Mixed media on paper, framed, 42 x 27 3/4 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles

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writes about the female orgasm. She doesn't call it an orgasm, but the way she describes it, it's an orgasm. I'm like, cool, very cool. This is a nun, right? She’s been in a nunnery since she was six years old and she's writing about what women can feel. And it's well known that the nuns danced, they put on garlands of flowers, and they did these festive performances in the church. She was excommunicated for a while because of the people she was friends with. Her nuns were very free. When she was excommunicated, she was told that she couldn't pray.

HUO You kept coming back to Hildegard— you did works like Angel of History (2018). In the eighties, you did Propagations: Hildegard and I (1981). It's sort of a mix between trees, and bodies, and plants. It's not about separation from nature. It's about connection.

FW And also about survival in a certain way—how we’re incredibly dependent on nature at the same time as we're killing nature.

That's the kind of thing Hildegard is pointing out too, and it started way back in the 12thcentury—she was an eco person way back then.

People saw the effects humans were having on nature.

HUO Because they saw the beginnings of this colonial separation and of the extractive economy. And her work saw this necessity for a communion more than separation, which makes it so relevant for today. Also when we talk about the orgasm, one can say Hildegard almost anticipated what you and Suzanne Lacey did with your consciousness-raising group. Don't you think?

FW You know, that’s interesting, because people came to Hildegard from all over, and very high-standing people. She talked to the Pope, she talked to the local king and prince, and she would talk to anybody. People came to her to ask, “How shall we live?” Just like they used to ask Jesus. And she dictated all of her work because apparently she had terrible migraine headaches.

She had all these visions. But she gave me a lot of courage, because she was really brave in what she was doing—she spent her whole life doing this.

HUO She was excommunicated and had her own monastery. That idea of actually making one's own monastery brings us in a way to Womanhouse, because it's interesting that you co-created your own structure, which is radical and now celebrated in Los Angeles in a new exhibition. Do you remember the day Womanhouse was invented? How was this idea born?

FW Well, CalArts had just been founded in LA. Judy Chicago’s best friend at the time was Miriam Schapiro, the wife of the head of the art department at CalArts. So, she persuaded her husband to invite Judy Chicago and six or so of

her students from Fresno to come to CalArts and start a feminist program there, which was very radical, of course. Then, an earthquake happened, and the newly-built CalArts and all of its floors were damaged, which meant we couldn't occupy CalArts in the fall semester. So, we were meeting in various places in the city of Los Angeles, and then our art historian, Paula Harper, said, “Why don't we make a project in

plan from the beginning—that we would do some performances as part of the house. I was at dinner with Arlene [Raven] and Judy one night and suddenly I was like, “I wanna do something about waiting—about what we've waited for, what I've waited for all my life.” And so we started making a list. I still have that list.

Out of that, I crafted the “Waiting” monologue, which we worked on as a group; other people

"Yes, what fascinated me was that she knew so much about the female body. She even writes about the female orgasm. She doesn't call it an orgasm, but the way she describes it, it's an orgasm.. " a house?” And that's how Womanhouse was born. So, we looked for abandoned houses and CalArts actually owned this old house, or somebody had been connected to this old house, and we got it for $2. It was pretty messed up— not a single toilet worked, all the glass windows were broken, but it was quite a large house, two stories. The first couple months were spent just restoring it enough so that we could actually use it. And it never gets super cold in LA, but it was pretty cold because it was February, and there was no heating. There were maybe twenty people who were interested in working with Womanhouse. Some of them were from the Fresno program. Every week, we went through consciousness raising—going around the circle and talking about our experiences as children, and how we connect to the house, and to the idea of a woman's place in the house, and what making a home is. A lot of stuff came out because people have all kinds of different experiences connected to houses and homes. There was a lot of crying and acknowledgment—it's a big topic. Home is a big topic.

HUO Was Luchita Hurtado part of the group?

FW She wasn't really part of the group, but she did come in, as did a couple of other artists, to do certain things. Betye Saar met with us. It was a really great chance for us to meet up with these women artists in LA. I'm still connected to some of them, which is really great.

HUO You did two very legendary works in Womanhouse. You did the “Waiting” performance—an almost Beckettian performance about waiting, but very different from Beckett. And then you also did an installation called “Womb Room.” Can you tell me about these two works? What kind of reaction did they get?

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tried out how they would perform the piece.

But you know, I have given permission to anybody who wants to perform it, and lots of people have performed it all over the world in different kinds of ways, which is really cool.

