Port Issue 33 Franz Rogowski

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PORT 33

TAIKA WAITITI TEO YOO JASMINE JOBSON CAI GUO-QIANG

I THINK I’M WHERE I BELONG FOR NOW FRANZ ROGOWSKI

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DYLAN SEATING SYSTEM | RODOLFO DORDONI DESIGN RAPHAEL SOFA | GAMFRATESI DESIGN DISCOVER MORE AT MINOTTI.COM/DYLAN

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Dan Crowe CREATIVE DIRECTOR Matt Curtis, Uncommon Creative Studio

SENIOR EDITOR Kerry Crowe

FASHION DIRECTOR Mitchell Belk

ART DIRECTOR Ellie Rose, Uncommon Creative Studio

PUBLISHERS Dan Crowe, Matt Willey

MANAGING EDITOR Samir Chadha

SENIOR FASHION EDITOR Julie Velut

ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Andrew Chidgey-Nakazono

SPECIAL PROJECTS MANAGER Ethan Butler

FASHION EDITOR Georgia Thompson

DESIGN Angelina Pischikova, Uncommon Creative Studio

HOROLOGY EDITOR Alex Doak SUB-EDITOR Sarah Kathryn Cleaver EU CORRESPONDENT Donald Morrison

PHOTOGRAPHY DIRECTOR Naoise O’Keeffe

DESIGN PRODUCTION Jodie Hurn & Aurelia Rahofer, Uncommon Creative Studio ARTWORKER & RETOUCHER Ian Alwis, Uncommon Creative Studio

PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR Jodie Michaelides

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Kabir Chibber Robert Macfarlane Albert Scardino SPECIAL THANKS The Production Factory Lock Uncommon Creative Studio Tom Bolger Everyone who has ever worked at, or with, Port

COVER CREDITS Franz Rogowski photographed in Berlin by Suffo Moncloa, wears PAUL SMITH AW23 Jasmine Jobson, photographed in London by Annie Lai, wears eyewear by PERSOL Taika Waititi, photographed in New York by Jai Odell, wears ZEGNA WINTER 2023 Teo Yoo, photographed in Seoul by LESS, wears LORO PIANA FALL WINTER 2023-2024 Cai Guo-Qiang, ‘When the Sky Blooms With Sakura’, daytime fireworks commissioned by ANTHONY VACCARELLO FOR SAINT LAURENT

“I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip.”

Vladimir Nabokov

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MASTHEAD

ADVERTISING DIRECTOR Andrew Chidgey-Nakazono andrew@port-magazine.com ACCOUNTS Charlie Carne & Co. CIRCULATION CONSULTANT Logical Connections Adam Long adam@logicalconnections.co.uk

US CORRESPONDENT Alex Vadukul

SENIOR EDITORS Katrina Pavlos, Film Hans Ulrich Obrist, Art Rick Moody, Literature John-Paul Pryor, Music Brett Steele, Architecture Deyan Sudjic, Design

MANAGING DIRECTOR Dan Crowe

WORDS Yemi Abiade, Ayla Angelos, Chloë Ashby, Tom Bolger, Ania Brudna, Samir Chadha, Jason Diamond, Annie Ernaux, Elizabeth Goodspeed, Simran Hans, Thea Hawlin, Joshua Hendren, Jo Lawson-Tancred, Nils Leonard, Ben Lerner, Lucy Mercer, Rebecca Miller, Billie Muraben, Lauren Oyler, Ethan Price, Zadie Smith, Philippa Snow, Deyan Sudjic, Chris Ware, Hannah Williams, Richard Williams, Gary Younge PHOTOGRAPHY Eleonora Agostini, Nina Maria Allmoslechner, Lily Anne Barton, Stella Berkofsky, Gaëtan Bernède, Joan Braun, Ania Brudna, Sebastian Bruno, Maria Canaeve, Rodrigo Carmuega, Leon Chew, Em Cole, Mattia Greghi, Annie Lai, Kalpesh Lathigra, LESS, Suffo Moncloa, Stanislas MotzNeidhart, Andina Marie Osorio, Jai Odell, Ali Peck, Gabriele Rosati, Florian Spring, Lucy Shortman, Riccardo Svelto, Jenna Westra ARTWORK Kate Copeland, Judy Chicago, Alec Doherty, Elizabeth Goodspeed, Fina Miralles, Chris Ware

CONTACT info@port-magazine.com SYNDICATION syndication@port-magazine.com SYNDICATED ISSUES Port China Port is published twice a year

by Port Publishing Limited 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 All rights reserved.

Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is strictly prohibited. All prices are correct at time of going to press but are subject to change. All paper used in the production of this magazine comes, as you would expect, from sustainable sources.

EDITOR’S LETTER It’s no secret that we’re fans of a redesign here at Port and this, our 33rd issue, comes with our most ambitious one yet. You will see many changes inside, including new sections, story formats and fonts. We are giving each story the layout it demands, and this has led us to some unexpected places.

Consider the cover, that key part of a magazine’s identity. We wanted to shake things up a little there, too. The idea was to get closer to the personalities who inspired this issue, to embrace something elemental about them and elevate the experience of a cover to something not only visual, but also emotional. Asking our cover stars to reinterpret the Port logo for each of their appearances seemed, whilst radical, somehow an obvious move.

Those talents are Passages star Franz Rogowski, interviewed over a Berlin breakfast by Lauren Oyler; Oscar- and BAFTA-winner Taika Waititi, talking about his unpredictable body of work with Jason Diamond; Jasmine Jobson, star of Top Boy and Surge, on growth and belonging; and Teo Yoo who, fresh from his starring role in the acclaimed Past Lives, speaks to Simran Hans about finally finding a place for himself, both at home and in his work. Our final cover is an art project, part of a beautiful portfolio by (literally) explosive Chinese artist Cai GuoQiang, alongside a reflection on his work by writer and translator Thea Hawlin.

All these people immediately inherently understood their Port logo brief, as if designing their own masthead was as natural as being photographed for the cover. (Indeed, some of them led the charge. Turn the page for some insight into Rogowski’s creative feedback during the process.)

Literature has always been an integral part of Port, and our magazine within a magazine, Commentary, features such innovators as Annie Ernaux, Philippa Snow, Ben Lerner and Zadie Smith, plus an original story of eavesdropping, seagulls and depravity, commissioned for us, from novelist and filmmaker Rebecca Miller.

Elsewhere, we’re proud to include a series of photos and interviews with Ukrainian male creatives, all still working in the besieged country, photographed by Ania Brudna. Deyan Sudjic visits Herzog & de Meuron in Basel in one of our most exciting architectural adventures, and graphic designer Peter Saville drops some truth bombs on us regarding his colourful career. Chris Ware reflects on his craft creating graphic novels, alongside an original illustration, and chef Dan Cox discusses Crocadon, the Michelin Green Star-winning restaurant and farm in Cornwall. Composer and drummer Yussef Dayes discusses his new album, Black Classical Music, and French novelist

EDITORS LETTER

Constance Debré talks about writing and relationships. If you love her work, or know of her remarkable life, you will not want to miss this.

Alongside 10:10, our horology supplement edited by Alex Doak, there is a new, enlarged section: the Port Review of Design, edited by Deyan Sudjic. It aims to offer a timely overview of the field now, but also to remember iconic practitioners who helped build our understanding of what design is for. We have a reflection on the groundbreaking 80-yearold Design Research Unit, responsible for, among many other things, British Rail’s iconic double-arrow logo; Nils Leonard shares his thoughts on the beautiful subversions of Yves Klein and we visit London Design Festival, interviewing four young industry talents; plus a look at the visual lineage of social media spirituality. We close the section remembering the great design thinker Reyner Banham.

A big thanks to Matt Curtis and everyone at Uncommon Creative Studio for the love and attention spent on the redesign. Also, to the entire wonderful Port team. This is a compelling issue – weird and beautiful in equal measure – and I’m excited for it to be out in the world.

Dan Crowe

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A NOTE ABOUT THE LOGO Port has always tried to bring out new edges in our cover features: to see the incredible people we’re working with from new angles and capture a side yet to be seen. With this redesign, we took that a little further and asked all those featured on our covers to write ‘Port’ by hand, with a pen of their choice, so every cover is stamped with a previously unseen part of them.

It’s the sort of thing that can’t be forced – on set, after he had drawn the Port logo, we asked Franz Rogowski to give us some more options. He refused, telling us if we asked for more, it’d be our interpretation and not his. He’s right.

