Paapa Essiedu 27 Port
“It's about sharing. It's not about you; it's about you and someone else – you and people” Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff talks to Paapa Essiedu “A way of looking at the world, at your pantry, and finding inner beauty in the humblest ingredient” By Massimo Bottura
“It’s important to preserve African cinema: filmmaking there has been more prolific than in other areas of the world” By Martin Scorsese
Things I like / Things I dislike Sharmaine Lovegrove
“You can rewire people's emotions through the senses. That's the power of poetry” By Roger Robinson
Autumn / Winter 2020
Eduardo Paolozzi’s philosopher-inspired screenprints By Matthew Turner
An interview with industrial designer Philippe Malouin By Deyan Sudjic
£8.00
Ceramics, creative freedom and disability with Shawanda Corbett
New fiction! By Joyce Carol Oates, Hari Kunzru, Brandon Taylor and Niven Govinden
Horology supplement 1010 + autumn/winter style & collections
CONTENTS
70 The Porter Words Reiss Smith, Brian Patrick Eha, Dylan Holden, Billie Muraben, Jamie Waters, Tom Bolger, Bolanle Tajudeen, Jamie Hewlett, Mark Williams, Jean-Yves Leloup, Matthew Turner, Harry Langham, Alex Doak, Massimo Bottura, John Harris Dunning
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Paapa Essiedu Words Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff Photography Liz Johnson Artur Styling Mitchell Belk
Bags of Style — Merging past and present with Berluti and Globe-Trotter Custodians of Craft — Innovation and tradition with menswear brand Canali
Words Jamie Waters Photography Luca Strano Words Jamie Waters Photography Crista Leonard
Design Profile: Philippe Malouin Words Deyan Sudjic Photography Taylor Lyttleton
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104 Windscapes An unexpected upsurge of windpowered turbines across America. Words and Photography Mishka Henner
CONTENTS
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Process of Evolution Photography Philip White Styling Julie Velut
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Matt Berninger: American Beauty Words John-Paul Pryor Photography by Arianna Lago
154 I Envy Your Evening Walk Photography Jeff Boudreau Styling Mitchell Belk 121 Commentary 184 When My World Stood Still 238 Prada Re-Nylon 246 His Dark Materials 256 Things I Like / Things I Dislike
Words Hari Kunzru, Brandon Taylor, Photostory Rahim Fortune Niven Govinden, Joyce Carol Oates Illustrations Leanne Shapton Photography Kalpesh Lathigra Styling Adam Winder Words Jamie Waters Set design Paulina Piipponen Photography Jesse Laitinen Photography Baud Postma Styling Adam Winder Words Sharmaine Lovegrove
"It's Not Where You Take Things From - It's Where You Take Them To" Photography & Set Design Matzo & Matzo Styling Lune Kuipers
220 Collections From The Rooftops Photography Daragh Soden Styling Mitchell Belk
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HOW LOVELY By Reiss Smith. Margaret Howell celebrates 50 years
Margaret Howell often recalls a shirt she came across at a jumble sale in 1970: beautifully made, likely from the 1920s, with a fine pinstripe and delicate stitching. But this isn’t the story of the sort of hackneyed ‘eureka’ moment you might expect of a lesser designer. When Howell discovered the shirt, she was a recent fine-art graduate, experimenting with different forms of craft, primarily creating colourful necklaces from papier-mâché beads. The shirt gave her fresh impetus to revisit a childhood love of clothes-making: first shirts, then jackets and other simple items. Fifty years on, she is regarded as one of Britain’s most discerning designers, with a consistent aesthetic, encapsulated by that original pinstripe shirt. Her brand was synonymous with utilitarian minimalism long before the current wont. Simple blazers and chore coats are mainstays, usually cut from traditional British fabrics such as Harris Tweed and Irish linen. The shirt is another constant, and perhaps Howell’s calling card: gently refined over the years; cut with different collars, sleeves and hemlines; occasionally reworked in unexpected collaborations with those such as Kenneth Grange and Dan Pearson. But whatever its incarnation, a Margaret Howell shirt is instantly recognisable as a Margaret Howell shirt. So, fitting then that her 50th anniversary should be celebrated with a limited reissue of two classic designs (collared and collarless). Both are made using Sea Island cotton woven by David and John Anderson, the textile-maker which has been a partner of Howell’s since her early days, and both are available for men and women. And, while the designs are some 50 years old, the genius of Howell’s work is that it is forever contemporary: Who else could spot a decades-old shirt at a jumble sale and use it to build a brand which, at its half-centenary, feels more relevant than ever? Photography William Bunce. Styling and set design Paulina Piipponen
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Photography Jack Orton
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A PORTABLE PARADi PARAD iSE By Tom Bolger. Roger Robinson reflects on his TS Eliot-prize-winning poetry collection