Then the other piece—I wanted to make a really primitive, simple dwelling, like a tent. In the commune, we did a lot of needle work and I could knit anything. I could sew anything, I could crochet anything, so I decided to crochet it. That was a really adventurous thing because I'd never crocheted anything huge like that, and something that was really sort of architectural. I had to figure out how to make really thick rope into a sort of net that would hold together, and people loved it. People would come in—other students while they were working on their work—and they would lie down inside it, look up, and rest a little bit. However, the work was stolen, so the original “Womb Room” does not exist anymore.

HUO And obviously, since then, you have created so many bodies of work, and you very often work in bigger series, for example, the Wall of Wounds (1996). This is a series of one hundred Rorschach prints, which are all about a different wound: sexual wounds, political wounds. Can you tell me about the epiphany of the wounds and how you work in series?

FW I started thinking about the many kinds of wounds that most of us carry. And how does one represent that? That's what the Rorschach is all about—you can read things into it. I like that idea because a lot of the wounds are internal—they're the wounds of the mind, or wounds of the spirit. And who knows what form they really have. I sold them for $50 a Wound, but I also gave a lot of Wounds away. It does seem to have echoed in people's minds. Right now, I'm drawing trees. Really big drawings in graphite of trees with no leaves. They look like old monsters. They're amazing because, where I live, there's all of these huge old oak trees, and 335

elm trees that have been standing there for over a hundred years. Now that it's winter, I can see their forms, and they're just like survivors— they've seen so much life.

HUO You also do research for some of your series, like for the Paraguay series. Of course, you needed to then go to Paraguay again, so that it became an embodied experience. But you also say that it was not about nostalgia—it’s about memory. I mean, we live in the age of more and more information, but that doesn't necessarily mean we have more memory. Amnesia is at the core of this digital age. It's also a very political work because it's about an exploited country with a very impoverished population, with an extractive, capitalist economy that destroys the environment. Can you talk a little bit about this very important body of work?

FW It was difficult; I hardly slept. I found it very depressing. I stayed with a family that I knew. We traveled a little bit to some of the places that I'd been to, like one of the lakes. The whole time I felt like I shouldn't have come back.

I felt like time had stood still in a way. There were some changes, but they just didn’t seem to be the right ones. I felt very alienated, and I don't know if that was a good idea. I was pretty much in the capital city, Ascención, because I couldn't travel by myself down the river and into places where I had actually grown up.

HUO I mean, it’s almost like an oxymoron because the works are supposed to be mournful, but they're also angry. So, there are two forces in a way. Later on, there were also the Battle Dresses (1995-97) that were inspired by the women in former Yugoslavia who were raped.

You also did the Armor Series (1991–94), which is another important series of work. In all these series, there seems to be this mourning, but also anger, or protest.

FW Right. As a child, I read all of King Arthur. I mean, here I was in a pacifist commune, and I'm completely crazy about knights in armor. Armor is obviously a physical thing, but it's also a psychological thing. I spent some time in Nuremberg, and they have the best collection of 10th-century, 11th-century armor. Every day, I would go and look at this armor and try to understand it. They are pieces of art in a certain way. They are beautifully decorated, a lot of them, especially the king's armor. And it’s this weird kind of metal body.

I've always been very interested in all kinds of forms of the body. The many different ways in which the body appears to us. And so the armor, as a body, is a metaphor. But also, my father was a conscientious objector. I grew up in a commune that was completely anti-war. So, I had to explore war, which was seen as evil in my childhood. I needed to know both sides. And, of course, the romance that is wound around these deadly things. War is not romantic, it's deadly.

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HUO There is also the Embryoworlds (1997-98), and there is the work exploring cyborgs and recombinants—the intersection between humans, animals, and plants. Can you tell me a little bit about that and how it's also now evolving with this current moment of the metaverse where cyborgs also play a big role.

You have engaged with technology a lot—you're part of a collective called subRosa where you work with these new technologies in relation to the body, but in very tactical ways.

FW I'm really ignorant about how the actual machinery works. That's not my part. I think a lot about the ideas. For the Embryoworlds, because there are so many issues around female fertility, subRosa was doing a lot of research about that and embryos, on what they can and could become, or not become. I'm really interested in things that are becoming things. And the recombinants are partly about this also. Most of us are connected to machines all the time. I'm connected to a machine right now. What is this doing to us? How far does the body extend? Our flesh bodies have a certain amount of space and volume and that's it, but because of these machines, we can extend our bodies. That gives people a lot of power. They can extend their body and what they do in the world without actually leaving home. I'd rather leave home and take my body with me into the world. But the virtual experience is not my friend for the most part. I mean, the imaginative experience is definitely my friend, but I think that's different from the virtual experience.

