Port Issue 28 - Matt Smith

Matt Smith

£8

dior.com

design design Mario Mario Bellini Bellini - www.bebitalia.com - www.bebitalia.com

C O N T ENTS

82 The Porter Words Tom Bolger, Max Vadukul, Billie Muraben, Felix Bischof, Merlin Labron-Johnson, Kuchar Swara, Dylan Holden, Sarah Trounce, Alex Vadukul, Jeremy Leslie, Jeremy Atherton Lin

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Anthea Hamilton Words Linsey Young Photography Adama Jalloh

A Theology of Matter Considering the Anthropocene age Katherine Waterston The actor reflects on climate change and the limits of language

Words Emanuele Coccia Artworks Cecilia Bonilla Words Michael Shannon Photography Guen Fiore

Design Profile: Sou Fujimoto Words George Kafka Photography Kyohei Hattori

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202 Malachi Kirby Words Jason Okundaye Photography Marlen Keller 226 Halcyon Days

254 Making Good Time

Photography James Giles Styling Caterina Scardino Words Alex Doak Photography Flora Maclean

I Prefer Living in Colour Photography James Robjant Styling Warren Leech

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264 I Come Into the Presence of Still Water Photography Norman Wilcox-Geissen Styling Lune Kuipers

Matt Smith Words Anna Smith Photography Luke Paige

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CONTRIBUTORS

DAVID KEENAN David Keenan is the author of four critically acclaimed novels; the cult classic This Is Memorial Device, which won the London Magazine Prize; For the Good Times, which won the Gordon Burn Prize; The Towers The Fields The Transmitters and Xstabeth. His latest novel, Monument Maker, is published by White Rabbit Books in June 2021. He lives in Glasgow, Scotland.

ANDREA TRIMARCHI AND SIMONE FARRESIN Since founding Studio Formafantasma in 2009, Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin have championed the need for value-laden advocacy merged with holistic design thinking. Their aim is to facilitate a deeper understanding of both our natural and built environments and to propose transformative interventions through design and its material, technical, social, and discursive possibilities.

Alongside works for clients including Flos, Fendi and Hermès, their projects have been presented at and acquired by MoMA, the V&A, Serpentine Galleries and the Centre Pompidou.

MICHAEL SHANNON Academy Award-, Golden Globe-, and Tony Award-nominated actor Michael Shannon’s notable performances include Revolutionary Road, Nocturnal Animals, The Shape of Water and Knives Out. He continues to make his mark in entertainment, working with the industry’s most respected talent, and outside of his roles on screen, Shannon also maintains a strong connection to theatre, beginning his professional stage career in Chicago, Illinois. Upcoming projects include Hulu series Nine Perfect Strangers, Michael Maren’s Shriver, David Leitch’s Bullet Train, and an as-yet-untitled David O Russell project.

JEREMY ATHERTON LIN Jeremy Atherton Lin is an American-born essayist based in London. He is the author of Gay Bar (Granta, 2021). His work has appeared in The White Review, Noon, Tinted Window, The Yale Review, ArtReview, The Face, W and the TLS. He is an editor at Failed States, the journal of art and writing on place.

AKALA Akala is a BAFTA and MOBO award-winning hip-hop artist, writer and social entrepreneur, as well as the co-founder of The Hip-hop Shakespeare Company.

With an extensive global touring history, he has led projects in the arts, education and music the world over, and regularly lectures on subjects ranging from youth engagement to British/African-Caribbean culture. His 2018 partmemoir, part-historical analysis, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire, is a Sunday Times bestseller.

LINSEY YOUNG Linsey Young is curator of contemporary British art at Tate Britain, and in 2019 was the curator of Scotland + Venice, presenting Charlotte Prodger at the 58th Biennale di Venezia. She is currently working on a major research project exploring art and the women’s movement in the UK in the 1970s and ’80s.

BHANU KAPIL A recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry, 2020, Bhanu Kapil is the author of The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: A Space for Monsters (Leon Works, 2006), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), Schizophrene (Nightboat, 2011), and Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat, 2015). Kapil’s first full-length collection published in the UK, How to Wash a Heart (Pavilion Poetry, LUP, 2020), won the TS Eliot Prize in 2021.

JACK UNDERWOOD Jack Underwood is a poet, writer and critic. His poetry collection, Happiness, was published by Faber in 2015 and won the Somerset Maugham Award. He is a recipient of the Eric Gregory Award, and a draft of his upcoming publication Not Even This was shortlisted for the Arts Foundation’s prize for creative non-fiction in 2017. His work has appeared in the Poetry Review, Poetry London, Five Dials, the New Statesman, the Observer, the TLS, Poetry, The White Review and Tate Etc., as well as internationally and in translation. He is a senior lecturer in English and creative writing at Goldsmiths College.

10 YEARS, 10 COVERS

In 2021, Port turns 10 years old.

Over the past decade, we have had Daniel Day-Lewis reporting from the Gaza Strip, taken a long lunch with the likes of Ray Winstone and Fergus Henderson, published new writing from Noam Chomsky, Joyce Carol Oates, Will Self, and Naoise Dolan, all while running cover stories with Samuel L Jackson, Steve Buscemi, Chimamanda

Ngozi Adichie, Maya Hawke, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Thomas Anderson, and David Remnick.

Our raison d’être has always been to beautifully document creativity, be it science, design, fashion, architecture, or art; and to celebrate our anniversary we’re publishing 10 special-edition covers over the course of the year, split across our biannual issues. Spring/summer has five

formidable talents gracing its front cover, masters of their arts: Akala, Matt Smith, Katherine Waterston, Malachi Kirby and Caleb Landry Jones.

It’s been a hell of a journey, and the magazine has grown as we have; whether you’ve followed us from the beginning or have only just started, thank you for being part of it. And here’s to another 10.

EDITOR'S LETTER

Port is one decade old!

For our 10th-anniversary issue – no small feat considering we launched during the hysteria of the iPad-induced “Print is dead!” media era – we recruited some friends, old and new, to help guest curate a special issue. Produced at what we hope is the tail end of a devastating global pandemic, it’s nevertheless our biggest release to date, at over 300 pages. Our guest editors come from the worlds of film, design and art: the actor Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road, The Shape of Water); award-winning design studio Formafantasma; and Linsey Young, Tate Britain’s curator of contemporary British art. In each of their special sections, the editors have introduced people and ideas which they feel are culturally important, in many instances with an environmental focus.

These visionaries have brought to the issue a celebration of art, mentoring, creative and intellectual freedom, and, ultimately, empathy – which is crucial, not just to well-informed judgements, but to making art and effecting change. As Shannon comments in the issue: “These are people I genuinely respect. People who share a healthy degree of concern for the future of the world and humanity; who never forget that ideally the work we make reverberates beyond pure sensory satisfaction to a place of questioning, of extraction and exactitude.” We also celebrate, with multiple special cover shoots, five masters of their craft: author and musician Akala (who writes for us a thoughtful and timely consideration of art and politics); actors Matt Smith, Malachi Kirby, and Katherine Waterston (interviewed by her pal, the aforementioned Mike Shannon), and the musician and actor Caleb Landry Jones (“Sometimes you can hear things in music and see things in art, and it’s kind of naked – you can see struggle there, and I love that.”)

There is suitably extraordinary writing in the issue, including an extract from one of the most mesmerising authors working today, David Keenan; a lyrical meditation on the relationship between language and fatherhood by poet Jack Underwood; and a poem from the recent TS Eliot-Prize winner Bhanu Kapil.

We also hear from visionary Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike; Michelin-starred chef Merlin Labron-Johnson; Young Vic artistic director Kwame Kwei-Armah OBE; and legendary photographer Max Vadukul, who discusses his hitherto unseen photograph of Iggy Pop and the (late, great) Anthony Bourdain. There is fashion editorial shot all over the world – I think some of the most beautiful we have ever published. It’s an issue of reflection, of course, but also one looking to the future: We’re excited to share with you a redesign of the Port logo, as well as many inside pages receiving a fresh look.

Thanks to everyone who has worked on Port, past and present. And if you are new to the magazine, it’s a great time to subscribe (see page 185 for a compelling offer). Intrigued as to what our launch issue looked like, all those years ago?

Head to the last page to see the entire number (albeit in miniature), with some liner notes on how we have, and have not, changed over this extraordinary decade.

We started Port with the desire to mix style with genuine substance, to make a beautiful magazine, and ideally to have some fun in the process. This issue is a fitting celebration of that dream, and we’ve certainly had some fun along the way.

Dan Crowe – Editor

P H OTO G R A P H Y BY ZO Ë G H E RT N E R

ARRANGEMENTS

BY M I C H A E L A N A STA S S I A D E S

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MASTHEAD

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Dan Crowe DESIGN DIRECTOR Matt Willey FASHION DIRECTOR Mitchell Belk DEPUTY EDITOR Tom Bolger CONTRIBUTING FASHION FEATURES EDITOR Jamie Waters ACCESSORIES EDITOR Paulina Piipponen ART EDITOR Sophie Dutton DESIGN Matt Willey, Sophie Dutton, Adriana Ji PHOTOGRAPHIC DIRECTOR Max Ferguson SENIOR EDITOR Kerry Crowe HOROLOGY EDITOR Alex Doak INTERIORS EDITORS Huw Griffith, Tobias Harvey CONTRIBUTING WRITER Reiss Smith

SENIOR EDITORS Fergus Henderson, Food Dan May, Fashion Samantha Morton, Film Hans Ulrich Obrist, Art Rick Moody, Literature John-Paul Pryor, Music Brett Steele, Architecture Deyan Sudjic, Design CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Richard Buckley Kabir Chibber Robert Macfarlane Albert Scardino

PUBLISHERS Dan Crowe, Matt Willey ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Andrew Chidgey-Nakazono MANAGING DIRECTOR Dan Crowe ADVERTISING DIRECTOR Andrew Chidgey-Nakazono andrew@port-magazine.com ACCOUNTS Charlie Carne & Co.

EU CORRESPONDENT Donald Morrison US CORRESPONDENT Alex Vadukul JAPANESE CORRESPONDENT Ryo Yamazaki AUSTRALIA CORRESPONDENT James W Mataitis Bailey

SPECIAL THANKS The Production Factory Everyone who has ever worked at, or with, Port

CIRCULATION CONSULTANT Logical Connections Adam Long adam@logicalconnections.co.uk

SPECIAL SECTION EDITORS Andrea Trimarchi, Simone Farresin, Michael Shannon, Linsey Young

COVER CREDITS Akala, photographed in Miami

by Donavon Smallwood, wears GIORGIO ARMANI Caleb Landry Jones, photographed in Texas by Rahim Fortune, wears SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO Matt Smith, photographed in London

by Luke Paige, wears DUNHILL Katherine Waterston, photographed in London by Guen Fiore, wears LOEWE Malachi Kirby, photographed in London by Marlen Keller, wears ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA

CONTACT info@port-magazine.com

WORDS Alex Vadukul, Billie Muraben, Jeremy Atherton Lin, Tom Bolger, Jeremy Leslie, Kuchar Swara, Sarah Trounce, Dylan Holden, Felix Bischof, Linsey Young, Emanuele Coccia, Paulo Tavares, Hannah Williams, Imogen West-Knights, George Kafka, John Harris Dunning, Deyan Sudjic, Michael Shannon, Akala, Jack Underwood, David Keenan, Bhanu Kapil, Matthew Turner, Jason Okundaye, John-Paul Pryor, Anna Smith, Alex Doak, Ben Pester PHOTOGRAPHY Rahim Fortune, Donavon Smallwood, Guen Fiore, Marlen Keller, Luke Paige, James Giles, Fumi Homma, James Robjant, Hazel Gaskin, Norman WilcoxGeissen, Flora Maclean, Charlotte Hadden, Lee Whittaker, Lisa Jahovic, Michael Hemy, Anaïck Lejart, Thomas Martin, Rebecca Zephyr Thomas, Cian Oba-Smith, Adama Jalloh, Daisuke Hamada, Kyohei Hattori, Morwenna Grace Kearsley, Izzy de Wattripont, Suzie Howell, Max Vadukul, Benjamin Swanson, Abhishek Donda, Tommaso Sartori ARTWORK Cecilia Bonilla, Dror Cohen HEADLINE TYPEFACE A2 Record Gothic by A2-Type (A2/SW/HK) www.a2-type.co.uk

SYNDICATION syndication@port-magazine.com SYNDICATED ISSUES Port Spain portmagazine.es Port Turkey port-magazine.com.tr issn 2046-052X Port is published twice a year

by Port Publishing Limited Vault 4 Somerset House Strand London WC2R 1LA port-magazine.com Port is printed by Park Communications Founded by Dan Crowe, Boris Stringer, Kuchar Swara and Matt Willey.

Registered in England no. 7328345

“The world is a very puzzling place. If you’re not willing to be puzzled, you just become a replica of someone else’s mind.”

— Noam Chomsky

All rights reserved.

Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is strictly prohibited.

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Fuck Boris.

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© Jean Nouvel, Gilbert Lézénès, Pierre Soria et Architecture-Studio / Adagp, Paris, 2021

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COSMIC RAYS

By Max Vadukul. From the archive, a previously unpublished photo of Anthony and Iggy

This portrait of Anthony Bourdain and Iggy Pop was unexpected. I didn’t know what kind of shot I was going to end up with. They were both sunbathing and relaxing with their shirts off in a garden in the El Portal neighbourhood of Miami. As they relaxed, I approached them from behind, and without any introduction I just started taking pictures. I told them: “Don’t move.” They instantly froze. After a few shutter clicks, I already knew I got the shot I wanted. But what happened afterwards was more interesting. They began discussing life and death, and I was deeply touched by some of what they said. Iggy said he thought about death a lot and that he wouldn’t mind vanishing into the ether. Anthony said he wouldn’t mind if his last moments were spent having sushi at his favourite restaurant in Tokyo. They talked about life in great and honest detail, and I thought that was a powerful thing.

As told to Alex Vadukul

Photography Max Vadukul

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POROUS BOUNDARIES

By Billie Muraben. Exploring gravity, time, and entropy in Alexis Harding’s abstract paintings

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Photography Thomas Martin

“I’m excited by the conditions around making something,” artist Alexis Harding tells me over video from his studio in Purfleet-on-Thames; where freight liners pass throughout the day, their containers stacked up in grids; where the Thames river meets the North Sea. “The paintings end up on the wall after being in drying racks, or leant for months at different angles. I put my arm into them and lance the paint, turn them upside down, squeeze, twist or shake them,” he explains. “I’ve come back to the studio after a day and found whole paintings have slid to the floor. The slow-drying time of oil paint, combined with irrational moments where they’re interrupted, or gravity dislodges them, can be addictive. It’s something to do with not wanting them to be fixed, not wanting them to end. It might be a fantasy of mine, but long after paintings are on a wall, they continue to leak, move and include the viewer.”

The act of painting, the physicality of it, and the choreography that’s integral to it – particularly for Harding, as he coaxes, turns, and leans each work, over an extended period of time – overlaps with the residue, or legacy, of the associations and context of when, how, and why each work is made. “I’m always trying to create space to show that the work isn’t just illustrative of a process. The paintings cling to associations with the world. They’re abstract paintings that are aiming to include the world, rather than shun it and be cold, process-driven things.”

Harding often starts from geometry, two lines crossing each other, or a grid, and using the tradition of abstraction he’ll “attempt to corrupt it, and prove that boundaries are porous”. “It’s always been an attempt to make a body of work that begins in a similar way, but leaps off in many different directions,” he tells me.

“A lot of the early grids seem a bit unsettled; they were about unifying a surface and disrupting or breaking it.

There was a belief that the fracture of the painting in one instance could reflect on many different ideas, such as the action of the heart going around the body, while

another might be to do with looking at neon lights from above a city.”

Working with each painting is key to Harding’s practice: “They say when they are ready to be moved.” He mixes paint relying on instinct rather than measurement – “It’s quite an advantage that oil paint is something I don’t understand... I mix materials anticipating how they will behave in time: One is thin and smooth like velvet, while another is thick and takes days to move” – and sees each work as being “alive, in a way”.

“They’re a series of mistakes, errors, contingencies, incidents – full of haphazard accidents and humour,” he explains.

These incidents, or accidents, are part of Harding’s choreography, and a core element of how he embraces the principle of painting being time-based: “The question of where to stop or start, this sense of formalism, is something I’m always battling with. There are moments where you can stop the slippage, breaking, blending or sliding; where the compositional gestures indicate where the painting’s movement has begun and would have continued to travel. And the skin of the paint, the way it wrinkles, seems to prove or embrace a kind of figuration. It has a relationship to the body, and ageing.”

Harding’s Temporary Wet Paintings are a way of freeing up his approach. “You set the painting up, it goes vertical, and you walk away – it’s exhilarating.” Rather than interacting with the paint, as it slides and stands and settles, he installs the works in galleries or alternative spaces, and leaves them to rupture. The paint often falls away from the support, creating a second piece on the floor, which reflects moments that have passed in the life of the work. “They’re explicit in allowing painting to go to its full entropic death,” Harding notes. “In a way, they contradict my studio work, where things can be stopped or controlled. They free that up, shun my habits and liberate me from the formalism I seem tied to in the making of the work. I’m learning not to get in the way so much.”

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Photography Thomas Martin

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Photography Benjamin Swanson

Styling Paulina Piipponen

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DYED IN THE WOOL

By Felix Bischof. Hermès’ Clamp Dye plaids pay tribute to their non-industrial origin

Florence Lafarge likens the undulating surface of woven fabrics to an “infinitely small form of architecture”. She had long been a champion of all things handmade when a fascination for cloth led to her specialising in textile design. “Weaving, warping, dyeing, printing, cutting, sewing, embroidering, colouring – all are universal gestures and languages,” Lafarge enthuses.

And so, once she had graduated from Paris art schools the École Boulle and École Duperré, she eventually worked for French designer Primrose Bordier. Doyenne of whimsically printed linens, Bordier had by then made history as the first female designer to be awarded the French Legion of Honour order in 1976. Lafarge left Bordier in 1998 to oversee the homeware business of Japanese designer Kenzo Takada as its style director. In 2009, she joined Hermès.

At the French house, Lafarge’s initial role came with a rather poetic sounding job title: as creative director of art de vivre, dreaming up the heritage brand’s collection of decorative objects (lacquer boxes painted by hand, paperweights and change trays) fell within her remit.

“Art de vivre is a way of orchestrating objects in the home,” she explains.

Much like a conductor directing an orchestra, Lafarge today harmonises the work of a creative team, among them graphic designers, architects and illustrators. “It is a constant search for appropriate know-how, technical innovation, singularity, daring,” says Lafarge, who has since been appointed creative director of home textiles, furnishing fabrics and wallpapers. At the brand’s master ateliers, and when partnering with external workshops, she acts as a translator of sorts, concretising creative flights of fancy into products. She notes that, “I am the link between the idea and the realistic translation of the idea, the material realisation of the object.”

Most recently, Lafarge tasked expert makers in Nepal with realising a line of blankets crafted from hand-woven cashmere. “Natural materials such as cashmere are our first choice,” says Lafarge. “The care we take at each

stage of its metamorphosis – spinning, weaving, dyeing, finishing – amazes with its beauty.” A labour-intensive technique to work cashmere, hand weaving was chosen to achieve a lightweight cloth that is cloud-like to the touch. The result is a choice of blankets that comes in six two-tone plaids. All are superimposed with stamplike geometric prints, their striking shapes the result of traditional clamp dyeing.

A variant of reserve dyeing, when clamp dyeing, Nepalese artisans pinch, fold and tuck Hermès’ cashmere cloth, which is then tightly clamped between purpose-carved and moulded pieces of wood. Once this wooden reserve is in place, the bundled fabric is submerged in liquid dye and left to soak. “When unfolded, the fabric reveals the replica of the pattern made by the reserved shape,” Lafarge clarifies, outlining the method’s final step.

The blankets’ designs pay tribute to their non-industrial origin, finding timeless beauty in simplicity and the artisan’s hand. Christened Géranium, a warm orange tone is emblazoned with rectangles arranged in three neat lines of five. Gris perle – a pale grey hue that has become something of an Hermès speciality – features a sextet of pale squares; Bougainvillier – a rich magenta hue – is contrasted with pale circles; an impressionistic letter ‘H’ is spelled against a Bleu de Nîmes background of deep azure. Then, there is Emeraude, a gem-like green tone interspersed with two lines of criss-crosses, while elsewhere a yellow Maïs base with red plaid grid also features a pattern of fantastical shapes.

At Hermès, blankets count among the brand’s pillars. For an example, look no further than its best-loved Rocabar throw: Its striped motif inspired by 19th-century racehorse blankets pays tribute to Hermès’ equestrian heritage and its 1837 beginnings as a harness workshop. “All our fabrics are exceptional, whether printed, dyed or embroidered,” says Lafarge. “Nothing is left to chance. Every step in the creation of a textile is guided by beauty, timelessness, contemporaneity and accuracy.”

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Photography Benjamin Swanson

Styling Paulina Piipponen

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NATURE AND NURTURE

By Merlin Labron-Johnson.

The award-winning chef reflects on the joy of growing his own produce

You can’t cut corners gardening. No shortcuts, no rushing. Like cooking, every single process must be respected because each dictates the end result. When you are creating a dish, you are nurturing those ingredients in much the same way you love, care and pay attention to what you’re growing. Both practices are unforgiving, and in the beginning I made plenty of mistakes – the trick is not to make them twice.

I grew up in South Devon, and the countryside is where I feel most comfortable. How I cook and approach food is very much connected to agriculture, landscapes, the wilderness. What I previously lacked in London was inspiration; I was on autopilot. Yesterday, I walked through a beautiful pine forest and was transported to the Swiss Alps, where I cooked for many years. I think most creatively when I am outside, watching the plants grow, feeling the seasons change.

Launching a restaurant is often traumatic and chaotic, never mind on the eve of a pandemic, and having to close Osip’s doors after only five months was hard.

The first lockdown gave me time to reflect on what I’d created and what I did and didn’t like about it, what I would change in an ideal world. After a brief respite from the day-to-day madness, I could actually see the wood for the trees. The restaurant I reopened that summer was 10 times better than the one I’d closed, and the most important factor behind this was teaching myself how to grow.

We now have two sites, essentially next door to the restaurant, to cultivate vegetables – Spargrove and Dreamers Farm – and this direct relationship inspires what we cook. I intend to be entirely self-sufficient all year round, and will be busy during the hunger gap – the January to May period in the UK where little grows – clearing and ploughing the ground, building polytunnels and greenhouses. I have overwintering things like kales, cabbages, chards, onions, garlic, and purple

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sprouting broccoli currently working their magic underground, and I’m planting strawberries, gooseberries, raspberries, as well as black, white and red currants in time for summer.

I am guided by and at the mercy of the land. It’s rare to be in an environment where a chef can pick something that morning and serve it for lunch. The difference in flavour is enormous because every day that a vegetable is out of the ground, it deteriorates in quality. My cooking has never had a clearer identity, or felt more emotionally rooted, because I’m only working with ingredients I’ve grown myself. Osip is an expression of who I am.

Ethical and ecological opinions aside, I’m bored of protein. I love a steak as much as the next person, but I find vegetables to be infinitely more versatile in the ways they can be prepared and presented. In the past, this country has been particularly unimaginative with vegetables. In France, they have different ways to describe national methods; carrots à l’Anglaise means to boil in water with no salt. That says it all really. If you look at the way Italians prepare produce, there’s real thought and care poured into every step. Perhaps we’re still on that journey of discovery here in the UK. In recent years, some of the greatest meals of my life have revolved around the humble vegetable. I felt sated, satisfied, enthused but not heavy. There’s a distinction to be made between being full and fulfilled.

As told to Tom Bolger Merlin Labron-Johnson became the UK’s youngest Michelin-starred chef in 2015. His latest project is the farm-to-table restaurant Osip – and the accompanying wine bar and épicerie, The Old Pharmacy – in Bruton, Somerset. Having only been open for seven months, Osip was recently awarded a Michelin star.

Photography Izzy de Wattripont

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Trout with leeks and wild garlic Ingredients 500g

trout fillet, scaled and pin boned

50g

rock salt

10g

caster sugar

1

shallot, finely sliced

400ml

water

glass of dry white wine

1

100ml

cream

1

handful parsley leaves

1

handful wild garlic

1

lemon

3

large leeks

75g

butter

1

slice of old bread, crusts removed olive oil

Method Place the trout flesh side up in a dish large enough to sit in the fridge. Mix the rock salt with the caster sugar and smear over the flesh of the trout. Grate over the zest of one lemon. Leave for four hours before rinsing the fish, making sure to remove all the salt and sugar.

Use a clean towel to dry the fish fillet and return to the fridge uncovered for another few hours to allow the fish to dry out a little.

Wash the leeks well and separate the green part from the white part. Roughly chop the green part and place in a saucepan with the water. Bring to a boil and cook for 30 minutes on a gentle simmer before straining through a sieve. You will use this leek broth for your sauce. Slice the white part of the leeks as thinly as possible and sweat very gently in 25 grams of butter for 30 minutes without any colour. Season with salt and set aside.

Preheat the oven to 150 degrees.

Put the shallots and white wine in a saucepan and bring to the boil. Cook until almost evaporated and then add the leek broth and cream. Cook for a further 10 minutes, then transfer to a blender. Separate the leaves from the stems of the wild garlic. Add the leaves and half the parsley to the blender and blitz until smooth and bright green. Return to the saucepan and add the remaining butter. Season with salt and keep hot.

Cut the trout fillet into four even-sized pieces and place in an ovenproof dish. Drizzle a liberal amount of olive oil over each piece, cover the dish with foil or a lid and place in the oven for 15 minutes. Dice the bread into tiny cubes and fry in a little olive oil. Chop the wild garlic stems and the remaining parsley as finely as you can. Reheat the leeks.

After 15 minutes, the trout should be lightly cooked, flaky and a little bit raw in the middle.

Remove from the oven and top with the chopped parsley, wild-garlic stems and fried bread.

Divide the hot leeks between four bowls. Place a piece of trout in each bowl. Give the wild-garlic broth a good whisk and pour a little onto each plate, serving the rest in a jug on the side.

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Photography Izzy de Wattripont

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Indian Institute of Management.

Photography Abhishek Donda

ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL

By Kuchar Swara. An ode to the ancient building block

Dating back to 7000 BCE, the humble brick continues to be our structural foundation.

Few fundamental innovations go back further: The written word is a little over 3,000 years old, the invention of the wheel only 3,500, by comparison.

In their first iteration, bricks were made of clay or mud, and sun dried. Modern-day varieties are mainly sand and clay, fired at up to 1,100 degrees. While the methods and constituents have evolved over time, this simple modular idea has hardly changed.

Brick architecture can be paradoxical. On the one hand, it is mostly geometry, and devoid of figurative carvings or ornamentation, lending it a timeless quality. Look at Tate Modern by Herzog & de Meuron, the Indian Institute of Management by Louis Kahn, or, going back a little further to 2030 BCE, the Great Ziggurat of Ur by King Ur-Nammu. Conversely, telling the age and geographic location of a building can be easy when looking at the brickwork in abstract: A Roman building has signature-style workings and bonding, as does a Dutch townhouse, when compared with a building of the same date in London.

There is a multitude of patterns and colour-coded systems in bricklaying, opening the door to various styles of geometric decoration: 45-degree herringbone bond, Flemish diagonal bond, Della Robbia bond, Scottish bond, American bond, double English cross bond. . . the list goes on.

With new innovations on the horizon including recycling of old demolition waste and other constituents, the modest brick will likely continue to be used long into the future. Amen to that.

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Photography Benjamin Swanson

Styling Paulina Piipponen

MODERN LOVE

By Dylan Holden. Dior’s charming adaptable tailoring

Savoir faire – literally ‘know how to do’ – is a French term denoting confidence, instinct and grace: being adroit and adaptable in any situation. And, if there were two things Christian Dior intuitively knew how to do, it was draw and cut cloth. As an adolescent, he sold fashion sketches outside his house for 10 cents apiece, and as a man, re-established Paris as the central locus of fashion with his debut collection.

His New Look line – typified by the infamous Bar suit – was a not-so-quiet revolution after the austerity of WWII rationing, with groups such as the 30,000-strong (and bluntly named) League of Broke Husbands protesting in the street against the costs related to the amount of fabric needed for them. For the house he founded in 1946, the art of couture and tailoring remain its hallmark, and a skill its ateliers have deconstructed on a seasonal basis since.