Tom Bolger: How does ‘paradise’ appear in your book? Roger Robinson: It morphs. Paradise became hope when thinking about my prematurely born child; it was the idea of people coming to paradise and finding hell in Grenfell; it was grappling with where paradise was for the Windrush elders who were sent back. I was born in London, raised in Trinidad, but came back to the UK to put down roots – could I create paradise here? Can a text be a portable paradise? Can it give hope? All of these strands from my life coalesced, and the book wrote me as much as I wrote it. Your opening poems focus on Grenfell. Beyond the terrible loss of life, what did it represent? That people were devalued, underrepresented and not given an equality of opportunity. Many of us live happy lives, but Grenfell came along and showed that for some, there is no value put on their safety or general wellbeing. Why are certain people devalued in society? It’s not simply a race issue, it’s class, sociology. I drew attention to it because I thought the media was doing a hopeless job; they weren’t getting anything down that I could empathise with. Just the facts, that would inevitably get lost in the news cycle that turns and turns. I thought their lives were worth remembering. Can poetry help process trauma? You can rewire people’s emotions through the senses. That’s the power of poetry, as well as other art forms. When I see a Mark Rothko painting, I am literally different for seeing it. Witnessing the collisions of blood and light, spirituality, artistry, depression; there’s so much in so little. That rewiring is in me; I’m altered by it. That’s the importance of art – it’s the possibility to change someone and for them to practice that humanity with others. How did it feel to win the TS Eliot and Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje prize? Really good! I’m into the idea of creative citizenship and would like to fill out the idea of what a poet is, what they can be in society. Poetry should not be people failing to solve a riddle and thinking they’re stupid. The poet used to be an important part of the community: These orators would stand up and be counted. If you look back at Latin America, they were busy creating revolutions, helping people get fed. What care does poetry have to take when working with real life? When things truly happened, you have to honour the moment. My mum always said that before something is a thought, it’s a spirit. If you move in a spirit
of honouring the best of the person or event you’re writing about, then hopefully it will come out true. In ‘Citizen III’ you write that “areas become ends”, suggesting some young people have little to hold on to beyond their postcode. How can we fix this alienation and fatality? We still struggle to see capitalism as the driving force for oppression. Nobody wants to tackle how wealth, land and housing is distributed, or how generations get stuck on repeat. Society can flourish in most spaces, but to take the example of living in a tower block, the very nature of a mother being at the top of the block while her child plays at the bottom in a prescribed area – that physical distance in surveillance is a simple thing that can lead to social problems. Small details can make a massive difference, and we can begin by providing living conditions for people that don’t set them up to fail. My book looks at the context of somebody running away as a slave and the context of people being killed in tower blocks. These are not separate stories. When people say communities are “acting out”, you’re never given the context, because they’re trying to criminalise the act. I wanted to give context to resistance and the devaluation of black bodies. Your poem ‘Beware’ (“When police place knees/ at your throat, you may not live/ to tell of choking”) has only gained more urgency. Why have we seen global protests during lockdown? COVID-19 is a collective trauma, but one that disproportionately affects minorities. Black men are dying at three times the rate of white people. Then we had the entire global arena looking at George Floyd’s death with terrible clarity – a metaphor for how we’re perceived in the world. People had time to sit still, assess their lives and build a collective voice. With all that trauma, past and present, things will explode. I have a lot of hope in millennials though: They’re politicised, serious about diversity of thought and employ unapologetic change quickly. You’ve written that “Your strength lies in the very humanity of the questions that your poem asks of the reader.” What are some questions we need to wrestle with? Here’s one everyone should think about: If you don’t worry about your son being attacked by the police, that he will be safe coming home, or you can clearly see him living past 22, then you have some privilege. Are you willing to lend some, and do some heavy lifting for those that don’t? A Portable Paradise by Roger Robinson is published by Peepal Tree Press 41
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BLACKBiRD Mi BLACKBi MiSS SSiiSS SSiiPP PPii By Bolanle Tajudeen. Turner bursary-winning artist Shawanda Corbett discusses cyborgs and ceramics
When Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain, announced its 2020 bursary recipients (the Turner Prize was cancelled this year due to COVID-19), he remarked that the selected artists showed “care for oneself, care for a community one identifies with”. The ethics of care are evident across Shawanda Corbett’s practice, the bursary-winning, interdisciplinary artist who recently had her first solo exhibition, Neighbourhood Garden, at Corvi-Mora. Corbett’s show astutely referenced the many personali-
Shawanda Corbett in her studio, Ruskin School of Art, Oxford
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Photography Alice Zoo
ties that she grew up with. On entering the gallery, visitors were greeted with luster and gold-painted vessels positioned in pairs – ceramics that honour her family and humanise characters from “the hood”; her vibrant, jazz-inspired paintings lining the walls an ode to childhood memories and universally shared experiences. Born in Mississippi in 1989, Corbett gives thoughtful consideration to how Blackness is portrayed in her artwork, choosing to tell the stories of people in her life
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KAIJU: OF MONSTERS AND MEN By John Harris Dunning. Seventy-five years after the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, investigating the birth of a monstrous legacy
“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.” — Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb.