HUO It’s interesting because you grew up in a collective and your practice always had a collective dimension, like with Womanhouse.

Can you tell us about how your collective works?

Does your group have a manifesto?

FW (Laughs) I'll have to check. There's only two of us in the group. Hyla Willis lives in Pittsburgh. So, I would have to email and ask if we have a manifesto. We used to have a manifesto, and I think it's in the subRosa book.

HUO Many young artists are inspired by your work—by your performances, by your installations, by your drawings, but also by your activism. You were recently interviewed about activism, and you said there are two models right now for activism. One is a kind of direct action against specific targets. And the other one is more exploratory, whose goal is to create interventions and disturbances into the public spectacle, but also disturbances into biotech or bioinformatic systems.

FW I'm a teacher, and I definitely talk to students about that. I think that's one way in which I can still be active. Mostly, I'm doing artwork, and I'm trying to put some of my ideas and thinking into that work. But it's not as activist, shall we say, as many of the other things that I've done in my life.

FAITH WILDING Interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist

HUO Do you have unrealized projects?

FW I have never thought about that. I mean, some things that subRosa really wanted to do we never did. I really wanted subRosa to go to South America. We didn't really succeed in doing that. So, I would have to think about an unrealized project. Right now, I'm drawing trees, that's where I'm at, and I don't know what that's going to lead to.

HUO Also, I was wondering—Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a little book that was full of advice for a young poet. What is your advice to a young artist today?

FW My advice to young artists is to keep working, because you just don't know what's going to come out. That's the way I go at it. I just keep working.

HUO And of course, you work not only with visual art, but you are also a writer. I saw a fantastic conversation between you and Lucy Lippard, whom I've known for a long time. I wanted to ask what writing means in relation to your practice, and a little bit about the epiphany that led to the book you wrote, By our own hands [The woman artist's movement, Southern California, 1970-1976].

FW People have begged me to write my autobiography. There's pieces of it here and there, but why should I write my autobiography?

I mean, who cares really? But I might, you never know. But that's a lot of work—a lot of work.

HUO Do you have any projects that faced censorship?

FW That's an interesting thought. There's a few things I've done that people have not liked to see. Galleries have not wanted to hang shows up. And I can't really think of what that might be at the moment—you seem to have a much better grasp of what I've done than I do. (laughs) You've been doing your homework. I think I would like to do a book in which I just ramble around and show a lot of pictures, but don't hold me to it.

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Faith Wilding, courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles.

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Photography THOMAS HAUSER Styling TOBY GRIMDITCH

MARIANA TRENCH

LOCATED IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC OCEAN ABOUT 200 KILOMETERS (124 MI) EAST OF THE MARIANA ISLANDS; THE MARIANA TRENCH IS THE DEEPEST OCEANIC TRENCH ON EARTH. IT IS CRESCENT-SHAPED AND MEASURES ABOUT 2,550 KM (1,580 MI) IN LENGTH AND 69 KM (43 MI) IN WIDTH. THE MAXIMUM KNOWN DEPTH IS 10,984 METERS (36,037 FT) (± 25 METERS [82 FT]) (6.825 MILES) AT THE SOUTHERN END OF A SMALL SLOT-SHAPED VALLEY IN ITS FLOOR KNOWN AS THE CHALLENGER DEEP.

THIS PAGE top Marine Serre OPPOSITE PAGE dress Olivier Theyskens, necklace & ring Nhat-Vu Dan, bra Du Ciel, shoes stylist's own

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HENDRIK SCHNEIDER Black Spring

THIS PAGE jacket Issey Miyake vintage, tights Genevieve Devine, shoes Lanvin, OPPOSITE PAGE dress Dolce & Gabbana vintage, gloves Dries Van Noten, shoes Lanvin

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THIS PAGE dress Loewe, bra Du Ciel, tights Falke, shoes Celine OPPOSITE PAGE top & skirt Miu Miu, tights Marine Serre

SOME UNREPEATED MEASUREMENTS PLACE THE DEEPEST PORTION AT 11,034 METERS (36,201 FT). IF MOUNT EVEREST WERE HYPOTHETICALLY PLACED INTO THE TRENCH AT THIS POINT, ITS PEAK WOULD STILL BE UNDERWATER BY MORE THAN TWO KILOMETERS (1.2 MI).