Playing with, while paying dues to, this formal heritage, Dior Men’s artistic director Kim Jones has released a capsule collection dubbed Modern Tailoring, comprised of three styles of jackets and trousers. Urban, yet urbane, a workwear suit jacket comes in grey wool with a micro-houndstooth motif or Prince of Wales check; while the double-breasted model with signature cross-strap, or Harrington-shaped blouson, has a black virgin wool and mohair-blend option. All come with a CD Icon lapel pin and buttons borrowed from the Bar suit, with each design intended to be freely mixed and matched with any of the line’s chinos, suit or jogging trousers. Together, they offer a much desired smart-casual versatility in a period that continues to blur the boundaries of work and play – a charming adaptability for the situation we find ourselves in.

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INTELLIGENCE AS UNDERSTATEMENT

By Sarah Trounce. B&B Italia’s new artistic director talks sustainability and common sense

Rather romantically, Piero Lissoni had always thought of B&B Italia as a special star in the furniture industry’s night sky; so, the Italian architect and designer’s recent appointment as artistic director of the brand is a proud achievement, and a serious responsibility. Founded in 1966 by the Busnelli family, and still enjoying a modernist appeal today, B&B Italia – with its distinctive clean, bold lines – is a shorthand for elegance and technical brilliance.

Lissoni has joined the business at a moment of reflection and transition, as it looks to define its creative vision for the years ahead. Protecting the legacy of a well-loved name while casting a critical eye on the horizon is a unique challenge – not dissimilar to walking on a frozen lake, he muses: “You need to be silent, to show a lot of respect and to move with a lot of attention.”

For Lissoni, B&B Italia is defined by understatement. The design strategy of the house is to feel consistently contemporary; occasionally, this means breaking with convention, injecting a jolt of rebellion to shake things up. The company, he believes, must speak to coming generations, as well as its veteran audiences. Culture and curiosity inform the spirit of the future customer, fuelling Lissoni’s own desire to create something interesting, and yet timeless, today. The company’s commitment to craftsmanship is married with constant growth through its prestigious research and development arm, ensuring design and manufacturing processes remain technologically advanced, while “saving the soul of the brand”.

Another central focus for Lissoni will be the company’s partnerships with an impressive roster of design-industry heavyweights. He has already proved himself a fluent B&B Italia collaborator, but Lissoni’s latest

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Borea. Photography Tommaso Sartori

collection for them announces his intentions with a thoughtful and surprising twist on outdoor furniture.

The eclectic pieces in the new Borea range make use of tubular metal structures that embrace functionality and sustainability as much as the slick, uninterrupted silhouettes they cast. Resulting in seamless constructions, the fluid metal-bending processes echo techniques typically employed for building aeroplanes. Remembering the classic BN-3 model of 1969, Lissoni thinks of the Borea style as “a gentle aeroplane” reimagined as seating.

The pleasingly curved aluminium chair frames are lightweight and stackable for easy stowing, and sustainable practices have informed every element. Graphic striped cushions are made of polyester fibre from recycled plastic bottles, while glazed-lava-stone table tops repurpose glass from discarded computer screens. In addition to making use of typically wasted materials, all the furniture in the collection can be completely disassembled for repair or recycling.

At the Italian house, there are two strong forces simultaneously at work. The first is the careful handiwork of artisans, bringing their deep knowledge and human touch to the manufacturing process. The second is a futuristic laboratory of machine-led innovation. For Lissoni, luxury is about the intelligent use of materials, creating sophisticated and durable objects through thoughtful and honest processes. As he explains, “The best system to be sustainable is to design something with a long life.” In a world that has persistently encouraged mindless upgrades at great cost to the planet, Lissoni advocates for exceptional quality, and later, if and when necessary, repair. B&B Italia is facing the future with gentle resistance.

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Photography Suzie Howell

RECOUP SOME CORNER OF THE UNIVERSE

By Tom Bolger. The artistic director of the Young Vic, Kwame Kwei-Armah, on the necessity of theatre

Tom Bolger: Why does theatre remain an essential art form?

Kwame Kwei-Armah: Theatre is the seeing and smelling of sweat, feeling the funk, of seeing yourself reflected in three dimensions. I’ve had to think about your question profoundly this year, at a time when technology has played such a dominant role in our lives. One of the biggest disasters has been the loss of haptic exchange – feeling the heart of someone else when you hug them, shaking a hand and feeling someone’s energy. These acts literally increase your life. I cannot think of a better artform then live performance – dancing with the sensibilities of another human being – to keep us in touch with who we really are. We’re going to need these citadels, homes of communion and joy, more than ever.

Do you come across people who say it just isn’t for them?

All the time. Sometimes it’s articulated explicitly and other times it’s through the body, eyes going blank when you start to talk. All of us in the ‘high arts’ wish it was the ‘popular arts’. It’s a beautiful thing to be reviewed and have the middle classes assign value to what you do, but we’re not into serving the 10 per cent; we’re here to evangelise the power of seeing yourself through others. There’s a play or musical out there for everyone that can make them a believer.

It was the Young Vic’s 50th anniversary in 2020, and, I assume, one of its hardest years to date..?

In this pandemic, you don’t know where and when you’re going to land on the other side. We worked throughout to keep buoyant, keeping staff on with hardship funds, working with hundreds of freelancers through our Directors Program, as well as arguing our position to the government, which meant we were rewarded nearly a million pounds from the Culture Recovery Fund. Existentially, that saved us; it enabled us to plan the new season that we hope will grace our stages and digital platforms within the next year. 2020 was debilitating. I’d be creating a false narrative if I said it hasn’t been bloody hard.

How does the wider industry come back stronger from this?

We won’t know what the new normal is because it defines itself on a moment-by-moment basis. A new contract needs to be established between theatres and the freelance community where we’re both giving an account of why and what we’re doing, in a more transparent way. ‘Building back better’ means greater collaboration in a less opaque manner.

In the digital realm, we must prove that we’ve used this time to think about how to innovate and reach the maximum audience possible while protecting the mothership. The reason I didn’t want the Young Vic to race headlong into digital projects is because I only want that work as a by-product, not as the product. It has to be in juxtaposition to what is happening on stage, in order to drive people to it. What do we lose when that live call-and-response feedback is absent? Theatre cannot live by monologue alone.

Finally, television and film have now become – the former in particular – the default setting for most of our writing talent. Within five years it will be seriously hard to get new writing for our stages; we’ll be

decimated unless things change. Previously, theatre was the site where a writer would come and find their soul – television has replaced that.

It’s the new novel, the new theatre, and, crucially, it ensures they can make a living. We are going to have to devise methods by which to attract that talent back, or share them with our televisual friends. That’s going to dictate a brand-new way of partnerships and programming.

As the first African-Caribbean director of a major UK theatre, you’ve said your job is not “to pull the ladder up but to open the building”. Does making history make the weight of responsibility that much heavier?

Responsibility is not a burden to me, and I seldom worry about being a first, because I’ve been blessed to have been so a few times. That said, when I had my first recognisable first, I was tremendously humbled. I’m a history buff, so when my mother could go and see Elmina’s Kitchen – the first African-Caribbean play to come to the West End – that touched me deeply. But as soon as that had been done, it disappeared as meaning anything other than: What do I do with it? What does this access allow me to build? I established the Black Plays Archive at the National Theatre because of that momentum, and that is one of the proudest things I’ve achieved in my life because it means no Black British playwright will be able to feel that they’re the first person ever again; they’ll be able to see professional work that goes back to the turn of the 20th century.

At the Young Vic, I’ve been throwing down ladders in as radical a fashion as possible – administratively, artistically – to how we serve our communities. We’re trying to make sure our staff and audiences look like London. Before COVID-19, I’d describe much of our programme as Black postmodernism, to quote Gloria Jean Watkins; that actually Black people can do everything, anything, and race doesn’t have to be the major driver. We’re not asking that culture be divorced from art, but from Hamlet to Bronx Gothic, I want performers of colour to lead work that isn’t about Blackness, but allows it to simply be a part of what they do.

We’re constantly creating projects with our neighbours in Lambeth and Southwark, taking our work directly to local schools or working-class communities with YV Unpacked, because we believe these connections enhance what we produce.

Last year you signed open letters to UK theatre, TV and film, advocating for better representation. What steps require action today, not tomorrow?

I find self-flagellation or beating people up is secondary to doing the do. I can describe our conversations around diversity on stage, in front of and behind the camera, as negotiation with our children. We have to be mindful of alienating anyone, and in real truth, straight white males are under the cosh not even necessarily because of their peers, but because of the sins of their fathers. I’m trying to make sure that my children and my grandchildren don’t ever have the same debates that I’m having. Our job is to stop this discussion from having any validity.

If we don’t start everything now, we will not solve this problem of diversity and inclusion. We must give away power so that power can continue to give itself away in as wide, broad and deep a process as possible.

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HOW TO SEE THE WORLD

By Sarah Trounce. Mr Armani’s subtle silhouette

As the hostile clouds of lockdown part and the sun makes a more than fleeting appearance, clement days should be greeted with open arms and eyes. Fitting accessories for a breezy drive or lively lunch might include a pair of sunglasses that are less of a barrier to life’s extremities, and more a tool for engagement. Giorgio Armani’s Icon eyewear is one such collection, inviting the wearer to interact with the world, rather than hide from it.

Revisiting the iconic style of the 1930s and ’40s – round wire frames being the refined option favoured by film stars looking to dodge flash bulbs or rest tired eyes on set – the luxury house’s take is a contemporary expression of the first style created and worn by Mr Armani himself. “Glasses for me are a complement to a style, the mirror of a personality,” he reflects. “I prefer them to be lightweight and essential in design, not to be invasive. Only in this way do they become one with the wearer, a light filter that captures the smallest of nuances, the frame through which we observe the world.”

Rendered in a finely crafted titanium, the frame delivers an almost ethereal oval silhouette. With a discreet matte finish, a minimal palette offers gunmetal with blue lenses, gold with brown lenses and, in the prescription version, gold or black titanium with clear lenses. The subtlest of details betray the model’s craftsmanship: the delicate curve of the bridge, a barely there attachment at the temples. Blink and you’ll miss them.

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Photography Benjamin Swanson

Styling Paulina Piipponen

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LOCULUS

By Dylan Holden. dunhill’s house icon – where the old guard meets the new

Alfred Dunhill was an industrious man. After inheriting his father’s saddlery business in 1893, at the tender age of 21, he set about creating a line of accessories for the fledgling automobile market. The catalogue soon counted over 1,300 items: lamps, goggles, pens, timepieces, leather overcoats, picnic sets – ‘everything but the motor’ ran the tagline. Restless, Dunhill sold his shares over a decade later and set about proselytising his love of tobacco, patenting a ‘windshield pipe’ to allow for a casual smoke when driving; launching the first fully enclosed lighter to be used with just one hand; and supplying, among others, the Prince of Wales, Siegfried Sassoon and Winston Churchill. His international appetite meant that his luxury goods and discerning brand of British-executive style was formally established not only in London, but New York and Paris by 1924. Despite the scale of his ambitions Dunhill understood that, in his own words, “Little ideas well worked bring fortunes.”

This self-same ingenuity, and faith that good things come in small packages, is present in dunhill’s new house icon: the Lock Bag. A celebration of the old guard meeting the new – the slight item’s design inspired by the classic attaché or diplomat case – its frame is lined with padded nylon and finished with box calf leather, a durable full grain that gently ages over time, giving each item a unique patina. “Leather goods are quintessential to dunhill,” notes creative director Mark Weston. “They are definitive pieces born from the house’s beginnings as a leather-harness family business; for me it’s a continuity, revisiting and evolving product in a natural and real way.” First seen on the Paris runway last autumn, removable shoulder straps allow for either cross-body or pochette styling.

Available in black, ink, oxblood and – referencing their founder’s iconic Rollagas lighters – limited AD brass and AD silver, the bag has been reimagined for spring in white eel skin with palladium-plated metalwork.

Part of a wider lock collection, including a messenger bag and case, it is the perfect size for just about everything (but the motor).

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COVER TO COVER

By Jeremy Leslie. The founder of magCulture on the front-cover arms race

Just as the business model of magazine publishing has been transformed in recent years – and the magazine you’re holding in your hands is a part of that transformation – so has the creative model. Nowhere has this been felt more keenly than the front cover.

One of the final stages of failure in mainstream publishing was the ever more desperate sales pitch of the front cover design.

Produced to grab attention from the height and distance of the newsagent’s shelf, front covers were conceived to algorithmically tight parameters: a celebrity face (tick!); full eye contact (tick!); logo at top of the page; a set of cover lines written to appeal to as many people as possible, while not putting anyone else off (tick; tick; tick!). Research demonstrated the ever-decreasing number of seconds available to grab the interest of the potential reader.

An arms race developed in an escalating battle for this attention. Cover headlines became larger, fluorescent inks were introduced, then multiplied; pull-out supplements were added and gifts glued to the front. Sales fluctuated issue by issue as each magazine fought its competitors for attention. Readers jumped from magazine to magazine as the last drops of loyalty evaporated.

Scott King’s fluorescent pink “I’m With Stupid” cover for Sleazenation critiqued this direction back in 2001, the very concept relying on the issue being shelved alongside the competitors it sought to abuse.

However, that cover also suggested a way forward: the return to a singular poster-like design as the battle for attention gradually swung from the newsagent to the screen.

Since the 2010s, magazines have announced new issues via their social media accounts, and Instagram in particular has proved a key channel. The front cover is ideally suited to the platform, and, in taking advantage of it, the format has morphed completely.

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This phenomenon can be traced to the 2010 design of Bloomberg Businessweek. Editor Josh Tyrangiel and art director Richard Turley used their weekly front covers to shout about a single feature story, and for several years they produced a series of brilliant poster-like covers that were powerful in real life and arguably even more effective as thumbnails on Twitter and Instagram.

The weekly arrival of the new front cover of Businessweek became a key element of my social feed; a favourite was this vivid red global warning cover that cleverly adapts Bill Clinton’s 1992 election phrase, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

The Gentlewoman reveal their biannual cover star using a format with just four elements: a background colour, the magazine’s name, a star portrait, and her name.

The design of MacGuffin’s covers are canvases across which a large paintbrush stroke “M” is scrawled over a collage of parts hinting at the theme. That “M” provides the recognition factor.

It’s Freezing in LA! has developed a similar formula, adding the additional social-friendly element of a large text announcing “An independent magazine about climate change”. Such scale is not required for the newsagent, but is needed on Instagram.

The New York Times Magazine goes further. As well as single-issue covers that look great as thumbnails, they produce a weekly promotional video for social distribution. Creative director Gail Bichler and editor Jake Silverstein talk through the development of the front cover, sharing dropped ideas and talking the viewer through to the final version.

While not everybody can afford such a production, a small-run biannual like Berlin-based drawing magazine FUKT can compete by creating covers that are mobile in print, such as the example here. Their System issue had a pivoting title on the cover: beautiful in real life, perfect when animated for Instagram.

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November 5 — November 11, 2012 | businessweek.com

it’s global WaRming,

stupid p6

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GOODBYE, GAY BARS

By Jeremy Atherton Lin. The beginnings and endings of queer sites of belonging

I’m a hugger, not a continental kisser. This distinction has been rendered irrelevant by the pandemic. But I’ve been thinking about hugging, and some of the great gay huggers I know. A film director and a museum curator come to mind. Neither is smarmy; they’re demonstrative. It’s hard to imagine when I’ll hang with them at a gay bar again.

Hovering over all the ‘When things get back to normal…’ conjecture, a question: What normal, and why was it so? The status quo of cities developed over time and resulted from fissures – like war, like plague. Maybe we were due a change. This definitely pertains to the gay bar – an institution I’d contend was never only one thing.

Gay bars were already shuttering across the UK and the States, a trend blamed on property developers, hook-up apps, assimilation. Their flickering out altered my cityscape – as if signalling the demise of gay identity altogether. In London, young promoters re-envisioned queer space. Pop-up venues paid heed to the LBTQ+, after decades dominated by alpha Gs. Nights were devoted to womxn and femmes of colour. There were sober events, drag-king shows, activist meetings, literary happenings and policies forbidding inconsiderate behaviour; idealistic visions, whereas nightlife venues have often reflected the worst of society – like racism, ableism, ageism, lookism, transphobia and misogyny.

At the Chateau in south London, which took over from a wine bar with a holy communion theme (the stained glass with Biblical scenes remained), the house rules were posted as the Ten Commandments. A similar charter was issued by the Friends of the Joiners Arms, a collective throwing of events under the banner of the much-missed namesake. But at the Joiners itself, my plimsolls soaked in an admixture of ambiguous fluids, I’d been groped at the bar and trapped in a toilet stall by a pair of overexcited men. On the dance floor, I espied a semi-erection brandished like a Blackberry. The rhetoric had come to be of safe space, but I’d known the gay bar as a site of slight discomfort and risk.

Certain aspects that made the new models refreshing – such as parties that roam rather than fix to one place – hearken back to historical queer socialising. In London, proto-gays were on the move through the ages, taking to the shadows of gardens, arches and public toilets. In the 20th century, the discreet and flamboyant (‘screamers’) congregated at pubs with a wink-nudge reputation. At flashy nightclubs, queerness hid in plain sight, indecipherable from cosmopolitanism. The orchestra would strike up a tribute when a dishy young man entered the room. Dingy cellars were furtive and self-protective, but could come with a frisson impossible to replicate in a high-street club with colognes in the loo and swarming hen parties.

There can be no gay-bar grand narrative. The first gay bar? Depends what you mean. There’s no Gay Bar Common Era, unless we presume to label a historical hotspot retroactively. The first recorded use of the term gay bar is a diary entry by comedian Kenneth Williams (“Went round to the gay bar which wasn’t in the least gay…”).

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That was Singapore, 1947. The venue he’d attended would have been specific to that time and place. It’s also possible he was merely being ironic, not intent on coining a name.

In London, theatres provided a location to rendezvous since something like the 16th century. The molly house, a meeting place for proto-gays and cross-dressers in the 18th century, is cited as a predecessor to the gay bar as we know it. There, lying-in ceremonies were held during the Christmas season, with the mollies gathering to witness one of their own ‘give birth’ to a jointed wooden doll. (Sometimes ‘the midwife’ instead delivered a block of Cheshire cheese.) This spectacle involved, according to a sensationalist exposé from 1709, much bustle and buffoonery.

In London’s Soho after the crest of AIDS, soiled pubs were replaced by gleaming bars purpose-built for a socially acceptable image of gay. Their sleek, sanitised interiors connoted a place free from disease, an aesthetic the scholar Johan Andersson identifies as ‘chichi’.

The surfaces were smooth and impenetrable, like the staff. Through large plate glass could be seen gaggles of proudly out, wholesome gays. I assumed such places had been around forever, whereas gay bars had only recently been unmarked, with blacked-out windows. A few decades prior, a Soho pub was vulnerable to raid if it had the whiff of too much panache.

The slick, commercial gay bars of the ’90s demonstrate how social spaces that follow an epidemic won’t necessarily be a utopian reimagining. The future gay bar might err on the side of caution. It’s not hard to imagine a scant few remaining – operated by chains, with vaccinated but skittish customers at a distance, serenaded by rusty drag queens.

Then again, the proliferation of lockdown-breaking raves exposed the allure of the illicit, not to mention how the urge for social contact isn’t always matched by social responsibility. Walking past the nitrous canisters and rainbow flags chalked on pavements, I considered how easy it is to neglect the existence of vulnerable gay elders in our vicinity. By contrast, the team behind the Chateau – no longer a brick-and-mortar (and stained glass) venue – hosted an online event celebrating the story of another bygone south London institution, the Black Lesbian and Gay Centre. It was a deft move of using the dispiriting present moment to put things into perspective.

There’s much punditry about the death of the gay bar. But which one? The gay bar has meant mafia-owned dives, spit-and-sawdust rooms run by lesbian poets, S&M dungeons, touristy cabarets. Each has its issues, but cumulatively suggest all manner of hedonism. The lineage is multifarious and slippery. Another shakeup would only honour the spirit of the story. The gay bar need not be taken as a given.

Gay Bar: Why We Went Out by Jeremy Atherton Lin is published by Granta, March 2021

Taken in the Nelsons Head pub, photography Rebecca Zephyr Thomas

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CALEB LANDRY JONES WORDS JOHN-PAUL PRYOR

PHOTOGRAPHY RAHIM FORTUNE

STYLING JAI MIDGETTE

Having acted for luminaries such as David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch and the Coen brothers, Texasborn Caleb Landry Jones embodies an archetypal otherness, made all the more so through his avantgarde music. Sonic outlaws, authentic art statements and the darker angels of our nature: Welcome to his world

CALEB LANDRY JONES WEARS SAINT LAURENT

BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO SS21 THROUGHOUT

“You greasers have a different set of values. You’re more emotional. We’re sophisticated – cool to the point of not feeling anything. Nothing is real with us.”

– SE Hinton, The Outsiders Civilisation has always had a fascination with its outsiders, and perhaps more expressly, its rebels – those societal outlanders whose very existence seems antithetical to the maintenance of a consensual white-picket-fence status quo, or quote-unquote reality. This enchantment exists across most artistic mediums in the pantheon of Western culture, but it has some particularly frazzled outer edges in the acid-soaked sonic universe of ’60s psyche – perhaps best personified by the troubled likes of Kim Fowley, Roky Erickson and Joe Meek. While these iconic counter-culture figures belong firmly to the lysergic mythology of another era, it could be argued that they have something of a contemporary avatar in the form of our cover star Caleb Landry Jones – a 31-year-old ball of frenetic energy from Texas best known for his cameos of drugged-up, twitchy, switchblade-happy types in work by some of the most iconic auteurs of our era (David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, the Coen brothers… the list goes on).

When he’s not busy ranting about suicide for David Lynch, or being unceremoniously thrown out of windows by the likes of Sam Rockwell (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), the charismatic actor embodies a somewhat archetypal otherness in real-life – not only in his often unkempt personal style and openness about the regular ingestion of what seems to be a fairly profound weight of marijuana, but also in his (lesser-known) avant-garde musical output. This sonic aspect of his creative verve first reached an audience in 2020 with the release of his debut album The Mother Stone, on Sacred Bones Records – a deeply anti-commercial experience in which a Beefheart-esque sensibility (circa Trout Mask Replica) is married with the tongue-in-cheek fuck-everything vibe of early-’90s intellectual super freaks, such as Ween and Butthole Surfers. Suffice to say, it’s a record that effortlessly pinballs around an otherworldly psychedelic universe, and is one that is increasingly name-checked in muso circles as the epitome of retro-fetishist cool – being favourably compared by some to the likes of the legendary White Album by The Beatles.

It’s the psyche-troubadour Caleb Landry Jones, rather than the actor, that I have in mind to interview when I hit him up on a Zoom call from London in order to discuss the upcoming chapter in his musical odyssey, which has been heralded by the release of the single ‘I’m on Top of the World’ – a track that I suggest to him wouldn’t sound out of place on an early offering by The Kinks (…had north London’s finest whimsical dandies been mainlining DMT).

“The Kinks! It’s always The Kinks,” enthuses Landry Jones while steadying his blackedout smartphone to reveal a pair of feral blue eyes and a rat’s nest of long, tousled hair. I’m immediately struck that he resembles one of

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Sometimes you can hear things in music and see things in art, and it’s kind of naked – you can see struggle there and I love that

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I don’t have any conception of what I’m doing sometimes when I sit down at the piano, except maybe a feeling

the hippies living on Spahn Movie Ranch in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and, as it turns out, he’s actually hiding out from the global pandemic in a barn on his parents’ farm in Texas. It seems apparent that like so many American outsiders, his roots lie firmly in her vast open spaces. “Man, I was obsessed with The Kinks when I was about 20 years old and I bought The Village Green Preservation Society.

I was living in New Orleans and listening to that album all the time. I just couldn’t get enough of that record, even if a lot of its riffs are stolen from Howlin’ Wolf.” He half-laughs half-coughs as he mentions the blues legend, breaking out a lupine grin that feels as though it might crack the screen that divides us – it’s emblematic of an enthusiastic zeal that proves infectious.

“When you’re in certain pockets of making music, or certain aspects of making, just like with filmmaking, there’s certain moments where you’re allowed this kind of freedom, you know?” offers the multi-instrumentalist at an all-tabs-open pace when I kick off by asking what he finds creatively fulfilling about the process of music-making, as opposed to that of taking on a role. “The music is on my own dime, and it’s all about what can happen in the process. I don’t have any conception of what I’m doing sometimes when I sit down at the piano, except maybe a feeling?” he continues, displaying a tendency to almost ask himself questions as he rockets along a meandering but enlightening internal freeway of thought. “I just try to see how close I can get to what’s in my head, and how exact I can get it, and then to see whether or not it will become something completely different. I might not feel sad, but sadness comes out; I might feel angry, but somehow the sounds come out kind of jolly. There’s no control, but maybe just a possibility of something extraordinary happening, from kind of just letting whatever happens, happen.”

And what happens is a rare kind of weird that is all at once an ironic vaudevillian psyche-rock circus and a deeply heartfelt outpouring of

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emotion – crash landing somewhere in the surreal yet emotive landscape of near-mythic artists such as Vivian Stanshall and Daniel Johnston.

“Sometimes you can hear things in music and see things in art, and it’s kind of naked – you can see struggle there, or something, and I love that,” he says, when I ask if the latter lo-fi legend is an influence. “I was actually watching footage of Daniel Johnston playing in a record store somewhere in Austin just the other day, and, you know, he begins crying while he’s talking about the Judgement. He’s going through something right there! He’s letting it all hang out. It just gives me so much peace and joy to see people do that,” he continues apace. “I guess I’m very drawn to artists that do their own thing; I really identify with that, and I think it’s up to artists and folks to keep pushing for that space. I’m so sick of all the talk about a little materialistic world, and the aspects of life that, you know, the magazines show you…” he laughs, a little conspiratorially, as if checking his manners.

This seeming commitment to a kind of authentic honesty or emotion in art begs the question as to whether there’s a self-healing aspect to the reason he himself makes music?

“Oh yeah. A hundred per cent, man. It sounds stupid, but when music doesn’t do it, those are the scary, scary times. When you sit down at the piano because you’re about to do something really stupid, you are giving yourself the shot to let this be the stupid thing that you do, and that it can maybe turn into something.

When that doesn’t work, I don’t know what to do, you know? And sometimes that doesn’t work, and that’s really tough.”

Given some of the visceral places he has been to as an actor, not least the suicidal abusive junkie boyfriend of Amanda Seyfried’s wide-eyed high-school beauty in David Lynch’s opus Twin Peaks: The Return, I wonder if music is a way for him to battle certain real-life demons.

“I definitely got some kind of sick disease in my head at 18, or something like that, and it was the sense that this ride wasn’t going to last too

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I definitely got some kind of sick disease in my head at 18... and it was the sense that this ride wasn’t going to last too long

long,” he explains. “I was on a very self-destructive path in a lot of ways, and that feeling was just in my head all the time. It felt kind of like the Cheshire Cat sitting up there in the tree – just always there. I hated it, and I didn’t know what to do about it, but every time I made music it felt like I was making sense of something; even if I listened back and it was complete nonsense, it felt like there was something there.”

I can’t help but think it’s significant that Landry Jones seeks some kind of salvation in music because his childhood entrée into a musical universe first came in the environs of the church, playing with his friend in a worship group: “Church was the first kind of space I could make music, but me and my buddy couldn’t make the noises we wanted to make, because as kids we were already way into stuff that was never going to be in the Sunday worship.” But it isn’t only music that has arguably saved him from the darker angels of his nature; acting also proved cathartic in allowing him to actually play them out. “I didn’t scream very much as a teenager… I didn’t yell, I didn’t get angry. There was this aggression in certain aspects of me that was really kind of dormant,” he remembers. “I didn’t know how to allow myself to have these feelings, but some of these characters that I’ve gotten to play have allowed me to kind of push myself in ways that I’ve always been afraid to. It has definitely forced me to look at myself in a lot of different ways and kind of stretch a lot of the things that I was too afraid to look at, or didn’t know how to talk about. I mean, I have been so lucky with the directors I’ve worked with – people I really think of as artists. When I was a kid, to think I would even work with one of those directors, man…”

At this point in our conversation, his face suddenly lights up, and he smiles as his girlfriend arrives with a ready-made joint for him, which he begins to smoke with an almost tangible sense of relief. It makes me think of

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a quote from Cronenberg’s celluloid vision of Naked Lunch, stolen by Bomb The Bass to introduce their 1995 album Clear: “I think it’s time we discussed your, ah, philosophy of drug use as it relates to artistic endeavour.” So I ask him why he smokes pot, and what happens if he doesn’t. “I don’t like finding out, because the time before that it was, yeah… so messy,” he says, taking a long drag. “Since I was 20, I haven’t really wanted to find out too much what life will be like otherwise, because it’s become such a way of…”

He breaks off, thoughtfully, then leans into the screen and animatedly asks me if I’ve seen Tarkovsky’s Solaris. Thankfully, I have, and it helps me make some sense of his next metaphorical leap (spoiler alert: at the end of the 1972 sci-fi classic, we leave its astronaut protagonist wandering inside a facsimile of his childhood home on Earth drawn from his own memory, safely floating somewhere in outer space, surrounded by the gentle rain of a sentient ocean). “I guess I like to think of this cloud being around my head, just like this kind of rain around the house in Solaris, and that kind of keeps everything in; otherwise, I can feel like things are happening too fast, or emotions or thoughts are maybe going too fast… I don’t know,” he says, breaking off to further ponder the creative value of the psychoactive herb.

