Le Dépanneur ISSUE 03

Emily Adams Bode Clarisse Fahrtmann Other Fields Zoe Kauder Nalebuff

Clarence Kwan Laida Lertxundi Tim Lyons Emma Leigh Macdonald

Emmanuel Olunkwa Jordan Page Sissòn Rowan Spencer Thing Thing

Ama Torres Chloé Vadot Eugene Whang

ISSUE

Welcome to what you might call a time capsule. I’m so glad you’re here. This issue began in earnest the first days of 2017, and is reaching you about four years later. A lot has changed and—as this collection of conversations makes clear—on the other hand many of the discussions we were having then, we are still having now.

I would like to think this group of stories needed to come together over a longer stretch of time because of a combination of sincerity and curiosity. For example, EUGENE WHANG and I met because he found a copy of Issue 02 by chance in Vancouver. He and ROWAN SPENCER have so much in common (with each other, and with the obsessions of this project), that I knew they needed to meet and record a conversation the next time Rowan was at home in the Bay Area—and now you can read that conversation, on page 30. These sorts of paths are some of my favorite things that have come from putting Le Dépanneur out into the world. As JORDAN PAGE and EMMANUEL OLUNKWA discussed over Zoom for the issue, the Internet used to be more “destination-based” than it is now (meaning you logged on for a specific reason when you weren’t out in the world), and I hope this project can offer a destination in a similarly intentional way.

Across destinations, locations, and landscapes, OTHER FIELDS, THING THING & CHLOÉ VADOT’s conversation was urgent years ago and is even more so today. It’s a discussion on repurposed materials and design practices that echoes EMILY ADAMS BODE’s work earlier in the issue: their references to designer Enzo Mari’s autoprogettazione instructions for making furniture yourself feel like a nod to Bode and Green River Project’s new storefront, which is the setting for her feature. Thrilled to have Monday—the newest addition to the Bode & Green River Project family—in the issue, too.

Fortunately, Monday is not the only pup to appear on these pages, and the first essay you will come to is a series of photos taken by AMA TORRES, which begins with another four-legged creature saying hello and welcoming you to Ama’s work. Her photographs somehow find a stillness and a solitude that at the time must have existed just for the second it took to get the shot—and in a post-Covid era might be more common to come across. TIM LYONS’ photo essay takes us to Bell Labs later on in the issue, allowing unusually generous access to this mythical space. The issue includes two recipes: one an exercise in resistance by CLARENCE KWAN on the last page (edible), and one an exercise in letting go by ZOE KAUDER NALEBUFF (technically, also edible), which appears as a limited print you will find bookmarked somewhere as you travel through the issue. Zoe’s recipe is for failure, and I sincerely hope Clarence’s is not. While this issue was not meant to take a whole (American) presidential term to come to life, it has always intentionally been an exercise in slowness. LAIDA LERTXUNDI’s description of a “cumulative” creative process has always resonated. This approach feels worth pursuing now more than ever, and while I hope the issue’s conversations on racial injustice, quarantine, and industrial waste will seem as though they are from another world when someone picks this up years from now, for the moment each of them is in dialogue; connecting across time. (Based on these connections, Virgil Abloh seems to be someone we can’t resist referencing, for example, in conversations that dive into the knots of contemporary art and life).

Because of these relationships, my dream is that you might read it cover to cover—starting with CLARISSE FAHRTMANN’s letter to labors of love (which also introduces her conversation with SISSÒN later on in the issue), on the next page.

X, emma leigh macdonald

Edited

Alongside our full-time work, these kinds of projects, halted due to Covid-19, took on a new meaning after the realization, at first slow, then brutal, of the speed at which the virus had progressed into our peripheries. The soft deadlines of our personal labors of love suddenly became meaningless to the immediate future as all planning became focused on shelter, new habits, and trying to wrap our heads around an invisible timeline—and whom we might want to and be able to spend this unknown amount of time with.

Emma’s Dépanneur being chief among the labors of love I admire (and part of my own periphery), had run its path thus far in parallel to the whims of her life, and those of the kindred spirits being invited onto its pages. These pages seem to me like the most wonderful place to meet right now.

Sissòn and I first met in true New York fashion—meaning in the most random situation in the least random of places. Emma had been tasked with asking four friends to participate with her in a photo shoot for the Guggenheim’s next series of ads. I think I was made for the job, no need to act: we basically had to walk through the museum and pretend to be a fascinated public. Only five of us walking through an empty Danh Vo exhibit. Heaven. Sissòn and I met again on Instagram, chatting about another space I love and that they were curious about: my own apartment, that I share with Mary Howard and her gallery, cfcp. Sissòn and Mary met, meanwhile Emma and I were secretly hoping for a show of theirs to happen in the space. Success on all fronts: our Guggenheim ad ended up being plastered all over the New York City subway, Emma and Sissòn elegantly gazing across Frank Lloyd Wright’s rotunda; myself in a bottom corner looking a tad less tall and slender. More importantly, I got to live with Sissòn’s art for the better part of two months, while their show Rhythm & Blues was up at cfcp (informally, my office). From daily staring and looking and getting-to-know, I think I started having imagined conversations with the show’s characters. We met once again for a birthday of Emma’s at Spicy Village in New York, a Chinatown institution, and once more on the phone to have the conversation that would eventually be printed here in this issue.

It seems fair that we would meet again on a page following our Guggenheim ad, and that we would do it for Emma (and an indulgent reader, like you). It also seems that during this time, the only way we would be able to meet would be on paper, or over the phone.

Clarisse

Other Fields

Zoe Kauder Nalebuff

Clarence Kwan

Laida Lertxundi

Tim Lyons

Emma Leigh Macdonald

Emmanuel Olunkwa

Jordan Page Sissòn

Rowan Spencer

Thing Thing

Ama Torres

Chloé Vadot

Eugene Whang

www.depanneurmagazine.com

@depanneurmagazine depanneurmagazine@gmail.com

Printed matter and phones are even more of a blessing during these most uncertain of times: I hear this a lot. Stories and check-ins now channel the power other institutions have lost. A few weeks ago, all I wanted to ask Sissòn was how they were doing; what had happened since we last spoke; if they felt like we should add anything to this piece. Le Dépanneur being an annual magazine—and therefore growing at its own pace alongside the schedule of each of its geographically scattered contributors—I was already curious and excited to call Sissòn again and go over a few moments in our now year-old phone chat. The world and our worlds have moved since then, and—while Dépanneur’s appeal and beauty arguably lies in the stories printed among its pages remaining as true in 2019 as in 2020, 2021—in January I felt like our heartfelt conversation might need a refresher, if only to add something that tied those years together.

Now that months have passed I want to ask Sissòn the exact same questions (are they okay, how is their work going, what do they think of the piece); but as our lives have become a convoluted nexus of unanswered questions and—albeit nuanced— collective anxieties, the questions about the piece might have seemed, to the part of me immersed in existential dread, no longer as relevant. But to the part of me decidedly not yielding to the pressures of what cannot be controlled, I relished (and still relish) the

To: Labors of love, and to all labors and services deemed non-essential (but that continue to shape sound minds capable of recovery).

by Emma Leigh Macdonald

Produced by BookArt

Design by Emma Leigh Macdonald, Rowan Spencer, and Paula Vilaplana de Miguel

Titlefont by Namita Devadas

Cover and interior covers, Bode photographed by Emma Leigh Macdonald

2021 featuring Emily Adams Bode

Fahrtmann

knowledge of a printed labor of love about pre-Covid conceptions of individual practice; of intimate looks into some of the fields now compromised by this pandemic; and into the dynamics of conversation and communication made clear in print between people who have chosen to have similar interests in different places—but by choice.

I have landed here: how great is it to have a conversation timestamped to years ago, when our worries were about art and inclusivity and the telling of history; the cruel and colonialist drive of 19th century powers; the growth and education of artists; the spaces fueling our work. These concerns will greet us always, especially when the most dire leg of this route to recovery is behind us. In the meantime, we call, we think, we write, and we print to keep ourselves in check—and check in on each other, our loves, and labors of love—along the way.

Ama Torres

Eugene Whang & Rowan Spencer

Emily Adams Bode

Emmanuel Olunkwa & Jordan Page

Sissòn & Clarisse Fahrtmann

Laida Lertxundi

Tim Lyons

Other Fields, Thing Thing & Chloé Vadot

Clarence Kwan

the world of interiors

ama torres

Images by Yoko Takahashi.

Eugene Whang & Rowan Spencer

Eugene Whang—better known as Eug—came across Le Dépanneur by chance. He picked up a copy of Issue 02 in a shop on a trip home to Vancouver, and from there it was clear he needed to find a place within its pages, and even more clear that he needed to have a conversation with fellow designer/DJ/ wearer-of-too-many-titles-to-name, Rowan Spencer. Early in 2018 they sat down for breakfast in the Bay Area (after a FACE party the night before no less, with Eug, DJ Harvey, and Virgil Abloh among others).

The following is the ground they covered. A companion audio recording would include not only the range of music they get into, but sizzling eggs, clanking forks, and coffee slurps.

Eugene Whang: I’m trying to remember where I first found Le Dépanneur—I think I found a copy in Vancouver. It seemed to be Canadian and I love supporting anything Canadian.

Rowan Spencer: The first issue really came together in Montreal.

EW: Right, it’s named after the bodega in Montreal.

RS: Do people still say liquor store for corner store here [in the Bay Area]?

EW: People say corner store here, and sometimes bodega but not so much, maybe that happens more on the East Coast.

RS: Way more on the East Coast.

As a Californian, you know, I had grown up with mostly hip-hop, and during the hyphy movement: it was a lot of snares on the two and the four; party music. Going to Montreal is where I got from E40 to, say, Earth Boys.

I really got exposed to house there—before then I didn’t even know what house meant. I didn’t know what most of those genres meant. I’m still pretty confused about some of them [laughter].

EW: I think we all are. It’s not so black and white.

RS: And that’s part of your thing, right. That genre is a little bit

EW: Exactly: it’s not a genre, it’s a feeling.

RS: Anyway, even as the magazine has expanded from a Montreal focus, so much of the second issue also looked at city and place and how where people are from can shape their identity. The project is expanding but that’s still a huge part of the story. And that’s definitely something I’m curious about with you, because I know you’re from Vancouver, right?

EW: Yeah, East Van. But I went to school on the West Side.

RS: Have you by chance heard about the blog East Van Disco?

EW: I don’t think so?

RS: Oh man, I will send it to you. It’s this really interesting guy who I met through some friends in Montreal: he’s a travelling DJ who has this incredible site.

EW: I wonder if I would know the guy. The guys that I’m doing stuff with up there now are called Pacific Rhythm.

RS: I know them well.

EW: Those guys are my homies. Derek [Duncan]—it’s his baby, and they also started No Fun Radio.

RS: Right, which you appeared on.

EW: And then there’s a guy named Dylan, who goes by Khotin.

RS: Dylan Khotin Foote! I don’t know him, but I know a lot of people who do and I love his Waterpark records—I have Nessie’s Revenge. Love that tune.

EW: So, my label just put out a record of his.

RS: I saw that, and didn’t he do an [Earth Boys] Trail Remix?

EW: He did a Trail Remix. I typically like to somehow— it doesn’t always work, and I don’t think this is necessarily very obvious to people—but I try to have kind of a passing of the baton between certain releases. Say, Dylan does a Trail Remix, and that then loops somehow into the next release.

Because everyone on the label is kind of connected. It’s essentially like a family.

RS: That’s really cool.

EW: My friends KZA and DJ Kent—who go under Force of Nature—they’re these total Tokyo OGs, they’re amazing: they did the new remix for Khotin.

And then next will be the Earth Boys album [Editor’s note: eBoys was released September 2018]

RS: No way, that’s unreal.

EW: Yeah we’re doing a double LP.

RS: Wow, that’s great. What’s their approach to the album?

EW: You know, I like to give some guidance obviously, but I also ``like to let the artist position or edit as they want. And [the Earth Boys] have so much output that really we’re just trying to find a good story within this huge bunch of songs.

They output very quickly and then they’ll go back and clean stuff up and polish it. So we’re kind of in the phase of refining it now, and have a concept of what the design will be. Julian [Duron], he’s one of the Earth Boys—he does all the design.

RS: He does the design for their stuff?