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full look Marine Serre 344

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full look Avellano

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jumpsuit Celine

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THIS PAGE jumpsuit Alisia Wood, gloves and tights Marine Serre, shoes Lanvin OPPOSITE PAGE skirt and tights Genevieve Devine, shoes Lanvin

AT THE BOTTOM OF THE TRENCH, THE WATER COLUMN ABOVE EXERTS A PRESSURE OF 1,086 BARS (15,750 PSI), MORE THAN 1,071 TIMES THE STANDARD ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE AT SEA LEVEL. AT THIS PRESSURE, THE DENSITY OF WATER IS INCREASED BY 4.96%. THE TEMPERATURE AT THE BOTTOM IS 1 TO 4 °C (34 TO 39 °F).

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gloves & tights Marine Serre, dress Yohji Yamamoto vintage, shoes Celine

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full look Sia Arnika

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THIS PAGE dress Vaillant, bra & g-string Du Ciel, tights Falke, shoes Lanvin OPPOSITE PAGE dress Y/Project, bustier Dolce & Gabbana vintage, gloves Dries Van Noten

full look Gucci

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MONOTHALAMEA HAVE BEEN FOUND IN THE TRENCH BY SCRIPPS INSTITUTION OF OCEANOGRAPHY RESEARCHERS AT A RECORD DEPTH OF 10.6 KILOMETERS (6.6 MI) BELOW THE SEA SURFACE. DATA HAS ALSO SUGGESTED THAT MICROBIAL LIFE FORMS THRIVE WITHIN THE TRENCH.

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Stylist's Assistants CAMILLE PAILLER & LEA WILBRAND Photographer's Assistant RUBEN HUESKES SPECIAL THANKS Roman Vardijan, Julie Siniosplease, Skand Mahdhi & Chris Lucas

Hair KOSUKE IKEUCHI Makeup MARIO MENDEZ Producer LAURA HOWES Model MARGAUX LION @TheClaw

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THIS PAGE denim bodysuit Diesel, red bodysuit, stylist's own, shoes Lanvin OPPOSITE PAGE jumpsuit Acne Studio, bra Du Ciel

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Photography & Casting SCOTT GALLAGHER Styling NAOMI MILLER

THE SKIN WE'RE IN

Our largest organ is a semi-permeable container for all that we call our self. Acting as a barrier between us and our environment, it regulates our temperature and allows us to feel the contours of our world. It keeps a record of traumatic events that we might otherwise forget, expresses our genetic code through variations in color and texture, and when our environment deviates from ideal conditions, our skin adapts in kind. Scott Gallagher, a photographer who lives with psoriasis, explores and honors these anomalous markers of an inherently entropic world.

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THIS PAGE Yasmin wears a top by Rene Scheibenbauer, jeans and belt are her own OPPOSITE PAGE Lily wears a nude dress (worn as top) by Poster Girl, bikini top Eleonore Butler-Jones, jeans are her own

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SCOTT GALLAGHER The Skin We're In

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THIS PAGE James wears trousers by Études, OPPOSITE PAGE Vera wears trousers by Balenciaga, dress Marques Almeida

SCOTT GALLAGHER The Skin We're In

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THIS PAGE Zac wears trousers and cardigan by Toga, OPPOSITE PAGE Krishy wears a top by Nina Ricci, shoes Poster Girl

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THIS PAGE Becky wears a dress by Isa Boulder, underwear Bodas OPPOSITE PAGE Issey wears a top by Chanel, jeans Marques Almeida

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THIS PAGE Niles wears jeans by Aries

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Photography ALEX HUANFA CHENG Styling NATACHA VORANGER

WET MEDUSA

Makeup SAYURI YAMASHITA DENOIX Hair SACHI YAMASHITA Photography Assistants EMILE GOA & CLAIRE BADOU DELMAS Styling Assistant LOTTE DE JAGER Model JUSTINE MIEL, ANAIS BREMOND BWALYA NEWTON, SHATKI ANIORTE-MENDEZ All clothing SOSSKYN (Samara Scott x Mugler) Location CAPC Musée d'art Contemporain de Bordeaux 372

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ALEX HUANFA CHENG

Wet Medusa

the wet medusa of last night’s pleasure roughly had grinning in my oilslick palace, saliva making it all happen this is what we were born in: FRESH SKyN the curve of the continental rise of my ass thighs pinstriped for protection, cartilage diamantés the barnacle, Flotsam pubis The city beach where you pan your hand seductively through the golden sand and come up with a glittering needle-stick bleeding in the Mediterranean light or a pearl chain of lipsticked butts. they all wanted you sweaty violet skies hot moon wet heaves gummy dregs: algae, mush, cream AND SPEW THEM OUT. Stinks of salt and motor oil. freshwater barracuda in split crotch pants watch out for my crotch rip young boy.