“I’ll smoke to write a song, and then, when I start recording, I won’t smoke anymore. By the time I’m done recording, I won’t be high. I edit sober and then I get high again, so then I have to re-edit again. I feel like all those things need to happen, so that other things can happen – there’s no time that goes to waste, as long as you’re, you know, doing it.”

There being no time to waste seems to be absolutely key to Landry Jones’s creative drive, and it’s clear he is for a no-holds-barred approach to creating, rather than one defined by preachy pseudo-moral parameters. “I think it’s becoming more and more important for

people to get out there and make stuff and not give two fucks,” he says. “I think it’s vital. I was kind of ranting a bit about this to my girlfriend last night, but I do think there is this responsibility that we have to keep pushing ourselves to keep doing whatever we think is right for ourselves; I mean… what’s beautiful?” There is another pause as this sudden questioning self-reflection ricochets across his skull. “Some people, like my brother, believe there is beauty, and then there’s ugly, and that is definitive, you know? Just like there’s good and evil. But I don’t believe that. I know that sometimes I look at things and I go – that’s beautiful, but it’s also disgusting. I tend to then think back to the Greeks, and how you were not allowed to play this note or play that note because it would rub someone the wrong way. How far does that go?”

It’s a salient and refreshing point of view in an era seemingly defined by wannabe celebrity and fear of social-media censure. In fact, it seems for Landry Jones there should be almost no constriction to the limits of self-actualisation, which might go some way to explain why he is drawn to playing anti-heroes on-screen, and making music that is genuinely impossible to pigeonhole. “You know, I’d like to think that everything happens for a reason,” he says, when I ask him if he is fatalistic, or believes in a random sequential order of things, as we draw to the close of what has been nothing less than an exhilarating rollercoaster of a conversation.

“But then some things happen and you go, Okay… if that happened for a reason, then what the hell am I supposed to get from it? There is probably always something that I’m supposed to learn, though, from everything.” These final thoughts, before we amiably wave goodbye across the digital stratosphere, call to mind the sentiment of another outsider with a penchant for exploring the vast inner landscapes of the human soul – that one need only to buy the ticket, and take the ride.

Groomer: Heather Fitzgerald Production: The Production Factory NY & Red Roan Productions

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Section guest edited by Linsey Young Curator of contemporary British art at Tate Britain

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It might be 2021 but the experiences of women, their lives and creative process, are still too often overlooked and undervalued. I hope that the encounters on these pages offer a small window into what so often remains hidden.

— LINSEY YOUNG

London-based artist Anthea Hamilton – currently working on a new performance with movement director Delphine Gaborit, as well as a permanent garden commission for Studio Voltaire – discusses synthesising nature, anti-performance and the art of gift giving

JUXTA— POSITION WORDS LINSEY YOUNG PORTRAITS ADAMA JALLOH

‘Leg Chair John Travolta’, 2010.

Postcards, perspex, plaster, brass. © Anthea Hamilton. Courtesy of the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery

Right: ‘H is for Hairy Leg’, 2018.

Acrylic, metal clamps, spray paint, rubber, beads, plastic © Anthea Hamilton. Courtesy of the artist, kaufmann repetto, Milan, New York and Thomas Dane Gallery

Anthea Hamilton (born 1978) is a London-based artist whose current practice comprises installation, sculpture, and performance. Her work is always site-specific: a consideration of the location and the cultural and political environment, as well as her personal circumstances at the time, provide the framework for Hamilton’s research.

Intuition then pulls ideas into forms within a non-verbalised structure: kimonos, chastity belts, boots, perfume, furniture, and mime troupes. Conversation and collaboration are also key to the way she works.

Constituted from a combination of objects and images, both found and made, and rooted in a common experience of the world, the environments she produces are live and conversational – at once humorous and serious, dually minimal and maximal.

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Hamilton has exhibited her work worldwide, most recently in solo exhibitions at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; Kaufmann Repetto, Milan; Tate Britain, London; and SculptureCenter, New York. She is currently working on a new performance with movement director Delphine Gaborit for group exhibition The Paradox of Stillness at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and a permanent commission for Studio Voltaire, Clapham, which will open with the gallery’s relaunch in October 2021.

Linsey Young: For the past few months, you’ve been working on a permanent garden commission. Do you feel like you have a close relationship with the natural world? I imagine you approaching it as a set of materials – maybe I’m projecting because I grew up mostly in the wild and you in London?

Anthea Hamilton: I don’t know which way to respond because there are many ways to answer… personally, logically, romantically.

I haven’t got a way that encompasses all. For good and bad, I love the city – I feel agoraphobic in nature. I need that proximity of humanmade decisions in bricks, buildings, systems.

Its fractured and relentless juxtaposition. I can just about grasp how these historical, political, financial and technological systems – so violent and haunting – interweave. Yesterday, I was in Greenwich looking out across the Docklands, the old East End, ‘Royal’ Greenwich, patches of suburbs – seeing across to St Paul’s and Parliament. It’s all a horror, but, nevertheless, I can recognise myself and my personal history in there, whereas the time span of nature floors me. On a practical level, I’m not able to be in nature in terms that I can reconcile with. I don’t

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Installation view, ‘The Squash’, The Duveen Galleries, Tate Britain, London, England, 2018. © Anthea Hamilton/Tate Images.

Courtesy of the artist, Tate, and Thomas Dane Gallery. Photography Seraphina Neville

get to be me there. Nature appears as synthesised in my work – couture squashes, synthetic fur walls, ethnographic garments such as kimonos dyed with eucalyptus, or printed with Roger Phillips’ Wild Food photography. Or bits of lichen, or Murano animals and more vegetables. Even ‘real’ nature gets switched into being an image of itself, much in the same way that the city does; it dehumanises and separates us from nature.

Building a garden from scratch seems such a complex proposition: You’re dealing with the usual demands of a commission, but with the added complexity of a whole new ecosystem.

How do you begin to approach that?

By wanting to see things differently – to position myself in a different context, away from

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spaces and conversations that I’m over familiar with. I’ve always felt like an outsider, but rather than feeling awkward about it, it means being able to feel free to approach other areas of practice with no expectations of myself or them.

I wonder if the performers you work with have similar attributes to the organic materials that will be in the garden?

Not sure. Maybe you can see something I can’t, or you need to tell me a bit more what you mean. Which performers? Which garden? I really don’t know about plants. I’m patching the decisions together from people in my life who are connoisseurs in their own right – from allotment growers to exclusive landscape gardeners, to conversations with those working hard to decolonise gardening. At this point it

doesn’t seem like the same process to working with performers. There are ripples of familiarity, like having to focus in on the myriad of practical details that most likely – and hopefully – pass unobserved to allow for that which is living to thrive, but that’s not truly interesting; that’s about my need for control over things.

I guess I was thinking about ‘The Squash’ in the Duveen Galleries’ commission and how you workshopped their movement with Delphine Gaborit, but perhaps I’m being too literal: squash = squash.

No, not too literal. It was that it was such a basic task that gave the performers so much space: ‘Try to be a vegetable.’ You mentioned earlier about natural things becoming images; well, maybe it’s that Westernised human beings

‘Vulcano Table’, 2014. Blown glass, limestone tiles, powder coated metal. © Anthea Hamilton. Courtesy of the artist, Loewe Foundation and Thomas Dane Gallery. Photography Blaise Adilon

are limited… only perceiving anything other as images, and are ignorant of the fullness and complexity of their lives, their sentience. With ‘The Squash’, one thing that was key to me was that the ‘performers’ didn’t perform or serve the audience. In the audition process, anyone who was impressed by the grandness of the Tate’s architecture, or who needed feedback from viewers, was out. It had to be people who could draw upon their own internal capabilities. Movement came from Delphine’s articulation of that idea into how to move, how to perceive time, how to understand it as a paid gig, too: the ‘squash’ should also be understood as the ‘pressure’.

You’ve told me before about making work as gifts for other people. I know it’s something

that goes unsaid in a finished work, but I wonder if you could explain a little more about that element of your work.

Ha… that’s a funny question from you because you are very, very good at giving gifts – elegant.

I’m terrible at it. It snarls up all my worries about the ‘right way’ to do things. Probably a consequence of never handing over the gifts, I appear ungrateful. It’s the opposite: I’m overwhelmed – paralysed – with gratitude.

For works, maybe not gifts but devotions, or dedications, for a single person – it tunes me into another frequency of decision making not solely based on myself, or the parameters of the place in which the work will be shown. It’s an escapist technique. And I would never tell the focal object it was for them, which is probably a bit creepy when I’d be fine to share it in

university lectures or interviews to large groups of strangers. You refer to creating a space for the performers of ‘The Squash’ in particular.

That work I made for myself: I figured, if the museum was going to ‘give’ me the show, I’d take it, thank you very much. So in terms of devotion, escapism and gift giving, that split the self into several pieces… It’s also important to say that that project was shaped by our working relationship, how we bounced off ideas from one another and the levels of trust we had in each other and the project – that’s a big kind of gift, too. For the performers in the work, I was aware how vulnerable they’d be in that big stone corridor-room-hall, and I wanted to make them a space that was solely for them, to do whatever they needed – even not be there if that was the mood.

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Exploring intergenerational support and sacrifice between contemporary female creatives and their artist matriarchs, the following conversations illuminate the extraordinary work of mothers – spanning tapestry, crochet, paint and papier-mâché – as told by their daughters WORDS LINSEY YOUNG

PHOTOGRAPHY MORWENNA GRACE KEARSLEY

Mother & Child

Elizabeth Radcliffe & Beca Lipscombe Elizabeth Radcliffe is a Scottish tapestry weaver practicing in the classical tradition of hand weaving on a loom. Influenced by the fall of clothing and textiles about the human body, she makes full-figure portraits, to create highly detailed, almost painterly effects of light and texture. Known for combining new and old techniques, Radcliffe has developed a distinctive method of finishing a shaped tapestry.

Her daughter, Beca Lipscombe, is a Scottish fashion and textile designer, printmaker, and one half of Atelier E.B. A Portrait of Elizabeth and Beca in Elizabeth’s house, January 2021

graduate of Central Saint Martins, Lipscombe’s professional practice is multi-layered and draws upon a vernacular aesthetic. This sensibility was evident in both her eponymous label and her work as a freelance designer for various companies including Liberty, Chloé, Stella McCartney and AnnSofie Back.

Now, under the umbrella of Atelier E.B with artist Lucy McKenzie, Lipscombe operates in the space between design, art and commerce, responding to and critiquing the tensions generated by these uneasy bedfellows.

My mum and I rarely discuss our work with one another. She is in her world making up for lost time

‘Cool Bitch and Hot Dog’ at Elizabeth’s degree show, 1978

Linsey Young: A lot of women artists of the ’70s and ’80s in the UK worked with textiles in extraordinary and innovative ways. How did Elizabeth come to work with tapestry and was she engaged with a network of other artists?

Beca Lipscombe: Encouraged by her many elder male colleagues, my mum gave up her first job as a cartographer to be employed by the artist Archie Brennan, who was then the director of Dovecot studios in Edinburgh, to work in the screen-printing element of the studios. This was my mum’s introduction to tapestry.

By the time she f inished her tapestr y degree in the late ’70s, she was a divorced mother with t wo young children. She attended teacher training and once qualified she found a creative outlet in her role as an art teacher. My mum had – and has – many creative friends; however, tapestry is extremely

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Elizabeth weaving at art school, 1977. Photography Theresa McKenna

time consuming, and although it’s changing now, for a long time it was considered highly unfashionable in contemporary art. Many of her cohort from college did not practice tapestry after they left college.

Most tapestries, graphic or abstract, are woven in a square or rectangle. Mum’s figures when woven are cut from the loom and finished truthful to the silhouette of the sitter. I have seen many brilliant tapestries, but none accomplished in this pioneering way.

In her tapestry portraiture she seems largely to focus on portraits of women, was that a conscious decision?

I believe my mother’s choices regarding her sitters or characters come from an elan perspective, rather than gender.

My mum and I see the world through tex-

Right: ‘Youngjoo Yoo’, 2012

tiles. I believe because Scotland was such a prolific textile producing nation, it’s ingrained in the Scottish psyche, especially for my mum’s generation who would have experienced this industry at its finest.

One of my favourite works is ‘Cool Bitch and Hot Dog’ (1978). It’s gorgeous, and the three-dimensional elements like nothing I’d seen before, but I also love it because it seems to capture something of Edinburgh women.

My granny, who lived next to the art school, was a classic Miss Jean Brodie character – wild and contained in equal measure. I know your mum taught art at James Gillespie’s, where Muriel Spark went to school; could you talk a little about that particular east-coast character and how it is expressed in your mum and her work?

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Atelier E.B (Beca Lipscombe & Lucy McKenzie) ‘Paravent Uchiwa-e / Fantasy escalette’, 2015. Courtesy of Galerie Micheline Szwajcer

Mum created ‘Cool Bitch and Hot Dog’ in her final year at art school. It’s a full-scale figure of a woman (Cool Bitch) and her Dalmatian dog (Hot Dog). Charlie Miller, Edinburgh’s equivalent to Glasgow’s Rita Rusk, borrowed the tapestry to stand at the entrance of his eponymous hair salon. Cool and Hot then came to live with us. This work became extended family. I love her, she’s my sort of bitch – woven in two dimensions with a three-dimensional fur coat and accessories.

The Gillespie’s my mother taught at was so different from the Gillespie’s Spark would have attended and wrote about in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Spark was brought up in Bruntsfield in Edinburgh, where James Gillespie’s is located. My mother was brought up in council accommodation in Musselburgh, then Juniper

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Green, on the outskirts of Edinburgh. She was very bright, and, in those days, children were strategically placed into secondary education on their primar y school performance. My mother got into Boroughmuir Secondar y School, located in the same area that Spark grew up; it was a state school where they placed the children they viewed as high achievers. My mum had to travel for hours a day on the bus to get to and from school. She excelled there and became captain of the tennis and hockey teams, and also fenced. When I say this now, I know how it sounds; however, my mum really did come from a working-class background.

People often tell me how much they loved having my mum as their art teacher, which I can imagine is how Miss Brodie’s girls felt about her.

Your mum, like so many of the other women artists I’m researching, has tirelessly juggled roles of artist, mother and breadwinner, having to take time out of the studio to support her family. How do you think that affected her work, and do you think things have changed for women artists, or do you still face similar struggles?

I remember reading that Spark left her family to concentrate on her writing career. I can imagine she was severely judged for this. I am thankful that she was so forward thinking and driven, as we wouldn’t have all her great writing.

Without a doubt women still struggle with their many roles. I can remember my mum having migraines from stress and sleeping a lot when she came home from work. No time or energy was left for her or her own work. My

‘Beca post art school’, 2000

mum only began weaving again in 1999 when she retired from teaching, hence the 20-year gap in her output.

In contrast, my own experiences have been very different. Although I was, at one point, teaching, freelancing and working on my own label, in tandem with bringing up our daughter, I have the most supportive and intelligent ex-partner, and, unusually, I feel at times that perhaps his career may have felt the impact of having a child rather than mine. I also have a business partner and friend who sees me, understands my roles, and gave me the opportunity to get out of teaching.

Elizabeth taught you art at Higher and A level, and, since 2008, you and Lucy have included her work in solo and Atelier E.B exhibitions;

‘Marc Camille Chaimowicz’, 2015.

Photography Ivan Erofeev

in addition, you also live in the same building. Are you able to talk a little about how that works? Do you discuss your projects with each other, or is it telepathic by this stage?

When I attended the art department at Gillespie’s, it was open plan and had at least five art teachers who all brought different skill sets. My mum’s specialist area was design. She was very good at inspiring from a distance. She had a cupboard full of thematically organised folders she had assembled. Most folk who went through the art department remember utilising this great resource. These folders now sit in her studio at home like a time capsule.

We don’t show my mum’s work out of a familial obligation. We hold her work in high regard and view her as our contemporary.

Myself, my brother and my mother live

in the same building, however we have separate dwellings. Our f amily experienced real tragedy when I was little and only now do I realise this is probably why we all stick together in independent yet close proximity. The house is an old whisky bond that was bought in the early ’80s by my mum and her partner at the time. We were working on this derelict building as a family when my mum’s partner died at the age of 34; therefore, this building remains an incredibly special place to us – it’s brought up three generations of women. My mum has her tapestry studio in her home, and I have my print studio on the ground floor.

My mum and I rarely discuss our work with one another. She is in her world making up for lost time.

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Above: France-Lise McGurn in the artist’s kitchen, Glasgow, with crochet figure and wall paintings by Rita McGurn Right: Rita McGurn

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Rita McGurn & France-Lise McGurn

Rita McGurn was a self-taught artist and designer. She began work as an interior designer when she and her family moved to Zambia in the ’60s. Upon returning to Glasgow, she moved into production design on commercials and films. McGurn created an extensive body of work in a wide range of materials and across disciplines, and was commissioned to make the smokestack sculpture for the Twomax building in the Gorbals, which still stands, and can be seen on the Woman’s Library Tour of Glasgow. Painting, papier-mâché and crochet were among the central methods in her practice.

France-Lise McGurn is a Scottish painter who creates layered installations, often incorporating studio-made works with the gallery walls, floors and ceilings. Working indirectly from an archive of images, her figurative compositions are made intuitively and stretch from canvas to wall to evoke movement and the process of recollection.

She has recently had exhibitions at Pasquart Kunsthaus Centre d’Art, Bienne; Tramway, Glasgow; and Simon Lee Gallery, London.

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Above: The living room, including tall ‘Lizal’ crochet figure and crocheted cushions by Rita McGurn

Opposite (clockwise from top left): Wall-mounted painted wooden plates by Rita McGurn; A crochet figure in the hall made by

Linsey Young: When I was at university, I lived at the end of your road; we didn’t know each other at the time, but I clearly remember always trying to steal a look at your mum when I walked past the house. She was so beautiful and always seemed to be working on something fabulous that I couldn’t quite see from my position peering in from the street!

France-Lise McGurn: It’s so funny you used to pass by the window; I love that. It was such an open view; it never bothered mum that people could see in. We were always a very open house with an open-door policy too, always full and bustling. I used to get recognised in the street and asked, “Are you the girl who lives in the house with all the paintings?” She was always making, and she told me as a little girl she was constantly drawing and creating things, but that art school just didn’t seem like something she could do, because her grandparents – who raised her – thought they would need money.

My memory of mum is that she would be cook-

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Rita McGurn; A collection of paintings by Rita McGurn in the stairwell at the artist’s home

ing, painting, crocheting, moving furniture, painting it, scribbling in notebooks, and hosting the family, all at the same time and with equal energy.

She didn’t need to take herself away to paint in another room; there could be a full house, the telly on, the fire going, and she would be smashing plates in the garden to make a mosaic. I vaguely remember the beginning of her oil paintings, but it didn’t start with one – she was so prolific it started with 20 somehow. She certainly created in bodies of work; she would become obsessed with one material and the whole house would shift... It would be painted completely in leopard skin, or suddenly be populated by papier-mâché figures.

That sounds like the most perfect house to grow up in. Did your mum ever work with a gallery or have formal exhibitions?

It was! No, she never worked with a gallery in a formal way. She did have some exhibitions,

in Compass Gallery in the early ’80s, and some organised with my dad, in Virginia Court and Ingram Street. Iota gallery, in Partick, Glasgow, were very supportive of Mum’s practice and commissioned a wall piece in 2014, and she had several public commissions, including the Grand Ole Opry, on the south side of Glasgow. She worked as a set designer, and in interior design, so making artwork was simply something she did all the time; it wasn’t with a view to exhibiting. I mean, she liked to, but the work was getting made either way!

The feminist artists I’m researching often worked with domestic materials because they were available and affordable. I wonder if it was similar for Rita?

Very much so. Everything was fair game; any surface or material could be used. My mum was born in the Calton area of Glasgow; her grandad had a stall on the Barras market (he cut keys and sold pets if I remember rightly), and she

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Crochet heads in shelves, bedroom, created by Rita McGurn

had her own stall years later. The Barras had a huge impact on her, finding bits of whatever she could get her hands on. I think that’s why the crochet was such a big part of her work; she could do it anywhere, anytime, and it was easy to get job lots of wool. I remember somehow she got her hands on some IZAL toilet paper (the shiny stuff – if you know, you know), a lot of it, and it became a 15-foot figure which now stands in my dad’s hallway.

She would use anything that was lying around or not being used, even if just for a minute. There was a joke that if you stood still too long in our house, she would turn you into a sculpture,

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freeze you for soup, or paint you Hammerite blue. We all lost some good jumpers to those crochet figures, as stuffing or just stitched right in.

She has such a distinctive aesthetic – did she ever talk about artists or makers that influenced her?

Mum certainly drew influence from people she loved – like Chaïm Soutine, Philippe Starck – but to be dead honest, she wasn’t a follower; she didn’t have heroes. She would get enchanted by a painting, artist or designer, but then she could fall out of love with them. I recall a fleeting adoration of Paula Rego and Darcey Bussell, but she

was mysterious like that, driven by something else – a kind of horror vacui.

She worked in set design?

She started working in interior decor in Zambia. My parents lived there for five or so years in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and she worked on set design for films and commercials when they got back. I believe she started on photography shoots and then in film with Charlie Gormley, a filmmaker and my Dad’s best pal. She later did theatre too, which she loved… maybe not some of the more corporate gigs, but I remember all the props: 300 fake fish in the bath in particular.

France-Lise McGurn, ‘Self-Control’, 2019.

Courtesy of Simon Lee Gallery London

She must have been thrilled when you went to art school. Did you ever talk about your work together?

She was happy; however, we never really got to the stage where we discussed artwork together, because mainly she was a mum. It would have come eventually, but I didn’t have an exhibition to speak of when she was alive. She would definitely get worried… feared that I would be shit at it, or rejected. I remember her grimaced face asking if I had got accepted to art school. She was worried for me because I think she knew being in art could break your heart.

She was delighted for me, despite the fact

she never got a chance to go herself, but it wasn’t her style to think like that; she simply loved making. Her lack of training didn’t bother her. She said she would be happy whatever her children did, as long as they were happy. The one exception was if we went into the police force…

In terms of making work, has any element of her practice informed what you do?

Her wall paintings are a direct influence, and certainly my fixation with figuration started there. One of the most influential things about my mum’s work was her approach: I didn’t learn

about the ‘serious artist in their studio’ until I went to art school. I realised when I got there that there was an incredibly pretentious view of artists, and they painstakingly laid out their palettes, discussing paint hues and theory. For me, work happened compulsively, constantly and with a lot of love. I was lucky to not feel afraid of it or have a restricted view. Of course, I have had a very different life than mum, and a lot of different opportunities and training, so my set up is more normal. But it carries through, her fearlessness and dedication.

Special thanks to Peter McGurn

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Section guest edited by Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin Founders of Studio Formafantasma

When thinking of who to invite to contribute to this issue, we quickly drafted a list of practitioners that are challenging the borders of their discipline with expertise and intelligence. Collectively, their works are precise tools for dissecting contemporary ecological concerns. They do so by testing the boundaries of the most underestimated human sense, smell (Sissel Tolaas); exposing the possibilities and problematics of technologies when intersecting with the organic world (Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg); adapting the tools of architecture to deconstruct the hidden infrastructure of ecological destruction (Paulo Tavares); and through philosophical reflection in order to empathise with the nonhuman living creatures with whom we share planet Earth (Emanuele Coccia). For us, their work is not only a form of inspiration, but also of an ethical and intellectual standard we aim to achieve with our own practice. — ANDREA TRIMARCHI AND SIMONE FARRESIN

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A Theology of Matter WORDS EMANUELE COCCIA

ARTWORKS CECILIA BONILLA

Emanuele Coccia is a philosopher and associate professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, writing on nature, art, theology and fashion. Here, he considers the age of the Anthropocene and the natural tools available to redesign our technological, biological and climatic balance

1.

The era that has just begun is unlike any other that history – human and non-human – has recorded to date. It is not the random result of a deviation of elements in the landscape. It is not the outcome of the emergence of new eyes and new minds observing the world. The break with the past has been much greater. It is not the inhabitants of the planet that have changed: It is the planet itself.

In the last few decades, the Earth has undergone an unprecedented acceleration on a technological, biological, climatic and geological level. An immense army of machines and artefacts has covered the Earth’s soil and consumes huge amounts of energy to maintain itself. Thousands of species have disappeared, triggering unstoppable mechanisms of alteration of ecological balances built during centuries of common evolution. The new climate regime is imposing changes on the life form and geographical distribution of thousands of plants, animals and species, transforming the balance of biomes. All the activities carried out by men have transformed the geological surface to such an extent that it is incomparable to what it once was.

We are all on a different planet from the one our ancestors knew, described, and painted.

It is as if we have now all landed – humans, plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, archaea – on another planet. We are pioneers: new Eves and Adams, forced to explore the world, to give names to the living and to things, to skin our knees walking through territories uninhabited until this point. But unlike the biblical myth, it is we who must transform this new planet into a habitable garden.

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2.

We owe everything to stones.

We live, mostly, in constructions made of stones. They are no longer caves but enormous mineral constructions that we model in diverse forms. We spend the vast majority of our day surrounded by stones of all kinds. It is within stone spaces that we eat, sleep, make love, cook, wash, and regenerate. It is between walls of stones with different chemical compositions that we think, imagine, dream, write, draw, and build works of art.

Stones are not only the silent witnesses of our lives, they accompany us in other forms as well. We use stone and metal tools to get around. We call them automobiles and they are glass and metal objects that feed on a strange form of liquid stone – oil – and allow us to move on land. Other metallic objects, airplanes, also extracted from stone, allow us to move in the sky. Other artefacts, ships – produced through a combination of metals – allow us to move on water. Due to these modified stones, we are able to profoundly transform our lives, as well as the lives of the entire planet. Thanks to them, our species has radically multiplied its movements, redefined the fauna and flora of every space on Earth, and fundamentally transformed the very geography of the planet and the universe. Virtual corridors of stone have opened, everywhere, to allow all species to change position and migrate.

But other stones determine our lives today.

It is in objects composed of stones and minerals – computers – that we record all our memories and thoughts. Polymers, plastics, ceramics, copper, iron, nickel, and silicon. Our brains are now made of the same substance as the planet.

Our archives are made of the same material as the planet. And it is thanks to black stones – mobile phones – that we are able to communicate with anyone on the entire surface of the planet. Copper, silver, gold, tantalum, nickel, dysprosium, praseodymium, terbium, neodymium, gadolinium, silicon, oxygen, antimony, arsenic, phosphorus, gallium, and much more.

The Earth allows us to connect with anyone.

Our feelings are now conveyed not only by our bodies, but by the body of Gaia itself; it is as if we have transferred more and more of our life back into her body. As if we have made the Earth an appendage, a prosthesis of our own bodies.

3.

This humanisation of the body of the Earth has been called the Anthropocene. We wanted to acquire all the powers of the Earth, take possession of all the strength of the stones, occupy the matter of the planet with our thoughts, our emotions, our life. It has been an unconscious form of narcissistic obsession: We have demanded at all costs that our face be reflected on that of the planet. We have tried to mask its appearances. We could have tried the opposite: to let ourselves be invaded by the planet, to let ourselves be crossed by its forces, be shaped by its powers. But it is a path that is both more dangerous and more difficult. Letting ourselves be breached by Gaia means having to accept to change shape often, to transmit our life to other species, to consider the human form a simple mobile configuration of the planet’s life. It would have meant, above all, recognising that we are already of the same flesh as the planet, and that we do not need to impose a form on it to recognise our familiarity.