EW: Yeah. So Trail Mix and Trail Remix, he designed those.

RS: Those are some great covers.

EW: And then the poster for the [DJ] Harvey party, Julian did that poster too.

RS: Oh no way. And you did another party that used a similar poster.

EW: Mmhm we had Massive Attack DJing. It’s meant to be a series, so we’ll do another one at 1015 again, four or five months down the road.

RS: I feel like font-wise it makes sense that he did the poster as well as Trail Mix. Am I wrong? They’re similar.

EW: You’re right, there is one font on there that he likes to use. I can’t remember the name of it but it’s the extended one. He’s great.

Typically for the records, my buddy Rishi designs everything with me. Rishi is a real typographic purist and has his own agency, but it’s been so busy that I’ve started thinking about how to incorporate other people, and it’s worked out that Julian has been able to be on a lot recently.

RS: Where is this other designer based?

EW: Rishi is here in the Bay Area.

He’s been doing FACE and Public Release stuff pretty much since the beginning.

RS: Where did the Public Release logo come from?

EW: That’s a funny story. That was actually designed by a man named Evan Hecox, who used to do—I don’t know if he still does—all the art direction for Chocolate skateboards.

Do you know the logo?

RS: Oh yeah, that sort of crude cursive.

EW: Yeah, and then if you remember they did a whole series of vintage cars and illustrations that’s all Evan. He used to live here and he drew [the Public Release logo] before I actually did the records, when I was just doing these mix CDs. It must have been 2005 when he drew it.

RS: You mean you would release mix CDs under the name Public Release? Is that how it started?

EW: Yeah it started with that. The name just started because they started as downloadable mixes, like a public document, just something that anyone had access to. And then it went from there. Eventually mix CDs. And the style of them was a little bit different back then; the music was a little bit more all over the place. It got really focused when the label started.

But I used to sell those mix CDs at Colette and places like that; there was a store back then in New York called The Reed Space. And then there was a great space called I Heart, on Mott. And then aNYthing.

So the mixes made their way around, but I really wanted to start a label.

RS: And were the mixes happening at the same time as early FACE stuff, or was this pre-FACE?

EW: No, this was kind of pre-FACE.

RS: But you were doing parties, just not as FACE.

EW: Yeah, we were doing a party in the Tenderloin called Weekend, which was a Friday monthly; I had another party called Space Cakes; then there was Casino Classics. I had a bunch of nights and then FACE was started with myself and my buddy Justin Montag who used to be at Cornerstone in New York, which was part of The Fader magazine.

RS: Cornerstone Media?

EW: Yeah yeah. Our buddy back then introduced us when Justin moved here, and we started our party together at this little tiny spot on Valencia called Amnesia. They didn’t have a dance night really, it was all more live music.

RS: I know what you mean, I’m doing a similar thing at the moment. I mean, there is such an incredible dance scene in Brooklyn but a lot of the places I tend to throw parties are not used to that sort of thing. One of our favorite places to play does hard-hitting hip hop on the weekends and punk during the week, then we come in and play disco and soul and house on wax. But it works!

EW: I love that whole kind of contrast.

When we started our night, most of our friends didn’t want to go to clubs. They were bar people, into dives. And honestly unless I really wanted to see someone play or a friend was playing, I didn’t really either. There were a lot of good nights here the Bay Area has always been great for music, but our mix of people and our aesthetic and our curation; our detail, there wasn’t anything we were into. That’s why we started FACE.

RS: What’s your relationship to the Pacific Rhythm guys. Are you working on stuff together?

EW: Well, they’re kind of like the new generation of Vancouver-heads. There was a big lull in Vancouver

for the kind of music that we’re into, so when I would go back to see my folks or see friends, I didn’t really have a place I wanted to play or a crew that I connected with, until those guys started coming up.

RS: That’s more what I wanted to get at. What you ended up starting here, did that exist for you in Vancouver?

EW: Not really, no. There could have been stuff going on that was in a similar vein or had some crossover, but I wasn’t aware of it or wasn’t friends with them. But the Pacific Rhythm guys, they’ve got a good thing that they’re doing.

RS: Totally. Emma [Leigh Macdonald] came back from her last visit to Vancouver—for Thanksgiving I think—with the song DVOTE by Florist—

EW: Oh totally.

RS: It’s one of my most rinsed records now.

But yeah, the way that they bring certain names to Vancouver and also create names who are now coming through New York, going over to Europe, what have you, is cool. And I didn’t know much of anything before them in Vancouver, which is why I was asking.

EW: They have their own very particular aesthetic, which I love, and we have ours. One important thing we have in common is that we take it seriously in terms of aesthetic detail, but the whole goal is to have a good time and to have fun. And I think you can tell even in terms of verbiage of all their stuff and ours. We’re not uptight about the whole thing.

RS: Do you think that in and of itself is related to where you do what you do?

Or in any way connected to being from Vancouver?

EW: I think it might be a West Coast kind of attitude.

RS: I think so too. But I’m biased, my DJ partner in New York is actually one of my best friends from Berkeley. I think there is something very West Coast about our attitude.

Speaking of, do you know much about hyphy music? It’s got such a big footprint all over this area.

Images by Yoko Takahashi.

EW: I remember when it was blowing up.

RS: It still has influence. Like DJ Mustard. That whole sound is so hyphy to me: just massive snares on the 2 and the 4.

LA was making the better hyphy stuff for a while, but I think the Bay has kind of taken it back with this group called SOBXRBE. It’s so interesting to me how cities will trade who holds the title in that respect, almost like its a soccer trophy or something.

I definitely witnessed that living in Montreal and seeing how Toronto would take the music crown for a bit, not just in terms of producers but also in terms of parties. It feels like with Pacific Rhythm, Vancouver has really stepped up its game there in a big way.

EW: It really has, and in a way that’s very unique to Vancouver, you know what I mean? It celebrates Vancouver and BC.

RS: How long have you been in San Francisco now?

EW: I’ve been here for a while. Eighteen years.

RS: In terms of San Francisco and music, I’m clearly very out of the loop here if I’m still talking about hyphy. Are there other labels or parties you—

EW: We’re pretty friendly with most of them, and we do try to support each other. The closest crew is probably these guys who do a party called Club Lonely. It’s Vin [Sol], Primo, and Jeremy [Castillo]. I do stuff with Jeremy a lot. We’re kind of going back to the DIY, shitty dive bar stuff, doing these parties in Chinatown.

I think we kind of have a knack for spots that haven’t been used in a long time: we had another party at a spot on Mission Street that had kind of been forgotten about. We had Jacques [Renault] play there, Mans Ericsson, and Eric Duncan who used to do the Rub N Tug parties in New York. So we had those parties at that under the radar spot, and are now looking at switching them to somewhere in Chinatown.

We have our big club stuff when it’s a proper FACE party, and then we have our grimy, shitty dive bar parties where the speakers are blown but it kind of sounds better and more low-fi because they’re blown, you know?

RS: I was just about to ask about sound.

EW: At the Chinatown spot, the booth monitors are connected to the main, so if you turn the monitor down you turn down the whole house—which you can’t do, so you just have the monitors blasting in your face the whole night. It’s pretty raw, and sometimes we prefer it like that.

Julian from Earth Boys actually does our flyers for those too: the first we did was in December, called Forget the Year, the next was called Spring Blossoms.

RS: Where do those names come from?

EW: Well this party we’re going to do more seasonally, about four times a year, so we’re trying to capture that mood, you know, what everyone is looking forward to.

And there is a special Japanese word called bonenkai for the New Year’s party that happens mid December in Japan. It’s a night where you can get your boss trashed with you—it’s generally a work thing, too. In Japan end of year is actually very quiet, but this December party is really anything goes.

RS: I’m so constantly and pleasantly surprised at how people are able to use such great labeling and names in dance music. Whether it’s for labels, parties, or acts, right? There’s something so fantastically weird about where people are digging around for the sort of labels that they put on things now.

EW: Totally.

RS: It reminds me a bit—I haven’t thought of this until right now, but this was stuck in my head the other day—it reminds me a bit of The Beatles’ approach to writing “I Am the Walrus.” They were just like, “We’re going write a song that you absolutely cannot fuck up by projecting your meaning onto it,” you know?

Sometimes it’s just for pure fun. Sometimes it is really meaningful. But in either case, I just love the depths people are going to in coming up with great language as well as design.

EW: Totally. I mean, a lot of those names or those words are often—as you know—very targeted words or signs that most people see and filter and will just be like, “I’m not going to that. That looks like a shit party.”

Graphics by Hassan Rahim.

And that’s exactly what we want.

It’s ultra targeted, yet it looks even more everyday common. It’s a bit the aesthetic right now I guess.

RS: How has the Public Release aesthetic stayed the same or changed over the years?

EW: Well, the first five releases were picture discs. So, my buddy, Shadi Perez, who is an old school New York photographer, did a lot of early stuff for Supreme; shot a lot of the early videos for like Brand Nubian and the Beastie Boys. I think he did a Tribe Called Quest video; Cypress Hill; House of Pain. You know that “Jump Around” video? That’s all him. So we used his photography for the first two releases, and I partially did that because it was two New Yorkers doing the edits. On the first, the edits were done by Tim Sweeney from Beats in Space. His name isn’t written on there, it was on the down low a bit, but on the record it says for BIS use only, meaning Beats In Space.

Since then, Tim and I have become super tight friends and he just did a remix with Lauer on Trail Remix: the T&P remix. That’s Tim Sweeney and Lauer together, their first remix together.

RS: And next is the Earth Boys LP?

EW: We’re going to go all out for that one. Probably do a little bit of merch around it.

RS: That’s great. Damn, I need to get them to one of our parties before they blow up! I hope that there are some shorter length things on there. It’s interesting to imagine what they would do given a track that is going to be 45 seconds or a minute interlude style.

EW: Yeah there is some shorter stuff on there. Their creative outlet is just so fast.

It’s also exciting just because it will be the second full album on the label.

RS: What was the first?

EW: It was this group called EYE O. Local guys here, out of the Bay Area. More experimental, post punk, not really dance music.

RS: Do you by chance know FaltyDL?

EW: Yeah, I’ve been playing his stuff recently.

RS: I met him at a record fair he was at for Blueberry Records, which is his own little imprint, and he was talking to me a little bit about the future of physical releases, because he as somebody who makes vinyl is super mindful about the impacts that it has. The pressing of records has a massive carbon footprint.

That aside, or considered, is that something you think about? Vinyl will remain important because of the act of DJing, but do you ever think about its future?

EW: It’s an interesting question. I mean, definitely more and more DJs, even hardcore vinyl DJs, are traveling less and less with vinyl. And I think one of the main reasons, not only because of the convenience of USBs, is also because at the majority of clubs there is always some kind of issue with the setup of the turntables.

RS: One hundred percent.

EW: It’s not set up correctly. It’s humming, it’s buzzing, whatever. I mean, unless you’re like a Harvey or James Murphy level DJ, where you can demand audio techs that are there for a two hour sound check beforehand. If you’re not at that level and you’re rolling into the club—especially if you’re playing after someone—the risk management side of your brain is like, “I’m not gonna bring vinyl, let’s bring digital.”

RS: Totally. There was a good article about it on Resident Advisor recently. Did you see that? It’s called, “We need to talk about turntables in clubs.”

I’m consistently shocked at how banged up some of these things are, or how they’re being stored—if you can even call it that.

EW: What’s interesting is that the Chinatown gig I was talking about, that one is actually vinyl only. Because they have turntables and we don’t really want to haul in the CDJ, and I feel like it also forces you to select differently for the night.

You know, with USBs, you roll in with thousands of songs potentially at your fingertips. Usually you make some sort of edit from a smaller selection, but it’s still

in the back of your head and you know you can pick from almost anything, which makes your approach a little bit different.

RS: Tell me, how did the parties with Harvey come about?

EW: I think we’ve done parties with Harvey for, I would have to check the date, but I think about ten years now. And you know, everyone seems to have a certain introduction to Harvey. I was introduced first to Heidi, his manager, through some mutual friends in LA. Our first party together was cool, but we weren’t used to working together.

He’s definitely the most detailed person—sonically— that we work with, in an amazing way. Back when he was traveling a lot with vinyl, he would literally tune the room starting from the needle that was on the turntable and then almost work backwards. He just has a very systematic kind of way of approaching and tuning the room. He has the sound people pay attention to what are more problem frequencies. Which frequencies typically hold melody better, stuff like that. He doesn’t really seem like it when you just look at him, but he is ultra-detailed and obsessive about sound, which is amazing.