Belly button ring hooked in the swash, pink laces fizzing like fresh beer, pinstripe seacucumber disappeared. skin grazed like bark Each protein shakeslick on cobblestone, each brighter sharp hertz. belch exiting lava Silk Cut Wavelet we stink of a pack, of fags.

– Madeleine Stack and Fer Boyd

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ALEX HUANFA CHENG Wet Medusa

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DAN COLEN Sky High Farm

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ALEX HUANFA CHENG Wet Medusa

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Jessie Andrews Photography DARIA KOBAYASHI RITCH

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OLIVER KUPPER Let's start with your beginnings—you grew up in Florida—what was it like growing up there?

JESSIE ANDREWS I grew up in Miami, in an area called Kendall. The area code is 305, like the rap song, “305 Till I Die.” That kind of explains everything.

Everybody has preconceived notions of Florida, which are pretty much true. When you hear stories about a man getting eaten alive by an alligator in his closet because he was hiding from his wife that he cheated on with his sister—things like that happen in Florida. My mom is a police dispatcher.

She called me one day and she was like, “Have you heard of bath salts? There’s a guy on the bridge getting his face eaten off by somebody on bath salts.” Other than that kinda stuff, it was normal.

KUPPER What does your father do?

ANDREWS He's a handyman. I grew up really learning how to do a lot of household stuff. So now, when I'm doing renovation or contracting, whatever it is, I'm very handson with it. I can just look at something and take it apart in my mind and put it back together. I feel like I got that from my dad.

I always hated school. I hated math and history. Not that those things are irrelevant, they just weren't as interesting as the stuff going on in the outside world. And I never graduated high school.

KUPPER You dropped out at what age?

ANDREWS Well, they kicked me out of high school because I was already doing porn. They blamed it on me missing too many days of school, which I could understand, but I was really close to graduating. I was two months away. I'm sure they knew—it was pretty public when my first scene came out. Somebody in high school was watching porn, found the scene, and posted my Facebook profile next to the porn scene on 4Chan. This was when 4Chan was huge. It really blew up.

KUPPER What was that like knowing that kids your age were seeing you in pornographic films?

ANDREWS I always take myself out of the equation. I was like, I can't believe they were watching porn. In reality, why was I doing porn? (laughs) KUPPER Was the high school conservative?

ANDREWS I went to public school and I was one of about five white kids in my

Former adult film actress Jessie Andrews, who has successfully broken through to serious film and television roles, knows a thing or two about the body as a commodity in the everchurning attention economy. Born in Miami in 1992, she headed West to Los Angeles . After reaching the zenith of the porn industry, she retired and founded a sustainable jewelry brand called Bagatiba, and two clothing labels, Basic Swim, and Jeu Illimite, which utilizes recycled fabrics. Andrews does it all with a vice-like grip on her own destiny.

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school. It was a predominantly Hispanic high school. I had to grow thick skin really young because I wasn't like everybody else. I always wanted to have brown hair.

It was like a whole thing. When you're young, you always want to be accepted.

But after a while I didn’t care what people thought about me. I was gonna do whatever I wanted. And I think I took that into whatever else I did. It really helped me have no fear of doing something that I wanted to do, like porn.

KUPPER And you really used porn as a vehicle to propel yourself into a world that

KUPPER It's definitely like a crash course in sexuality. The porn industry is so varied in what types of porn there is.

There’s mainstream porn, but there’s also super dark, underground porn.

ANDREWS I didn't have that desire to push myself. Even the five or six years I was in porn, I was still just exploring from zero to five. I hadn't even hit five yet, to start exploring the darkness, or even getting bored of just doing the basics. I remember seeing girls that were doing anal, double anal, and gang bangs, who were into super kinky stuff, and I didn’t have enough

"I don't know how much more I can know about sex. I've read the whole book already." you wanted to be a part of—it seems you had a vision of what your future was going to be from a very early age. Is that right?