The design of the future will have to try to break out of this dialectic. To do so, we must try to work in two directions. First, recognise the deep integration between all the stones and the sky. The Earth is not an isolated reality in the cosmos; it is made of the same material of which all the sky is made, and to manipulate the earth is to manipulate the sky – to give form to the material divinity. Design is a form of theology of matter.

Secondly, the task of design will be to affirm once and for all the unity and equivalence of all materials. The Earth is not only the place of the disjunction of the destinies of species and materials, but the place of their recomposition and equality. Each species is the evolution – that is, the metamorphosis and recycling – of other species. This is also true for all matter.

The Earth is the equivalence of all stones. Gaia is the only philosopher’s stone.

We are all on a different planet from the one our ancestors knew, described and painted

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DesPaulo Tavares, the Brazilian architect and researcher, examines the conflict and space between cities, territories, and ecologies.

Des-Habitat is a graphic-textual investigation into the modernist magazine Habitat and its complicit relationship to the colonial violence that shaped 20th-century Brazil

Habitat WORDS PAULO TAVARES

Cover collages of Des-Habitat

by Paulo Tavares

Created in 1950 by Italo-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, the arts and architecture magazine Habitat – revista das artes no Brasil (Magazine of the Arts in Brazil) – was one of the most important vehicles by which modernism was debated and diffused in Brazil after the Second World War. Habitat was part of a larger project gestated at the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) under the guidance of curator Pietro Maria Bardi, Bo Bardi’s collaborator and partner and the founding director of the museum, which opened in 1947. In its heroic years MASP pioneered a unique pedagogic programme, establishing a series of outreaching initiatives with the aim of forming a public constituency around modern art, architecture, and design. Besides showing consecrated European modernists, this programme included the realisation of so-called “didactic exhibitions” on art history; the creation of the Institute of Contem-

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porary Art, a Bauhaus-inspired design school; and Habitat, its own printed medium, which was published until 1965.

Habitat not only propagated images of modern art and design, but also images of popular and indigenous cultures, introducing its audience, the urban elites of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, to the vocabulary of modernism and vernacular and native forms of cultural expression at the same time. Images of Amerindian ceramics, ornaments, and paintings were placed in relation to a constellation of images of contemporary art, architecture, and design, performing a pivotal function in defining the modern sensibility that the magazine sought to impress upon its public-in-the-making.

The articulation between the indigenous and the modern was often didactically conveyed through the texts that accompanied the images, explaining to the reader how indigenous draw-

ings were comparable to the “most sophisticated contemporary painter”, their ornaments with the designs of a “European stylist”, their ceramics aesthetically equivalent to avant-garde sculptures: “some Picassos in thongs, silently modelling their anonymous oeuvre”. Further, the magazine’s constructivist, neat graphic design often displayed images in such a way as to emphasise this relation on the visual plane.

To be modern, Habitat pedagogically communicates, is to be connected both to the language of modernism as well as to popular, indigenous, “primitive” forms of art. Figurations of the primitive, the indigenous, and the wild played a central role in shaping the modern movement in Brazil, and for that matter of modernism tout court. Different from the European context, however, where the avant-gardes sought a radical break from past and tradition, the encounter of Brazilian modernists with the

The crucial question they ask is far from anything related to the ‘ethnographic art’ they show; it rather concerns that which is outside the frame

Collage artwork by Paulo Tavares

primitive was associated with the fabrication of national culture and identity.

By virtue of its pedagogic design and language, Habitat framed the images of indigenous bodies, arts, and crafts as if they were displayed in a space between the ethnographic museum and the museum of modern art, objects detached from their social and territorial milieu, which should be contemplated as autonomous works of art. Likewise, such framing bracketed out the social processes by which these images were produced. The crucial question they ask is far from anything related to the ‘ethnographic art’ they show; it rather concerns that which is outside the frame. For what was the historical and social context that allowed such images of indigenous bodies and objects to be produced, reproduced, and circulate in sophisticated mass media publications as formal references to the ‘new language’?

Image from the archive of the Brasil Central Foundation, one of the state-led expeditions realised in the 1940s–1960s, showing an aerial view of the complex Hotel JK on Bananal Island

After the 1930 revolution, which initiated the 15-year rule of Getúlio Vargas, the Brazilian state embarked on an aggressive project of hinterland colonisation. Government policies, such as the ‘March to the West’, prompted a series of expeditions with the aim of establishing outposts and towns across the unexplored territories of central Brazil. By the late 1950s, under the democratic presidency of Juscelino Kubitschek, this frontier ideology was being pursued through ambitious projects of territorial and regional modernisation, the most expressive of which was Brasília, the modernist capital city built from scratch at the centre of the country. As urban planner Lúcio Costa wrote, Brasília was conceived as “a deliberate act of possession, a gesture similar to that of explorers, in the mode of the colonial tradition”.

In order to accomplish this project, the Brazilian state counted on an agency dedicated to

[1 – Hotel; 2, 3 – Annexes; 4 – Airport / Military Base; 5, 6 – Indigenous Village; 7 – Araguaia River].

Courtesy of Brazil National Archive

govern indigenous affairs called Indian Protection Service or SPI. The SPI was responsible for executing what was then officially known as the “pacification” of indigenous groups whose territories were designated to development projects. Founded in 1910, SPI’s ideology and practice of protection was integrationist and expansionist, aimed at transforming indigenous populations into national citizens while at the same time opening their lands for colonisation. The agency actualised forms of territorial and social control developed by colonial administrators and missionaries, displacing and concentrating communities in centralised villages, thereby containing their movements and depopulating vast territories in order to appropriate their lands.

By 1950, when Habitat was first published, the SPI counted on more than a hundred outposts distributed across the Brazilian territory.

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Gift-giving was a widely-used tactic in contacting indigenous groups. Courtesy of the Museum of the Indian-FUNAI

Collage artwork by Paulo Tavares

SPI – Section of Studies, “Distribution of clothes and gifts to the indians”, Indigenous Post of Attraction Curisevo, Scientific and Documentary Exploration of the Curisevo River, photography by Heinz Foerthmann, 1945.

Initially serving as ‘advanced bases’ where indigenous groups were coerced to move, encampments gradually developed into farming colonies governed by SPI officers where communities were indoctrinated into the habits of western civilisation, agricultural labour, and the ideologies of nationalism.

The activities of the SPI were extensively documented in texts, photographs, and films, especially after the creation of the Section of Studies in 1942, an associated bureau under the leadership of anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro dedicated to registering the culture of the indigenous groups that were being ‘pacified’ by the agency. The images and imaginaries of the indigenous, the primitive, and the wild that informed the modern movements in the metropolitan areas were furnished by the circulation of photos, films, and artefacts that were captured and collected during the pacification mis-

sions conducted by the SPI, as well as a series of other exploratory incursions that increasingly penetrated the Brazilian hinterlands during the 20th century. Moreover, in the 1940s and 1950s these exploratory missions became connected to burgeoning practices of photojournalism whose images were diffused not only by the general-interest illustrated magazines of that time, but also by architectural publications such as Habitat.

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The Karajá people, an indigenous nation that for centuries has inhabited the banks of the Araguaia River in central Brazil, was one of the groups who most prominently featured in the pages of Habitat. Not only was their sculptural ceramic work easily comparable to modernist art, thus serving as an excellent pedagogic device, but by that time it was also easy to get access to these objects and their images.

Since the 18th century, the Karajá villages were targeted by countless missionary and colonising fronts. From the 1930s onwards, their territory was subjected to a series of state interventions by the Vargas regime, including the instalment of SPI outposts and a base of the Brazilian air force. Journalists and photographers came alongside the pacifiers, and the Karajá land turned into a highly mediatised space from where images of nature, primitiveness and national identity were produced, diffused, and manipulated.

In 1956, Habitat issues 33, 34, and 35 published a sequence of long essays on the Karajá by photojournalist Mario Baldi, who often accompanied the expeditions of the SPI. Baldi’s ethnographically informed narrative portrays the Karajá as an isolated cultural entity and erases much of the context that made it possible for him to construct such a narrative. The only

Modern design functioned as a tool to block out the social violence implied in that gaze, fabricating a modern experience of primitiveness and wilderness whose foundations were essentially colonial

Collage artwork by Paulo Tavares

traces of it are registered in a short comment

by Baldi: “Before, they used to live dispersed in many villages. In 1936, I visited twenty-seven of them... today, however, all of them, or at least the great majority, live on the Bananal Island where they have been concentrated by the SPI.” By the time these images were published in Habitat, the Karajá territory was undergoing another intense process of territorial and social transformations due to new state-led colonial initiatives. Together with Brasília, the Kubitschek administration envisioned the creation of a luxurious tourism complex on Bananal Island, in the heart of the Karajá ancestral territory, for which architect Oscar Niemeyer was commissioned. Conceived as a tropical resort for the political and bureaucratic elites of the new capital, Hotel JK was built next to the Karajá village of Santa Isabel do Morro, or Hawaló. Niemeyer’s project, with its panoramic

view over the river island, translated the articulation between modernism, the primitive, and the wild into a lived experience mediated by means of an architectural panoptic display. From the hotel windows, the Indians could be observed in the same fashion as their images appeared in the pages of Habitat, suspended in between a modern and a colonial gaze. Modern design functioned as a tool to block out the social violence implied in that gaze, fabricating a modern experience of primitiveness and wilderness whose foundations were essentially colonial.

The images published in Habitat are representative of a paradoxical preservationist impulse of collecting and archiving the ‘heritage’ of indigenous populations at a moment when their lands were being rapidly encroached and their modes of life were increasingly threatened. In 1957, one year after the publication of Baldi’s photo-essays

in Habitat, Ribeiro published an appalling report demonstrating that most of the 230 indigenous groups known in Brazil in the early 1900s were on the verge of total disintegration due to the violence of colonial contact. In less than 60 years the indigenous population of Brazil had diminished by over 80 per cent, and those who survived were living in wretched conditions.

The Karajá were amongst the most affected nations. Observing the images of Habitat carefully, but also looking to what they do not show, we realise they are close-ups of one of the most dramatic periods in the history of the people they portray, taken at a time when the Karajá population had reached a demographic historic low. They say nothing about ‘the primitive’, but reveal much of the colonial violence inherent to the moderns. Outside the frame, we see episodes of dispossession, des-territorialisation, des-habitat.

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Dr Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg explores the fraught relationship between the natural world and technology. Spanning artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, conservation, and evolution, her artwork considers how dreams of a brighter future shape our designs, for better or worse

GARDEN OF EDEN WORDS IMOGEN WEST-KNIGHTS

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Previous spread: Preparatory sketch of ‘Pollinator’ by Dr Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, 2020

Often, what we call ‘good design’ is design that makes something better.

However, what we mean by ‘better’ varies enormously. Do we mean better looking: more visually appealing? More economical?

More efficient? And when we say that things have been made better, it begs the unspoken question: better for whom?

These questions – and how they relate to our attempts to design the natural world, in particular – are central to the multidisciplinary work of the artist Dr Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, whose next commission will open at the Eden Project in spring this year as a permanent installation.

“To paraphrase Margaret Atwood: better for some will always mean worse for others,” she tells me. “That’s incredibly important to me.”

Ginsberg has taken a roundabout route to seeing herself as an artist first and foremost.

She started out studying architecture, followed

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her nose into design, and eventually went into the realm of synthetic biology and biotechnology, through a master’s degree in design interactions at the Royal College of Art. “I was learning about engineers who were designing DNA,” she explains, “and I started to wonder: What would good design be like if it was made out of biology? And what is the role of the designer, and who gets to decide?” Thinking along these lines led her to write her PhD on the notions of ‘better’ in the context of the dreams realised through design and technology, and post PhD she began to make artworks that explore these notions even further.

In 2019, she exhibited a suite of four works.

‘Resurrecting the Sublime’ was a series of immersive installations for visitors to experience the smell of three long-extinct flowers, whose fragrances had been brought back in collaboration with the biotech company Ginkgo Bioworks

Above: ‘The Wilding of Mars’, 2019.

Photography Ed Reeves

and smell researcher and artist Sissel Tolaas.

‘The Substitute’, commissioned by the Cooper Hewitt museum, consisted of a video of a digitally rendered northern white rhino winking in and out of existence, a subspecies on the verge of extinction that scientists hope to resurrect by implanting harvested eggs and sperm from one of the species into a southern white rhino.

‘Machine Auguries’, part of Somerset House’s 24/7 show, was a sound-and-light installation featuring a dawn chorus produced by AI trained on bird song to explore the effects of night light and noise pollution on birds’ ability to communicate. In ‘The Wilding of Mars’ at the Design Museum, Ginsberg explored the idea of sending 16 plant species chosen with help from NASA to ‘colonise’ Mars instead of humans, and exhibited pairs of video simulations of the possible outcomes doing so could produce on the planet in thousands of years’ time.

There could hardly be a more suitable time to be making work about what an improved future might consist of. “The last year has seen the crumbling of the structures upholding modernity and ideas of what a better world looks like,” says Ginsberg. “All these intertwined emergencies that we’ve seen around health, social justice, inequality, the climate, biodiversity, and the economy – these are all problems manifesting from the modern world that we’ve built. The question is, are they too complex to find solutions that are better for us all?”

And by all, she decidedly means the non-human world as well as ours. Her work asks whether it is possible for us as humans to reprioritise other species over our own, a possibility that can seem farfetched. “Humans exploit nature. That’s what we do. I think I’m not hopeful,” she tells me, “but in me there is optimism.”

Although her work is speculative, looking at possible different worlds, it is not exclusively about the future. The past and the present can also be the location of our shared societal fictions. “Golden Ages are social imaginaries,” she notes. “Things like ‘Make America great again’, or ‘Bring back control’ reflect an imagined past that somehow a group of people buy into, and these powerful fictions can affect the present and the future. So whether the other world that you create is in the future, the past, or parallel to the present, it’s about creating a space for reflection.”

This notion of a simple space for the viewer to reflect is important to Ginsberg, and is one of the greatest strengths of her work. Each project is the culmination of often highly complex scientific research and takes on philosophical ideas, but each one can be enjoyed by a viewer with no prior experience in these fields. “What I

really want the person experiencing the work to do is to feel something, an emotional response; then they can look further, but it’s really important to me that you don’t need to read the label,” she says.

Having made these four works that create what she terms an “immersive, emotional space” for a viewer, she is now grappling with a difficult problem for any artist making work around ecological crisis. “I was left with the question: what am I asking the viewer to do?

What on earth do we do? We’re fucked. What’s my contribution? We can put stuff in a gallery and people can look at it and feel sad, but how can I give agency?”

Her upcoming work for the Eden Project’s large outdoor plot is a partial answer. “I was asked to propose an artwork about pollinators, but I decided I wanted to make an artwork for

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The last year has seen the crumbling of the structures upholding modernity and ideas of what a better world looks like

Stills from ‘The Wilding of Mars’, 2019.

Courtesy of Dr Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg

pollinators,” she explains. “The way we’ve understood design has been about the manufacture of stuff, as part of capitalism. But design can mean other things; other organisms design.

Is it possible to help other species to create a better world for them? Or in doing so are we always creating a better world for ourselves?”

She decided to design a garden by algorithm that would be optimised from the perspective of bees and other pollinators, using plants they prefer, in arrangements that include reducing the distances they need to fly to visit similar flowers. They’re not necessarily the ones most beautiful to the human eye, which is often the guiding principle by which we design a garden.

In partnership with Eden’s horticulturists and

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external experts, she is building a database of these pollinator-friendly plants, and an algorithm that dictates where on the plot they will be planted for maximum blooming periods over the year. “Hopefully we’re going to create a garden that looks really strange, very different to a tastefully laid out, human-planned garden!”

The second part of the project, and the part that gives that all-important agency to the viewer, is making the algorithm available online to the public, so people can plant their own version of the garden. “I was very inspired by being under lockdown while creating the proposal. Pollen, data, seeds, these are all things that can travel while we’re locked down at home,” she adds.

Designing the natural world can be an uneasy undertaking. Instinctively, something feels unheimlich, even ethically dubious, about engineering what is natural. But Ginsberg’s works taken as a whole show a confidence that posing questions around this unease is just as valuable an undertaking as proposing solutions to them.

“The more I learned, the more I realised that these boundaries between nature and technology are artificial, as is the idea of nature itself,” she concludes. “Broccolis aren’t natural, they were bred for human benefit. My puppy is not a natural wolf, he’s half poodle. Genetic modification is nothing new. It’s not so much the technology, it’s what we do with it – who gets to decide – that is interesting and messy.”

‘The Substitute’, 2019.

Courtesy of Dr Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg

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ON A MOLECU— LAR LEVEL For 30 years, interdisciplinary artist Sissel Tolaas has been leading pioneering research on the subject of smell. At a time of sensory crisis, how does the act of olfaction – chemical communication – transcend the boundaries of individual and communal, organic and manmade, human and animal? WORDS HANNAH WILLIAMS 118

Last spring, I went on daily walks to my local park as part of the exercise allowed under lockdown. I’d walk through the formal flower garden, with its fleshy hyacinths breaking through the ground, its tulips unfurling their petals like the wings of a bird. But it was the wisteria I came for, a vast purple arch of it – its scent sweet and ripe and animal. Each day that I visited, I saw more people stand beneath it, eyes closed, nostrils raised, taking in the smell of the flowers, an almost communal experience. The timing of this public act felt profound: As the pandemic raged on, we learnt more about its effect on our ability to smell and taste. Friends who caught the virus told me how bewildering it was to suddenly experience anosmia; one took to chopping and eating cloves of raw garlic to gauge his recovery. People suddenly realised how valuable smell was to their enjoyment of life, as though they wanted to experience the world around

them to the fullest extent, to interact with it on a deeper, more intrinsic level. Smell became a commonality, a shared way of communicating when we could no longer see or touch.

The importance of smell – the way in which it transcends the boundaries of individual and communal, human and animal, organic and manmade – is central to artist and smell researcher, Sissel Tolaas. Founder of the Smell Re_Search Lab in Berlin (supported by fragrances giant IFF Inc), Tolaas has conducted research at most of the world’s eminent universities and participated in exhibitions at major galleries across the globe, as well as for commercial clients like Tesla, Balenciaga and Adidas. Her practice spans chemistry, linguistics, medicine, and fine art and design, with Tolaas referring to herself as a “professional in-betweener”. I ask her why she came to use that phrase. “I have called myself a ‘professional in-betweener’ since I was a child,” she explains.

“Because there are smells all the time, everywhere, I can’t limit myself to one specific area or profession. It was important for me to try to understand the topic of smell both from the perspectives of science and the humanities. I didn’t know where I was heading; I only knew I was heading somewhere unexplored.”

This blurring of boundaries has resulted in a process of constant experimentation and analysis, drawing inspiration from a host of unconventional and disparate sources. Starting points, Tolaas tells me, can be “actual issues in the world such as climate change, inequality, politics. But a singular molecule or a random smell can get my attention and become the sole focus.” An underpinning of openness informs all that she does: “Being passionate, alert, and alive inspires me to always move beyond my comfort zone.” Above all, her work requires the ability to identify patterns, to stitch together scraps of information, to decode the world around her: smell as transla-

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Previous spread, left: Fieldwork and smell molecule recording in Greenland, 2019

tion. “Smells, or chemical signals, link the world together all the time, all over. Now is the time to make sense of it.”

Like any scientist, her research involves fieldwork, a process of interacting, observing and engaging with her environment. Tolaas defines this as “active smelling”, which involves collecting and recording her smell sources and then chemically replicating them. The archive she’s gained from this is vast: a database of 15,000 such chemical molecules and molecular structures. Also integral to her practice is “smell coding”, or the practice of “giving an abstract smell a content code”. She explains this using the example of natural gas: Despite being naturally odourless, after a deadly explosion in the 19th century, scientists added “three abstract smell molecules”, meaning that we’re now instantly able to recognise a gas leak – a sign that transcends language and cultural boundaries. It’s these “narratives” that Tolaas is interested in uncovering, leading to an understanding “beyond semiotics”.

The practical functions of smell molecules in areas we may not immediately associate with smell are another source of enquiry.

“One singular smell molecule can help you sleep better, another one can make you more alert, and one can even make you cry on the spot,” the researcher notes. “I use smell molecules – on myself and in my surroundings – for various purposes: stay away, come closer, be aware, listen to me. The invisible is talking, and it works.” We see these concepts at play in (N)visible, her collaboration with jeweller Georg Hornemann, which involves rings – silver, domed like a cardinal’s hat – that contain functional smells designed to attract, repel, or focus. Backing this up with hard evidence is where the advanced technology of the Re_Search Lab comes in handy. MEG and fMRI scans allow Tolaas to investigate how molecules can affect us throughout our brains and bodies. She’s optimistic about the radical potential of this work: “Can a smell molecule one day be used to kill a cancer cell? I truly believe so.”

When I ask Tolaas about how Covid-19 has affected her way of relating to smell, she reflects that it’s allowed her to examine her own body as a site of experimentation. “Now I have time to smell myself. I am trying to detect unfamiliar smell molecules and chemical compounds emitting from various microbes that my body is

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Previous spread, right: Fieldwork and smell molecule recording in New Zealand, South Pacific, 2018

hosting.” Although the virus may be new, she’s quick to point out that pathogens are integral to the world we inhabit – “They perform an important role in the ecosystem” – and sees echoes of her work in the way that “chemical compounds are used by all species, including bacteria and viruses, for communication.”

Still, Tolaas tells me, she’s sensed a stepchange in the way we interact with our environments. She’s conscious of the renewed attention being paid to smell – “Never before have we been more aware of what the sense of smell is. Hopefully, this will remain” – and throughout the pandemic, she’s recorded air and breath samples (“to try and catch some of the fear and anxiety that I sense all over”). She’s given each day an abstract smell molecule – “a smell content code” – which she says will inspire memories of this period, eventually creating what she terms a “Covid artefact”, and jokes that “a molecule a day keeps the enemy away!” Despite the horror of the virus, Tolaas is hopeful that it can spur us to think about the necessity of interconnectedness, the futility of pretending we exist in isolation. “This is the moment to seriously accept that we are not alone, and that in and outside of our bodies there are multiple living organisms we have to learn from and co-exist with.”

It’s this emphasis on smell’s ability to destabilise boundaries, as well as to uphold them, that Tolaas sees as key to realising this understanding. She points out how smell continues to be used to “reinforce social hierarchies at a semi- or sub-conscious level”, weaponised to police distinctions in class, gender and culture.

“Smells have become more and more defined by ‘good’ and ‘bad’, rhetoric that divides rather than connects.” In contrast, Tolaas believes that it’s the inherent universality of smell – not just among humans, but among animals, plants, bacteria – that is key to creating a common language. “In my research and work, I try to reset and return to where it all began. I am trying to understand how plants and animals communicate using smells, which opens up opportunities to study olfactory communication between all creatures.” She stresses the importance of finding equilibrium in this process, of exploring what we can learn from the world around us, saying, “To be able to coexist with other living matter, we have to re-learn to be tolerant.”

And how best to do this? It’s clear to her: “This must start with the nose.”

Below: Smell RE_searchLab Berlin.

Photographs Courtesy of Sissel Tolaas

Can a smell molecule one day be used to kill a cancer cell?

I truly believe so

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Section guest edited by Michael Shannon

So many people I would love to talk with, to interview. I could do this over and over again with a different theme every time. Asking questions of people you genuinely respect can be thrilling. These are two people I genuinely respect. People who share a healthy degree of concern for the future of the world and humanity. Who never forget that ideally the work we make reverberates beyond pure sensory satisfaction to a place of questioning, of extraction and exactitude. It’s hard not to feel like making movies isn’t a silly waste of time, but when artists such as Katherine and Ramin stir the pond, the ripples are worth paying attention to as the sun sets on another frivolous and excruciatingly important day. They’re pitching in, so to speak. And they have both challenged me to work harder, to ask more of myself, and to examine more closely, more rigorously, the world around me.

I thank them for putting up with me, and I thank you for your attention.

— MICHAEL SHANNON

Equally comfortable performing Chekhov as she is working with the likes of Paul Thomas Anderson or Ridley Scott, leaving indelible stamps on independent features and Hollywood blockbusters alike, the Anglo-American actor can do it all. In an intimate conversation, Waterston reflects on climate change, the limits of language and how motherhood will forever shape future performances

KATHERINE WATERSTON WORDS MICHAEL SHANNON

STYLING MARIANTHI HATZIKIDI

PHOTOGRAPHY GUEN FIORE

Michael Shannon: It’s been a while.

Katherine Waterston: That’s true.

Your new film, The World to Come, was extraordinary. How did it come to you?

The director, Mona Fastvold, sent me the script and after reading the first page, I didn’t read the rest for a week. I got scared – it was that good.

There was a line: “At night I often wonder if those who have been my intimates have found me to be a steep hill whose view does not repay the ascent.” I found the character – a rural New England woman in the mid-1800s with no prospects, no autonomy – who was kept up at night wondering not what they didn’t get out of life, but what they didn’t give, so striking.

You do a lot of voiceover work for the film too: How was that part of the process? Did you record the narration before, during or after the filming? Was it a challenge or were you comfortable with the process?

Yeah, it was a long process. I started trying to figure it out about a year before we started filming, just recording and deleting a lot of terrible attempts at home, and then, on set, Mona would have me do scratch [draft] recordings on the day – to time shots and sometimes whole scenes with the voiceover. Finally, in post-production, we hunkered down and recorded it all a final time. That was a wonderful experience – to have the time to fine tune and tinker with it. I loved the single-mindedness of that task, just me, Mona and David, our editor, in a windowless room, zeroing in on it. I guess I love obsession – the focus that makes the rest of the world fall away. It was a great way to end the project. I felt ready to leave the part alone after that final round.

You don’t get that feeling of completion often…

You usually have to be Zen about it, shrug your shoulders and walk away.

I relate to how David Fincher works – shooting take after take to get it right. I could just do one scene for days and be perfectly happy. Painters talk about it a lot, that one of the hardest things is knowing when to stop. Actors don’t have to know when to stop because someone else stops

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us. I don’t have a sense of when something’s really done; I just want to keep trying. It’s why I like the theatre, because you get another shot.

You can keep chipping away at it.

It’s a strange thing to do your whole life, going from person to person. Now that you have had a kid, do you feel more grounded in your own life and less suited to it? Or do you still have that desire to take a trip outside yourself ?

It’s hard to talk about acting without it sounding obnoxious… I like getting to understand a character, a person, celebrating the best things about them, revealing and even admiring the things that are ugly and questionable about them. You’re hired to embrace everything, and it doesn’t feel entirely dissimilar to forming friendships – getting to know a person and letting them teach you things. Acting, I suppose, provides an escape – a freedom – but it also feels so incredibly normal at this point, and essential to my life. I’ve had this year to find out what it’s like to live without it – my life is certainly less rich.

The reason I ask is because I did the same play twice, before and after I had kids. My character had children; the first time, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. It just rewires your central nervous system.

It is such a profound experience, having kids.

Before I became a mother, I’m ashamed to admit, it never occurred to me, when I was playing someone who had children, that I should do research. I figured… I’ve seen kids, my siblings have kids, I know what kids are about; that, by osmosis, I’d learned about parenthood.

I look back on parts, like my role in Steve Jobs, and think I would have played them considerably differently now. Even though I thought I was pretty out of my mind in that film, fighting for my child, I would’ve been tearing the walls down if I had someone denying paternity whilst my kid was freezing at night and the guy was making that kind of dough. They would’ve had to call security! It’s the power of these feelings and the depth of them that rattles me all the time. I see now that I took that for granted as a performer. Of course, in The World to Come I lose

a child, and that weighed heavy on me, knowing what I know now.

Are you good at playing?

My grandmother was a great player, and my dad used to not fully understand that she was an adult, she was that good. So, the bar has been set high. Slapstick is big in this house, a lot of pratfalls – I feel like I’m training for vaudeville.

Despite everything getting more complicated, maybe, when we have children, we revert to simpler… tastes? Maybe it’s the pandemic talking but I’m drawn to silly things right now. It’s been such a grim time, I just want to do something absolutely ridiculous.

Our circumstances demand it. You and Vanessa Kirby had some serious chemistry in The World to Come. How did you orchestrate that?

I was cast as someone who describes herself as a ‘pot bound root’ turned in on herself, so I needed somebody who could blow the doors open and force Abigail to engage. There’s a lot to be said for hiring people who admire each other’s work, because you feel safe and hopeful from the start. And then, if someone’s a really present actor who is willing to play with and off you, it breeds confidence. All the scenes between Tallie and Abigail were subtle, charged, intricate dances – so I needed a partner who could really engage with me, surprise me. I couldn’t think of anyone but Vanessa for the part and was so relieved when she said yes.