RS: That’s beautiful.

EW: It took a few parties to get to a level where he was content.

RS: Had you worked with Virgil [Abloh] before this party [at 1015]?

EW: No, Virgil I actually know through Heron [Preston]. Heron is from the Bay, we’re old friends and he introduced me to Virgil four or five years ago?

RS: Considering you also work with design, have you ever sort of chopped it up about that world?

EW: Yeah, he is an architect after all so we do have nice talks about design and stuff, but we’re newer friends. This was our first time working together, and that was a great experience.

The whole point of this last party was to introduce certain music and stuff we’re into to new people: there’s a whole older kind of obsessive cross section

of people who are into Harvey’s sound, for example, and then there’s a whole generation of people who haven’t discovered it yet. I just happened to be texting with Virgil when I was trying to make the final details happen for the 1015 event with Harvey.

We were trying to figure out what else to do in the other rooms and then it was just like, oh fuck, I know Virgil and I have talked about Harvey before, I know how much Virgil respects him, and Virgil DJs and the culture of nightlife and music really influences a ton of his work. So I was like, hey, let’s see if we can make this happen. A lot of stuff was moving around for a while and then it just kind of started to work out.

And then Heron, he’s the one that introduced us, so I was like okay; we have to have Heron in the mix as well. It’s all about organic conversations, really.

RS: That’s really cool. That’s definitely special for things like this, especially considering how much gets produced in events and labels that is not so intimate. It’s special to have such successful parties, such nice records come about in that organic, friendly way.

EW: Yeah, it’s cool. I feel like the label really just started a few years ago, even though I started putting things on vinyl in 2009. For a long time it was one or two records a year and [2019] will probably be six or seven releases.

I still feel like I’m putting stuff out for friends, you know what I mean? It’s just that now more people are finding out about it, and we’re releasing more digital now—it used to be vinyl only, to try and keep it real low key. There’s no real website for it, and I’m not really that into SoundCloud.

RS: I noticed the SoundCloud doesn’t go super far back into the catalog. But folks are spending more time clicking YouTube links on Discogs anyway.

EW: Yeah it’s really just there out of necessity, to be able to point to. It’s not something I’m that interested in maintaining or promoting.

If you’re into this kind of music or you’re hungry to find music that’s like this, you’ll get to it eventually.

I’m not really in a rush for you to get there.

Bode Bode Bode

Images by Emma Leigh Macdonald, taken at the Green River Project-designed Bode store, 58 Hester Street, New York.

Emily Adams Bode & Emma Leigh Macdonald

What a delight to record a conversation with a friend. Though not without its challenges! This short back and forth took Emily and I some time to compile— every time we found the chance to see each other we had too much to catch up about personally to focus on discussing the ideas specific to this issue. Eventually we managed, and the resulting discussion is a brief introduction to the new brick and mortar Bode store shown across the next pages, and a portrait of the brand at a moment in time—Summer 2020—when it seemed fashion and design might be catching up to the commitments to authenticity and intention that Emily has always already been guided by.

These images were taken at the end of 2020 at the Green River Project-designed store at 58 Hester Street, which serves as a kind of salon space for the brand and its collaborators. The afternoon included cameos of Monday, the newest & four-legged addition to the Bode family, and a rotating cast of other friends who just happened to be there that afternoon—coincidental appearances that illustrate the Bode community in action.

Emma Leigh Macdonald: How are you? How is BC [Canada]? I know you and Aaron [Aujla] have been on Vancouver Island for the past few months. I feel the Bode world—both personally and as a brand—is so deeply connected to and built around the Chinatown and Lower East Side neighborhoods where you live, and where the store is. I’m curious how much being away has changed operations (aside from the obvious changes to life that have been felt by everyone this year).

Emily Adams Bode: For us it has really meant the chance to readjust what it means to be in the fashion industry: how we can step back and not run a marathon every day, which is really how it was. It was one competition after another. A lot of the team has moved thinking they will be working from home in the future over the past few months; New York apartments are not generally built with the ability to do that in mind. It’s been hard to build up such a close-knit team and then for this to happen, but we’ve been able to be nimble and adapt.

ELM: In the fashion world specifically, do you see New York as being distinct? My sense is the community is (maybe unexpectedly) supportive here, rather than competitive like I think is often assumed.

EAB: I think that’s true of community. But in terms of style and clothes, I don’t really know. I know I’m in fashion, but I don’t know, like, the “look of London” [laughter]. Maybe I did in college, but now I feel like what we’re aiming more to do is stand alone in the fashion industry, and have our own effect on culture, and not really try to participate in that way of understanting things.

We participate in men’s fashion week, and New York fashion week, and with the CFDA, and with Vogue, and all these institutions because it allows us to be a part of that cultural conversation of fashion. But I don’t consider us as really being in that world as much. The guys that shop with us aren’t necessarily capital-FFashion guys.

ELM: Right. I think you and Aaron are part of conversations regarding slow fashion too, and I think repurposing techniques and materials is part of that approach. I think we talk about material repurposing a lot, but not so much technique repurposing—though both are important to “sustainability” or more simply

having a creative practice that is environmentally responsible, even if it’s not its mission statement.

EAB: Within the cycle of each season you know, my personal narratives or conversations with my inspiration for that season, which is always an actual human and the narrative of their life new shapes and silhouettes come about based on that story. That’s where designs come from, rather than sourcing specific fabric or the current conversation in the fashion world.

Aaron and I have spent the spring and summer at his childhood home, which is the greenhouse that inspired the Fall 2020 presentation. Aaron and Ben had built that installation based on this space, and it’s been funny to be back revisiting it and living in that specific and familiar place.

ELM: Is that the space that makes up the world of the web shop right now?

EAB: Exactly. The whole idea was to make a website that feels like a private domestic space: this has always been such a big part of my practice and of Aaron’s practice, something we love to talk about, think about, work through. So during this time, the question has been how do we create a space that feels like a greenhouse online (rather than in a physical space, like they did for the show, for example).

ELM: I was just reading the description of the first Bode shoe, and that interest is even referenced there: “The Bode House Shoe is made to be worn outdoors, but inspired by life within the domestic space.”

I’m working on an exhibition right now that looks at communal spaces around the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the early 1970s, right in your neighborhood. This was a moment when artists and activists were experimenting in making the domestic public, Gordon Matta-Clark and Tina Girouard, for example, and I wonder if—aesthetically or conceptually—this resonates with how you are thinking about things right now. It certainly feels very relevant to all of us spending our time at home.

EAB: Definitely, and in making that domestic space public it’s about showing what’s real. We aren’t trying to hide the circumstances of the moment in our work—we are showing the space of the greenhouse

because you can see that the studio is a greenhouse right now. The two of us are still also using that space to water the plants, to harvest, to chop vegetables.

To show a pair of pants, someone in Aaron’s family needed to model them. Instead of trying to hide that mess, we’re asking how to communicate that whole experience online now that it’s how we are relating to one another.

I think that it’s also a sensory question: it feels like people have felt more acutely connected to the natural world amid the pandemic, so trying to convey what it feels like to take a walk outside or in a greenhouse or by the water has felt right.

ELM: I hope that connection to nature and that shift in pace of our lives is something that can be a lasting effect of this, to some extent.

EAB: I think it has also just made people feel connected to more outside of their own personal existences (on top of that connection to nature). Racial injustices and health concerns have put in stark perspective what matters most to us versus what we can take a hit on because it’s not the best way for us to help in making change.

In solidarity with protests we didn’t participate in Paris Fashion Week online this summer, for example, and that wasn’t even a question.

ELM: The brand is so personal. People connect in such intimate ways to Bode I think that sincerity is why.

recording

Emmanuel Olunkwa & Jordan Page

Images by Emmanuel Olunkwa.

If I’m not mistaken, the first time Jordan, Emmanuel, and I were in the same place was at Emily Adams Bode’s store opening, January 2020—which is fitting for this entangled issue, and refers back to Clarisse’s introductory letter. We came together in somehow both the most and least random of ways, as so often happens in New York.

Jordan is a producer, stylist, and vintage archivist, as well as the founder of Colour Plus Companie and @veryadvanced. Emmanuel is an artist, editor, writer, and filmmaker, and co-founder of November Magazine After a few attempts to meet, and a back and forth about whether having this conversation face to face would be possible, the two met over Zoom as summer 2020 was coming to a close.

Emmanuel Olunkwa: I was reading some other interviews that you’ve done. You have your story, right? You’re like, “This is what I was interested in, this is what happened, this is how it got me to where I’m at now.” I don’t want that story. What are the things that you never feel you can talk about?

Jordan Page: [Laughter] I wish I had come more prepared! Honestly, one thing I do find myself wanting to discuss—because I am a fashion guy—is the current state of fashion without really holding back for fear of a potential collaborator reading this, and then losing a work opportunity, for example.

EO: So let’s have that conversation.

JP: [Laughter] Let’s go. Any questions?

EO: Well, what are you thinking about right now?

JP: A lot of my thoughts have been on the state of menswear and who is really occupying where we are and reflecting that space back to us. To me, right now it’s a lot of guys who, 10-15 years ago, wouldn’t be in fashion to this degree but for whatever reason now are. When I look at certain aspects of menswear, I feel like I’m watching the sartorial version of a Jerry Bruckheimer film.

There should be enough room for everyone to exist [at that level], but in men’s fashion right now, for example, you’ve got Virgil Abloh who—you know, as a Black man, yes, I was excited to see him be appointed to his position, but is he really the Black man who deserved the opportunity? That’s another question and I think the answer to that is no [laughter]. You know?

EO: Yes.

JP: It’s frustrating to see these uber straight males dominate a space that was really there for people who are considered “other,” if you want to say that.

EO: To me right now, I actually feel 16 again in a very specific way, culturally. Nothing really seems to be guarded in the way it had become guarded over the last few years. I feel like it’s 2010 again, or 2011. For me specifically I’m like, “I don’t have to care about what’s going on anymore.” Not that I ever really did, but I still kept my finger on the pulse of what was going on, even just to decide whether or not I wanted to tap into it or interpret what was happening.

You know?

JP: Yes.

EO: Style-wise, art-wise, whatever. And I feel for the first time in a few years that I’ve been able to just slow down and really rediscover what it is that excites me and challenges things that I thought about or undermines certain things that I once cared about and prioritized. It feels like there has been a new breath of—not opportunities per se, but—perspective. In terms of how to move forward and the things that really are priorities for me.

JP: I do agree with a lot of that. I think one of the good things about the pandemic and quarantine has been— speaking from my experience—that the pace of my life slowed down considerably. I would never want to be insensitive or unaware of other people’s situations, but it has brought me a lot of peace. Yes, I have my battles with the psychological aspect of this like everyone does, but in a weird way I have gained a lot of peace from this and I think that’s why I’m able to think the way I am now and really speak for myself.

EO: I’ve been thinking about what it means to be Black and function inside of an institution [in that way]. Most institutions want the cache but aren’t actually invested in the movement of people, neither elevating nor nurturing Black talent systematically, because Black talent and Black intelligence isn’t always prioritized, even when representation is.

We end up having the same conversations about the same shit about the state of things. It’s more like,

“What do we do now?”

JP: Well I think that speaks to another issue of where we are, in terms of capitalism and people really wanting to dismantle that structure. I think that if you dismantle capitalism, a lot of dominoes will fall in place. Racism will be revealed to be what it actually is: a fucking result of the capitalist structure. You’ll see that patriarchy, homophobia, all the isms and ists that exist in the world that are awful are the direct result of a capitalist society and I think that our culture is one thing that we will see change and become more true to its form once we get rid of the hype and money-making spectacle of everything.

EO: I guess, for me, what’s boring about having this conversation is I just want to talk about the things we care about! Why do we have to have these conversations about homophobia, for example. I’m not saying to give people a break from what the realities are—but we’re given these opportunities, and we have these conversations and we have to talk about capitalism and racism, homophobic and transphobic people, when really it’s like: you know exactly what you like in fashion, why you like it, and what you think needs to happen. That’s the conversation that we should be having.

I do really—not to quote Toni Morrison, to be like a Toni Morrison stan—but it really is true that racism is ultimately a distraction from doing your work.