Right: A dragon ascends towards the heavens with Mount Fuji in the background in this 1897 ukiyo-e print from Ogata Gekkō’s Views of Mount Fuji
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Rain lashes a Japanese village at night. A man stands in a doorway, probing the darkness for the source of a pounding that cuts through the howling wind. His face suddenly contorts in terror and he stumbles back into the interior, throwing himself over his wife as the walls collapse in on them. A giant scaly shape lumbers past. . . And so audiences caught their first glimpse of Godzilla, king of the monsters. Released in 1954, Godzilla spawned the kaiju film, a genre that enjoys global popularity to this day. Kaiju can be translated from Japanese as ‘strange beast’, an accurate description of Godzilla. Although generally referred to as ‘he’, Godzilla’s creators were careful to avoid specifying the creature’s sex. The name has its roots in the words gorira (gorilla) and kujira (whale). Godzilla seemed to burst fully formed from the anxieties surrounding the birth of the atomic age. Japan was still reeling from the recent bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and its subsequent defeat. Its domestic film industry was operating at a fraction of its normal capacity, its cinemas glutted with American product. This cross-pollination with Hollywood was to become an important ingredient of the kaiju film. A hugely successful rerelease of the 1933 version of King Kong put giant monsters at the forefront of the Japanese popular imagination. The forgettable B-grade monster flick The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953) – which bears unmistakable parallels to Godzilla – further supplied the blueprint for the kaiju phenomenon. But if science fiction gave this Frankenstein’s monster flesh, then actual events brought it to life; in early 1954 Japanese-American diplomatic relationships were brought to boiling point by America’s flagrantly irresponsible nuclear testing in the Pacific Bikini Atoll. The crew of the Japanese tuna trawler Lucky Dragon was exposed to deadly radiation, despite earlier American assurances that they would be well within the safety zone. This event is clearly echoed in the first scenes of Godzilla, when deep-sea explosions herald the coming of the king of monsters. Coming only two years after the end of the American occupation, when open criticism of America in the media was virtually impossible, this thinly veiled portrayal of the incident was clearly recognised by audiences. Godzilla’s city-flattening antics – so reminiscent of the American annihilation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima – also allowed for an otherwise impossible cathartic release. The Porter
Godzilla – and the innumerable kaiju who followed in its huge footsteps – will always be linked to the dawn of the atomic age and related ecological concerns. But like all truly powerful mythologies, the figure of the kaiju resists any easy reading. This quintessentially modern pop-culture icon also has roots reaching back millennia. The Japanese have a long tradition of fantastical beasts and monsters, many of which can be traced back to the influential 4th-century Chinese text Classic of Mountains and Seas. Like Godzilla and other kaiju, the classic dragon can traditionally be both benevolent and malevolent – and also has a strong connection to ecology and the wellbeing of the planet. The islands that constitute Japan sit at the juncture of three overlapping tectonic plates, making it the most volcanically unstable nation on Earth. Overwhelming natural catastrophes are part of the natural consciousness. The very creation myth of Japan tells of goddess Izanami, co-creator of the archipelago of Japan, dying while giving birth to her child Ho-musubi, causer of fire. Godzilla – and many of the kaiju – are not malevolent by intent. The damage they do to humanity and its cities is mostly unintentional; they are simply not important enough to warrant the monsters’ attention. The kaiju genre shares this characteristic with the work of influential American writer HP Lovecraft, whose work set the blueprint for contemporary horror; his story cycle centres on an immense cosmic monster Cthulhu, who, significantly, also slumbers in the depths of the ocean until the unwise actions of humanity awaken it, effectively ending man’s dominion over the earth. Both Lovecraft and the kaiju genre operate at the intersection of horror and science fiction, presenting a universe in which man plays an insignificant role. This very postmodern view can be perceived as terrifying, but it’s also a kind of antidote to a relentlessly human-centric worldview, and chimed nicely with the increasing understanding of ecological issues in the 20th century. After the huge success of Godzilla, the formula