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A NOTE ABOUT THE LOGO

PORTFOLIO 50 LINGUISTIC SHREDS AND INCHOATE IMAGES Chris Ware 52 MAKING PEACE WITH PIECES Tom Bolger 55 MIRACLE OF TRANSMISSION Lucy Mercer

72 RICHLY RESTRAINED Jo Lawson-Tancred 76 CHOOSING WHAT’S RIGHT Tom Bolger

57 BLACK CLASSICAL MUSIC Yemi Abiade

78 TAKE A THIRD, TRAMPLE A THIRD AND LEAVE A THIRD Tom Bolger

58 SUDDENLY IT WAS JUST WORDS Chloë Ashby

82 DESIGN WITH SOLE Joshua Hendren

62 A THIRD WAY Billie Muraben

88 THEY DON’T WANT TO RUN Ania Brudna

64 STRIPPING BACK, BUILDING UP Jo Lawson-Tancred

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66 UNEARTHING TIME Ayla Angelos

CONTENTS

THE PORT REVIEW OF DESIGN 8 CRAFTING IDENTITY Four designers weaving identity into their craft Ayla Angelos

41 SUPERMAX Discussing the Max sofa with Antonio Citterio Hannah Williams

14 NOT JUST RIGHT PLACE RIGHT TIME Talking to, and reflecting on, Peter Saville Deyan Sudjic

42 SIT Eleven seating icons

25 IF CLAES OLDENBURG MADE A CHAIR Cassina revive the Soriana sofa

54 AN AGITATOR OF MEN AND MACHINES Meditating on the new Ferrari Roma Richard Williams

28 A ROOM TO SIT DOWN IN Taking apart Herzog & de Meuron’s new chair

58 DESIGN RESEARCH UNIT Michelle Cotton

31 SOMEHOW INTERCONNECTED Michael Anastassiades and Fabio Cherstich’s collaboration for Flos

64 SLIGHTLY IMPOSSIBLE Sam Hecht and Kim Colin of Industrial Facility

36 A SEAMLESS BLEND Minotti’s updated Yoko collection Ayla Angelos 38 NEW AGE, OLD TRICKS Elizabeth Goodspeed

72 REYNER BANHAM Deyan Sudjic 74 YVES KLEIN Power in the void Nils Leonard

FEATURES 98 FRANZ ROGOWSKI The star of Passages discusses identity, both real and performed Words Lauren Oyler Photography Suffo Moncloa

144 JASMINE JOBSON The Top Boy star talks about her all-consuming performance approach Interview Samir Chadha Photography Annie Lai

110 INJECTING COMPLEXITY A visit to Herzog & de Meuron’s studio in Basel Words Deyan Sudjic Photography Sam Johnson

154 TEO YOO The actor talks feeling displaced and finding a home Words Simran Hans Photography LESS

122 TAIKA WAITITI The director, writer and actor on wanting to surprise Words Jason Diamond Photography Jai Odell

170 CAI GUO-QIANG A meditation on the artist’s work around ‘When the Sky Blooms with Sakura’ Words Thea Hawlin

134 HEALING A MESSY SEPARATION Three American designers with the planet in mind Words Ethan Price Photography Jenna Westra

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CONTENTS

COMMENTARY

FASHION

182 THE CURTAIN Ben Lerner

194 RE-ROCCOCO Photography Stanislas Motz-Neidhart Styling Georgia Thompson

184 THE FRAUD Zadie Smith 186 JAGGED AND STRIKING AND GLAMOROUS AND MAD Philippa Snow 188 SHAME Annie Ernaux 190 HELL IN A HANDBASKET Rebecca Miller

212 LOOSE IN TENSION Photography Stella Berkofsky Styling Julie Velut 228 OUT OF OFFICE Photography Rodrigo Carmuega Styling Mitchell Belk 252 ATLAS EFFECT Photography Gabriele Rosati Styling Kerry Dorney 264 ALTAR EGO Photography Joan Braun Styling Kerry Dorney 278 CECI N’EST PAS UNE CHAUSSURE Photography Em Cole Styling Georgia Thompson

LAUREN OYLER writes essays on books and culture that appear regularly in the New Yorker, The New York Times, the London Review of Books, Harper’s, and other publications. Her first novel, Fake Accounts, was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction in 2021. Her essay collection No Judgement will be published by Virago in March 2024. She lives in Berlin.