There was this environmental biologist [Ayana Elizabeth Johnson] who wrote this piece that was like, “Can you solve the race war? Can you solve racism so I can focus on my work? I just want to focus on my work,” and asks, “What would the world look like if Black people didn’t have to take it upon themselves to be responsible for social and civil work, and could pursue their actual genuine interests?”

If a person wants to be a marine biologist, like everyone wants to be in the fifth grade, they can pursue that. If a person wants to be a fashion designer, they can pursue that. I think there’s so much about suddenly ascending to a position because you have a talent and then once you get there, you’re then made responsible to it and made representative of a body of people that you have to be—

JP: Everything about your existence is—

EO: Overdetermined.

JP: Yes. I was on the selection committee for this Black Creative Endeavors Grant [with Something Special Studios]. One of the categories we have is a writing category, and a lot of the submissions that we got—if they were story-based—were focused on trauma.

EO: Exactly.

JP: The person that I partnered with in this category is a white woman, and I was just telling her that Black folks in a lot of ways only really get to shine if we expose ourselves and make ourselves so vulnerable. If our trauma is on full display for everyone to see and consume.

I’m like, No. We need more spaces in the creative world where Black people can just create. Where there’s no politics to it. You feel safe, and you can just create to your heart’s desire. That is the ultimate goal for me. My thing is—not to quote Toni Morrison here again—but I understand racism to be white people’s problem. She has said that they need to start figuring out what they can do about it. Leave us out of it. And I really hold true to that.

EO: So what do you want to do?

JP: I want to create. I don’t want things that I create to ultimately be political. I don’t want them to be rooted and centered in my own trauma. I just want to be able to create as freely as a white creator does.

EO: Yes, and that’s not to say that these things aren’t going to be informed by that trauma or shaped by that trauma, but you don’t want to have to have that conversation.

JP: That’s not going to be the story. Every bit of my life, good or bad, influences who I am now and what I subsequently create. But it doesn’t have to be, “I painted this shoe this shade of red because when I was in the streets in North Carolina, there was a lot of blood that ran into the manhole after I’d seen my boy get shot.” No. But people love that.

EO: It’s pornographic.

JP: It’s trauma porn.

EO: Exactly. People like trauma porn.

JP: They love it more when you’re Black. Look at the Oscars: all the Black actors, writers, directors that have gotten attention have gotten attention from films that center Black trauma. Like Moonlight.

EO: 12 Years a Slave.

JP: The Color Purple, Glory, Malcolm X. All these movies that are great and focused around Blackness are so traumatic. Not that I need to compare any Black creator to a white creator but when is the Black creator who makes a version of La La Land going to get that same sort of recognition.

EO: I’m just trying to make La La Land and chill.

JP: We deserve happiness as much as anyone else does. We deserve peace of mind. We don’t need to be reminded. I don’t want to walk through my life feeling like a victim. But it’s hard when almost every media representation of Black people is either stereotyping or victimizing us.

EO: Even with Black creators and Black photographers specifically who base their practice and the ethos of their practice around this portrayal of the Black body. It’s really boring because it’s like; we’re Black people. In terms of the female gaze and the gaze writ large, we can’t perpetuate that gaze. Why are we trying to perpetuate that gaze and trying to use the camera in ways that people have historically used the camera as a capturing device?

These white guys mainly, sometimes white women, are genuinely just able to develop their craft in a way that’s so specific. It’s really simple. They’re really just able to figure out how to use the camera to depict something that’s specific to them. That, I think, is really beautiful. I think that everything that we do is just so overdetermined, it’s like why are we trying to fit ourselves into this system? Why are we trying to make ourselves legible?

JP: Well, like you said before it’s all racism in a way: racism is the distraction. We consume ourselves with having to do things the way a white person who set the standard did it. Isn’t that in and of itself a distraction?

EO: It’s also about asking why we are putting people

on. Ultimately, if the goal is to position and situate Black people front and center, then what happens when a very select group of Black people get their hands on power? The system is going to repeat itself, and it has, and we have seen that continue to happen.

JP: That’s the thing too, especially conversations we’ve had lately about racism and anti-Black violence. The fallout from all of this brutality and protesting that’s been happening the past few months has been diversity hires; getting Black folks in higher positions. But if it’s a Black person who upholds white supremacy, what’s the point?

EO: Okay I’m going to pivot this conversation now. I’m going to pivot because I’ve been thinking a lot about the ‘90s culturally, and I was reading one of your interviews and you were talking about how one of your favorite people is Whoopi Goldberg, stylistically. I was like, Oh shit. I really enjoy Whoopi Goldberg. Whoopi Goldberg is a person who I get a lot of my humor and comedic timing from. I watched the Sister Acts. I watched all her little weird movies that I could buy at Costco when I would go with my mom and would have to ask to purchase them.

The ‘90s—culturally—are so massive. Not enough people actually talk about it just in terms of production. New money, you know what I mean? New ventures, people who didn’t know what hip-hop was. Of course, it had started decades before; had a sound, but culturally, you know what I mean?

JP: I will say the ‘90s in my opinion is the pinnacle. In my opinion, as far as what was happening in America and how America influenced the rest of the world, it is the most influential decade in fashion.

EO: That’s what I’m talking about.

JP: So many subcultures had developed by that time— you had hip-hop culture which you could section off regionally from the East Coast to the South, to the West Coast; you had surf, skate, all of that stuff. It didn’t start in the ‘90s, but it took a form in the ‘90s. A form that still influences to this day.

I think that’s why if you look at this past decade from, I would say, 2014 to now, the ‘90s has been such a big influence in fashion and pop culture, because for one, it had finally been long enough to revisit a lot of things,

but two, there is just so much to pull from.

It was like the world became flatter in the ‘90s with everyone having the internet; cable became worldwide; instead of 30 channels there were 130. People had more access. And I think it was the right amount of access. Right now we’ve got too much to the point where you don’t even know where shit comes from anymore.

EO: Exactly, and you don’t even really know where to look. I think that is what is really troubling for me. When people don’t know where their references are from and why they are inspired.

I think that a way to differentiate yourself is to be grounded in something that’s tangible. That is really specific to you and your interests. The thing that you’re describing about the ‘90s is specificity. There was specificity and people really committed to styles, and understood what style mean to an extent. Not that you need to be authentic in every single one of your endeavors, but you should know why these are your references.

JP: I agree with you 1000 percent. I think that you saw a specificity in the ‘90s, singular sources of inspiration that a lot of people strove for. The source was different across subcultures, but everything that was a subculture then is now mainstream.

EO: When was the last time that even happened?

JP: You could see its decline as the ‘90s ended, going into the 2000s, and with the growth of the internet. Like I said, the internet in the ‘90s was that perfect point of being accessible but still not too accessible.

EO: Well—at least in my understanding—the internet for a very long time was very destination-based. It wasn’t really about going through something. It was about going to a place to spend time at and with. You went, you logged on. It was very different.

JP: It’s the effort.

EO: Exactly. The effort. You wouldn’t just idly be on MySpace all day, you know what I mean? You either had to actively be on for hours on end or you were away from the computer because of the way that having the internet used to be—tied to a landline while you would

be out in the world. It was very intentional.

I feel like that’s the internet that I miss, where we used it as a device to get somewhere else.

Now, I’m just at my house because I don’t even fucking need to see you to have this Zoom chat!

JP: Yes. I just had a conversation with a good friend of mine about how social media is ruining Black culture. My reasoning is the same as the accessibility argument. You have people who have access to cultures who are not of that culture, they misinterpret it and think their misinterpretation is true. I don’t know if you would call Black culture a subculture, but [that access] dilutes it and waters it down, it changes the definition. Other people take control of it that are not of those cultures, and therein lies the problem.

EO: The appropriation thing gets boring in that way though, because it’s like, we all are borrowing from each other. It is very specific with language and AAVE and how people try to use it—

JP: I’m not saying—look, for instance, if you’re not Black and you grew up around Black people—

EO: But you can tell, you know what I mean?

JP: You can tell. I will say this, to me there are three

A’s: appreciation, appropriation, and assimilation. Appreciation is, to me, yes, you can borrow from this culture, but you know the root if someone asks you about it. You can speak to it, in a way. Appropriation is sort of the pillaging of that. You take it; you don’t know where it’s from; you present it as your own. Assimilation is someone of a more marginalized culture basically assimilating to the majority culture, like how someone would explain why a Black woman might wear blue contacts and blonde weaves.

We know that as a stylistic thing now, but how did it originate?

EO: I’m thinking about The Players Club. Is that what that movie is called?

JP: With LisaRaye?

EO: Yes.

JP: Yes, and what’s her name in the movie? She had a blonde updo.

EO: Ronnie. That movie is so good.

JP: I watched it again early in quarantine.

EO: Really? It’s so sexy. It’s so sexy and such a specific—it reminds me of B.A.P.S., it reminds me of when these people were doing these things, these Black people were making films. Oh God, it’s just—

JP: I mean, they were Black [laughter].

EO: You know what I mean?

JP: That’s the thing! Emmanuel, we can’t talk about these things and not talk about the other issues that you find boring and overwrought. Those movies don’t exist anymore because those small Black studios got bought out by white ones and then were diluted. When we talk about the strength of Black culture, every conversation ends that way and it fucking sucks.

At that time you could make a movie and even a white studio exec could be like, “This is for a Black audience. It will do well in this Black audience.” Now that doesn’t exist anymore. Everything has to be for everybody now and part of me doesn’t think it always needs to be that way.

EO: I mean, for years we’ve been like, “Everyone needs to have a seat at the table.” But it’s like, “What if I don’t want to sit at that table?”

JP: I don’t want to sit at that table. I’ve never wanted to sit at that table!

EO: I was looking over at the table being like, “Cool. Good on you. Y’all don’t even look like you’re having fun there!”

JP: If I can be real with you, what I don’t understand is that for a lot of Black folks who consider themselves activists, the whole form of activism is taking over historically white spaces and I’m like, why? Why do you want to overrun that magazine that was founded by white people for white people 70 years ago, and all of a sudden make it Black? I don’t get that.

EO: You also just can’t make it Black.

JP: You can’t. I’ll use Teen Vogue as an example. I think that representation and diversity and inclusiveness are very important things for the things that they need to be important for, but I have a friend who works at Teen Vogue. She’s a good friend, and she does a great job there but I noticed the sharp pivot with the latest editor when she came in—she’s a Black woman—I noticed how a lot of the content changed and was geared toward young women of color and non-binary people as well. I think that is great, but also, for me, it was confusing to witness this change happen at a publication that was historically white.

I struggle with wondering why would you do that versus doing your own thing. Because this inclusivity is not in the DNA of Teen Vogue. The people that run this company are still very rich and very white.

EO: I mean to some degree awareness is so important, right? But I think that the Blackness gets lost. My whole thing is that just because you’re taking photos of Black people don’t mean it’s Black. There’s people that have style—this is what I’m talking about and I guess I haven’t really been explicit about it— there’s a style of Blackness that’s embodied within the theatrics of style. Like in B.A.P.S. Like, what? How did that movie get made? How? You have Halle Berry in this film?

JP: We’re talking about the last few years you could get the money to make that kind of movie from a studio.

EO: Dude, B.A.P.S. was a Black movie through and through. The director was Black, the screenwriter was Black, the composer was Black.

JP: Yes.

EO: I think what I’m trying to say is that I’m not bored by having these conversations about capitalism or whatever, but we can talk about capitalism and these things through actual tangible experiences that we have. Like B.A.P.S., for instance. Or The Players Club. For me, though, what’s interesting is I didn’t grow up knowing those things as culture. I saw Crooklyn at my cousin’s house, but it was never really talked about as culture. For me, culture wasn’t something to have as knowledge. For me it was taboo to talk about it. Instead, seeing a movie like Crooklyn, I would embody it. I would try to dress myself in those kinds of clothes. I was like, Oh, this is literally a map. These people are

literally showing me how to be or what’s cool.

JP: Black cinema and music formed me so much. I would not be the same person without them. These were things that got to exist outside of trying to be palatable for everyone.

I often talk about how the ’90s was great for Black people creatively because we got to create outside of the mainstream bubble and the audience was still there. There wasn’t this thing of like, “What would a white audience think of this show?” It existed more authentically in my eyes. To be a Black child in the ’90s meant that there was no shortage of seeing yourself in the media.