ANDREWS In a way. I also knew money meant freedom. I could buy a phone. I could buy a car. I could go do whatever I wanted. Also, I didn't care what people thought, so that didn't prohibit me from doing what I wanted to do. I didn't have a thought in my mind, like, what are people gonna think about me when I'm doing porn? I was just like, I'm gonna do it because I can make money and this is what I want to do. I didn't even think about what my family or friends were going to think.

KUPPER Was there a performative aspect to porn? Were there any philosophical ideas behind using your own body, and discovering your body, in this performative way?

ANDREWS I was around eighteen and I didn't think much at that age. I hadn't had sex many times, and I hadn't ever watched porn. I was really inexperienced sexually, and not so knowledgeable about sex or the body. Porn was such a new world that I could explore. I was learning so much about so many different people and their bodies. Everyone's body is just so different.

Their body shapes, what they want, the variations, and then putting two people together, creating even more variations. I was just using my body and other people's bodies as a point of exploration.

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experience to get there. Maybe that sounds vanilla, but it almost left something for me to explore later in life.

OLIVER How did you get into acting in porn?

ANDREWS I had a bunch of girlfriends that went to college. They were like a year or two older than me. One of them ended up getting into porn, but then got out after doing a few scenes. She had a lot of backlash from family and friends and just couldn't handle it. But that's a real testament of what happens in porn.

You either get sucked in and your family disowns you, or you start doing drugs and get addicted to making the same amount of money once your lifestyle changes. And then, when you're not making enough money, you go into hooking. It's a really dark cycle.

KUPPER Did you have a mentor? Did you have people that guided you through that early transition?

ANDREWS I didn't have any mentors in the beginning. I was always watching what other people were doing. I was watching girls get depressed and was like, I don't wanna be like that. And then Mark Spiegler came along as my agent who I was with for the majority of my career after I moved from Miami to LA. He represented Sasha Grey and Belladonna.

He’s amazing. He only represents twenty to twenty-five girls at a time. And he holds a really high standard for the girls. I really JESSIE ANDREWS Interview by Oliver Kupper

respected that. Everybody in the industry— every girl—wants to be with him because he has such high standards. The girls are getting drug tested every two weeks. You're expected to be on time. I still see him once a week. He's still a big part of my life.

KUPPER I’m curious what your thoughts are on pornography and the consumption of the body?

ANDREWS I think we're here for a reason—to explore, to learn, to grow, and to use what we have to do that. Our bodies are given to us for a reason. I think we should use them to explore and part of exploring is sex. The body is such an amazing piece of work that we've only unlocked a small part of. I feel like we've concerned ourselves with so many things that are outside of the body and we forget that we're living in this work of art that has so many other things to offer us in terms of knowledge. I love people who are into exploring their own mind and body.

KUPPER It’s fascinating because we sort of leave our bodies every day. We only tune into them for these very short intervals of time. There's a lot of sensual experiences outside of sex, like design and art. Our definition of desire and the erotic are tunnel-visioned into the idea of sex and the body as an object of desire.

ANDREWS I spent six years of my life exploring those external things, in terms of sex and interacting with other people and the body. I’m now more interested in internal exploration. The external is almost not even interesting to me anymore.

Not that sex is not interesting, but I feel like I've explored so much of that. I know so much. I don't know how much more I can know about sex. I've read the whole book already.

KUPPER Some of the scenes you did were pretty extreme in the sense that there's sadism and multiple partners. How do you experience other bodies in these extreme scenes? How do you experience your body in these moments? How do you prepare for those scenes?

ANDREWS I think the one thing I really prided myself in was leaving everything behind and just focusing on what you're doing in the moment so that everything feels natural. I think that shows on camera.

There's still things where you're doing a job and you need to show the camera what's going on; to be aware of where the lighting

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is, and how many people are in the room, and how long you're doing something for, and to be a good performer. But, you have to think about those things, and be in the moment. That's the hardest thing about being a top performer. That’s why there aren’t so many of them. A lot of our girls were really good at that. Very professional, but very intimate and present. You kind of just lose yourself. It's almost like a reflex.

Your body will move to open up to the camera, and you don't even have to think about it anymore. And then, you can really just let yourself go into the scene.

There were scenes where I've been so into something that I've cried or lost all sense of my body. Like my body just went limp.

There's a vulnerability, especially with people in porn that you probably can't have with anybody else because those people do it for a living. They do it so often that there's this sense of trust. And then, when you're finished with the scene, you move on with your life.