I do think too high a premium is put on chemistry or, maybe, that it doesn’t mean what many people think it means. We had a script where the chemistry was built into it; sometimes we are speaking in coded language (which is inherently sexy); often the communication is non-verbal, we’re just whiling away the time together. That’s all in the script, so as long as we were willing to follow its roadmap, that chemistry was there. Good writing leaves room for the performers to question each other, play with each other. Maybe the tension created by engaging with another is what we mean by chemistry? Perhaps we rarely see well-developed characters truly communicating on screen?

I was despairing a great deal when Trump was in office, worrying about bringing a child into such a broken world

Previous spread: Shirt & Trousers MAISON MARGIELA Cloggs HERMÈS Right: Full Look LOEWE

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I guess I love obsession – the focus that makes the rest of the world fall away

This spread: Full Look PRADA

You’re hired to embrace everything, and it doesn’t feel entirely dissimilar to forming friendships – getting to know a person and letting them teach you things

I miss people, and not just the ones I know and love, but, you know, being in a crowd – sharing laughter with strangers in cinemas…

Left: Full Look HERMÈS

Hair: Earl Simms @ Caren Make Up: Naoko Scintu @ The Wall Group Manicurist: Kim Treacy @ Stella Creative Artists Production: The Production Factory

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I have a pessimistic view of human communication. I think it’s ineffective 99.9 per cent of the time. That’s why it was pretty powerful watching you two communicate so meaningfully through, or beyond, language, non-vocally, because words so often fail. David Lynch, who extremely dislikes explaining his work, said a couple years back that “A film or a painting – each thing is its own sort of language and it’s not right to try to say the same thing in words.”

I love that sentiment. This feels a little different because you’re my friend and it might be easier for me to talk about acting with actors, but there is a possibility that talking about what we do too much could interfere with what we’re trying to do. What is that Italo Calvino line about Venice? “Perhaps I’m afraid of losing [it] all at once, if I speak of it.” In acting school, the students were divided into the people who didn’t truly enjoy acting but were getting better every day at talking about it, and those who didn’t want to talk about it anymore, but wanted to get up there, make mistakes, figure it out and “get dreamy”, to quote Lynch again.

Sometimes talking too much interrupts your encounter with the world. That being said, one of my favourite things in the world used to be reading interviews in magazines when I flew.

Do you enjoy reading them?

There was a great one between Zadie Smith and George Saunders in Interview magazine a couple years ago, but they speak in paragraphs and it sort of makes me want to pull the sheets over my head because I can never compete with that.

I would like to interview you, but we’ll do that another day.

For what magazine? Town & Country?

For some reason, I’m picturing you on the cover with flowing hair to the mid-waist, ’70style fan blowing it back. It could look quite good, actually.

Well thanks. Your character keeps a diary, have you ever done that yourself ?

When I was young, yes. My parents took me out of school a lot, which I don’t recommend.

I missed some very basic math. I mostly wrote about where I went and what I saw on the road with my folks. I also quickly realised it was a covert opportunity to curse, so all my old journals are pretty vulgar.

My dad said if you’ve got something important to say, write it down. Acting teachers wanted me to keep a journal, you know, “The Artist’s Way”.

You ever tried that?

No, I’m just freestyling here.

Apparently one of its rules is to walk into a museum or a cinema every day at some point.

That seems like a nice rhythm to have – drop what you’re doing: ‘Sorry, it’s my Artist’s Way moment.’

We’re going to have to come up with a COVID Way. I was meant to do a production of Waiting for Godot before all this, and there was a suggestion of doing it online. Samuel Beckett on Zoom? Not in my lifetime. It’s spooky not having live music too.

That must be a big one for you.

I hear that you’ve been busy trying to make other people’s lives a little bit easier during these challenging times. The environment is something that I’m deeply concerned about – have been ever since I was a kid – and this is an issue that’s been on your mind as well. Especially now that we have a new president, I’m hoping America is taking this seriously again.

I was despairing a great deal when Trump was in office, worrying about bringing a child into such a broken world. I was without hope before I got to know Christiana Figueres and what she’s up to. She shepherded the Paris Agreement and is a total bad-ass who coined the term ‘stubborn optimism’ about climate change. It’s an essential approach because without a determination to stick with it, without hope that we can solve this, we’re completely screwed. Her approach and extraordinary dedication helped me to get over myself.

I stopped despairing and started to think about what more I could do to help. I got

involved with an amazing project she’s working on called Count Us In. The United Nations has identified 16 actions that, on an individual level, can make a really big impact on the reduction of global emissions. The platform allows you to select and, crucially, track your chosen actions so you can see the wonderful thing you’re contributing to. Some of the actions are only for the rich and able, like promising that your next car will be electric, but many are easier to commit to, like eating more vegetables for the next two months, or riding my bicycle x number of times instead of driving. We’re keen for as many people to get involved as possible, because the aim is global behaviour change that plays out on an individual level. Beyond reducing emissions, the data of individual actions that Count Us In aggregates, inspires and puts pressure on multinational companies and governments when they see how many people actually care. Collectively, it all makes a difference.

Hallelujah… That’s amazing, that’s really something. It sounds like participation on your own terms, without somebody lecturing you. That is one of the fundamental problems: loneliness – thinking you’re alone with this seemingly insurmountable challenge.

With COVID, you’ve been sequestered in the UK for the whole year, pretty much. What’s your frame of mind? Are you getting antsy?

I am done with this thing, for sure. But my gripes are insignificant. I recently talked with a woman who works in Lima, Peru, installing a sawdust toilet-system to a very large portion of the city’s population who have no running water. I cannot complain. For me, slowing down has been an opportunity to remember what matters. Not seeing my family, being 3,000 miles away, is my number one beef; then, after that, it’s everybody else… It’s people. What else matters? I miss people, and not just the ones I know and love, but, you know, being in a crowd – sharing laughter with strangers in cinemas…

I miss being anonymous in a dark room.

Well, I miss seeing you around!

I miss you too, Mike!

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RAMIN BAHRANI The White Tiger, photography TejInder Singh Khamkha, Netflix, 2021

The late, great film critic Roger Ebert declared Ramin Bahrani, the son of Iranian immigrants, to be “the new great American director”. Winning multiple awards for early independent features Man Push Cart, Chop Shop, and Goodbye Solo, Bahrani is also a recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. Here he reflects on the meteoric success of his latest film, The White Tiger (below), spontaneity on set, and the strength of specificity

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Michael Shannon: They’ve got me editing the magazine. They’ve figured out my secret ambition in life is to be an editor.

Ramin Bahrani: Never say never. I’m glad you’re doing it.

Congratulations on The White Tiger. It’s still being watched quite a bit?

It’s nuts. When we went for that walk together, before it was released, I had no clue what was going to happen. It’s been seen by about 30 million households in less than a month and was the number-one movie in 64 countries for a week or more. I still wake up to emails from people that I met years ago – today I got one from Bolivia out of the blue. Since I come from independent movies, I never expected this kind of reception. It’s my first film with the streamers, and it certainly made me think differently about the possibilities of what we do, the kind of stories that we could tell, and who might see them. But it’s strange, and a shame, that I’ve never seen the film with other human beings.

Your stories are rooted in specificity, so even though it is very much about India, perhaps its global appeal is because of its precision in place?

The movie, and the novel it’s adapted from, have some critical things to say, but many Indians have told me they feel it was authentic and true to their country in ways they’re not used to seeing. I owe that to my friend and author of the novel, Aravind Adiga, to the all-Indian cast, and to the crew, who were 99 per cent Indian.

To your point though, who knows why things take off ? I’m definitely interested in specificity when it comes to the location of the society I’m filming. I remember asking you to go down to Fort Myers, Florida, and hang out with real-estate brokers when we were shooting 99 Homes, because I wanted you to see it, feel it. I wanted you to viscerally understand the things I’d researched, the house evictions I’d witnessed. Part of my drive for learning about new places and meeting people I’d otherwise have no chance to interact with came from living in Iran for three years. I loved Dostoevsky’s books growing up because he had this amazing ability to get a wide array of people from different walks of life that normally wouldn’t interact into a room. He’d put a pauper, a rich man, a religious man, an atheist, a political radical and the status quo all in the same room, and they would just go at it. I’d never experienced that in my life growing up in America, because we have a disparate society where people don’t intersect much.

That’s true.

It wasn’t like that in Iran. On a daily basis I found myself interacting with different people, from different classes and walks of life. Every

day I was encountering so much. I found that deeply inspiring. It helped change my focus, what I thought I could reach for as a filmmaker.

You’re incredibly prepared when it comes to research, but you’re also not afraid of the organic process of making, working with actors to shape a scene.

The White Tiger is my seventh film and I’ve figured a few things out since I started. I felt very loose on set because I had such confidence in the story, as well as the actors telling it. There was a fluidity that we could change things, react there and then, and just keep searching in every scene for something else, anything else.

Frequently, there were interesting discoveries that we had never conceived of. Our lead actor, Adarsh Gourav, would often want to try something new and be about to tell me exactly what it was, but I would ask that he not tell me, that he surprise me instead. I wanted all my actors to feel this freedom to risk and try.

There’s a scene where he yells at a woman begging in the street. We filmed it in a totally live environment; everybody’s real, and I have no control over anyone except him and the woman. He wanted to try something, so I got rid of everyone and told him I’d be the first audience to watch his experiment. I explained to the woman that whatever Adarsh does, just keep saying you’re hungry and you want a hundred rupees. In the scene he’s just supposed to tell her to get lost; that’s all. But in that take, he jumped up and exploded; he ripped his shirt off and showed her his wallet – I never expected any of that. It was not part of the script, but he made it so. I love that. There’s another scene where he signs a confession.

That scene breaks my heart.

Afterwards, when he comes outside to breathe, there’s a golf course. We came to this with no preconceptions, I simply asked Adarsh what the tall grass reminded him of ? He looked at it and replied, ‘Of my character’s childhood home, of the village’. I said I felt the same thing and encouraged him to incorporate that in any way he felt was right. In the end, he threw his shoes in anger, entered the grass and curled up into a ball. We shot it all in half an hour off the back of that reflection, and it worked beautifully.

The project I’m currently working on also gives that space and freedom.

With David O Russell? He’s amazing. I can’t imagine David is too prescriptive and tells you where to go. Is he loose and freewheeling?

I’ve been trying to put it into words because everybody’s so curious. There’s something going on in David’s psyche that almost feels radioactive. It’s constantly in motion. He’s always looking at possibilities and fiddling

It’s my first film with the streamers, and it certainly made me think differently about the possibilities of what we do, the kind of stories that we could tell, and who might see them. with the console, like he’s mixing a record.

What if I turn this knob? What if we speed it up? What if the scene ended here instead of here? You don’t have time to agonise over it; you create as many possibilities as you can.

Personally, I feel variety’s the spice of life, and surely it can’t hurt the editing process?

I love all that. Having freedom to experiment on set is so important. Having a director of photography who allows that is key. On The White Tiger, I brought Paolo Carnera, an Italian veteran, whose work I loved on the TV series Gomorrah. He has the soul of an artist in him. He is brilliant at lighting, is focused on the characters, and creates a world without interference.

The lighting works, and we don’t have to constantly start and stop, relight, break up the flow.

Paolo has an ability to make everything look great and give that freedom. Bobby Bukowski gave us that on 99 Homes.

It’s funny you mentioned Bolivia earlier, I was thinking the other day about our trip there, on the Uyuni salt flat.

With Werner [Herzog] for Salt and Fire? That was a lot of fun.

Have you spoken to him?

He saw a cut of The White Tiger to give me feedback, which he liked a lot. After seeing that cut, he told me to get ready, because this is going to be big. I said, I don’t know, who’s going to watch a class conflict? His favourite scene was when Balram takes a crap with that other man in the slum and they start laughing. He enjoyed it because it wasn’t part of the narrative; it was in another dimension, other-worldly, wild. You know how he is!

Well, he was right. I tell everybody to see it.

I hope it doesn’t go anywhere anytime soon, because although many people have watched it, there are many more that need to.

All right my man.

All right brother.

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Preparing for The White Tiger Captions by Ramin Bahrani

This is the floor plan and shot list for the pivotal scene in The White Tiger where Balram signs a forced confession. The scene was arranged for shot #2, a Steadicam shot on a wide lens that travels to Balram’s face as he signs the confession. I wanted us to experience the moment with the actor

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This “doctor’s” clinic was under this tree at Jama Masjid in Old Delhi. This man found a need and serviced it. He was an entrepreneur. I was here scouting the location for the rooster coop sequence in The White Tiger, which is the central metaphor of the film

Underneath luxury apartment towers in Delhi you will find drivers waiting in garages for their masters to call them. I spoke with this man, and his fellow drivers, for a few hours. It was in these conversations that I heard them say, “There are only two ways out for the poor, crime or politics”

While scouting for temples to film, I came across this moment and snapped a photo.

We visited many temples all over Delhi. They are as numerous as churches in North Carolina, where I was raised

While researching coal tycoons, I encountered this man who invited me into his home and told me about his life and business. He was very passionate about his herb garden. After taking his photo, he was keen to take one together

After travelling to Varanasi to visit the holy ghats at the Ganges river, we travelled to rural villages to try and get a sense of where Balram was born and raised.

Ultimately we shot the scenes in a remote village two hours outside of Agra, home of the Taj Mahal

This brilliant passage in Aravind Adiga’s novel always moves me. I knew it had to be in the film, but I was surprised by how many people told me it was one of their favourite scenes. It’s the moment Balram starts to realise that he is poor. And don’t we all wish we could “spit our past out”, or at least parts of it, in order to start over or reinvent ourselves?

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THAT’S HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN Growing up on the island of Hokkaido, Sou Fujimoto was surrounded by mountains and endless forests. Now a leader among Japan’s new generation of architects, his buildings are harmonious and optimistic, often taking their cues from organic and natural structures.

Port talks to the internationally acclaimed practitioner about social connections, corporeal experience, and questioning the fundamentals of his trade WORDS GEORGE KAFKA

PHOTOGRAPHY KYOHEI HATTORI

It was quite precious for me to be alone and spend a lot of time thinking about fundamental questions in architecture

Previous spread: Sou Fujimoto checking samples in his Tokyo office

Above: Resting samples of materials

Upon graduating from the University of Tokyo in 1994, Sou Fujimoto spent six years doing next to nothing. “I didn’t have any projects or tasks, so it was fully empty time for me,” he explains via video call from his home in Tokyo. Seen from the perspective of just under a year with the relative emptiness of life under lockdowns, the idea of a six-year void seems maddening. But Fujimoto assures me otherwise: “It was quite precious for me to be alone and spend a lot of time thinking about fundamental questions in architecture.

Now, it’s a pity, but I couldn’t have that kind of time. Maybe I should try to make it for myself.”

Indeed, these days he can afford no such luxury. Over the last two decades Sou Fujimoto

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has established himself as a vital creative presence in global architecture with a slew of built projects of increasing scale and public prominence. If the pandemic has stymied his ability to travel between his Tokyo and Paris offices, it thankfully hasn’t slowed down the work. In January, Fujimoto posted CGI drawings of the Torch Tower on his Instagram page (which typically features a charming blend of personal and professional updates): a proposal for a new skyscraper in Tokyo – what will be the tallest building in Japan when it is completed in 2028.

Not quite designing the whole building, and working in tandem with Mitsubishi Jisho Sekkei, Inc., Fujimoto’s contribution to the project is a sloped plaza which appears in the drawings as a

glowing cut-out in the top third of the building: an “open mouth” as he puts it. The proposal is to create a place for the public in the high-rise, to try and integrate the tower with its urban context. “Normally high-rise buildings are enclosed because of the wind, and they become like an object as a result,” he explains. “I was afraid it would become too disconnected from the urban situation, so instead of it becoming an object, we wanted to make a place where people could come together and meet.”

This notion of the architectural ‘object’ comes up a number of times in our conversation, and Fujimoto’s discomfort with the term is illustrative of broader themes in his work. For him, the object is a building that finds its value

A small working house for administration staff

Samples of materials laid out

139

in a purely visual exchange, rather than a more holistically corporeal experience. “The impression on people is more like a sculpture. I like to create buildings that people feel they can be a part of,” he says.

The same approach is evident at L’Arbre Blanc, a residential project in Montpellier, completed for private developers in 2019. The 17-storey structure – designed with local architects Nicolas Laisné, Dimitri Roussel, and OXO – is a white tower characterised by expressive overlapping balconies that protrude from the central core and give it the impression of a startled hedgehog, or tree, as its name suggests.

While certainly eye-catching, the balconies were designed to establish social connections between residents and to give the whole project the feel of a “three-dimensional village,” as Fujimoto describes it. This village proposition also seeks to make the project more welcoming to its neighbours, presenting the life of its residents as a sort of dynamic façade, in contrast to a typical housing block. Non-residents are also invited into the building, which features a rooftop bar and a public gallery.

In L’Arbre Blanc and the Torch Tower proposal, Fujimoto’s attempts to reject the isolated architectural object correspond with his efforts to expand the perceived limits of building typologies. In these particular instances, the ‘tower’ is rethought as a continuation of its context rather than a separate entity. This impulse for typological enquiry seems to be a product of the reflective hiatus at the beginning of a career asking simple yet foundational questions about even the most basic assumptions in architecture: “What is a house? And what is the boundary between inside and outside?”

These questions would come to define some of the most groundbreaking projects which made Fujimoto an international name. House N, for example, completed in Oita in 2008, is a series of nested white cubes built in white concrete and interrupted by large perforations allowing for fresh air and greenery. Similarly, House NA, also in Tokyo and completed in 2011, is a tree of interlinked glass cubes. More than a decade later, both are still startlingly provocative. “It was important for me to question what we know,” notes Fujimoto, reflecting on his earlier career. “I was questioning such basic things to find out something new, and this attitude continues in my architectural thinking.”

This lineage is manifest in the House of Hungarian Music, which is nearing completion in Budapest after a six-year construction process. Located in the centre of Városliget, one of the oldest parks in Europe, the museum echoes House N with a perforated roof to allow for trees to grow through the project, while loosening the boundary between natural exterior and constructed interior. The ‘house’ is part of a wider cultural regeneration project under construction in the park which will feature seven new museums and cultural spaces upon completion. However, Liget Budapest, as the project is known, has come under fierce local criticism (an IPSOS poll found that more than 80 per cent of Budapest residents were opposed to the

140

I’m still enjoying being a part of all these different projects, because different places, different programmes and different backgrounds are always new challenges and new directions for me

Previous spread: Open plan working space in the office

Above: Sou Fujimoto seated in meeting area

construction in the park), in part for the perceived damage it will inflict on the city’s ancient green space. Fujimoto is sensitive to these concerns. “The park is beautiful, and I grew up in a forest, so personally, I understand that it is precious,” he explains. “On the other hand, the location of the project was properly chosen. We tried to keep as many trees as possible, which will grow through the roof. All of us, the clients and designers, are trying to find a good balance between such beautiful existing conditions and the new built conditions.”

Balance is another consistent feature of Fujimoto’s work. From the light touch of House NA or the gossamer lattice of his 2013 Serpentine pavilion, to the balconies of L’Arbre

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Blanc, which protrude into Montpellier’s Mediterranean skies, non-human elements have as central a presence in his projects as typical architectural features like walls or doorways.

Despite this attention in his own work, Fujimoto is concerned by the lack of a concerted or coordinated response to the climate crisis amongst the Japanese architectural community.

“I feel in France, or in Europe, the discussion is very active compared to Japan,” he states. “I don’t know why. The temperature in Tokyo is getting hotter every year.” He speaks of the need for a method of response that is specific to the Asian context – in particular to the humidity of the Tokyo summers – which might grow out of traditional Japanese architecture.

Still, there’s an uncertainty in this response which befits an architect who has established international prestige and respected status, while retaining a core curiosity that seems to be the driving force of his work. That same architect, who took six years off to question the fundamentals of architecture before building his first project, remains reluctant to proclaim simple answers to complex problems. “I’m still enjoying being a part of all these different projects, because different places, different programmes and different backgrounds are always new challenges and new directions for me,” he explains towards the end of our call.

“They bring me a new understanding of architecture itself.”

Model of Ishinomaki Cultural Center

Sample theatre chairs for Ishinomaki Cultural Center

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Project 1: Serpentine Pavilion

Client: Serpentine Gallery

Location: UK

Year: 2013

Fujimoto’s 2013 pavilion for London’s Serpentine Gallery, in the annual series of commissions to leading architects who have not previously built in the UK, remains one of the most popular in the project’s 20-year history. At the time, Fujimoto was the youngest architect appointed by the gallery to the task. The cloud-like structure was built from a thin steel lattice that created nooks and seats for its interior while maintaining direct visual connections with the surrounding park. Today, the pavilion is at home in front of the National Gallery of Arts, in Tirana, Albania.

Project 2: House NA

Client: Private individual

Perched in a residential district in central Tokyo, House NA is one of the maverick home projects that first put Sou Fujimoto on the international architecture map when it was completed in 2011. The house is formed by a stack of glass volumes held up by a steel frame so light it seems as though the cubes might float away from each other. The interior can be read as a single room fragmented into different sections by its split levels and a few glass partitions.

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PHOTOGRAPHY IWAN BAAN

Location: Japan

Year: 2007–2011

Project 3: L’Arbre Blanc

Client: Opalia, Promeo Patrimoine, Evolis Promotion et Crédit Agricole Immobilier Languedoc-Roussillon GSA Réalisation

Location: France

Year: 2013–2019

L’Arbre Blanc sits proudly on the banks of the Lez river, to the west of Montpellier’s city centre. With its sprouting balconies and stark white finish, the housing project cuts a distinctive figure which aims to draw in neighbours as well as its residents.

The 17-storey building includes 100 private housing units, a rooftop bar, and a ground floor gallery, and is the first in a series of forthcoming French projects for Fujimoto’s Paris office.

PHOTOGRAPHY IWAN BAAN

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THAT’S HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN Growing up on the island of Hokkaido, Sou Fujimoto was surrounded by mountains and endless forests. Now a leader among Japan’s new generation of architects, his buildings are harmonious and optimistic, often taking their cues from organic and natural structures.

Port talks to the internationally acclaimed practitioner about social connections, corporeal experience, and questioning the fundamentals of his trade WORDS GEORGE KAFKA

PHOTOGRAPHY KYOHEI HATTORI

It was quite precious for me to be alone and spend a lot of time thinking about fundamental questions in architecture

Previous spread: Sou Fujimoto checking samples in his Tokyo office

Above: Resting samples of materials

Upon graduating from the University of Tokyo in 1994, Sou Fujimoto spent six years doing next to nothing. “I didn’t have any projects or tasks, so it was fully empty time for me,” he explains via video call from his home in Tokyo. Seen from the perspective of just under a year with the relative emptiness of life under lockdowns, the idea of a six-year void seems maddening. But Fujimoto assures me otherwise: “It was quite precious for me to be alone and spend a lot of time thinking about fundamental questions in architecture.

Now, it’s a pity, but I couldn’t have that kind of time. Maybe I should try to make it for myself.”

Indeed, these days he can afford no such luxury. Over the last two decades Sou Fujimoto

138

has established himself as a vital creative presence in global architecture with a slew of built projects of increasing scale and public prominence. If the pandemic has stymied his ability to travel between his Tokyo and Paris offices, it thankfully hasn’t slowed down the work. In January, Fujimoto posted CGI drawings of the Torch Tower on his Instagram page (which typically features a charming blend of personal and professional updates): a proposal for a new skyscraper in Tokyo – what will be the tallest building in Japan when it is completed in 2028.

Not quite designing the whole building, and working in tandem with Mitsubishi Jisho Sekkei, Inc., Fujimoto’s contribution to the project is a sloped plaza which appears in the drawings as a

glowing cut-out in the top third of the building: an “open mouth” as he puts it. The proposal is to create a place for the public in the high-rise, to try and integrate the tower with its urban context. “Normally high-rise buildings are enclosed because of the wind, and they become like an object as a result,” he explains. “I was afraid it would become too disconnected from the urban situation, so instead of it becoming an object, we wanted to make a place where people could come together and meet.”

This notion of the architectural ‘object’ comes up a number of times in our conversation, and Fujimoto’s discomfort with the term is illustrative of broader themes in his work. For him, the object is a building that finds its value

A small working house for administration staff

Samples of materials laid out

139

in a purely visual exchange, rather than a more holistically corporeal experience. “The impression on people is more like a sculpture. I like to create buildings that people feel they can be a part of,” he says.

The same approach is evident at L’Arbre Blanc, a residential project in Montpellier, completed for private developers in 2019. The 17-storey structure – designed with local architects Nicolas Laisné, Dimitri Roussel, and OXO – is a white tower characterised by expressive overlapping balconies that protrude from the central core and give it the impression of a startled hedgehog, or tree, as its name suggests.

While certainly eye-catching, the balconies were designed to establish social connections between residents and to give the whole project the feel of a “three-dimensional village,” as Fujimoto describes it. This village proposition also seeks to make the project more welcoming to its neighbours, presenting the life of its residents as a sort of dynamic façade, in contrast to a typical housing block. Non-residents are also invited into the building, which features a rooftop bar and a public gallery.

In L’Arbre Blanc and the Torch Tower proposal, Fujimoto’s attempts to reject the isolated architectural object correspond with his efforts to expand the perceived limits of building typologies. In these particular instances, the ‘tower’ is rethought as a continuation of its context rather than a separate entity. This impulse for typological enquiry seems to be a product of the reflective hiatus at the beginning of a career asking simple yet foundational questions about even the most basic assumptions in architecture: “What is a house? And what is the boundary between inside and outside?”

These questions would come to define some of the most groundbreaking projects which made Fujimoto an international name. House N, for example, completed in Oita in 2008, is a series of nested white cubes built in white concrete and interrupted by large perforations allowing for fresh air and greenery. Similarly, House NA, completed in Tokyo in 2011, is a tree of interlinked glass cubes. More than a decade later, both are still startlingly provocative. “It was important for me to question what we know,” notes Fujimoto, reflecting on his earlier career. “I was questioning such basic things to find out something new, and this attitude continues in my architectural thinking.”

This lineage is manifest in the House of Hungarian Music, which is nearing completion in Budapest after a six-year construction process. Located in the centre of Városliget, one of the oldest parks in Europe, the museum echoes House N with a perforated roof to allow for trees to grow through the project, while loosening the boundary between natural exterior and constructed interior. The ‘house’ is part of a wider cultural regeneration project under construction in the park which will feature seven new museums and cultural spaces upon completion. However, Liget Budapest, as the project is known, has come under fierce local criticism (an IPSOS poll found that more than 80 per cent of Budapest residents were opposed to the

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I’m still enjoying being a part of all these different projects, because different places, different programmes and different backgrounds are always new challenges and new directions for me

Previous spread: Open plan working space in the office

Above: Sou Fujimoto seated in meeting area

construction in the park), in part for the perceived damage it will inflict on the city’s ancient green space. Fujimoto is sensitive to these concerns. “The park is beautiful, and I grew up in a forest, so personally, I understand that it is precious,” he explains. “On the other hand, the location of the project was properly chosen. We tried to keep as many trees as possible, which will grow through the roof. All of us, the clients and designers, are trying to find a good balance between such beautiful existing conditions and the new built conditions.”

Balance is another consistent feature of Fujimoto’s work. From the light touch of House NA or the gossamer lattice of his 2013 Serpentine pavilion, to the balconies of L’Arbre

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Blanc, which protrude into Montpellier’s Mediterranean skies, non-human elements have as central a presence in his projects as typical architectural features like walls or doorways.

Despite this attention in his own work, Fujimoto is concerned by the lack of a concerted or coordinated response to the climate crisis amongst the Japanese architectural community.

“I feel in France, or in Europe, the discussion is very active compared to Japan,” he states. “I don’t know why. The temperature in Tokyo is getting hotter every year.” He speaks of the need for a method of response that is specific to the Asian context – in particular to the humidity of the Tokyo summers – which might grow out of traditional Japanese architecture.

Still, there’s an uncertainty in this response which befits an architect who has established international prestige and respected status, while retaining a core curiosity that seems to be the driving force of his work. That same architect, who took six years off to question the fundamentals of architecture before building his first project, remains reluctant to proclaim simple answers to complex problems. “I’m still enjoying being a part of all these different projects, because different places, different programmes and different backgrounds are always new challenges and new directions for me,” he explains towards the end of our call.