I just wish that we still—I’m going back to how you started this conversation—I wish that we could have the separate space to create, because we didn’t have to make our art palatable for every audience.

EO: Happy belated birthday by the way—how old are you?

JP: 35. I’ve got a decade on you! We’re barely of the same generation.

EO: Oh my god that’s what this is! So you were alive for B.A.P.S. and shit in a way that I wasn’t.

JP: I’ve gotta say, for the VeryAdvanced account a lot of people think that’s research but a lot is first hand memory. It’s me talking to myself, is what it is.

EO: I think I make my best work when I’m talking to myself. When I’m not thinking like, “Oh, is someone going to like this—?” You’re just throwing a bunch of shit in the pile; a dash of this; a dash of that.

And that’s more what I’m saying. It’s like, let’s show these people rather than talking about [racism]. Why can’t you just fucking do VeryAdvanced and design Colour Plus and chill? It’s because people want it to be Black. People want it to be Black. People want it to be complicated. Why can’t you just fucking know design?

JP: [Laughter] I hear you. It’s a problem I’ve run into because I run VeryAdvanced with some anonymity. I have my personal account linked in the bio so you can click over, but a lot of people don’t know I’m Black

because I don’t talk about Black things all the time.

EO: That’s what I’m saying but you keep trying to come in and talk about Black things! [Laughter] I don’t want to talk about Black things I want to talk about fashion!

JP: I do love Black things.

EO: I love Black things too. But the Blackness that we are talking about just doesn’t exist right now.

JP: I don’t want my existence as a creator to be like, “Everything is Black and struggle and shackles and the marches.” You know what I mean? I know all that. I’ve been through shit you won’t believe, but let me exist. I just want to be happy.

EO: Yes. Everything does not need to be an exposé on how it was hard.

Sissòn Season

Sissòn at Rhythm & Blues, cfcp, 2018. Opening photography by Emma Leigh Macdonald.

Sissòn & Clarisse Fahrtmann

Just prior to this phone call between Clarisse Fahrtmann and Sissòn early in 2019, Sissòn had realized a solo show at the Brooklyn gallery cfcp, organized by Mary Howard (who runs the space, which doubles as she and Clarisse’s home). Having lived among their paintings for months, Clarisse developed an intimate knowledge of Sissòn’s work, and this as well as her own research on museum narratives and the two of them being friends outside of these professional overlaps allowed for a frank, generous conversation to unfold.

Listen in as the two of them record a catch up over the phone: a discussion at once deeply familiar and stuck in time.

Clarisse Fahrtmann: Okay, perfect. Fabulous. How are you?

Sissòn: I’ve just been busy! Working on a bunch of different projects, and my next solo show.

CF: Well, I’m happy we finally get to do this. And Mary is in the next room.

S: Send my love to Mary. I love her so much.

CF: I think she’s going to be eavesdropping probably.

S: She’s got her ear on the door!

CF: [Laughter] We were just talking about what I was going to ask you. How are your latest projects shaping up?

S: I feel good so far. It’s been a bit quiet this year: I haven’t had any shows yet. And part of the reason for that is because I’m working on a larger show that’s going to take about six months. So I’m working in a different way. Last year I think I did five shows.

CF: Which is a lot.

S: It’s great to do five shows in theory, but this year I’m like, okay, the most I’ll probably end up doing is two really great ones.

CF: And those are going to be solo shows?

S: Both solo shows. I’ve been working in a new medium: I’ve been working in acrylic and I have about 20 paintings [in the medium] now. For me personally,

I have only ever known how to work in oil paint, and now I’m transitioning away from it. I’m in a space of thinking of progression, in order to really evolve as an artist.

CF: And for you to evolve you need to try a new medium? Or is it about scale?

S: I would say it’s about challenging myself. With acrylic, I’m in a space where I’m thinking, how do I use acrylic in the same way that I would use oil? Since I started working in acrylic I’ve also been working with Aerosol.

CF: That’s very new.

S: I’m in a whole different realm. I kind of feel it’s the equivalent of a rapper who suddenly has a different flow, for example—I just want to be a well-rounded artist. When I look back at this time I want to be like, sure that’s when I was working in acrylic, but it was really the vehicle to get me to another point to create the work that I’m creating now. You know? I’m even working with sculpture right now as well, so it’s a lot in the blender [laughter]. I’m just trying to decipher and take the best traits to then develop a new genre of art, really.

CF: Yes. Your own practice. I can also imagine— especially given you don’t have a formal background in painting—that it’s about needing to create. You are informing the growth of your practice, but also teaching yourself along the way. I feel shifting from one medium to another is part of a growth process too that not every artist wants to undertake. Correct me if I’m wrong.

S: Completely. I want to be a multi-disciplinary artist. And within that there are moments when I think about my education: I was taught to paint by my mother, and that’s different from how I would have learned in art school. But because of how I was taught, I think I’m in a space where I think more about the larger picture. I’m always thinking about what I want to do next and how to develop that. For example, working with pastel I reached a point where I was like, what is it about these drawings that you like so much more than in painting?

And I realized that it was the control of it. I had more control and space with the pastel than I did with oil on linen. So then I’m asking myself how to have

that control in oil painting, or in acrylic. I’m always unpacking and I think that’s in part because I went to design school [as opposed to studying fine arts].

CF: I feel like art school is really useful for mentorship. But in your case you had a mentor in your mother, who was herself an artist.

I wonder—is there specific artwork that your mom showed you when you were young? We’ve spoken about Picasso’s influence before, and he’s an interesting example. Picasso’s breadth was crucially fueled by his lifelong infatuation with African sculpture, although he never fully acknowledged the impact it had on his oeuvre. What was the first image of African art that you remember seeing? Did you define: “this is African art and this is American art”? Among the things that your mom showed you, what was the art that made its mark?

S: That’s a good question. It’s funny though, because when I was growing up I didn’t have any [direct] exposure to African art. All I had exposure to was European Masters. My mother really loved the Impressionists. Early on, that’s what I was exposed to—and that’s all I knew of art for a long time. I didn’t find out about Africa’s influence on European art until I really started to unpack Picasso, as you say:

I got really deeply interested in Picasso as a painter because of the longevity of his career and how he was able to develop different styles. It was the Blue period, the Rose period, Cubism—and I was really struck by how this one person was able to transcend this many ideas across time, and what he may have been influenced by. I remember when I first discovered that he was influenced by Africa and African masks and African sculptures, my mind was completely blown. And from then on, I started to dive more into African art to assess my heritage, and what I was drawn to.

In my earlier works I have 300 abstract paintings that were all based on African masks, all about 18” by 24”. I still have some of them. In the context of my work being collectible, those were the first things that I sold, and they were all influenced by Africa.

For my mother, though, there was no formal influence or really any mention of Africa in her work. It was a lot of European and Old Master techniques. That having been said, she did have works where she examined things that pertained to the United States and Black

culture. There is a drawing that I’ll always remember from being a kid, of this man in a park with a view of the city with these giant dreadlocks, and he has his fists up for hope. Those were the things that I grew up with.

CF: I think it’s so telling that when asking artists who are African American when the first time they saw African art or artifacts in America was. The answer is often adulthood. It’s absurd to think that the amount of people in this country whose ancestors were ripped from their continent over four hundred years ago are not reacquainted with part of their cultural heritage until much later in life.

S: It’s sad, but that’s the harsh reality of the United States. This is a place where a lot of things that should be taught in schools are not. And that’s part of the reason why I create the work that I create. I only paint Black people. I only draw Black people. And you’re exactly right: the reason for this is because when I was growing up, I would go to museums, and I never saw Black faces. And it kind of messes with you psychologically when you start to think about that.

CF: During my studies, two Met curators teaching a class asked us to reassess the way certain period rooms are presented at the Met.1 One of these rooms was built by slaves but is only attributed to its owner (a white plantation owner) and its architect. So I subsequently said to my professor that the label should account for those who built it, if only to make the history of such artifacts clear to the public. I was told, “this is not a museum of history. It’s a museum of art history.” And that really showed me the baffling and all too common approach to contextualization adopted in a majority of art institutions in the United States, which is to separate histories that belong together. Art cannot be separated from what makes it intelligible in the first place: it’s not an ahistorical fragment.

It makes me wonder, if your work were purchased by a museum, how would you feel about it? Would you want to be part of a collection like the Met? Would you be proud to be part of that change? Or would you feel like you don’t want to subscribe to their ideology? The museum is always thought of as the safest space for a work of art, but I wonder how you feel about this as an artist.

S: I would, but that’s in the context of me being myself

as an artist and not diluting the work. What makes a museum context so great is the ability to reach so many people. In that sense, of course I would like my work to be visible. But at the end of the day, museums are for education, and if they are only telling one side of the story, then the question is how much can you trust a museum to inform you?

There are so many examples of this [coming into question]: you’ve got people like Charles White who should have always been in museums, but are only just starting to be included now. And I think part of the reason for this is honestly Kerry James Marshall’s show Mastry.2 That show happened and it was like “fuck, wait a minute, there are Black Masters?” and it’s like yeah, there’s been Black Masters.

Which then becomes a conversation about what a new museum looks like, if this is the existing structure. A younger generation is starting to take over, and they’re doing things differently. What Mary is doing [with cfcp] is a prime example. That’s innovative in that it is a gallery, but not in the traditional sense of what a gallery is supposed to look like. That’s innovation, that’s how it should be. In my opinion as an artist, that’s how museums should be too. But what the fuck do I know.

CF: That’s exactly it though, that you as an artist would say, “what do I know?” is again showing you who still yields the most power in the art world right now.

My own research revolves around museums and around the Met specifically; what it’s doing right now to stay relevant; how it should expand its historical narrative. The question of: how do you tell one history of art when finally, the myth of western art as sole canon is destroyed? Before, it was easy. You had a French room and a German room and a British room, and then they brought over Egypt and the Middle East and a bit of Asia and suddenly, you had this collection. But it was such an arbitrary narrative of things, collected and curated by scholars who had the strongest grip on that narrative. Now, anyone producing art, in any corner of the world, can be part of that narrative and can aim to be part of that collection, because it’s supposed to be universal. So how do you do that? How do you tell a story that is so fragmented? The question of heritage and nationality is also fascinating to me, and I’m currently following the unfolding of a project initiated by the French government of returning looted works that are going to be repatriated to Africa from France.

S: Yeah because the French [laughter], you went over there and took a whole bunch of shit, and now the Africans are like, hey, well, now you’ve profited off of all these stolen goods and it’s actually our heritage!

CF: [Laughter] Okay something else: if you could only be collected by one museum, is there one whose collection you would like to be included in more than anywhere else?

S: Only one museum?

CF: Yeah.

S: I don’t get any more than that? [Laughter]

CF: [Laughter] No, you only get to choose one.

S: Okay, I’ll say the one museum I would want to be collected by is the Louvre. I would want them to have a lot of my work, too, because I think it’s one of the few museums in the world that also really needs the kind of work that I produce. There is no reason there aren’t more Black artists in the Louvre. There should be. So if I could only pick one? That would be it.

1. A period room is an entirely reconstituted period interior presented with original walls, furniture, and artifacts. It’s a somewhat antiquated method whereby museums recontextualize art, artifacts, and furniture original to a single period, or owned by a particular individual, by giving the viewer a feeling of their original setting—you could say that the white cube is the other end of that curatorial spectrum.

2. Kerry James Marshall: Mastry was a monographic exhibition of the artist Kerry James Marshall’s work, held at the Met Breuer from October 25, 2016 to January 29, 2017. It is widely considered a landmark show of the artist’s work, and a milestone in the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition history.

Sissòn at Rhythm & Blues, cfcp, 2018. Opening photography by Emma Leigh Macdonald.

Mary Howard and Sissòn installing Rhythm & Blues, cfcp, 2018.

Photography by Clarisse Fahrtmann. Guests at the opening of Rhythm & Blues, cfcp, 2018.

Rhythm & Blues, cfcp, 2018. Installation photography by Object Studies.

landscape plus

Laida Lertxundi & Emma Leigh Macdonald

Still from Vivir para Vivir / Live to Live Laida Lertxundi, 2015, 11 min, 16mm.