KUPPER It’s almost an extreme acting performance. It seems like you have to give every part of your body to those performances. Also, people don’t realize that there are a lot of people in the room.

ANDREWS People don't realize that it’s a job at the end of the day. It is acting.

But I think you can also have fun. Even in mainstream acting you become that character. You have that same feeling of actually being that person and feeling that feeling, which is amazing. And then you leave the room and you're like, oh that's not actually me, but that was still an amazing feeling.

KUPPER And what about jewelry—you created a very successful jewelry brand by happenstance. Is that right?

ANDREWS I just so happened to fall into it. It's been supporting my life for five years—since I stopped doing porn. I was making enough money DJing and making jewelry that I didn't need to do porn anymore. This was after I had won Best Actress [AVN Awards, 2012], and then the following year I won Best Sex Scene–AllGirl [XBIZ Awards, 2016]. After I won all those awards, I was bored. I hit the top of where I wanted to be. I didn’t want to go any further. So, I was like, I'm only gonna do scenes that I wanna do. And I think that showed in the scenes because I was more

excited to do them. And I didn't feel any pressure to do them because I needed to make money. That brought new life into porn for me. But I stopped doing porn when I realized my time was more valuable somewhere else—with jewelry.

KUPPER And sustainability seems like a big part of the brand’s DNA. ANDREWS When I started producing in China, we were using recycled surgical steel equipment and everything was made out of stainless steel. I didn't really think about sustainability. But, when I started doing private label for some people, they would ask if the jewelry was sustainable.

And I was like, “I don't actually know. What are the requirements of sustainability?”

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jewelry without even saying I am. And that pushed me to talk more about it. This was five years ago. And then, I got really into the idea of sustainability and what I could do in all different aspects of the brand—from production, to packaging, to shipping, just doing whatever I could to reduce our carbon footprint. Also, I realized over time that I don't want to have a massive brand. I want to do things on my own time schedule. I don't want to create thousands of products and release something new every week.

KUPPER I want to talk about your digital self. There’s an aspect of Instagram being an extension of ourselves that is very cyborgian. Can you talk a little bit about this?

ANDREWS Social media isn't hard for me because I'm very extroverted. But my online presence is still very important because I can reach so many more people than I can meet. I know a lot of people hate it and they're like, oh, it consumes my life.

But I like consuming information. If it's bad information, I don't let it get to me. I’m taking what I want from it.

KUPPER I feel like a lot of people drown in it, or it creates a negative self-image.

ANDREWS You have to use it. You can't let it use you. I think it's partly because of how I built my business, and how my business sustains itself—social media is such an important part of that. If social media disappeared, I don't know if my brand would sustain itself.

KUPPER Do you have any advice that you would give people, not only going into the porn industry, but also just wanting to take agency and do something interesting with their life.

ANDREWS Get over the idea of being perfect. Even though I strive to be more perfect, it's impossible. Once you accept that, everything becomes easier. But that has really hit me recently—I am who I am, and I'm not gonna change even though there's some parts of me that I'd love to change. I'm not perfect. I feel like I accepted that in porn a long time ago with my body. It's hard for some younger women to accept their body and also to see it change so much over time. It's really vulnerable seeing yourself on camera and constantly having to look at yourself. There will always be stuff on the internet of me from when I was eighteen years old—I looked totally different and I had no idea 390

how to take a picture, or do my makeup.

I was shot by some of the most amateur photographers. And then I realize, it's just the evolution of who I am, documented on the internet. I came to terms with that.

I am never gonna have a perfect image.

So, my advice is just to accept yourself as you are.

end

JESSIE ANDREWS Interview by Oliver Kupper

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ESSAY LITA ALBUQUERQUE

STETHOSCOPE TO THE COSMOS

“I simply knew there was information in the water and that it was encoded in my body so that in fact I could remember it. Perhaps I put it there and it was my set of instructions in case going through the Earth’s atmosphere erased my memory cells."

From The 25th Century Female Astronaut in 20/20: Accelerando, 2016

In Ancient Egypt, it is known that some initiates were placed in sarcophagi to train their body so that they may hear the beating of their own hearts. So that they may experience the vastness of the universe residing in their bodies. Inside the thick, black granite of the carved lid of the sarcophagus, their terror quiets down to a new form of listening. They begin to hear

Lita Albuquerque, Najma Returns, 2021, performance, Giza Plateau, Egypt, courtesy of the artist

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other bodies surrounding them: the body of the earth, the body of the air, the body of the sea, and of the wind, and of the stars.