“They bring me a new understanding of architecture itself.”

Model of Ishinomaki Cultural Center

Sample theatre chairs for Ishinomaki Cultural Center

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Project 1: Serpentine Pavilion

Client: Serpentine Gallery

Location: UK

Year: 2013

Fujimoto’s 2013 pavilion for London’s Serpentine Gallery, in the annual series of commissions to leading architects who have not previously built in the UK, remains one of the most popular in the project’s 20-year history. At the time, Fujimoto was the youngest architect appointed by the gallery to the task. The cloud-like structure was built from a thin steel lattice that created nooks and seats for its interior while maintaining direct visual connections with the surrounding park. Today, the pavilion is at home in front of the National Gallery of Arts, in Tirana, Albania.

Project 2: House NA

Client: Private individual

Perched in a residential district in central Tokyo, House NA is one of the maverick home projects that first put Sou Fujimoto on the international architecture map when it was completed in 2011. The house is formed by a stack of glass volumes held up by a steel frame so light it seems as though the cubes might float away from each other. The interior can be read as a single room fragmented into different sections by its split levels and a few glass partitions.

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PHOTOGRAPHY IWAN BAAN

Location: Japan

Year: 2007–2011

Project 3: L’Arbre Blanc

Client: Opalia, Promeo Patrimoine, Evolis Promotion et Crédit Agricole Immobilier Languedoc-Roussillon GSA Réalisation

Location: France

Year: 2013–2019

L’Arbre Blanc sits proudly on the banks of the Lez river, to the west of Montpellier’s city centre. With its sprouting balconies and stark white finish, the housing project cuts a distinctive figure which aims to draw in neighbours as well as its residents.

The 17-storey building includes 100 private housing units, a rooftop bar, and a ground floor gallery, and is the first in a series of forthcoming French projects for Fujimoto’s Paris office.

PHOTOGRAPHY IWAN BAAN

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The world’s largest independent design consultancy, Pentagram, is owned and run by 24 partners, each of whom are pioneers in their respective fields – Jon Marshall being one of them. From light-based quantum computers to everyday frying pans, the industrial designer illustrates the continued relevance, and joy, of great design

INDUSTRIAL DESIGN & MAGIC

WORDS DEYAN SUDJIC PHOTOGRAPHY CIAN OBA-SMITH

Nobody knows what such a product should look like in advance. There is no archetype for it

Full size cardboard model of the Quandela system

Jon Marshall is only the third industrial designer in the 50-year history of leading independent studio Pentagram to become a partner. The consultancy was established in 1972 by three gifted graphic designers: Alan Fletcher, Colin Forbes and Mervyn Kurlansky, alongside architect Theo Crosby, and Kenneth Grange, who was responsible for shaping everything from the London taxi to the latest version of the Anglepoise desk lamp.

“Design has become more complex and multifaceted since Pentagram started,” comments Marshall to me over Zoom on a grey London afternoon. “As an independent designer, you don’t have the same authorship that Kenneth Grange had when he started Pentagram. You won’t get to design a ThinkPad for IBM, or a Tizio lamp on your own. These days, big brands only hire a consultancy to get an external point of view.”

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Describing his own approach, Marshall explains: “We are not in the narrower world of how something looks and how it works. We are much more at the front end, and work on how products integrate with brands. Design is about how we experience products. When you are developing a product alongside a brand, you work with storytelling and with words.”

What made Pentagram stand out when it began, as it still does now, is that it was a studio owned and run by working designers, such as Marshall. It is not a conventional large-scale design practice, which these days is likely to be a subsidiary of a management consultancy or a media conglomerate with a share price to protect; nor is it run as a kitchen table operation. Like the Parisian photographers who launched the Magnum cooperative in the 1940s, Pentagram was configured as the means for like-minded designers to find ways to pool

their resources to work together and enjoy the process of doing so. There is a shared marketing team, an accounts department, a library, a reception area with trees and serious German-language newspapers, and a kitchen to feed everybody with wholesome lunches. It’s a structure that allows Pentagram to take on substantial projects around the world, and to bring to bear a wide range of skills and expertise, both creative and business-like. But it is the designers who run things, not outside shareholders or a chief operating officer. If partners step down, their replacements are recruited by invitation and their shares go back into the business.

A partnership at Pentagram has come to be seen as a form of professional validation, much as being tapped as a name for Lloyds once was, and is open only to those with an international reputation. Graphic designers of all persuasions, from David Hillman to Peter Saville,

Duality is an important concept in quantum mechanics, intrinsic in the nature of light itself

Assorted tools in the Pentagram workshop

have come and gone, along with a few architects – notably William Russell and Lorenzo Apicella. But Marshall, who joined in 2018, and Daniel Weil, who taught him as a student at the Royal College of Art (and stepped down last year) are the only industrial designers to work as partners at Pentagram’s London studio since Grange left. There is no single Pentagram style.

The partners each have their own voices, but the dry wit of Alan Fletcher and his founding colleagues remains a distinct presence.

Given the extended timescale of product development, it’s only now that the first signs of Marshall’s work at Pentagram are emerging.

They range from the highest form of high-tech (a commission to create a piece of equipment that manipulates single photons of light to power quantum computers) to the most basic of problems for a designer: how to make a frying

pan with a handle that doesn’t burn your hand.

One of the early assumptions in the industry regarding the impact of the digital explosion on design was that it would kill off an enormous number of categories of objects. There is no need for a transistor radio, a cassette player, a camera, a GPS device, or a credit card, when a smart phone can apparently handle all these roles at the same time. When a single object no larger than a small magazine can take the place of a library, a concert hall, a casino, or a broadcasting studio, it’s not just the traditional skills of an industrial designer that are being challenged; the relevance of the role of an architect is also in doubt.

But as the development of the Yoto, one of Marshall’s most engaging projects at Pentagram, illustrates, we still live in a world in which designers are called on to give form to new categories of object. To succeed, these are objects

which must not be seen only in isolation, but need to be treated as part of a network. Yoto is based on an understanding that the boundless two-way connectivity of screen-based technology can present a profound challenge to childhood. The most extreme and obvious threat is of unfiltered accidental or random access to the darkest corners of the web; and, while it may not be as immediately destructive, the addictive effect of any kind of screen-based device, and its negative impact on attention spans and concentration, is pervasive.

Yoto is a crowd-funded attempt to offer parents a way to give young children a more constructive engagement with storytelling and music. It’s a speaker system that uses radio-frequency identification device technology, and a library of pre-programmed cards. Each card can come with a story for the child to select for themselves, like an old-style cassette tape, or

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When a client says, ‘I want you to create something new’, I can’t say no. But I have to ask myself, ‘How do I do it better?’

parents can pre-programme blank cards. The business model is based on more than selling a single object; the content that the object brings to life is just as important. “It’s been one of the most satisfying projects that I have worked on since I have been at Pentagram,” says Marshall.

“It has allowed me to become involved with every aspect of a product: the industrial design, but also, with my partners, on the graphics, the branding, and the imagery.”

Yoto has a playful quality, with its two bright red ears to control volume and playback, but like a Pixar animation that has something to say to parents as well as their offspring, it can be understood on more than one level and stays on the right side of whimsey. It can serve as a night light, and alarm clock. Children and parents can record their own material.

Then there is quantum computing. The audience for Quandela’s products – a technology start-up from Paris working in the field

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of light-based quantum computing, being presented as a potential successor to semiconductors – is limited to a small number of research laboratories. Marshall met Quandela’s founder in a bar and they started talking about photonics. “I told him what we do, and its value,” says Marshall. “Quandela makes use of single protons of light. The company had a lab full of optics equipment. They needed to be in a position to sell something.”

He had to find a way to give the results of Quandela’s laboratory experiments a form that reflected the value and significance of a piece of technology that costs the price of a car, and may have an impact potentially as great as that of the first room-sized computers that emerged at the end of World War II. It could not look like a collection of electronic components taken at random from the parts bin. Marshall was in a position like that in which Ettore Sottsass found himself in 1959,

when Olivetti asked him to give form to Italy’s first mainframe computer, the Elea 9003.

“What should a computer look like?”, Sottsass wrote in his notebook at the time. “Not like a washing machine.” Marshall approached the problem in a similar way. Olivetti chose Elea both as an acronym, but also as it was the name of the Greek city built on the coast south of Naples, and its ancient school of philosophy.

Sottsass was trying to give the remarkable potential of this new machine resonance that reflected its significance: It was not simply a machine; it was a new way of looking at the world. At the heart of Marshall’s concept is a metaphor, based on the Chinese pictogram character for gate, one of the key elements of optical computing. “Duality is an important concept in quantum mechanics, intrinsic in the nature of light itself. To represent this in the products the front surfaces of each module are corrugated and finished alternately in matt

3d printed and cardboard development models for Soufflé cookware

and gloss, giving the material two different appearances depending on the angle of view.”

“Laptops are purely about differentiation from the last one, but this is about defining something new. If it doesn’t exist yet, you can’t talk to users. Designing it was a clean slate. We have a process to answer the question, ‘What should a quantum computer look like?’ It involved talking to the client, looking at art pieces and sculpture with them, and you see what sticks. Nobody knows what such a product should look like in advance. There is no archetype for it.”

Creating a range of kitchen equipment is a much more traditional design problem than dealing with quantum computing. Like Yoto and Quandela, Soufflé is another start-up; its strategy is to sell professional-quality cooking implements direct to the consumer at a reasonable price. As with Marshall’s other projects, his brief was to use design to give a new product

an identity, as well as a form. An essential part of Soufflé’s story is sustainability. To minimise the carbon footprint of the range, it is manufactured in France, as much as possible in a single factory. The packaging is reusable and there are no toxic chemicals to line the pans.

A start-up does not generally have the production volumes to justify investment in tooling. The products here were based on a selection of individual components chosen from pre-existing factory catalogues, with the addition of distinctive colours and details.

Marshall was asked to give the product a Gallic flavour. He came up with a profiled handle used throughout the range that deftly hints at corrugated metal sides of a Citroen van without lapsing into caricature, and is made by stamping thin metal. The range was further shaped by the understanding that France does things just a little differently from American or British kitchens. Saucepan lids, for example, are flat

not domed. As Marshall says, “It’s hard to innovate with a frying pan.”

Marshall remains convinced of the significance of the role that design will continue to play. “I respect and love critical design, even though it’s not the field I am in. I have read Victor Papanek’s critique [Design for the Real World] many times. Some people say ‘Stop designing,’ but the more we can get involved, the better.

It has been said that ‘the world does not need another chair.’ You need a chair that does the same job, with less impact on the planet.

We make things that use energy and materials – it’s up to me to work on reducing carbon footprint. We are a long way from carbon neutral, but 80 per cent of the embedded carbon footprint is determined at the design stage. We are able to make a real impact on that.

When a client says, ‘I want you to create something new’, I can’t say no. But I have to ask myself, ‘How do I do it better?’”

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Project 1: Quandela integrated system

Client: Quandela

Location: France

Quantum light sources (or singlephoton sources) are at the heart of photonic-based quantum computing systems and quantum communication networks, which greatly speed up computation time and increase their complexity by orders of magnitude. Led by Marshall, a fully integrated, modular rack system was designed for Parisbased, photonic tech company Quandela. Unifying multiple elements

Project 2: Yoto Player

Collaborating with Yoto CEO and CCO, Marshall – together with Pentagram’s industrial design team – interviewed families and children to develop the Yoto Player, a design that gives the latter, above all else, control. The interactive, screen-free speaker delivers stories, music, radio and podcasts via physical content cards and two simple push and twist buttons to allow control of playback and audio. Its intuitive form (turning the device on its face launches a special bedtime mode with the 16 x 16-pixel colour display put to sleep) means it can be placed upright on a table or shelf, its tipped back just as effective on the floor. The primary typeface of Castledown by Colophon Foundry was used as it aligned with the Montessori principles, with letterforms mimicking the action of drawing letters, as children first learn to write.

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Client: Yoto

Location: UK

Year: 2020

previously spread around a laboratory into a single device, this included a Quandela photonic chip, a compact cryogenic system required to cool the chip up to -265 C, a laser source, the qubit control unit, and control and monitoring electronics. An electric French blue was chosen to be distinctive in both daylight and semidarkness, key to working in optics laboratories that usually require lowlight conditions.

Year: 2019

Project 3: Soufflé collection

Client: Soufflé

Location: France

Year: 2020

High-end oven-to-table cookware is often an investment for life.

With that in mind, Marshall codesigned a minimal four-piece set and accompanying brand identity for the French start-up Soufflé.

Handcrafted in north-eastern France, its first collection was made as environmentally friendly as possible, both in its manufacturing process – local manufacturers in France producing all materials – and as a lived object, the range being comprised of a technically complex process whereby carbon steel is coated with enamel, ensuring less energy is needed when cooking.

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The Japanese master of cinema – director of over a hundred films – has a significant international following of genre geeks and cineastes alike. How has he elevated his singular brand of shocksploitation to auteur level? Port digs around the innards of his oeuvre to get to the heart of the matter

Takashi Miike:

WORDS JOHN HARRIS DUNNING

PORTRAITS DAISUKE HAMADA

There Will Be Blood

Stills taken from 13 Assassins, directed

by Takashi Miike. Courtesy of Recorded Picture Company

Takashi Miike is a study in contradictions. In person, this slim, stylish man is soft-spoken and unfailingly polite – something that can’t be said of his films.

Quentin Tarantino calls him “the godfather of ultra-violent, get-under-your-skin movies”. And yet his films Shield of Straw (2013) and Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai (2011) were both nominated for the esteemed Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival; while the latter was the first three-dimensional film to be nominated for the prize.

Miike hails from a tough neighbourhood in the bustling port of Osaka. As a youngster he cut school to watch Bruce Lee films and dreamed of a career as a motorcycle racer; he may not have fulfilled that ambition, but his love of speed is evidenced by his prodigious

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output – over a hundred films to date. “Compared to other directors I may be prolific, but it’s all relative. I didn’t mean to be. Essentially, I’m lazy,” admits Miike. “As a boy, I hated studying, so my grades were poor. When I graduated from high school, I had to choose between going to college or becoming a responsible member of society – in other words, a worker.

I thought, I don’t like either, so let’s delay the inevitable. Film school was ideal for lazy people; there were no exams, and whoever applied was accepted. I had no ambition to become a director. Then I watched Vengeance Is Mine (1979), directed by Shōhei Imamura, and felt a shock completely different from watching any other film. I think that was the starting point of my life in movies.”

On graduation Miike found himself drawn into the booming V-Cinema industry. Here he cut his teeth as a director by churning out straight-to-video content across a broad range of genres that aimed to exploit the latest contemporary viewing trends. Fudoh: The New Generation (1996) was his first success, enjoying a wide cinematic release and ending up on Time magazine’s list of top-10 films of the year. A frenetic pace of production and restless genre-swapping have remained important components of his filmmaking. His refusal to be tied down to any one kind of subject matter doesn’t negate his status as an auteur; indeed, there are many elements of Miike’s work that are immediately recognisable. Tight production times are somehow apparent in the quick pace of

When I graduated from high school I had to choose between going to college or becoming a responsible member of society – in other words, a worker. I thought, I don’t like either, so let’s delay the inevitable the action he portrays, a breakneck speed that leaves audiences breathless with adrenaline. His films often lure viewers into a spider’s web of plots that – although meticulously mapped – aren’t always clear on the first watch. But that’s the point: Like Miike’s hapless protagonists, audiences have the sense of being at the centre of vast machinations they can never quite grasp, leaving them in a constant state of jeopardy.

Audition (1999) was the film that won Miike his international following. Commissioned to piggybank on the crossover success of J-Horror smash hit Ringu (1998), Miike made the genre his own with this singular work. The first half of the film lulls us into a false sense of security, then upends it as a suburban romance descends into a savage battle of the sexes. A lovelorn

widower is used as a human pincushion before his foot is severed with piano wire; Love Actually this is not. The glee with which Miike approaches this transgressive material chimed with audiences and won their undying loyalty.

Miike, however, is bemused by his international success. “I’m grateful of course, but why? That’s what I want to know! Audition’s success was a surprise. Movies are not investments in your future. As the director it would be rude to treat characters as tools for my success – my job is to free the characters onscreen. But as a result, they’ve led me to unexpected places.”

The sheer breadth of Miike’s range is astonishing. Although they include his signature scenes of spectacular violence, with body counts that beggar belief, his big-budget features 13

Assassins (2010) and Blade of the Immortal (2017) also deliver as classic historical epics in the vein of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954). His film The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001) defies categorisation: A family’s dream of running a rustic inn near Mount Fuji descends into horror as guests keep dying in their rooms, and they have to dispose of the bodies to keep the business going.

Oh, and it’s a comedy. And a musical.

Miike is best known for extreme violence.

Blood. Gore. Torture. After all, this is a man whose film Ichi the Killer (2001) required no less than 11 cuts by the British Board of Film Classification in order to be awarded an 18 certificate. It was banned outright in many countries. One of Miike’s best loved films, it gave us Tadanobu Asano’s iconic performance as

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Still taken from 13 Assassins, directed

by Takashi Miike. Courtesy of Recorded Picture Company

the sadomasochistic yakuza Kakihara. In one scene, a man wakes to find himself suspended from the ceiling from multiple hooks secured in the flesh of his back – and that’s only the start of his troubles. Next Kakihara slowly pushes a meat skewer through his cheek. Just a warm-up.

He slowly pierces his victim’s chin, driving the spike up through his tongue and out of his mouth. Surely that’s the end? Of course not.

Kakihara slowly pours boiling oil over the writhing man’s back and head as his flesh sizzles and smokes… And there’s more. Much more.

There’s a particularly strong tradition of this kind of heightened, unrealistic violence in Japanese cinema, from the excruciating sexually explicit In the Realm of the Senses (1976), to the cartoony antics of the Lone Wolf and Cub (1972/3) series of films. The Lady Snowblood (1973) film series was an acknowledged inspiration for Tarantino’s Kill Bill series (2003/4), with its almost balletic fight sequences awash in fountains of blood. “Violence in my movies is the result of the character’s personalities,” explains Miike. “I don’t make a movie just because I want to portray violence. I’m simply obedient to the characters I meet in the script.”

The controversy surrounding Ichi the Killer came as no surprise to Miike. In fact, he encouraged it. When the film was presented at the Toronto Film Festival, audiences were provided with sick bags emblazoned with “For Viewing Discomfort”. In this way he follows in the footsteps of classic shocksploitation director William Castle, who activated buzzers under cinema seats during the run of his film The Tingler (1959) to enhance the onscreen action.

Miike’s disregard for the division between high and low culture can also be likened to that of f ilmmakers like Andy Warhol and John Waters. Warhol’s films were screened in high-profile galleries and sleazy porn theatres concurrently. John Waters has always worked within the shocksploitation genre, famously filming his lead, Divine, eating dog shit in Pink Flamingos (1972), and utilising the ‘odorama’ scratch-and-sniff card for Polyester (1981).

Despite these trashy stunts, and arguably partly because of them, these films are acknowledged as important cultural documents. What these filmmakers all have in common is a refusal to bow to accepted cinematic conventions.

Imprint (2006) proved that although Miike may be respected, he was far from being respectable. He was invited to deliver an episode for Masters of Horror, a portmanteau TV

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project initiated by American broadcaster Showtime, alongside horror film luminaries like John Carpenter and Dario Argento. Used to working to low budgets, he turned in a feature-length episode that Showtime deemed too disturbing to screen – surely the ultimate compliment to the filmmaker. Was it the infanticide? The syphilitic dwarf ? The conjoined twins? Surely not…

Miike is part of a long tradition of grossout limit-experience cinema. Film has always been about spectacle, right from its prehistory when zoetropes presented the illusion of movement, through to the capturing of photographic images on film. Some of the earliest photography and film was pornographic. Sex aside, what could be more spectacular than extreme violence, the ultimate strip tease of opening the body to our curious gaze? Director Ruggero Deodato learned the value of the public’s curiosity about eviscerated bodies when his lowbudget flick Cannibal Holocaust (1980) became an international cult hit. This film was spawned by the success of the mondo movie genre. These small-budget films competed with each other to present the public with the most bloodthirsty and taboo footage possible. It’s significant that most of this ‘documentary’ footage was clearly staged. Mondo films walked the line between horror and camp, the bloody restagings closer to opera or Grand Guignol than actual violence.

Contrary to the claims of his censors, Miike doesn’t present sexual and physical violence for the enjoyment of viewers, per se; this is not torture as titillation. These are visceral films that demand a physical response. They test the limits of their audiences, with groans and the covering of eyes common in public screenings – as are walk outs. That’s the point. This is cinema as a feat of endurance as well as enjoyment.

This extends beyond violence to any number of taboos: incest, necrophilia, infanticide, drug abuse, and prostitution, to name only a few. They aren’t romanticised in Miike’s films.

Rather, he presents them in an unflinching manner, allowing his audiences a rare chance to confront and truly grapple with these transgressive acts head on.

“Back when I was a production assistant, I couldn’t escape from the set for some reason,” notes Miike. “The work was tough, the pay was low, but I felt comfortable being there. I’m not the self-analysing type, but there is one thing I can say – I make a living as a film director because I’m extremely lucky. It’s almost frightening!”

I don’t make a movie just because I want to portray violence. I’m simply obedient to the characters I meet in the script

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Akala

COM— MENT— ARY To celebrate Port’s 10th anniversary, we have partnered with Giorgio Armani on a two-issue Commentary special. Working with extraordinary contemporary writers to bring you incredible original work, we present here, for the first instalment, a new piece of writing from the award-winning musician and best-selling author Akala.

COVER STORY

EXTRACT

EXTRACT

ESSAY

POEM

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The Seriousness of Small Joys

By Akala

Long Live Patience

By Jack Underwood

Monument Maker

By David Keenan

Under Paving Stones, the Beach!

By Matthew Turner

How to Wash a Heart

By Bhanu Kapil

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Akala The Seriousness of Small Joys

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COMMENTARY

PHOTOGRAPHY DONAVON SMALLWOOD

STYLING SEBASTIAN JEAN

Akala is a BAFTA and MOBO award-winning hip-hop artist and writer, as well as the co-founder of The Hip-hop Shakespeare Company. His 2018 part-memoir, parthistorical analysis, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire, is a Sunday Times bestseller. Specially commissioned for Port, the following rumination – in the wake of a debilitating global pandemic – looks at how to challenge self-importance, the thinking behind his debut work of fiction, and the vital role of art as a form of human sustenance AKALA WEARS GIORGIO ARMANI SS21 THROUGHOUT

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COVER STORY

I don’t know.

As the great James Baldwin put it, “When I was young, I knew a lot; now I don’t know nothing.”

Realising you are not anywhere near as smart or as important as you thought you were when you were 25 is both a humbling and a freeing process.

Perhaps the three most powerful words in the English language, “I, don’t, know.”

Now, to be clear, I’m not trying to project pseudo-humility, because I think that feigned humility is silly; it is right to be reasonably confident based on hard-earned achievements. And yet, the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.

As I think about politics and the politics of ‘intellectuals’ like myself, I can’t help but also think about the doctors, nurses, garbage collectors, sanitation contractors, structural engineers, and all of the other people whose technical expertise or labour is much more directly responsible for our well-being, and I wonder why so few of those people seem to think they have ‘the answers’ to society’s problems in the way that intellectuals tend to. That is not to say that I actually think I have the answers either, it’s just a reflection on intellectuals’ sense of self-importance.

‘I could be wrong; let me find out more; let me properly consider another opinion and attempt to understand another world view’: all things you’ll rarely hear people say publicly, because people – myself included, of course – attach so much importance to, and have such a huge ego stake in, our beliefs and ideas, and maybe this is admirable – especially when those beliefs push people to achieve extraordinary things. However, this attachment can be so strong, to the point that challenging our deeply held beliefs can cause literal pain: cognitive dissonance, as some call it. But the mind is like a parachute, it only works when it’s open; and lifelong learning keeps the neurons young (or so I’m told).

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The greatest challenge to my own sense of self-importance and my own political views has not been some particular event or a huge tragedy but rather the simple fact of my own family.

Whenever we want to reflect on navigating human imperfection or building a better world, it would be good to look closely at our own families and think about just how hard it is to secure consensus, mediate disputes, and maintain civility even among people that are all related. We then might marvel at the fact that there is any co-operation at all over larger social aggregates, and be quite cautious in our proscriptions, conscious of our own limitations.

None of that is to say that we disengage from larger social problems; quite the contrary. It’s only to say that we remain aware of our own limitations when doing so, and that we step back and think about how much more compassion we are willing to offer to people we are related to. And then to think about how delicately we might approach a problem within family and apply that diligence and care to larger issues.

Lockdown(s) have also – paradoxically – really made me reflect on how important art is as a form of human sustenance.

One cannot live by bread alone.

How many people have gotten through this last year with their mind and emotions intact in no small part because of the solace and guidance, inspiration and counsel provided by music and books and film?

Joy is a serious thing. Life is short, and the role of the artist in being a conduit for people’s joy is extremely important. I think artists like myself who are (or at least try to be) political with a capital P can run the danger of forgetting the importance of pure joy, of people getting together and having a fucking good time (this year has made it painfully clear). Life is short, and because good times are few, people from less fortunate backgrounds in particular are liable to take those small joys extremely seriously, for they form the only respite from a lifetime of hard work and

bills and stress. That’s why you should never barge into the barbershop or the pub and turn the football off; it’s why people broke the law to get a drink during the prohibition era. Small pleasures are a very serious thing.

How many relationships were formed at parties or other seemingly meaningless social gatherings? How many parents and children have organised their bonding and life lessons around sporting events? How many films and novels have allowed us to live in someone else’s shoes and to care for a character like a real person? Untold, in each case.

In fact, a very real and literal ‘not knowing’ inspired my latest book – my first novel – The Dark Lady. The book takes William Shakespeare’s Dark Lady sonnets and imagines that the Black woman so vividly described in those works had a son who is both a genius and a resident of Elizabethan London’s worst slum. The origins of the book came from a question posed repeatedly to me by young people. With The Hip-hop Shakespeare Company, I’ve been lucky enough to work at hundreds of schools and with over 10,000 young people globally. Countless times when discussing the Dark Lady sonnets or Othello (and contextualising the Moors), young people, particularly young Black people, would ask me, “Were there Black people back then, sir?”

Ponder the phrasing of the question: not ‘Were there Black people in London back then?’, but essentially, ‘Did Black people exist in the world 500 years ago at all?’ Of course children know intellectually that Black people have existed throughout the ages; however, it became very clear to me that they had no concept of the history of Black people, nor of a ‘medieval’ Africa, of Timbuktu, or Benin, let alone the Black presence in Islamic Spain or Elizabethan London, and that more stories were needed to correct this error and its implications of people’s perception of human history. Additionally, it seemed to me that virtually all period novels and dramas depict elites – kings,

queens, knights, and nobility. I wanted to write a story about the masses of poor people and the residents of slums back then, who they were and what contributions to society they’ve made… so that’s what I’ve done.

I am also finally working on a new album for the first time in six years and it feels exhilarating. I’ve been very much inspired by the Verzuz events during lockdown (soundclash/battles between great artists of similar ilk and stature; for example, Erykah Badu versus Jill Scott, Beenie Man versus Bounty Killer, or Raekwon versus Ghostface Killah), and seeing just how much music really means to people. Why music in particular should have such power to bring people from different walks of life, backgrounds, experiences, and ages together like perhaps no other thing in human society is hard to say.

The artist is a shaman.

But artists and intellectuals should stand in that power, always conscious that we are nowhere near as important or as smart as we think we are.

I write to try and figure some of these things out. I don’t doubt that this last year has been as strange and as humbling for you as for me, looking around and realising how little use you are to your fellow people, despite your best efforts, and then realising how arrogant it was of you to think any other thing would be possible in any case; you are just one of 8 billion, after all.

No matter who you are, if you live long enough life will humble you.

To family, politics, art, and intellectual inspiration.

I don’t know nothing, but I will try; I will fight and express and explore and share and opine regardless, because that’s who we are.

Hopefully I’ll see you somewhere along the road.