Le Dépanneur began with an interest in how an individual’s environment impacts their choices, their creative work, how they live their lives, and an acknowledgement of how important a question this is. The landscape in which creative work comes about is much more than a backdrop.

To a certain extent, filmmaker Laida Lertxundi has also articulated this sentiment through her work, and through her terminology surrounding “landscape plus”: her approach to filmmaking rooted in a cumulative, thoughtful practice of observation. This conversation took place in early 2018 as Laida was making work and teaching in Los Angeles. She has since moved back to Europe and its landscape, and has published the monograph Laida Lertxundi: Landscape Plus with Mousse Publishing on this distinct perspective.

Emma Leigh Macdonald: I think my introduction to your work was a screening hosted by MoMA. You answered some questions afterward, and it was really when I started reading and hearing you describe your work and the term “landscape plus” that I started to see such a striking connection between the interests of this publication and the interests of your work.

I’ve read your definition of this designation, but I was hoping just to begin you could talk a little bit about how you started to use that term, or how that became so descriptive of your work.

Laida Lertxundi: I started working in this way— creating a kind of vocabulary or syntax for a relationship between sound and image in film—and I became very interested in thinking about filmmaking in the city of Los Angeles in ways that also dismantled the language of Hollywood films.

For example, working with iconic images of the city and using cross-cutting, for instance, between two shots. Things that refer back to fictional film language vacated of their typical function within that language. This plays with our built in desires for narrative. It plays with projection and character and all those other tropes; we fall into those but then depart from the expected. I was interested in filming different landscapes in California and in the desert.

This is how it started: thinking about landscape in this way, as an inversion of the fictional film model. Trying instead to bring it to the foreground.

I also think about an interaction between the natural landscape and then these unnatural performances or actions or props. It’s both documenting the landscape and also creating this different approach to fiction.

Because I am interested in fiction; I just think of fiction as anything that doesn’t innately belong in a given setting.

ELM: In terms of landscape, the first thing I think of when calling to mind your films is the desert and the natural landscape, but the idea of a home and a domestic setting are equally present in your works. So right away I see what you mean about fictional tropes. I’m trying to think how to phrase what I’m curious about. Are the fictional elements you bring in ever related to practical concerns? For control?

Still from Cry When it Happens /

Llora Cuando Te Pase, Laida Lertxundi, 2010, 14 min, 16mm (top); 025 Sunset Red, Laida Lertxundi, 2016, 14min, 16mm (bottom).

Or for comfort, you know, working with non-actors especially. Is that part of it?

LL: Definitely [laughter], and this is something that may not be obvious from watching the films but what definitely informs them is that I work with non-actors in a kind of cumulative way. So it’s really more like a studio practice.

ELM: Oh interesting.

LL: I shoot twice a week, for instance, or record ten times a week. I add into something, as opposed to how a typical film shoot might function. And this often happens in spaces that I live or simply that I have access to.

ELM: Cumulative is a nice way of describing it.

LL: Yeah, there are no permits, there are no budgets. I don’t start because I have funding.

A lot of the shooting happens in places I’ve lived. And I’ve moved around a lot, so there is a bit of a documentation of all those places that I’ve been in and had access to, things that are within my reach or part of my environment in some way. And in terms of the domestic, there is a feminist tradition of bringing value to the domestic, right? So there is that side of interior spaces, too. And there is also the fact that, you know, I’m European and [LA] is not a walkable city.

ELM: It’s not!

LL: It doesn’t work like any other cities I’ve known, so ending up documenting these intimate spaces is kind of a portrait of my experiences.

ELM: Of what’s accessible to you.

LL: Really just how I feel Los Angeles works. I can go to the mountains, and I can be at closed parties and events. Interactions often happen in domestic spaces.

There is this Eileen Myles poem, I forget which one it is, but she talks about the freedom of standing in her kitchen talking to another poet at, like, 3PM in the afternoon on a Monday. I think she was actually talking about New York, but to me that’s Los Angeles. Talking to people about important things in their kitchens.

ELM: I like that description. But that also takes me back to a conversation I was just having about how here in New York, you know, so many very intimate conversations or moments are forced to happen in public spaces. Because people don’t have enough domestic space, or spend time in it, really. I know you were at school at Bard: how do you think your work might be different if you had stayed in New York?

LL: I think it would be very different, for a number of reasons. I’m very permeable; I really become part of the environment that I’m in. It’s not like I could take this project and just transplant it anywhere.

My mentor in graduate school was Thom Anderson, and working against the power of a city through images really came from him. So right now it’s really Los Angeles based for me, that experience is very specific and also a way of working very cumulatively. It really has to do with the time and space that I have here, so I think in New York it would be a very different thing.

ELM: Do you notice different reactions to your work in different parts of the world?

LL: Well I had a big exhibition of my films in my hometown of Bilbao, and there I definitely felt understood. And I guess it also perhaps seemed more exciting to them—the landscape—whereas if you show it in Los Angeles or the United States it’s more recognizable. [Reactions] are just different. Sometimes when I show in the UK I end up talking to people about music a lot, about a song I’ve used. There are different aspects of the work that are picked up more than others in different places.

ELM: You’ve spoken at length about your use of sound, and sound as kind of its own material in your work. Can you describe the process of choosing music, to a certain extent? I can imagine it falls into a similar description you’ve given in regard to other components of your work, but I’m curious how much it is a prompt to a given project versus something that is decided upon throughout its making.

LL: Because I work with diegetic sound, most of the time that means it needs to be planned ahead. It comes down to small things. Like someone walking over a piece of paper in a scene; it’s small but they still have to be orchestrated in an exacting way. They all have to be somewhat preplanned, and so the songs

Still from Footnotes to a House of Love, Laida Lertxundi, 2007, 13 min, 16mm (top); A Lax Riddle Unit, Laida Lertxundi, 2011, 6min, 16mm (bottom).

that I use are always already chosen.

There’s a French writer Michel Chion who talks about diegetic music in film, and about a cosmic indifference when you use non-diegetic music: let’s say you and I are having a conversation, and all of a sudden there is this music that comes out of nowhere and is supposed to inform the viewer’s feelings. It’s this invisible thing that affects our reading of the scene.

Whereas with music in the place we are having that conversation, its visible to us; it’s not trying to manipulate the emotion of the scene but rather is something material that person in the cafe decided to play at that moment in time. There’s something much more... I’m much more interested in that more complicated relationship. Non-diegetic music is so manipulative!

I’ve been advised by sound designers that my way of doing sound live is the worst: preparing with a song, ambient sound, traffic, and all these other things. But I’m interested in that, in all these micro events in sound and that feeling of everyday life. Superimposing sound afterward adds a lot of commentary on the images, and I’m just more interested in evoking a feeling of now-ness and interaction between components. Even within a fiction.

ELM: Do you play music at all?

LL: Not really. I grew up playing piano and I play drums a little bit. But I’m definitely music-obsessed.

ELM: What are your thoughts on methods of exhibiting film right now, and how that is approached by different institutions? Your work has been shown in more traditional film festivals as well as in art biennials and museum or gallery settings, and I know you have done some curatorial work yourself.

LL: I’ve really enjoyed doing all the installations I’ve had the chance to do up until now. And I’m very—what do you call it—I’m demanding about creating a space where someone can see the work from start to finish in a comfortable way.

I think there are a lot of things that for whatever reason a lot of museums still don’t do, and it ends up that film work is just kind of set up on these screens and maybe it’s 20 minutes long so you are just walking by it.

People don’t necessarily get to see the piece, you know? When something is time-based, it requires that full attention.

ELM: Right, if it’s part of the experience of the work. Comfort is so overlooked in exhibition settings, too.

LL: Exactly, and I think there are ways you can create places that are dedicated to viewing the work. Not necessarily a movie theatre, but somewhere that’s dark, and where you can sit or stand comfortably.

Recently at a show at fluent, Santander I had a projection on loop of one of my films in 16mm, and there were these benches to the side painted in response to the colors in the film. You would just walk in and press a button on the wall to start the film, and then it would stop when it finished. I liked that because I think there is something about the button that gives people some agency to be like, okay I’m going to watch this thing for 11 minutes.

ELM: Some agency—and maybe some focus too. I was listening to an interview recently with [Performa founder] RoseLee Goldberg, and she spoke about founding Performa in part because of the desire to create settings for viewing artwork that “hold you close”: that allow you to experience something from its beginning to end without interruption.

LL: Right, instead of walking into something and not knowing when the beginning was. There are different ways to work with spaces though, it depends. I also had some work in the Hamburg Museum recently that was installed throughout a show, three different films.

That context is different every time, and is still pretty new to me. To be honest I also love the equipment becoming part of the installation, too. It’s part of the material, right? The projector can have a sculptural quality, or the light throw from the projector. In a movie theatre those just become kind of assumptions that you don’t really think about.

So in my case I like them to become part of the experience as well.

ELM: Maybe that’s landscape plus, too.

PANDORA’S BOX

Tim Lyons

History never changes in a moment. It is always the result of small, seemingly disconnected events, accumulating like dry kindling waiting for the appropriate spark. In the case of our current digital revolution, the spark that lit the flame arrived just after lunch one day in December, 1947.

Before this moment, it would have been difficult to see what potential computers held. Early computers were large, expensive, and slow, leaving limited access for the general public.

The inability to scale down in size and price depended on the reliance of early designs on an array of vacuum tubes (pictured previous). Each tube acted like an on-off switch in an electrical circuit, that when linked together could complete basic logical functions.

The problem was, they required a great deal of power and would often break, costing time and money in repairs. The vacuum tube would find a replacement in early December 1947 when a small team would successfully use a piece of semiconducting material to amplify an electric current and switch it on and off. At the time, only a handful of people understood the significance of the discovery or understood the invention to come. The transistor (pictured left) and its subsequent iterations would become the foundation of all digital products and, by extension, contemporary life as we know it. The three researchers credited with the invention of the device (John Bardeen, William Shockley, and Walter Britain) were subsequently awarded a Nobel Prize for their discovery. A fourth character has also been described in this story, more important than any one individual: the research laboratory where they worked, Bell Labs.

`Bell Labs began with the consolidation of several engineering departments within the American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) Company and the Western Electric Company. Initially tasked with improving the telephone system of the 1920s, from the start the researchers at Bell faced the problems of collapsing distance with the communication technologies at hand. Over time as the Lab grew in scope and scale, it would become better known as a factory of innovation.

From its inception, what set Bell apart was an emphasis on the freedom its researchers had to conduct experiments. The distinction between scientist and engineer was fluid, and small teams were expected to reach across what would be distinct disciplines in an academic setting. Metallurgists were expected to work with theoretical physicists, chemists with applied mathematicians. This interdisciplinarity went further: in the 1960s, Bell Labs became known for what would be termed E.A.T., or Experiments in Art and Technology, which resulted in projects that brought engineers and artists (including John Cage, Yvonne Rainer, and Robert Rauschenberg) together in unprecedented ways.

This approach would allow the Lab to become something of an intellectual utopia, which housed scores of brilliant men and women who set out to create the future. And time and time again, they did.

This process continues today as Bell’s researchers reach into the unknown to service a giant network of satellites, copper wires, and fiber optic cables. From the phone in your pocket to the digital infrastructure that ensures food arrives on grocery store shelves, there is almost no aspect of modern life that remains untouched by the work to come out of this space. Bell stands as the Pandora’s Box that gave birth to our current age of information. And as is told in the myth, now that the box is open, there is no going back.

Tim Lyons is an artist and independent researcher interested in the deep past, the distant future, and the large questions that connect the two. The body of work featured in this issue is taken from a larger series on the broad subject of the history of technology, which will result in a book of collected images and writings.

The Transistor. The oft-cited metaphor to describe how the transistor worked is a faucet. A faucet because the force required to turn the knob could be much less than the force of the water coming out: with a small amount of power, a tremendous result could be produced. All photography by Tim Lyons.

SLIM Line (The Silicon & Lightwave Integration Models Line). Appropriately housed in the same Lab where the transistor was invented, SLIM Line works on the components that receive information through optical lines.

The Lab is connected by a system of long corridors bridging different zones, the intention being to incentivize chance encounters and create an academic campus, without the siloed effects of specific disciplines being regulated into designated buildings (a design move that Steve Jobs would take inspiration from many years later at Apple).