Imagine a universe connected through listening. The bodies of sentient life all heeding not only to their interiority, but listening to all bodies existing in different time signatures.

The still point is our body in the middle of spacetime, opening to the motion and expansion of the universe within ourselves, understanding the fluidity of thought and information now rooted in matter. We scratch the surface of the Earth, created by the explosions of supernovas transforming light into matter, and in our own existence, we too are transformed light, and through light, we live in time.

Light signatures past, present, and future meld into one elongated moment aligning body to Earth and cosmos. Our bodies can hear and they are beginning to listen.

In the future, we start listening. We step aside from ourselves long enough to perceive the multiplicity of sentient life in the universe and honor it by contributing to the ever-growing expansion of all expression.

The body becomes a site of listening, mirroring the Earth as stethoscope to the cosmos.

In 1978, I climb up a mountain overlooking the Pacific Ocean until I can see the curvature of the Earth. “We are in space!” I cry out, and Buckminster Fuller’s idea of the Earth as spaceship in his Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969) becomes real to me. I sense and see the edge of the Earth traveling in space. It is spinning around itself, orbiting the sun. I run down the hill to go to the edge of the bluff, see the languid Pacific below me, and straight ahead of me is the distant horizon. I feel the verticality of my body against the vast horizon, forming a cross. I discover sacred geometry within my own body.

The next day, I create Malibu Line. I dig a trench perpendicular to the horizon, filling it with powder blue ultramarine pigment extending to the horizon. The body is never separate from the Earth. In relationship to the Earth, it tells us everything we want to know.

A few months later, in a dry lakebed in the Mojave, working on Man and the Mountain II, I lie down on the earth with one hand stretched out to the horizon, wanting my body to connect to the distant mountains. The body is what I think with. It says something to me.

It is telling me to listen to the different time signatures: the time signature of the earth below, the time signature of the rocks, and of the mountain in the distance. It is whispering that we are not the only ones.

Geometries become performance, and three hundred bodies clad in red, descend down the mountain, becoming Spine of the Earth (2012).

The body exists in the present tense.

It teaches me what astronomers call our cosmic address, that today is Sunday February 27th of the year 2022 at 9:30 AM in Malibu, California, United States of America, in the Northern Hemisphere of Planet Earth, third planet of our solar system, in the Orion arm of the Milky Way galaxy within the Local Group, within the Virgo Supercluster, which is all within the Laniakea Supercluster. The body is always in the present, and our location in spacetime is also located in the present.

By aligning the body to time and space, we surrender to what is, and we can begin to LISTEN. I think of the body as a triangulation with Earth and cosmos. In 1993, I am running on Westward Beach in Malibu and an entire set of meditations come to me. I call them Energetic Meditations.

Each one is done while running barefoot on the shore. The first one is the “Arc Meditation.” It follows these instructions: inhale from the sun to your heart, then exhale from your heart to the sun. Repeat ten times, until the arcs at different times of day become circle, from body to sun and back. The next instruction is the "Dome Meditation.” I run kicking my heels to my thighs, head thrown back, eyes to the sky, arms extended from the horizon of the sea to the base of the mountain, breathing the Kundalini Breath of Fire, pumping the breath thirty-three times from my stomach into the air. This is repeated until a total of forty Arc Meditation breaths and ninety-nine Dome Meditation breaths have been completed. Then, I hold the breath and breathe up through the chakras of my body in a clockwise spiraling motion, reverse, and then back up again.

All of this to underscore the need to be intentional and specific in comprehending our body’s connection to the cosmos.

In 2003, I create The 25th Century Female Astronaut, who I name Najma. She comes to Earth to put us in relationship to the cosmos.

She stands in front of the Egyptian pyramids, her presence having taken 200,000 years in the past and 200,000 years in the future to be there at this very moment in time. As our astronaut takes us on this journey I ask, “Who is she in relation to our body? Who is she in relationship to her body? Is it a form that she assumes? Is our body a form that we have assumed? How much is the body ours?”

I take the blue as a swatch of sky; as a reminder that we are part of the sky and beyond. We are in between Earth and cosmos. Our bodies are given to us as a listening tool. Just as the Earth is a stethoscope to the cosmos, we are to listen to the intelligence of nature. The more we let nature in, the more conscious we become.

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Milky Way, courtesy of Pablo Carlos Budassi

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