The Dark Lady by Akala, Hodder Children’s Books, is out now

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Production: Production Factory Local Producer: Tyler Bruns Grooming: Taryll Atkins Studio: Ace Studio Miami Photo assistant / BTS: Beatrice Pelletier

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Long Live Patience

By Jack Underwood Jack Underwood is a poet, critic and senior lecturer in creative writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. Winner of the Eric Gregory Award in 2007, his first collection, Happiness, was published

by Faber & Faber in 2015. The following extract is taken from Underwood’s upcoming debut nonfiction work, Not Even This, a lyric essay penned in the wake of his daughter’s birth that reappraises, with fresh urgency, the importance of language as a ‘realm of intimacy, overlap, hope and trust’

You are five weeks old. You weigh about four kilograms, the same as our cat. Your vision can only draw objects into focus if they lie within forty centimetres of your face. The rest is background. Your sense of day, night, your body and what lies beyond it, is vague. I am not sure whether you are able to isolate your own voice from the rest of sound, whether your cry is something you feel that you make, or if it is suddenly just there, part of the world.

I watch your face, errantly exploring its possible positions and combinations, and I think I can see recognition taking hold. Not of me, or the room, but of yourself, being here. I know that you are already beginning to impress your memory onto the present, stopping you from existing in a constant state of spooling, endless newness. And we, as your parents, are a central part of that impression of continuity: our faces arriving above your cot and leaving again, waking, feeding, changing, sleeping, not sleeping, the light of the 4 a.m. television, muted with subtitles, the patterns of our shift work across this bleary, newborn time zone, daily ceremonies… these are your first worldly repetitions, the first structures by which you navigate your presence, or predict and prepare for whatever sensation comes next; in other words, your first language.

By adulthood, language and reality are hard to tell apart. The tiny pool of our early repetitions has become a great wide lake of terms and laws to apply… there is so much language to our consciousness that we scarcely move beyond those waters, while our desires and impulses coalesce in the unknown depths and eddies, convecting in the dark: those drowned voices, hidden from memory, that rise and find us in our sleep, half remembered, rarely understood.

This will happen to you too. With your ‘highly structured and limited’ brain, you will learn like the rest of us to recognise the feeling of being as a pattern, and part of me mourns this loss for you. You’re still so beginning! The slide into a conceptual present feels so brutal. Perhaps it is the inevitability of it; as if you could live some more authentic, less moderated existence instead, and your wild, contingent, newborn way of being in the world might be preserved or protected; as if you will one day grow up and demand to know why I didn’t save you from language, this dulled, violently categorical version of being alive.

The brain is not a general-purpose device. […] Human concepts and human language are not random or arbitrary; they are highly structured and limited, because of the limits and structure of the brain, the body, and the world.

– George Lakoff and Rafael E. Núñez

Three months have passed. Your world is no longer encountered as a diffuse, contingent mass of stimuli hailing you from within and without, but as a collection of things in relation to yourself. I can see already how insidiously, how without thinking, the words and symbols for these things will arrive next, as if they were not sounds and shapes that we taught you to make, over and over, but somehow part of the things themselves:

Your fluency in this language is absolute, because you have never known another way of measuring yourself against the passing of time. We all started off this way: a tiny pool of repetitions imposed upon the present, giving our novel lives the impression of similarity, when in truth, no one has ever been anywhere before, despite the mind’s invigilation.

Then the tiny pool floods out and deepens. We continue to draw our past into the present. But we also begin to imagine alternative versions of events. We triangulate and rerun. We edit and fantasise. And we rehearse our futures too, catastrophic or heroic, the terrible accident, the narrow escape, the mot juste, the acceptance speech… The outside world, various and ready, runs parallel to the creativity of our inner lives, each tramline steering the other. And somehow language mediates. Or perhaps it rescues us from meaninglessness: modulating what we feel and imagine with its concepts, its theoretical frameworks. Language lays its names over and across the present like the eastings and northings and contours of a map. It gives shape and reason, a stable sense of relativity within its system, and a relationality with the world.

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*

We must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life […] the word is not the thing.

– Alfred Korzybski Your brain, thoroughly calibrated by thousands of years of evolution to choose the efficiency and safety of finding repetition over the vulnerability of living in a world perpetually new, is readying itself for the nameable world. In time you will simply accept the limited version, its habitual roll call, and so you will reduce your reality in order to know it.

A door.

A tree.

Water. *

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Now I am wishing the days away. In such a hurry. I want to know you, and to be known by you more and more. I want you to be more arrived. Why does this part take so long? I want you to speak to me, to pass the symbols back and forth, so that it feels as if we are, yes, both here – not just here in the world, but in the world and in language simultaneously: a place where love and knowledge can be declared with a reassuring sense of ongoing permanence. I want you to meet me here, where the words are! * Daddy. A name. A handle. A contract. And it is a mad wish, really, to want to be named that way, because if anything I am lost in its prevalence. It is only a rain cloud to stand in. But such contracts are all we have to know one another. *

We do not think real time. But we live it, because life transcends intellect.

– Henri Bergson *

But does language really reduce our contact with reality? All at once, in a gasp of thought, it seems only to complicate the world, to open it up to us; there is so much of it, and it takes so many different forms, with its signs and gestures and ceremonies. How miraculous that it might bring you closer to the surface of yourself and to us, bring you here to me. Every day we say it: bring her to me, give her to me, let me take her, and doesn’t language do that more than anything else? An equal miracle to being alive and witnessing another life begin is being able to make life comprehensible.

It is miraculous that we possess the faculties to simplify reality for ourselves in this way.

In otherwise total darkness there was a handle became my hand and I was very somewhere when suddenly I took it. * Then, today, I looked at you and thought about all the repression and the burying that human beings attend to in exchange for this workable coherence within ourselves and with the world. I thought about how we burn and fuse the brain’s shorter routes to learn, how we teach ourselves with the pain that the body makes for us, its harsh replies, to expect the ground to be hard, to expect radiators, oven doors, cups of tea to be hot, to fear love and connection that might one day be lost… You cannot even swallow solid food yet, or deliberately drop an object… Your mind’s sums of reduction will also be your mode of survival; without them, where would any of us be? Not here at all. *

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I searched online to find out how far you can see. There was no average visual range given for a five-month-old baby, but I did discover that you now have the fundamentals of depth perception.

You can experience distance. It makes me imagine the time when our faces must have simply bubbled up before you.

I also learned that the central visual range of the human eye is only 5 degrees, and that most of our 120 degrees of vision is peripheral. It is the eye’s narrow progress across an object that accumulates a sense of its whole, in the form of memory; we rarely see anything in one go. Most of what we ‘see’ is what we remember. I go and run the tap. What am I looking at?

I distract myself and do not stop to remember my clothes are not my body, or to listen to paintings.

Am I even in a room, or just following its story to the next confusion like my weight on the floor?

I want to tell you there is a necessary loneliness in anything unverified; loneliness is anything unverified.

It’s 4:21 a.m. and I have taken you to the sofa so your mother can sleep, the television flickers blue with the sound down subtitles landing the story in chunks while you shut yourself in sleep and I am not lonely but laying to waste the rest of my life over my shoulder to be here this way with you like a habit like a knack or a lock like the downturn or narrowing on my face, which I hardly ever check to read, daughter, in a line of cars at night, or a line of thoughts preceding, and when I do, I lie.

Not Even This: Poetry, parenthood and living uncertainly by Jack Underwood is published by Corsair, an imprint of the Little, Brown Book Group, in May 2021

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Monument Maker

By David Keenan David Keenan is a Scottish author, critic and musician who has penned four critically acclaimed novels: This is Memorial Device, For the Good Times, The Towers The Fields The Transmitters and Xstabeth. Taken from his forthcoming novel, the following extract is a rhapsody of lunar proportions, a single breath of human marvel

Book Three: Choir 1. The Gospel According to Frater Jim The young boy, who was back wearing a regulation striped pyjama top after losing his smart denim jacket in a brawl, would ask me questions about the far future, about the possibilities of the fantastic, things that were beyond the reach of my own terrible powers, things that were outside the span of my own life, but nonetheless I would entertain his fascination with speculation that I would present as vision and soon we had two parallel futures that we spent much of our time in, one that would unfold and that would come around and that would pass just as surely as the sun would continue to shine, and one that we would never enjoy outside of anticipation and fantasy, a world where they landed on the moon, they really did that? the young man burst and yes, I told him, yes, they really did, the Germans were working on the technology in secret, I claimed, and after the war they moved over to the American side and they came up with a great saucer, a round disc with retractable legs, which could move so fast it was almost invisible and they kept it inside a mountain and it would take off vertically and soon they were sending fleets of these ships to the moon to conquer it, though when they got there they found there was nothing to conquer, that it was in fact just a dead stone floating there, but nevertheless it was some kind of achievement, but how did they prove it, the young man asked, how did they prove they were on the moon, and I told him that they took photographs, that films were made, and the young boy said, well, they can make a film of anything they like, he talked about a film he had seen where a race of aliens conquer the earth, and I said, yes, okay, but what happens is they put a huge flag on the face of the moon, a flag so big that it can be seen from everywhere on earth, that’s how they prove that they get to the moon, but what’s on the flag, he asked me, surely it isn’t just the flag of a country, surely people would protest across the world about having to look at another country’s flag every night stuck in the moon and towering over them, like an advert, an advert for a country, and of course he was right, and I had to think, what would they put on a great flag that wouldn’t even flap on the moon, a flag that would stand motionless, a flag that would, of course, attract attention from all sides, from out there in the solar system, in the depths of space, as much as from the people of earth, and I was stumped for a minute and then I said, well, what they come up with is, what they decide would best represent the achievement of man, what would best represent him to the cosmos, in a way, is, well, what do you think they chose, I asked the young man, who at this point had stopped shaving with a rusty razor that he would borrow from an emaciated Italian who described himself as a

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prisoner of conscience and had therefore sprouted the beginnings of a soft beard and who was also sporting a bloodshot eye and cuts across his hands as a result of the fracas over his purloined denim jacket, and the boy thought a while and said, well, a flag is ruled out, we know that much, people across the world don’t want to look at the same flag flapping every night in their face, even though you point out that it wouldn’t flap, I think we get the point, so I would guess that they would put something on it like a picture of a man, a drawing of an earthman, no, well, in that case, a man and a woman, you know, that’s how we get along down here, why not up there, any aliens can check us out, we can see ourselves in space, everyone wins, no, okay, I see, I guess there are many types of people on God’s earth so it was too hard to decide, you know, should they be fat, should one of them be fat and the other tall and beautiful, but who wants to look at an ugly fat person flapping on the moon, which I know they wouldn’t flap but you get what I’m saying, but I suppose the whole thing became too fractious, too complicated, like should the man have a beard, should the woman have long hair or short hair, this is the human race we are representing here, after all, and we’re all going to have to look at it, though in what detail I’m really not sure, could you make out their genitals from the earth, for instance, or would you need a telescope, should they even be naked in the first place, but you know if you put them in clothes that, well, fashion keeps on changing, they will be out of date in no time, but maybe that doesn’t matter too much as although in the short-term they will become a bit of an eyesore, kind of an embarrassment, with people looking up at the moon incredulously and thinking, did we really dress like that, I mean, we could get to the moon but we couldn’t figure out just how off the mark women’s fashions were, but of course eventually, in time, they will come to seem quaint and then historical and that of course lends them a certain air of gravitas, a certain authenticity that we can all be proud of, even if we wouldn’t be seen dead looking like that today, and of course how do they stand, do they stand like statues, heroic, mythic-looking, or is that all too much, should they slouch around, touch each other, appear casual, and of course we haven’t even brought up the race thing, never mind what age these two should be, should they be at their peak, which I read somewhere for men it’s twenty-one and for women thirty-two, which puts us out of sync, I’ve always felt, and a twentyone-year-old man, let’s call him, with a thirty-two-year-old woman on a flag on the moon, well, that’s too much reality for anyone, I fear, should she expose her breasts, of course, being a breast man I would say yes, and wouldn’t that be a healthy attitude, there’s a voluptuous naked woman on the moon for all to see at any age, but then I’m a freethinker, well, I regard myself as

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one, and there are lots of religious people who would not be happy with a buck-naked woman on the moon, never mind a guy with his penis hanging down, that’ll inevitably offend someone, you can imagine whole areas of the world where they would have to lock themselves in at night just to make sure they didn’t catch an inadvertent eyeful, religions that would be forced into fear of the moon, which is fear of women, if you think about it, which would give women a nice feeling of revenge for all that they’ve had to put up with over the years, yes, I’m rather coming round to the idea of a giant naked woman on the moon, if women were able to be reasonable with each other and agree on basics then they all could get a lot out of a development like that, but I know, as I say, I’m a freethinker, and there are men to think about too, aliens might think it was a race of women, for a start, and think we were a pushover or an ideal conquest, more likely, and of course men would feel left out, it wouldn’t be the whole story unless, of course, you could plant a flag in the sun and have the man on that, but that’s never going to happen, let’s face it, and of course what colour skin should the woman have, should she have oriental eyes, should she have those hips, those great wide hips, or what about the women with the longs necks and the eyes all askew, I’m partial to those myself but what’s wrong with a blonde, a traditional blonde, or a Scandinavian blonde, if you really want to push the boat out, and of course what about South Americans, what about Latino women, the most beautiful women in the world, some might say, and sometimes it’s hard to disagree, at least that is until you get into Eastern Europe and then it’s all over, for me anyway, at any rate, it’s all over when confronted by the beauties of the near East, Polish women, oh my God, the women of Czechoslovakia and Hungary and Romania, okay, hear me out, this could be out in the realm of fantasy but how about a painting, a painted flag, with five women on it, a Japanese woman, an African woman, a great Eastern European beauty, a Latino honey and an Arabian woman – a Persian would be my first choice – and the painting, the way I’m seeing it right now, which is with my mind’s eye, it looks like something by Marc Chagall, do you know him, he’s a great Russian painter, though God knows where he is now, with all of this turmoil, what has it done for the arts, who knows, will they ever recover, though the arts are resilient, we all know that, you didn’t know I had a background in the arts myself, I’ll bet, you took me for one of those

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kids that run off to the army straight from school, well, no, not quite, but I was that oddity, a patriotic artist, well, not so odd if you think of it as an artist with a social conscience, if you twist it like that, but that was never me, I kept politics out of art but I loved my country, loved England, and of course loved Poland and loved the women of Poland, which is what drove me to enlist, those terrible animal Germans stomping all over Poland then threatening England into the bargain, what a thought, and so I abandoned my painting, which, as you might have guessed, was very influenced by my discovery of Chagall, and so I’m imagining this flag, this flag on the moon with a painting by Chagall on it, a painting of five women and the women are standing in a ring in a garden and they might be dancing, they might be twirling around, a leg is lifted here, a heel kicks out, a thigh curves in the way that only Chagall can make a thigh curve, the quality of his brushwork, which is what makes a great painter, ultimately, look closely and tell me I’m wrong, and if you think about it, Chagall’s paintings, if you’ve never seen them let me tell you, they have the quality of moonlight, that is of reflected light, that is of the memory of the sun, the memory of colour, they are illuminated, like stained glass in the cold dark of an old church, something that he also dabbled in, or so I heard, so I was told at art school where we would marvel at his works, how they were illuminated from elsewhere, the colours like a fantasy of colour, an uncomplicated supernatural aspect, that’s what they said, and of course Chagall was a Jew, which makes me wonder if he is still alive, after you told us of the fate of the poor Jews in this war, have we lost Chagall with his wonderful light, even more reason to memorialise him and his women on the moon, though I’m sure, like myself, he would have opted for five women from Eastern Europe, five dark beauties with pale skin like the light of the moon itself, translucent skin and dark eyes and with their breasts exposed, let’s say, let’s compromise, with their nipples of scarlet and of darkest brown, dancing in a circle, of course what would have been even better, if you ask me, would have been to erect a church on the moon, a church with huge panels of stained glass that could be seen from the earth, one that stood on the surface of the moon as a sign that mankind had been there with reverence, which is the correct attitude with which to approach the moon, I believe, and the windows filled with dancing women in the style of Chagall, in the style of the late Chagall, I almost said,

and who can say for sure that he hasn’t been murdered already, shot in the back of the head with a single bullet, thrown into a communal grave, what a loss to mankind, will the world ever really be the same, tell me, think of all that we have lost, a holocaust of books and paintings and ideas and thoughts and visions and great buildings rising up on other planets, all the different colours, all the gradations of light, that we will now never experience, people call the light in Chagall’s paintings otherworldly and of course that’s understandable, I said myself that it resembled bright moonlight, but moonlight is of the world, Chagall’s colours are of the world so completely that there is something ridiculous about them, it’s colour reflected through a small eye, a tiny pupil that longs to be the size of a planet, that longs to have the surface of the ocean at its disposal, that longs to reflect the expanse of the sky but that is hemmed in, that is concentrated on a tiny surface, and of course Chagall’s paintings, forgive me my passion for him, but Chagall’s paintings have no depth of colour, his paintings place colour next to colour, never so much colour on top of colour, everything has risen to the surface in a painting

by Chagall, everything has risen in the paintings of Chagall, which again is a good enough reason to have his paintings on the moon, in a great church on the moon is how I would have done it, and of course there is something simple about the moon, in my opinion, something that is happy just to be, but even so it makes its demands, it makes its demands of women and of the oceans and of gravity too, there are days of the moon when you can move faster than others, days of the moon when you can jump higher, days of the moon, as we all know, where you can make love all night, days of the moon where you can go a bit crazy and drink yourself till you’re poisoned, it makes demands of birds and of moths and, who knows, of insects too, I’m willing to bet, and wouldn’t that be something, a painting of a moth, a great moth landed on the moon, wouldn’t that be humorous and kind of touching too, the dream of every poor raggedy moth fulfilled, would it confuse the moths of the earth, though, that’s impossible to say, and a moth painted by Chagall, inevitably, if he’s still around in the future to paint them, and I pray that he is and I pray that as well as women, as well as Chagall’s dark and, inevitably, tragic women, that he lives to paint moths, who better, who better to paint their translucent wings, their splashes of eerily simple colour, the way they too become besotted by the

reflection of light and fly towards it and burn up, and think of all the light that’s burned and buried already, but we go to the moon anyway, we never lose that attraction, that’s reassuring, somehow, that we have enough leisure time, that there’s a cessation of conflict long enough to facilitate going to the moon and planting a big flag there, even if it doesn’t have a painting by Chagall on it, even if it’s not, inevitably, a ring of happy and sad women dancing on the moon, or a great moth hovering in happy silence above it, even if it took a war and a holocaust to get there, even if it took a battlefield to invent a UFO, which according to what you are telling me is how it went down, that the Nazis invented UFOs as weapons, at first, and then afterwards for a short trip to another planet, and of course there’s the matter of your new face, which came to you through the experiments of the Nazis, so some good came out if it, as least that’s how it seems, we’re still waiting to hear how that goes, though it would seem like the possibility of a fresh start, and that’s something, that’s something we would all love to have, a life all over again, rising up, like the colours in a Chagall painting, how incredible, but first, okay, put me out of my suspense, what was it that they put on the huge flag that they raised on the moon and that everyone could see from space and from down here on the earth, it wasn’t the earth itself, was it, the earth in space, no, okay, that might have been too uncomfortable, like looking in a mirror all the time, plus you might get vertigo, depending on the scale, okay, in that case I give in, what did they decide in the end, after all the back and forth, the inevitable complaints and pressure groups and special interests and lobbyists and international law, I’m sure that must have come into it, as the moon knows no borders and so the flag would have to reflect that, wait a minute, wait a minute, a perfect reflection, of course, after all is said and done what else could they possibly do, don’t tell me, I think I have it, it’s outlandish, but I think I have it, in the future, when they land on the moon, in order to prove they have been there they erect a huge flag that has a picture of the moon on it, am I right, yes, am I right, wow, okay, I guess there was no other option, really, though I don’t suppose it was painted by Chagall, was it, that’s asking for too much, isn’t it.

Monument Maker by David Keenan is published June 10th 2021 by White Rabbit Books

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Under Paving Stones, the Beach!

By Matthew Turner Matthew Turner is a writer and lecturer at London’s Chelsea College of Arts. His novella LOOM, published by Gordian Projects at the close of 2020, is a story of threads, hidden wealth, and identity. In this essay, he turns his attention to the shifting symbolism of the beach in landmark prose and poetry

“Sea, sex and sun” runs through Serge Gainsbourg’s 1978 classic as a mantra celebrating the granular, constantly shifting dreamworld of the beach – a place where desires can be freely pursued without the complications of language and inhibitions.

The phrase has been adopted in various combinations by travel companies as a lure to far-flung coastlines. Yet in every burnout body recumbent on the sand, there is a sun-bleached vestige, an invisible sunburn, of why we started going there en masse in the first place.

In the various societal shifts following World War II, the city was for remaking the mind, while beaches, and the waters that encroached upon them, were used as biopolitical laboratories for experimenting with body, leading to a renewed interest in therapeutic settlements on the coast – such as the De La Warr Pavilion; a continuation of the Victorian obsession with ‘taking the air’ in the manner one would a spoon of medicine. Think of how quaint Bexhill, Eastbourne and Southend-on-Sea now seem in the popular imagination; well, they were once at the radical forefront of a race to heal the machine-like body in order for it to perform manual labour again – a release valve to ensure the smooth running of the economy. The opening sequence of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock is reminiscent of a scene Brueghel could have painted, with ‘bewildered multitudes’ of revellers decanting their sorrows into the ‘fresh and glistening air’ to extricate a mere ‘grain of pleasure’, before sleepily drifting back to London’s ‘cramped streets’.

To prescribe a place as an environmental pharmaceutical is curious, but it worked because the beach was the opposite of the city. It was a place to escape poor living conditions, overcrowding, pollution, noise, and stress. It was a place where people could lose themselves in distant horizons rather than feeling trapped between buildings. This eventually gave rise to the slogan “Under paving stones, the beach!”, used during France’s 1968 student demonstrations – expressing the desire that beneath the city, which had been hardened into sterile grids by stone, there was the freedom of the beach. The beach has often demarcated escape, and still does. However, that might not always be quite the case. Weird things happen at the beach; maybe because it’s the only place where we’re all half naked. Perhaps it’s because it feels like a primal ground zero, with only the most elementary of ordering principles – the line between earth and sky still the same as that experienced by the earliest of organisms. There is more to it than that. Writers have often used the restorative and pleasurable attributes of beaches as backdrops to intensify uncanny events and emotional states, and in doing so have exposed its more secretive undercurrents of meaning and symbolism.

In 1921, after one of his many breakdowns, TS Eliot was recommended Margate as a place to recuperate, where he eventually

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composed Part III of ‘The Waste Land’ from the safety of a shelter overlooking the beach. Eliot once wrote that water and its interaction with the shoreline had a massive impact on his imagination, culminating in the recursive and tidal time signatures present in his later work; an effect present in the ‘East Coker’ section of Four Quartets, which begins with the line “In my end is my beginning,” and finishing with an interchange: “In my beginning is my end.”

Washing back and forth as a continually reformed ruin, it mimics the way in which sea interacts with the shore: a dual action where sea forms the beach, and in turn the beach leads the movements of the water, just as the repeated phrases change. By the end of ‘East Coker’ there is a sense that what is cast out into the water always comes back eventually in some horrific accumulation: “The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters.”

The same can happen with the clothes and layers of personality that are stripped off at the beach, much the same as the old stresses coming back on your holiday’s final day. They may be gone momentarily but might just end up coming back as echoes – even if in slightly altered form. Recovering from heroin addiction, the narrator of Roberto Bolaño’s single-torrid-sentence short story, Beach, takes to the seashore to aid his recovery while undergoing methadone treatment. It seems idyllic until his actions become repetitive, and his justifications for going back each day are those of a junkie reasoning whether to take more dope. His tan becomes more intense, and still he goes for more. It is only when looking at the others lazily lounging next to him that “distant memories of junkies frozen in blissful immobility” return. He goes home to take a shower and examines his glowing sunburnt back, one that seems to belong “to someone else”. Rather than an escape to the sun, he sees old demons in his reflection once more.

These circular migrations are a strange phenomenon that can occur on beaches outside of fiction. If a stone is untethered from its chosen crevice by the water’s movements, it can be adrift for years; however, due to the repetitive motions of the waves, it can, at odds with all probability, easily end up back in that exact crevice again. Tom Ripley seems well aware of this in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley. Beaches and azure tranquil seas loom large in Highsmith’s oeuvre, because where better to be tormented than somewhere heavenly? Early on, the beach is an important location of metamorphosis for Tom, where he is remade and casts away his old identity. A key source of suspense in the mid-section of the plot then hinges on waiting for when the tide will wash this unwanted identity back again, along with the dead body he has assigned it to, weighted down and hidden within the waves. Highsmith plants constant reminders of this potential fate through reference to his fears of water and

ILLUSTRATION DROR COHEN

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drowning, and by how she cleverly picks Venice (the city a thin disguise for the 118 small sandy islands it’s built on) as his hideout from the authorities. With its ambiguous status between land and water, it has an identity crisis similar to her protagonist’s, echoing John Ruskin’s rhapsodies about the city’s entropic persona, “which seemed to have fixed for its throne the sands of the hour-glass as well as of the sea”. He saw Venice as Tom Ripley sees himself at moments of crisis and moral reflection, as “a ghost upon the sands of the sea”, so lost in its decline that “we might as well doubt, as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which was the City, and which the Shadow.”

Why are we attracted to the beach? Because it’s where, as Clarice Lispector notes in The Waters of the World, our bodies can soothe themselves with their “own slightness compared to the vastness of the sea”? A reminder that human history is just a microscopic grain in a vast sandbank? There is a fine line between this pleasure and total disappearance, as “The man” (later denoted as Jumpei Niki) finds in Kōbō Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes.

The novel begins: “One day in August a man disappeared.”

The man, an avid entomologist, has gone to a remote area of sand dunes next to the sea, with hopes of identifying an undiscovered sand beetle. There is a strange shift in scale, and as night falls, unable to find transport home, he is coerced by locals to stay in a ramshackle house at the bottom of a funnel shaped pit of sand, strangely similar to the habitat of the beetles he wished to discover. The occupant of the house, a young woman, spends her nights shovelling sand into buckets which are then raised by villagers and deposited elsewhere: Her house is one of a bulwark which prevents the village being swallowed by the perennial shifts of the dunes. The man awakes in the morning to find the ladder he used to enter the hole is gone.

The sand is like a living being that, although insentient and without empathy, “creeps everywhere” with “shapeless, destructive power”, thwarting his attempts to climb out of the pit and feeding voraciously off his energy. The “tentacles of ceaselessly

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flowing sand” obsess his mind, then infuse his body, to the point of being buried alive, covering his skin, gathering in folds of his clothes, his throat and eyes. Next, it guides his actions, and he dominates the woman of the dunes in the same way the sand has imposed itself on him.

The sand is the prison: literally and symbolically, and not just for the man. We too are in this burning sand pit. We too must spend a lifetime fighting against something, dreaming of elsewhere and getting nowhere, not even leaving footprints in the sand. Shovelling never-ending deposits of sand around, or Excel cells and pixels. Just as we liberated ourselves from factories and hard labour, only to start going to gyms to work our bodies in the same way, the beach in The Woman in the Dunes is not an escape from the strains of work but a condensation of its hardships.

The beach is the eternal, what flesh is fated to fight against.

It is the psyches that confine us, the ghosts that come back to haunt. It has been a place to question notions of existence and the trace fossils we leave behind ever since the first impossible footprint in the modern novel. When Crusoe, in Daniel Defoe’s 1719 Robinson Crusoe, finds “the Print of a Man’s naked Foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen in the Sand”, he is scared and spooked by apparitions of human presence everywhere, “mistaking every bush and tree, and fancying every stump at a distance to be a man”. Is it his own print? His shadows? How can there be only one print of a foot, isolated in the middle of an otherwise pristine beach?

The students in France’s 1968 demonstrations may well have found sand under the cobble stones they dislodged to throw at riot police, but maybe, as a symbol, it’s just representative of another layer of struggle. The beach is a simpler place, purified of the physical strictures that ensnare everyday life, and without these normal distractions it’s a condition that initiates a troubling confrontation with other, even more byzantine, inner subliminal worlds. We may have misunderstood the beach all along. Rather than feeling better there, perhaps we just feel different.

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POEM

How to Wash a Heart

By Bhanu Kapil The following poem is taken from the TS Eliot prize-winning How to Wash a Heart, published

by Pavilion Poetry, Liverpool University Press. Beginning life as a performance at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Kapil’s first full-length collection published in the UK interrogates the complex dynamics between an immigrant guest and citizen host. With a uniquely disarming form and exacting voice, she uses the experience of diaspora to illustrate the limits of inclusion, bodies, hospitality and compassion

I do not enjoy eating too much.

It’s so painful.

The only remedy is the bitter herb That grows by a rushing brook.