Helium Recycling Lab. Within Quantum research, Helium is like the rocket fuel that helps propel the researcher’s reach into the subatomic realm. Due to a worldwide Helium shortage, Bell recycles all Helium in-house to be used in repeated experiments. 101

Radio Frequency Chamber. Similar to the acoustic anechoic chamber in the first image; however, the interior surface of the Radio Frequency Chamber is lined with radiation absorbent material.

Holmdale Horn Antenna. The large horn antenna was initially built for the Echo Satellite Experiment, but became a more significant landmark in the history of science when it helped collect data that proved the existence of the Big Bang.

Designers today are the makers of the future. In every maker’s project exists a cycle of resource use, beginning with the extraction of materials, followed by the production of objects or landscapes, to finally end with an installation an object, a place, a work of art and the residue of the work itself as it produces its own waste through the process of making and aging.

The following conversation with members of Other Fields and Thing Thing explores the subject of waste in a multi-faceted way, related to each collective’s work and principles. In this 2017 interview, the space is given entirely to the participants, with almost no moderation as the invitees investigate topics such as the value of garbage, the inherent qualities of plastics, and the processes of recycling, reusing, and making new materials out of those discarded.

I first encountered Other Fields a New York-based collaborative project between landscape architects Ian Quate and Colleen Tuite, known at the time of interview as GRNASFCK at an exhibition opening in a space called 1.5 Rooms. This cross-disciplinary think tank and exhibition space in Brooklyn was started by Ian, Colleen, and a few more of their friends: Chelsea Culprit, Ben Foch, and Jaffer Kolb. [Editor’s note: In 2019, the building where 1.5 Rooms was housed was put on the market, leading the collective to conclude the project]. On the occasion of this opening, I also met one of the collectives exhibiting in the space at the time: a Detroit-based manufacturing studio called Thing Thing. The studio is made up of Simon Anton, Eiji Jimbo, Rachel Mulder, and Thom Moran, and together they have developed new methods for recycling plastic waste into lumber, out of which they produce playful, whimsical objects.

The subsequent exchange between designers goes far beyond the work each studio has produced, but rather explores the values and opinions that motivate the practices of Thing Thing and Other Fields: from object and landscape design to the future of ecological and economical sustenance.

Chloé Vadot: Let’s begin by talking about what you all do what your current projects are, how you became involved with those and what inspired you to get into your latest research.

Colleen Tuite: Ian and I went to grad school together [for landscape architecture], and both ended up in New York. We had a very small class, so throughout our time in grad school, we were always in conversation. Once we got here, we started working together in more of a research capacity, through camping trips and writing, studying the ecology and culture of different places

through field work. A very subjective process.

Ian Quate: Living here, we continued that dialogue and started thinking about more physical things, still in parallel with the research. We wanted to make things, and one of those things in dialogue with our friends, Ben and Chelsea, who are curators was a space for happenings, gatherings, conversation. We first did a show in San Francisco, where we had curated a talk, like a collective symposium

CT: Called The Summit on Invisible Urbanism, kind of a poetic prompt—

IT: And extending that concept to something a little bit more in our backyard and practicable is where 1.5 Rooms came from.

CT: In our own practice over the past years, we’ve been wanting to grow from a research capacity we did a couple of pieces for Manifest Journal on West Texas, Florida, and North Dakota to more design. We accomplished a number of things last year speculative proposals but there is definitely a push towards making and finding spaces to make things with other people. As people who are in the field but also around it, that’s interesting to us. I feel like there are a lot of overlaps [with Thing Thing’s work] in terms of using the detritus of modernity, so maybe you want to jump in.

Simon Anton: Rachel, myself, and one other person, [Eiji] Jimbo we were all students at the architecture school of the University of Michigan. We started working with Thom, who’s a faculty assistant professor there. Thom was invited to be a part of the Venice Architecture Biennale, with a group of fellows from UofM and he hired us to work with him on this project, so we had this very intensive summer working together. That’s when we really, for the first time, got into a lot of the recyclable plastic processes on this project. We were discovering a lot of new ways of working with the material and we also had a really good working dynamic with each other.

At that point we decided to make this practice together, and we’ve been doing it for 5 years. A lot of our work is really experiment-driven; material and processdriven, and a lot of it revolves around working with either plastics or other industrial or manufacturing waste materials. From a formal angle, it has to do a lot with making things that are really playful light-hearted, whimsical things.

Thom Moran: When we started working with plastic, a lot of it was an expedient way of getting colored, gooey material. Now, we’re making our own. Along the way we went back to our original references: Enzo Mari and the Autoprogettazione project from the ‘70s, where he was basically designing furniture to be made in one’s apartment, with simple tools and off-the-shelf lumber. For him, being an Italian Marxist designer, it wasn’t just about making cheap furniture, it was about empowering people to make things for themselves, which is a big part of our practice: empowering ourselves to work with this material that is usually reserved for industrial production. The pieces we made were based on the formal language and set of techniques that you would use for cheap lumber, but there were these subtle things that came out of working with plastic lumber. These seem small but A. you can bend it, and B. you can drill into its end grain, which again doesn’t seem like a big deal but it just leads to other formal possibilities that you couldn’t really have in the Enzo Mari project. We’re really excited to continue that project in some way and I think it especially has the potential for a workshop because it’s the most accessible and repeatable of the techniques that we’ve developed so far. It doesn’t involve burning yourself or having to use a lot of idiosyncratic machinery—once we make the lumber, students or participants can really work with it like they would with wood.

SA: This makes me think of your symposium work, which seems awesome. I feel like that’s been harder for us. There are communities of designers in Detroit that we’re friends with and that we work with at times, but I think we’re mostly making objects and doing less reaching out and social or cultural things. With workshops, the idea of connecting with other people seems great. A lot of how we approach our own work is through the performance of making, and we would love to have more back and forth with a design audience.

CT: We’re in New York and have our office jobs, among other things, and part of developing our practice is culled from that experience. One is the project team, and the idea of the consultant: you’re not just speaking to yourself, but rather having a conversation between different people. Through the Summit and more, we’ve tried to talk to biologists, geneticists, and people with different skills that can kind of be linked together in the broader field and landscape.

CV: Can you talk a little more about the Symposium

work Simon is mentioning the topic, the participants?

IQ: It started when we were in San Francisco and had a show about microorganisms, specifically microorganisms that like extreme conditions uncharacteristically high temperature or high acidity, for example. Extremophiles. You find these in contaminated properties, contaminated areas and the supposition is that by living there, they’re actually metabolizing these same things that would be targeted in a cleanup. So there is something to be learned from studying them, instead of just trying to remove that waste, that contaminant. Inadvertently you are also removing that ecology and removing all that information before you actually take a look at it.

CT: It was a few years ago now, but the Summit on Invisible Urbanism was aimed at putting people in the role of consultants to have a broader technical but also poetic conversation about toxic landscapes and the ecologies that develop in them without our consent. In the past decade, there has been sort of a base movement in landscape architecture which uses ecology as a tool to scrub the environment, but as such produces this fetishization of environmental scrubbing that I think we’re skeptical of. We are interested in investigating what those things are—the bad, dirty stuff—and how they are creating and developing new systems. To me, that’s honestly where the big parallel is with your work: investigating garbage.

SA: I see a kind of exciting parallel when you think about plastic on an international waste perspective. When you think of the Pacific Gyre, for instance, where plastic as a material reaches the level of a geological mass. In his research, Thom looks at plastic as a building material with different aggregates and imagines futuristic scenarios where waste plastic is made into large structures combined with elements of the environment. Last December, Rachel and I went to a conference on upcycling in Seoul and the ideas that were talked about really revolved around plastic plastic at such a monumental scale that you could potentially make gigantic plastic monuments out of it, or it could form intentional masses.

Rachel Mulder: And to me, what came out of this conference was a question on the value of plastic. Perceived from our Korean audience, the conversation was “your product is very expensive, other upcycled products are very expensive: how do you market these

and keep them afloat within the market?” I think that made us question the cost of plastic, whether it is the cost now or the cost later and of course, the cost of our products. We sort everything by hand and recycle the plastic by hand and it’s very expensive, and maybe other products are too cheap. But eventually we’ll run out of oil and everything will become very valuable. Once you’re out of oil, you can collect all the plastic and create monuments of your once wealth.

CT: It’s interesting how our art is starting to see waste having embodied value. Starting with e-waste, which is actually a big business. In 2015, Manifest commissioned us to give tours: both in Chicago on the occasion of the opening of the Chicago Biennial, where we toured the Chicago Board of Trade, and in New York, where we went to the New York Mercantile Exchange. The Chicago Board of Trade is where agricultural futures are bought and sold corn, soybeans and the New York Mercantile Exchange is mostly minerals oil, gas, copper and they’re sold in futures. At the time of the tour, the institutions were switching from the open pit system, which you recognize from the classic Wall Street movies where everyone is shouting, to an electronic process. That prompted us to think about what the next source of value will be: what corn and crops are now, and what mode of exchange will come next. Will it be people selling futures on e-waste and plastics, the things we now find repugnant in the way people at some point thought modern agriculture was undesirable? What is really a raw material?

TM: Where plastic fascinates me is that it is so ubiquitous people see it as valueless, and yet its inherent qualities are just remarkable which is exactly why it’s everywhere. It has all these amazing qualities on its own, but it’s also embodied energy: it’s a petroleum product. I think people have this idea that you put something in the recycling bin and it gets recycled. But actually, it’s a way for it to initially get sorted, and then the market takes over. When oil prices are low, plastic gets shipped to China and incinerated in power plants. It has nothing to do with the physical trajectory that you put it in. It’s the market that dictates: we have all these pallets of bailed up plastic in Detroit, and whoever is going to pay the most for it determines where it’s going. When I found that out, it really did shake me up a bit, because I had this idea that if I put something in the garbage can, it goes to a landfill, and if I put something in the recycling bin, it gets recycled, but that’s really not true. The market has more to do with what happens to

that plastic, because some weeks it’s worth more as embodied energy that’s going to run a power plant than it is as a material with inherent structural durability and qualities. I find that fascinating.

CV: Rachel and Simon, at the conference that you attended in Seoul, did you meet other designers working with plastic, or interested in it the way that you are?

SA: Not so much with plastic. A lot of what we saw and maybe it is disheartening in a way was creative designers trying to make upcycled products and trying to find new ways to use waste materials. But one of the common techniques of working with waste materials is procuring the material and casting it or coating it in resin, so you can use it as a building material or as a product for an aesthetic effect. You embed pieces of recycled, reused materials into sheets of cast resin, which brings up a kind of hypocritical point, because you’re taking this material and then adding fresh

CT: Petroleum.

SA: So there is this question of using a material and looking at the lifecycle of your recycled material. What is its end of life and can that be reused?

RM: Is that resin method worse? Is is better to just throw away what you had?

SA: We get a lot of the plastics that we work with from a recycling center. Actually, your descriptions of these kinds of accidental ecosystems made me think of it: I’m sure that in those piles of plastic trash at the recycling center there is a rich invisible ecology! Old dairy containers, bacteria growing there… The question is, you have this material, then is the cost of cleaning it too high? And once you clean it, are all the surfactants all the chemicals on those materials going to go in the water stream? At a certain scale, is it actually worse for the environment to try to recycle those things? Not to say that recycling is bad

SA: It’s a much more nuanced evaluation of product and process. It counts to look at these big environmental, ecological questions.

CV: You all talk about ecosystems places where you work, places where you study and I’m wondering how the cities that you’ve lived in and worked in have inspired your work? How do you find your spaces of work, study,

Pan-fried stools, Thing Thing. Various dimensions, plastic and hardwood.

and resourcing? For instance, Thing Thing, is there one landfill where you go to find your plastic?

SA: When we were in Ann Arbor, there was a really nice recycling center and they gave us as much plastic as we wanted for free.

TM: But it has since shut down.

SA: Yeah we had a great plastic hookup there. We processed a lot of it, so we still have a lot of material from our original trips. When we moved our studio to Detroit, there were a lot of different opportunities to get plastic. A lot of people give us plastic things—I think we’re known as, “the ones who make things out of plastic.” We have a friend who bought a warehouse where she found a bunch of plastic objects: old dish racks, drop ceiling, plastic screens. The lamp that we made for the 1.5 Rooms show used some of those screens, so we get things from people, and then Thom has also done a lot of research on post-commercial plastics.