was quickly copied, and a host of kaiju fluttered, slithered and crawled across the big screen. Monsters like Mothra, Gamera and Rodan were so popular that they spawned franchises of their own. By 1967 each of the five major studios in Japan had at least one kaiju film, kick-starting the domestic film industry’s recovery. These films were then exported to America where they earned big box office. Badly edited, with cheaply shot footage inserted to appeal to the Western audiences, for decades they were critically ignored and labelled camp or B-grade. They’ve been re-evaluated in recent years as restored versions have been made available in English and other European languages. Ongoing franchises like Cloverfield, Pacific Rim and the Legendary MonsterVerse films like Kong: Skull Island and the upcoming Godzilla vs. Kong make it clear that the kaiju genre is alive and well, and still wreaking havoc across the globe.
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Left: Godzilla Japanese film poster, 1954 Right: Mushroom cloud after Fat Man exploded over Nagasaki on 9 August 1945, Charles Levy U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
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Paapa Essiedu He made his name playing Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company and stunned audiences with his nuanced performance as Kwame in the groundbreaking I May Destroy You. The Ghanaian-British actor talks to Port about lessons learned from his mother, the stories he wants to tell and the pull between humility and ego
Words Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff Photography Liz Johnson Artur Styling Mitchell Belk
PAAPA ESSIEDU WEARS AMI PARIS THROUGHOUT
“It’s about the fundamentals that I’ve learned from my mother that I want to implement in the adult that I want to be, in the father I’d like to be one day”
Paapa Essiedu bleeds a self-effacing familiarity that I suspect is part of his gentle charm. Heart-shape faced and speaking often with his heart tucked up just past his sleeve, the actor becomes, in the space of an almost two-hour dinner on a late summer’s night in north London, something like a friend. You too should know Essiedu by now. He is canonised – the lead male in undoubtedly the most talked about TV show of 2020; caught in a perfect storm of mutual genius and circumstance. The 30-year-old’s friendship with I May Destroy You writer and director Michaela Coel led him indirectly into her light, and the perfectly placed role of Kwame, a beautiful gay man struggling with self-esteem issues throughout the course of the series. Though this role feels like a defining one at this time, he’s also currently starring in Gangs of London as brainy gangster Alex Dumani and is well known in theatre circles for his turns in Shake74
speare plays; dazzling as a youthful Romeo in 2015 and, notably, playing Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company the following year. His lead role on Press in 2018, a TV miniseries centring around tabloid journalism, may be less infamous, but is nonetheless, as it turns out, one of the shows that got me through early lockdown. “I find it really difficult to relish it or to even talk about it or feel it,” he tells me of his successes. “You know? I’ve got such a fear of things being taken away from me. A fear of loss. I think it’s my instinct to downplay or trivialise even incredible things that have happened.” Essiedu is caught in an all-too-familiar pull between humility and ego and the subsequent worry that the former is actually just a more covert type of the latter. His biggest fear, he tells me, is “getting carried away with himself ”. He would never want to become conceited, like other actors he knows who think they’re better at their craft than they are. “I think constant self-reflec-
tion can protect you from doing that,” he adds. But his success at this stage is undeniable, and, thanks in part to his therapist, he knows that he needs to move forward in a way that allows him to address it without spiralling into worry. “A lot of what I’m trying to do now is to recognise that I’ve been so fortunate and relish the pride of it,” he says. “This addiction to humility at the expense of even experiencing joy or fortune is actually mad.” He also credits Coel with making him face the magnitude of his acting achievements, as they sat down together to watch episodes of I May Destroy You. “She was just like, ‘Look, especially when it’s going out live, you actually need to feel the madness of the fact that those many million people are doing the same thing at this precise moment because of you. Don’t get lost in the minutiae of your own ego. Just put that aside and enjoy it.’ She really taught me that.” His humility, however you want to look at it,
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