Oils, sugars, pearls, crushed diamonds, linens and songs Populate your crappy cabinets.

Make a list of what you need And I will get it, you ungrateful cow.

This is what I need: The light and the heat and the yesterday Of my work.

A candle on the wonky table at dusk.

How thyme migrates.

The chalky blue flowers.

I need something that burns as slowly As that.

Because living with someone who is in pain Requires you to move in a different way.

You bang the cup down By my sleepy head.

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This Is How We Walk on the Moon

Photography Hazel Gaskin

Styling Mitchell Belk

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This page: FENDI Opposite page: DIOR

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SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO

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BOSS

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GIORGIO ARMANI

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PRADA

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LOUIS VUITTON

BOTTEGA VENETA

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Hair Stylist: Anna Chapman @ Julian Watson using Virtual Labs Make Up Artist: Porsche Poon using Susanne Kaufmann Skincare Models: Adamu @ Next, Billy @ Present, James Spencer @ Supa, Nassia @ Wilhelmina Production & Casting: LG Studio

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ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA

CANALI

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With star turns in the mini-series Roots, Black Mirror, and most recently Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology as the powerful polemicist and racial justice campaigner Darcus Howe, the London-born actor talks to Port about vulnerability, shunning social media, and the joy of sharing Black British Caribbean history

Malachi Kirby WORDS JASON OKUNDAYE

PHOTOGRAPHY MARLEN KELLER

STYLING JULIE VELUT

MALACHI KIRBY WEARS ZEGNA SS21 THROUGHOUT

Malachi Kirby has the sage demeanour of an older brother. He feels at once charming and close, but with the evident amour propre and stature that doesn’t permit overfamiliarity or a disrespect of boundaries.

Perhaps I say this because, within the opening minute of our two-hour conversation on Zoom, we realise that we had grown up in neighbouring buildings on the same estate in Battersea – the Patmore. “Oh, behave yourself – no one else lived in Patmore!” he says. We become engrossed with describing the architecture of the estate, its adventure playground, and gesticulating to each other as if our hands could beget a holographic map of its geography. As Kirby remarks to me, “This is a special one.” And when I listen back to the recording of our chat, I realise that we are both, at brief moments, notwithstanding his attentive and softened parlance, caught in a storm of each other’s memories, and speaking at breakneck speed.

The relative seclusion and anonymity of growing up on the Patmore – its neighbouring estates in Battersea, like the Doddington and the Winstanley, are more famous – to me, frames the actor’s modesty in the face of his own success. Standout performances in 2016 as Kunta Kinte in the heart-breaking miniseries, Roots, about slavery as America’s original sin, closely followed by his role as the vulnerable soldier, Stripe, who hunts humanoid monsters

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in the Black Mirror episode ‘Men Against Fire’, have brought him firmly into the limelight.

But he admits that fame is not something he relishes, and that as a child, whose primary passion was for words and literature, acting wasn’t even on his radar: “It wasn’t something that I thought was accessible. And even if it was accessible, it wasn’t something I had any interest in. The spotlight for me was somewhere that felt unsafe.”

When he reached year nine of secondary school, his mother brought home a leaflet for a short drama course at Battersea Arts Centre, which remained on their table for a year until he decided to take it up. He describes the course there as life changing, and, like dipping a toe into a bathtub to test the heat of the water, he gradually acclimatised to the space, splendidly populated by total strangers, and eventually felt able to act and perform with freedom. It was at a showcase for friends and family that he received local acclaim. “At the end, someone’s parents came up to me and said I was good. And they didn’t have any reason to say that; it was just kindness,” he tells me. “But it encouraged me. I didn’t go, ‘Okay, I want to be an actor now’, but there was definitely a thrill of, like, ‘Wow, I was just on stage and people watched me and I had everyone’s attention, but I didn’t feel in danger. Okay, maybe this isn’t so bad.’”

This local success found Kirby admitted to Identity School of Acting in late 2007, where he befriended the actress Letitia Wright, who enrolled in 2009. “As soon as she came in the room, I adopted her as my little sister, whether she knew that at the time I don’t know. And I’m having to get to grips with the fact that she’s not so little anymore.” These two titans of Black British acting co-star in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe-anthology film Mangrove, and he recalls auditioning for his role as Darcus Howe in Letitia’s house with a friend, unknowing that she had already been cast in the part of Altheia Jones-LeCointe: “We were recording an audition tape, and she overheard us and said ‘Hey, what are you auditioning for?’, and I replied ‘I can’t really speak about it.’ Anyway, we kept going and she was like, ‘I know what you’re doing; that’s the Mangrove!’ I said ‘How do you know?’ She’s like ‘I’m in it, bro!’”

Knowing that he would be starring alongside one of his closest friends amplified the joy in getting the role. But he tells me that his biggest fear for performing as Darcus Howe was mastering the Trinidadian accent, a prospect he had dreaded his entire career. “Prior to this there were two accents that I just thought I was never ever gonna touch. It was Australian and Trinidadian, specifically. I just thought, people are gonna get offended.” However, he describes learning to speak like Howe as one of the most

I’ve just got this thing about social media where I think, am I being naive?

Am I being stubborn? Is this insecurity? Is it against my sense of morality, or is it just not for me?

thrilling parts of the role, crediting his voice coach with imbuing him with the confidence to nail it. And so it transformed from a fear to an honour, “To be able to tap into that and enjoy the rhythm of that, and the musicality of his voice, was like eating apple pie.” He emphasises that it shouldn’t be assumed that he could master a Trinidadian accent on the basis of his Jamaican heritage, noting the complexity of the dialect. “A Trinidadian accent is not just Trinidadian; it’s so full of all of these different cultures, and all of these different places in the world, infused into this one voice.” The process of becoming Howe was intensive, and with just three weeks to prepare, he immersed himself in his biography, newspaper articles and old video tapes, noting his luck that Howe was perhaps the most widely and accessibly documented character of the film. He comfortably admits to me that he had been unaware of Howe’s history or that of the Black Panther movement, but rather than responding to this with guilt, he embraced the belated education he was receiving and developed a newfound appreciation of Black British organising. He was particularly impressed to learn that Howe had represented himself in court, something he did not even know was possible. “There was a weight for sure of, I’ve got a lot to catch up on… and not just for my sake, but also because of, I believe, the work that we need to do to progress and move forward.” Before filming, the actor met with Barbara Beese, Darcus’s former partner, and his son Darcus Beese, initially intending to “pick his brains” about his father, but instead resolving that his family’s blessing would be enough to inspire his performance.

It’s clear enough that Kirby has a deep appreciation for craft and artistry. He says that

from his audition he knew Steve McQueen would stretch him “as an actor, as a human, as Malachi, and as an artist. And that was terrifying.” The vulnerability he felt, though, was soothed by McQueen’s love. “He has a really big heart; he cares, and he is passionate about what he does. I began to realise that he was going to create a safe space for me to be vulnerable.” Indeed, it’s this symbiosis between deep craft and curating spaces for comfort and safety that also defines his perception of his mother, whom he lives with, and whose cooking he celebrates as a kind of artistry. When I ask him his favourite home-cooked meal, he simply says: “Everything. Everything. If she cooked cereal, it would be beautiful; there’s just a way that she makes food that I love.”

Kirby has been close to his mother, living with her only since his father passed when he was six years old. As such, despite this early tragedy, he describes his childhood on Patmore Estate as happy: “I always remember it being sunny. My primary school was literally a two minute walk from my house. And I just have really beautiful memories. I have an incredible mum, and there was always a lot of love at home.” In fact, the most special part of performing in the Small Axe anthology for him was being able to share these stories of Black British Caribbean histor y with his Jamaican mother and grandmother. It was also an important moment for Kirby, as this was the first time he had embodied a Black Caribbean character, as opposed to previous portrayals as African Americans, Africans, or ethnically unspecific Black British people. “We made the decision to go around to my grandma’s every Sunday to watch each episode. And it was so beautiful.” When I ask him his favourite film

of the series, other than Mangrove, he immediately replies Lovers Rock, “because for me it was the most familiar. Before I even knew what it was about – as soon as you hear Lovers Rock, memories come flooding in; there was a nostalgia to it. And also the experience of watching that with my family, and them witnessing and remembering the silly games and dancing and singing. It was a whole experience.”

Kirby prefers privacy over the public sphere, so his social-media presence is minimal. We laugh when I note that he follows no one on Instagram, and so is clearly uninterested in what anyone has to post. As an actor he is often met with confusion at his disinterest in social media, but as safety and reclusion are motifs which define him, he’s in no rush to tie his career to it. Though, he’s not against distributing a few follow backs in the future: “I’ve just got this thing about social media where I think, am I being naive? Am I being stubborn? Is this insecurity? Is it against my sense of morality, or is it just not for me? I’m waiting for some kind of clarity, to just either run into it or run away from it.” I’m scrolling through his Instagram at this point, flashing photographs from his various shoots and editorials to him, half teasing, half curious. He tells me that although he’s still grappling with having his picture taken, he feels most comfortable on editorial shoots where he gets to go into acting mode, “I enjoy the ones where I’m not actually being myself… it feels a bit more like a character. Those are the ones I enjoy the most, because I feel the most safe.”

Both the near and distant future will see Kirby exploring his first love, writing. His debut play was meant to premiere at the Bush Theatre in May 2020, but was a casualty of the

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[Steve McQueen] has a really big heart; he cares, and he is passionate about what he does. I began to realise that he was going to create a safe space for me to be vulnerable

Produced in collaboration with ZEGNA to celebrate their What Makes A Man campaign, a new platform for discussion on the meaning of modern masculinity.

Make-up: Nadia Altinbas using Tom Ford Beauty Groomer styling: Tanisha Rochas Groomer beard: Sheldon Edwards Set: Clara Boulard Production: Rosco Retouching: Helen Studios

COVID-19 pandemic, though he hopes that he’ll have a full audience once theatres are able to open again. Before he had even written this play, however, he had been working on a few film projects that he remains excited and hopeful about. He gives little away about the scope and content of his written projects: “They’re not ready! They’re not ready! Genuinely, I don’t know if I’m ready to have this conversation, but I will say that they are all stories that are close to my heart, the play especially.”

As for influences in theatre and storytelling, he cites theatre writer Arinzé Kene. “In terms of scripts, I think he was the first writer that I really resonated with in terms of theatre. The poeticism of his language. And I find him very inspiring, especially because he comes from a background similar to mine.” A play that he

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finds himself constantly returning to whenever it is on stage is Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange, “I think that play has always just stuck with me. I remember seeing it at the Arcola Theatre in Hackney with an actress called Ayesha Antoine starring in it, and then a second time at the Young Vic with Daniel Kaluuya. Whenever I hear Blue/Orange, I just get excited. But also, on a personal note, my two favourite colours are blue and orange. I’ve come to describe them as two different sides of me. A really deep blue, and a really vibrant orange.”

Depth and vibrancy certainly define Malachi Kirby for me. His kind face, and his relaxed disposition, remind me of the gentle smile and brotherly nods of elder boys on the estate that we shared. Perhaps I, or my brothers, saw him at points, even briefly knew him, even if we

didn’t remember now. When our conversation ends, he asks me about Battersea, noting that he left the area at 15 but frequents Clapham Junction. I tell him that the area has changed beyond recognition, the forces of gentrification having displaced many residents and jarred the landscape with the kind of plastic architecture that has the Nine Elms quarter being nicknamed locally as ‘English Dubai’. I ask that he come and visit the Patmore Estate and see Battersea again, promising to send him a recent Guardian article about developments in the area, and he keenly accepts both the invitation and the article link, clearly retaining some emotional concern and connection with the home we both once shared.

And hopefully, one day, these two Battersea boys will share space again.

Stop Making Sense

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Photography Fumi Homma

Styling Mitchell Belk

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Halcyon Days

Photography James Giles

Styling Caterina Scardino

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Tom, Suit GIORGIO ARMANI, Shirt SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO, Rings & Necklace BREATH & STONE

Dante, Full look DIOR

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I Prefer Living In Colour

Styling Warren Leech

Photography James Robjant

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Making Good Time

Like any work of art, a fine timepiece embodies artisanal skill as much as creativity – the difference being that a single watch depends on not one but 30-odd timeworn crafts in order to wrest steel, sapphire, and brass into something beautiful, soulful, and eternal WORDS ALEX DOAK

Photography Flora Maclean

Set Design Paulina Piipponen 254

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Previous page, left: Chanel J12 Paradoxe £7,400 chanel.com Twenty years ago, Chanel proved to the watch world that fashion could do proper watches – its J12 pioneering ceramic technology from a purpose-built Swiss factory. Following some major upgrades beneath the bonnet (courtesy of Tudor, whose mechanics tick to chronometer levels of precision), the Paradoxe now refocuses on Chanel’s ceramic expertise, fusing two precisely cut white and black cases in Mademoiselle Coco’s signature two-tone, seamlessly. An answer to a question no one asked, but all the more alluring for it – much like the most fabulous fashion.

Previous page, right: Patek Philippe Aquanaut 5167R £31,430 patek.com For hardcore watch nerds at least, the biggest news of the year has been Patek Philippe’s sudden discontinuation of their Ref 5711 – the purest, most collectible, most waiting-listed cult classic of their catalogue; in the process, obviously, making the Swiss maestro’s curvaceous ’70s sports watch more cultish and covetable than ever. But now the vapours have dispersed, fear not, for we still have the Aquanaut collection: arguably the properly ‘sporty’ version of the Nautilus, almost 25 years young, and feeling fresher than ever. The Patek you really would brave a jet ski wearing, yet still housing all the hardcore horology you’d expect from Geneva’s favourite son.

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Opposite: Omega Seamaster Diver 300M Chronograph £16,770 omegawatches.com While we wait with bated breath for the long-overdue release of No Time to Die, trust James Bond’s watchmaker of choice to keep the action rollicking onwards. Not only did Omega and its iconic Seamaster diving watch assume double-O status from Rolex’s incumbent Submariner when Pierce Brosnan hopped into Timothy Dalton’s boots in 1995, but it stayed up to speed when Daniel Craig’s ‘brute in a suit’ took over. Sure enough, this chronograph version is an entire Q Branch for the wrist, built from a weaponsgrade cocktail of titanium, tantalum, and ceramic, plus mechanics certified by the Swiss Federal Institute of Metrology as antimagnetic enough to resist an MRI scan (or laser torture beam… probably).

This page: Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore Selfwinding Chronograh £35,700 audemarspiguet.com The Hublot watch also featured in this story owes a lot to the watch on this page: along with Panerai, the Royal Oak Offshore was the original oversize icon of the ’90s. While in development chez Audemars Piguet, the incumbent old guard, who treasured the delicate design codes of Gérald Genta’s 1972 original, dubbed it ‘The Beast’. It says everything about how modern taste in watches has moved on that that sounds like a compliment today. Now in black ceramic and up a further 2mm to a hefty 44mm in diameter, the green ceramic bezel and rubber strap move things from bestial to positively monstrous. In a good way.

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Opposite: Cartier Pasha de Cartier £5,700 cartier.co.uk We’re talking Gérald Genta again here: the designer responsible for Patek’s Nautilus, therefore its roundedout Aquanaut; plus, the ’70s ur luxury steel sports watch, Audemars Piguet’s Royal Oak, which inspired Vacheron’s Overseas. By the time the ’80s era of ‘disco luxe’ was in full swing, Genta was a shoo-in to revive a Cartier waterbaby from the ’30s, pumping up the Pasha’s outré forms and chain-link crown cap for the shoulder-padded glitterati of Long Island.

Now up to 41mm, the strap is instantly switchable for those boardroom-to-bar transitions, and you can even monogram the chain link.

This page: Bulgari Octo Finissimo Chrono GMT £13,800 bulgari.com Elizabeth Taylor’s favourite jeweller has cemented its Swiss-made credentials in formidable fashion of late, not just through some clever intellectual acquisitions, but by establishing the core Octo and its squashed ziggurat of monumental facets as the most progressive design of the 21st century. How? By watching its weight – slimming everything from the tourbillon to minute repeater down to record-smashing dimensions.

Next up: the thinnest-ever mechanical chronograph movement, at a Matzos-wafer-like 3.3mm. It’s thanks to some diaphanous engineering, sure, but also a winding rotor that circles the circumference of the inner works, rather than atop.

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Opposite: Tudor Black Bay S&G £2,990 tudorwatch.com Call it what you want – whether it’s a recession-driven hankering for halcyon days of yore, or simply the ongoing craze for vintage, in defiance of everything digital – the hills of the Swiss Jura are alive with the sound of archives being wrenched open, and have been for over a decade. Which is a good thing when it comes to watchmaking’s golden age of scuba diving, as demonstrated perfectly by the brace of beauties you see here. This page features less of a like-for-like reboot, more a ‘now that’s what I call Tudor militaryspec waterbabies’ greatest hits – its oversized crown and ‘snowflake’ hands belying the properly modern innards (Tudor’s in-house MT5612 mechanics) and properly modern materials fusion: steel case and gold bezel inlaid with high-tech anodised aluminium.

This page: Vacheron Constantin Overseas Dual Time £23,000 vacheron-constantin.com About as butch as it gets from watchmaking’s elder statesman nonpareil – the 265-year-old(ish) Genevan grande maison whose Latin élan sets it apart from Switzerland’s handful of others. Like Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, and Girard-Perregaux, it couldn’t resist boarding the disco-era, sporty-luxe bandwagon back in the ’70s. But unlike the Nautilus, Royal Oak, and Laureato respectively, its own 222 was a more reined-in take on the geometric steel bracelet thing – meaning today’s Overseas evolution integrates better than ever into Vacheron’s broader, still resolutely neoclassical, picture.

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Hublot Big Bang Meca-10 Black Magic £18,200 hublot.com Toys, Hornby, Airfix, and sooner or later fine wristwatches…

The obsession may progress monetarily, in ever more sophisticated fashion, but the thread remains constant: a love of mechanics and attention to detail – a sentiment Hublot has tapped with the Meca-10, whose mechanical movement is inspired by the struts and bolts of Meccano.

It could have been naff, but Hublot’s horological expertise, combined with the creative freedom afforded by a lack of any historical baggage, mean it’s a formidably technical affair that’ll tick for 10 whole days on a single wind.

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Rado Captain Cook Bronze £2,600 rado.com Now in a burgundy colour scheme good enough to pair with a camembert, and encased in complementary bronze, Rado’s revival of its 1962 Captain Cook is, like the Tudor Black Bay, a thoroughly modern evolution of a timeworn design. Even the strap is a deliberate anachronism: The Ministry of Defence didn’t issue its Defence Standard document 66-15, for a failsafe folded-loop “Strap, Wrist Watch”, until 1973. Still, it’s a heady cocktail of watch-nerd details, and by extension extraordinarily good value, given its 300m water resistance and more-than-enough 80hour power reserve.

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MATT SMITH From sci-fi royalty to on-screen royalty proper, Matt Smith remains surprisingly down-to-earth. Set to feature in John Michael McDonagh’s latest, and the widely anticipated Game of Thrones prequel, the British star catches up with Port to ruminate on life under lockdown, vampires, and the transient state of acting

WORDS ANNA SMITH

PHOTOGRAPHY LUKE PAIGE

STYLING MITCHELL BELK

MATT SMITH WEARS DUNHILL SS21 THROUGHOUT

Matt Smith is at home in London.

He’s just been for “a nice long walk on the heath in the snow” with his dog, who’s 16 weeks old. The canine companion got into so much mischief they ended up at the vet’s, making him late for our interview.

After apologising effusively, he tells me that his puppy is fine: “He’s… Absolutely. All. Right,” he stresses, emphasising each word as if to reassure himself too.

Smith has opted to do the interview by phone. He is not a fan of online group calls, asking if I have done any Zoom quizzes with an air of fascinated revulsion. He finds Zoom drinks an acceptable compromise. “Yes, where it’s like you’re in the pub… and if you’re doing something you can dip in and out of. Our lives used to be dictated by immediacy, whether you were ordering food or communicating. A touch of patience may not be a bad thing for everyone to go through.”

Upbeat, with a casual, slightly self-deprecating frankness, Smith’s energy isn’t a million miles from the role that shot him to fame in 2009. His cheeky, excitable delivery made him

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an instant hit with Doctor Who fans. Asked if he misses playing the eponymous time traveller, he doesn’t skip a beat. “Of course you miss Doctor Who; everyone misses it; it’s the best job in the world, but it’s challenging and taxing as well.

That’s why people often only get to three or four years before they throw the towel in, because it places so many demands.” Does he hang out with other Doctors? “Yeah, I see David [Tennant] every now and then at conventions and stuff. You bump into people and you have a sort of masonry handshake…” he jokes.

While most actors are at pains to point out that being on set is far from magical, Smith admits to getting swept up in time travel.

“There’s something really beautiful about the concept; as weird as it sounds, I truly felt it. It’s like being a child again, a sort of endlessness, or boundlessness, the romance of being able to go back and see dinosaurs.”

He has, of course, a few Who souvenirs around the house. “I’ve got the sonic screwdriver. They gave me a little box painted like the Tardis, but which looks like a coffin, to be honest. And they gave me my costumes.” Would he

ever wear them out, say, for a fancy dress party?

“No, I’d look like a right pillock! It would be like Margaret Thatcher in Spitting Image: ‘I used to be Prime Minister, don’t you know.’”

Despite being a household name for the role – as well as that of Prince Philip in The Crown – Smith has made some daring choices, including the Almeida Theatre’s American Psycho musical and Mapplethorpe, the arthouse biopic about the New York photographer, whose striking work explored celebrity and homosexuality. “He’s an interesting character,” ponders Smith, his emphasis hinting at the complexities the film explored.

He’s also a fan of Mapplethorpe’s work. “I’d love to get my hands on one of his prints. I did try; let me tell you. I was asking around, but they’re half a million pounds.”

There’s a darker side to his genre obsessions. “I have always been a vampire-phile,” he admits, referring to his role in the upcoming Marvel film Morbius. “I love the whole myth that surrounds them; even if they’re ugly, they’re weird and sexy. Think of Interview With the Vampire or the great Nosferatu, and even 30 Days of Night… I guess it’s the night-time brutality and

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When this started, I embraced the stillness of it all. How often would I be gifted time to figure out what is going on inside myself?

Our lives used to be dictated by immediacy, whether you were ordering food or communicating.

A touch of patience may not be a bad thing for everyone to go through.

trendiness rolled into one. The eternal life thing has always felt quite appealing, on some level, and the fact that you just get to be the best worst version of yourself.”

There’s a hint of mischief here, a delight in the permission to be decadent. Smith “used to be a night owl”, and he plans on picking it up again when the pandemic allows. “I’m looking forward to having a party with everyone. It’s going to be like the 1920s: moonshine and nice sparkly dresses.”

To while away the time he’s been amusing himself with British comedy (“I’ve been listening to a lot of Alan Partridge – genius”), but he’s clearly itching to get out and about. “I’d love to watch football, go for a dance, go on holiday...

I can’t wait to be back in the theatre, and the cinema, and to be able to hug people again.” He brightens most at the thought of sport. “One of the benefits of lockdown is that there’s been a lot of football.”

Born in Northampton, UK, in 1982, Smith originally wanted to be a footballer – playing central defence in youth teams for Northampton

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Town, Nottingham Forest and Leicester City – but fate had other plans after a back injury at 16. “I stumbled across acting when I was in the National Youth Theatre, which was quite formative for me.” A career turning point was a 2007 Royal Court Theatre production of That Face by Polly Stenham. “It was with my friend Lindsay Duncan, who is a wonderful actor, a very nurturing spirit. I look back on that time in quite a fond way. I have fond memories of the TV series The Street as well…” He’s starting to sound a bit wistful about simpler days. “I don’t know… It’s the glory and the pain of being an actor; it’s there for a second and then it’s gone.”

He’s still fired up, however, about his upcoming roles in the John Michael McDonagh drama The Forgiven (“All these rich, hateful people descend upon a house in Morocco”), and in Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho (“Great clobber, those ’60s suits! I’ve never known anyone to have seen as many films as Edgar”). And he’ll soon get his wish of getting out more: He’s set to film the Game of Thrones prequel series House of the Dragon.

“We film it for, like, a year,” he says, a faint note

of anxiety possibly creeping into his voice. “It’s a long-running thing, which feels quite intimidating when you say it out loud. A year feels like a lot of time to commit to anything.”

Like many around the world struggling with enforced separation, he has “found this last portion of the lockdown much harder. When this started, I embraced the stillness of it all.

How often would I be gifted time to figure out what is going on inside myself ? We took, I took, a social life, a normal rhythm of work, being able to see family, for granted. The novelty has certainly worn off now though.”

Asked about his personal future, as we draw to a close, Smith seems more concerned about the state of the world. “Tomorrow seems a long way away. Who knows what everything will be like on the other side of this? I hope we’re not too physically removed from each other. Collectively, as the human race, we’re about to enter a very difficult period as we adjust. I know that in those moments the arts will offer a genuine way out of things. An understanding. We’re gonna have to jump in with both feet.”

Production: Production Factory Grooming: Petra Sellge at the Wall Group

I Come Into the Presence of Still Water

Photography Norman Wilcox-Geissen

Styling Lune Kuipers

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Trousers GIORGIO ARMANI

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Scarf HERMÈS

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This page: Top LOEWE Opposite: Top GUCCI

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Shirt FENDI

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Jewellery SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO

Gilet LOUIS VUITTON

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Windbreaker PRADA

Glasses ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA

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This page: Sweater BERLUTI Opposite: Boots DIOR

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L’appétit vient en mangeant

ALL ACCESSORIES FROM CARTIER’S ICONS COLLECTION

Photography and set design Anaïck Lejart

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Juste un Clou ring, yellow gold

LOVE necklace

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Santos de Cartier watch

LOVE ring

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Trinity ring

Top: Panthère de Cartier watch Below: Juste un Clou bracelet

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Ballon Bleu de Cartier watch

Juste un Clou ring, white gold

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Under Wraps

Photography Charlotte Hadden

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CEL INE BY HED I S L IM A NE

Styling Marie-Louise Von Haselberg D I OR

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DUNHILL

GUCCI

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HERMÈS

KENZO

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Set Design Paulina Piipponen Grooming Takuya Uchiyama using TIGI by Bed Head Models Woosang Kim @ Premier, Jefferson Obuseri @ PRM Casting Director Sarah-Maria Booth Photographer’s Assistant Lucy Rooney

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LOUIS VUITTON

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This page: SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO Opposite: ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA

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MARTINE ROSE

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GIORGIO ARMANI

CANALI

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Day-Glo

Photography and set design Lisa Jahovic

ALL ACCESSORIES DIOR AW21 MEN'S COLLECTION

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Levels of the Game

CLOTHING BOSS X RUSSELL ATHLETIC THROUGHOUT

Styling Warren Leech

Photography Lee Whittaker 318

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Grooming Mark Francome Painter Set design Josh Stovell @ Saint Lukes Casting Monika Domarke Models Emmanuel Adjaye @ Next and Tosan Pierau @ Elite Special thanks to Waddington Studios

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Oscillations

Photography Michael Hemy

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ALL CLOTHING AND ACCESSORIES FENDI SPRING/SUMMER 2021 COLLECTION

Set Design Lisa Jahovic

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Styling Georgia Thompson Model Jin Hu @ Wilhelmina Casting Troy Westwood Grooming Takuya Uchiyama

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STOCKISTS

ABC AMI PARIS AUDEMARS PIGUET B&B ITALIA BALLY BERLUTI BIRKENSTOCK BOSS BOTTEGA VENETA BREATH & STONE BRUNELLO CUCINELLI BULGARI BURBERRY CANALI CARTIER CDLP CELINE CHANEL COMME DES GARÇONS

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PRSTV

JLMNO JIL SANDER LANVIN LOEWE LORO PIANA LOUIS VUITTON MANOLO BLAHNIK MARNI MONCLER NANUSHKA OMEGA

DIOR DUNHILL ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA ETRO FALKE FENDI GH BASS GIORGIO ARMANI GUCCI HERMÈS HUBLOT ISSEY MIYAKE

jilsander.com lanvin.com loewe.com uk.loropiana.com louisvuitton.com manoloblahnik.com marni.com moncler.com nanushka.com omegawatches.com

PANTHERELLA PATEK PHILIPPE PAUL SMITH PERSOL PRADA RADO RALPH LAUREN SAINT LAURENT SALVATORE FERRAGAMO SONG FOR THE MUTE SPEEDO TEN PIECES TOD’S TUDOR TURNBULL & ASSER VACHERON VALENTINO

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