TM: Anything that’s used in shipping. Plastic bottles of Coke, they come in these ubiquitous plastic racks that get thrown away. Some things are such predictable polymers, they get recycled easily, whereas what we end up with are generally the mix-matched, orphaned polymers that are typically more expensive to recycle than they are to just throw away. There’s a lot of junk that businesses create we don’t think about: post-consumer waste is often what people think of when they think of recycling, but of course that’s just a fraction of the waste that gets produced.

At the beginning of our practice, we were training on all the stuff that people already know as things that get bought, thrown away, and recycled, but there’s another whole hidden economy of materials. We all kind of know about them, we’re all informed, environmentally conscious, educated designers, but I think a lot of people have no idea that there are mountains of garbage being produced truly every step of the way. The postcommercial stuff is something that’s really fascinating. It’s the stuff that you’ve never really seen before, just objects and packaging that are totally beguiling compared to the familiarity of a Tide bottle.

CT: I think you’re hitting on something that’s been kind of inspiring to us. You think of landscape architecture as parks in a city or something, but then there’s also mountaintop removal, for example: a scale of

landscape architecture that is so beyond how we think about design. They are designed landscapes, but more like an industrial solution rather than one that is about inhabitation.

TM: Ian and Colleen, can I ask you a question? I’m really curious: you said you were suspicious of remediative projects “this is toxic, so let’s fix it” and it seems like you have very consciously taken that on. So how do you characterize your practice? Is it critique? Is it another form of cultural production? Is it an aesthetic project? I’m just curious how you think about it, because clearly you’re not falling into any pious category of environmentalist soldier.

CT: It certainly started as critique, even down to our initial name for the practice [GRNASFCK]. It was kind of a joke that stuck around, but I think the practice is evolving as we also grow into what we’re doing. Moving from research to writing and responding to proposals, to starting to think about building. We did an installation last summer that started to engage some of the things that we think about. The installation consisted of creating a tube within a space, that would bring in mosquitoes from the outside and create this vector pathway for a sort of unwanted nature that you can at once exist alongside of, while also being aware that the plastic tube is a petrochemical extrusion.

IQ: As Colleen said, [GRNASFCK] started as a response to the greenwashing that’s so prevalent in design, particularly in architecture and landscape architecture. I’m thinking of Gas Works Park and Duisburg in Germany, where you take these former industrial sites and make them into parks. I think that was important culturally for our society to do, so we can enjoy these wild industrial spaces that were formed for some blast furnace. Now we can walk our dogs there. But then what? We still use steel, we still need these industrial processes and can’t make them all into parks.

As designers, how can we engage with the operational spaces, and engage more meaningfully with these perhaps more damaged, more harmful spaces for humans. It’s not black and white. From the outside, it seems like you either clean something up or you don’t, you’re an environmentalist or you’re industrial, you’re pro-industry or pro-environment, but that’s bullshit. The more you look, the more you dig, the more you see that there’s a lot of complexity there and it’s fun to start making provocations.

The Summit on Invisible Urbanism, Other Fields. 2014.

Installation view, Nuclear Family. Chanel von Habsburg-Lothringen and Thing Thing, on view at 1.5 Rooms, 2016. Part of the series Cross-Sections: Four Views of Emerging Artists and Architects.

CT: One really inspirational thing for me that put us on this path was a studio we did through the Architectural Association right after we finished grad school. We went to Chernobyl and tried understanding what that landscape has become. It was depopulated and restored into a wetland to keep the forest from burning down it’s in the forest where all the radiation is stored. It has now become this huge biodiverse sphere. It’s a huge migratory birds sanctuary, and you know, it’s a little bit TBD about what will happen there, how much the animals are affected and whether they will carry the radiation with them. It’s an uncomfortable circumstance, but it’s also in some ways a test case for how we can look at reusing a landscape that’s been altered through human impact. We went to North Dakota last year and that was a big thing on our minds, looking at oil and gas extraction there. It’s something that I have a critique of, but regardless of that it’s happening. It’s happening and this is what’s going to be left behind, so how do we think about these places?

TM: I don’t know if you have ever read [Slavoj] Zizek’s writing on environment. I’ve been really mulling over it recently as he kind of challenges us to not aestheticize waste or environmental disaster. And I really don’t know what he means by it, but I think it’s a sort of generational or sensibility shift that maybe our practices share. Greenwashing is really just one way to aestheticize away environmental problems, whereas [Zizek] is challenging us to engage or confront them. Again, we’re all designers so I don’t know what he means by “not aestheticize something” I feel like it’s kind of an impossibility—but it’s something that I’ve been really thinking about lately. How do you engage with these problems without simply making them more palatable?

CT: It’s funny because they also already have their own aesthetic. I’m thinking of an orange hazmat suit, or things that are particular to a toxicity. There’s already a kind of industrial aesthetic that is deployed around it, even piles of plastic… It’s interesting. I understand what Zizek is getting at, and in a way it is already there. I’m inspired by that, but I also want to think about it beyond just an aesthetic experience. When you were asking about how cities and the landscape influence us, Chloé, one thing that came to mind is that I went to college in Chicago, and the first year I lived in the dormitory, which is downtown. It came to my attention that there were all these hawks that lived in downtown Chicago because it’s structurally like a canyon. The buildings are really close together, especially in some areas. They’re not

stepped back like in New York, where once it reaches a height it steps back. In Chicago, it’s much more cavernous and so there are all these hawks that live on skyscrapers because the buildings essentially replicate their environment. And I come back to that a lot. They don’t actually need a beautiful canyon to live in. Just as geology has provided that canyon, we’re providing something else that they can adapt to.

IQ: The urban cliff hypothesis that the conditions of a city, mostly mineral, really steep, favor the ecology that you see in cliff habitats. Raptors, mice and rats, and that’s really it.

CV: Do you feel that both in New York and Detroit; Chicago; San Francisco, wherever you’ve worked, there are communities of designers looking for alternative products to work with and organizing events that get people to talk more about the topic?

TM: When Rachel and Simon came back from Seoul, there was a question about institutional support for this kind of work.

RM: The purpose of the conference was a roundtable discussion about how an institution can support working with waste materials, especially for independent designers. They went around and asked everyone at the table what help they had received in their experiences, specifically from institutions. Everybody from all over agreed that there is really no group of upcyclers nor an upcycling institution that helps designers. That having been said, Detroit is very supportive.

SA: The Detroit urban design community is small, and many-faceted, and super supportive of each other, which is excellent. I can’t really see us doing what we’ve done in any other city as well as be able to survive and support ourselves; rent a studio space with a solid community of our friends Another thing that’s cool about Detroit for us is that the Midwest in general is kind of the heart of plastic manufacturing for the United States, and manufacturing in general. In maybe a 60mile radius around us, we’ve come into contact with all these different plastic facilities, and they’ve really been instrumental in teaching us. And this is something that we’ve been much more interested in recently: the kind of relationship that we as independent designers can have with big manufacturing companies.

In 2017 we had a piece at the St. Etienne International

Design Biennale in France, made in collaboration with the automotive supplier Lear. They’re a Detroit-based company that make mostly car seats, and work with a lot of foam. We did this collaborative project where we visited their facilities in Michigan; recuperated their foam manufacturing waste; and tried to make it into objects. We made a kind of experimental bench for them, and some more furniture pieces. I think Detroit has provided the scaffolding for that kind of collaboration because there are a limited number of designers and people are looking for innovative new ways of working together.

RM: One of the most exciting discoveries has been how open corporations and large industrial manufacturers can be about working with independent designers and artists, especially if you’re taking their waste. From the people on the line to the environmental supervisors; to the marketing and PR people; all the way to the top. In our experience everyone is excited to work with you and they’ll give you their materials for free, they’ll give you tours, they’ll teach you how to work with the material.

SA: People in advanced plastic manufacturing don’t have a lot of people to talk about it with, so if you show an ounce of interest, they’ll want to show you everything!

CT: The landscape is different in New York, but we work in a different way than you do: it’s a little less hands-on. New York is great because there are so many inputs in terms of people and ideas, though it definitely means something that we’ve had to look outside of the city for landscapes that we’re interested in actually dissecting. Ian did a project about the Gowanus Canal here, but other than that, we’ve been a little removed.

CV: Where do you go to find places to dissect?

IQ: We’ve been sticking to the continental U.S. just because there is a lot to see, and something has seemed right about looking to other American landscapes.

CT: We’re interested in how those connect in terms of industrial infrastructure: pipelines and the kinds of new landscapes that are created by those as well. The city kind of keeps us here and I’m certainly inspired by the arts and culture, but [our work] has definitely been looking outside.

IQ: I think Colleen and I are both interested in the sort of landscapes that aren’t made by design.

In general, when we go about our research, we’re interested in landscapes that evolve over time, or that are driven by different ends. Normally, more commercial or industrial processes shape these landscapes, generating unusual spaces that are not generally intended for human experience. That’s what we respond to because they’re unusual. The materials are unusual; the spaces.

CV: And it’s interesting to think about these spaces being reused.

IQ: Reused, or retrofitted or changed. How can you also do that with designers, engineers? I think that’s what “sustainability” might look like, something industrial that’s also not a place where it’s terrible to be a person.

CT: We did a project in 2016 that thought a lot about making a landscape around the XL Pipeline. It’s this kind of groomed, one hundred-foot wide, grassy landscape. They have to maintain it, so what could that become as a habitat? A city is great, but people are already looking there.

CV: And by creating a space through 1.5 Rooms, are there conversations you hope to have?

CT: 1.5 Rooms is a space that can exist as it is in New York. Ian, Jaffer, and I are all in New York, Chelsea is in Mexico City, and Ben is in Chicago. In a way, New York can act as a nexus for us to collaborate in a way that would be more difficult anywhere else. There are actually not that many spaces in New York that are geared toward young designers, surprisingly, and I think we want to insert ourselves in there. Among our peers, there’s a new generation that wants to work and structure [their own] design practice. I definitely see it as a post-Recession response: the previous idea would have been building toward a notion of the office, but I’ve seen an interest in more diverse practice.

SA: Detroit has its own design community, and we really have a wealth of industrial landscapes. We can host you anytime.

CT: Ok, we’re coming.

ANTI-RACIST A-CHOY

Clarence

Kwan

Everyone knows by now that it’s not enough to simply be “not racist,” we have to be anti-racist. And learning about and engaging more deeply with how other cultures live and eat is an important part of that work. The more we explore and shine a light on BIPOC food, the closer we get to a deeper understanding of one another.

I grew up, like most POC kids, eating my culture’s food under the white gaze. Meaning our food was (and is) considered “weird, stinky, and gross.” This recipe attempts to challenge this othering of BIPOC food.

This is a vegan recipe using A-Choy, a vegetable unfamiliar to most people. It is a leafy lettuce, very popular in Hong Kong and Taiwan but hard to find in North America. So hard to find, in fact, that I couldn’t source any myself. I’m using Romaine as a substitute.

Here, the lettuce is braised, which a lot of white folx might find odd. Yes, you can cook lettuce! It brings out a buttery, rich flavor. The sauce is made from fermented bean curd, which to many will be an acquired taste. It’s very pungent, but balanced with sugar it’s incredibly delicious. It tastes like a savory, Asian blue cheese dressing, which pairs perfectly with Romaine. I hope this recipe challenges everyone’s notions of what is considered normal food vs. food that is “exotic” or “weird.”

Ingredients:

A-choy or Romaine lettuce

Fermented bean curd, a few cubes

Garlic, minced

Shallot, sliced

Chilli oil

Fried garlic, store-bought

Fry garlic, shallot, and bean curd in oil for a minute, then balance with salt, sugar, and white pepper to taste. In a clean pan, fry lettuce in a splash of vegetable oil quickly until wilted. Remove from heat.

Place lettuce on a plate, drizzle with fermented bean curd sauce and chilli oil. Sprinkle fried garlic over top.

Excerpted from Chinese Protest Recipes, 2020. To learn more about how to resist through Chinese food, visit @thegodofcookery on Instagram, and support BLM.

www.depanneurmagazine.com @depanneurmagazine depanneurmagazine@gmail.com

and interior covers,

Edited by Emma Leigh Macdonald

Produced by BookArt

Design by Emma Leigh Macdonald, Rowan Spencer, and Paula Vilaplana de Miguel

Cover

Bode photographed by Emma Leigh Macdonald