CHRIS WARE is the author of Jimmy Corrigan – the Smartest Kid on Earth, which won the Guardian Prize in 2001, and Building Stories, which was chosen as a Top 10 Fiction Book by both The New York Times and Time Magazine in 2012. A regular contributor of comic strips and over 30 covers to the New Yorker, his work has been exhibited widely. A solo retrospective of his work was presented at the Centre Pompidou in 2022 and the Cartoonmuseum in Basel, Switzerland in 2023.

SIMRAN HANS is a film critic and culture writer based in London. Her work has been published in The Guardian, The New York Times, New Statesman and GQ magazine among others.

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CONTRIBUTORS

#SANTONIANDREA

santonishoes.com

ZADIE SMITH is the author of books including the novels White Teeth, NW and Swing Time; three collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free and Intimations; a collection of short stories, Grand Union; and the play, The Wife of Willesden, adapted from Chaucer. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Zadie Smith was born in north-west London, where she still lives.

GARY YOUNGE is an author, broadcaster, journalist, professor of sociology at the University of Manchester and 2023 winner of the Orwell prize for journalism. His most recent book is Dispatches From the Diaspora: From Nelson Mandela to Black Lives Matter.

ANNIE ERNAUX, born in 1940, grew up in Normandy, studied at Rouen University, and later taught at secondary school. From 1977 to 2000, she was a professor at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance. In 2017, Annie Ernaux was awarded the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her life’s work. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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CONTRIBUTORS

www.baxter.it

photography by Andrea Ferrari

ELIZABETH GOODSPEED is an independent designer, educator and writer working between New York City and Providence, Rhode Island. She’s a devoted generalist, but specialises in idea-driven and historically inspired brand and editorial projects. She’s passionate about the lesser-known visual past, and regularly researches and writes about various archive, culture and trend-focused subjects. She also publishes Casual Archivist, a newsletter about printed ephemera and design history.

KERRY DORNEY, a Paris-based stylist, dedicated a number of years to assisting at the highest level before embarking on her career as a stylist in her own right. Her perspective on contemporary fashion is instinctive and narrative. Dorney has worked as a stylist with magazines including Document Journal, Self Service and Vogue.

JASON DIAMOND is author of Searching for John Hughes and The Sprawl, contributor at GQ and New York magazine’s Grub Street, a writer, editor, and a guy who probably owns too many books, records and shirts. He has a newsletter called The Melt.

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CONTRIBUTORS

MAKING PEACE WITH PIECES MIRACLE OF TRANSMISSION BLACK CLASSICAL MUSIC

A THIRD WAY

SUDDENLY IT WAS JUST WORDS

LINGUISTIC SHREDS AND

INCHOATE IMAGES

STRIPPING BACK, BUILDING UP

RICHLY RESTRAINED

CHOOSING WHAT’S RIGHT

UNEARTHING TIME TAKE A THIRD, TRAMPLE A THIRD AND LEAVE A THIRD DESIGN WITH SOLE

THEY DON’T WANT TO RUN JACKSON WEARS LOUIS VUITTON SS19 SPECIAL THANK NAME NAME

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LINGUISTIC SHREDS AND INCHOATE IMAGES

The award-winning cartoonist meditates on the singular vitality of his art form

By Chris Ware

I am a cartoonist. And, as such, occasionally I will be asked by a normal civilian why, since I also appear to be a sensate, functioning adult, am I not just a regular writer, or a regular artist? Fortunately, this is a question I also ask myself about every two and a half minutes, so I am always prepared with a concise and perfectly sane-sounding answer.

We humans have a superhuman ability: to be able to see with our eyes closed. (Think of when we dream, or when we remember.) Even more remarkably, we can also see with our eyes open: such as when we daydream or remember while, say, driving a car. And as we worry about where we went wrong with our lives, ‘seeing’ memories that have happened to us or even fabricating pictures of things that might happen to us, we simultaneously experience our present reality, perhaps suddenly realising that a squirrel is in the road up ahead. Fortunately, the idea of a squirrel helps us to act quickly, even if that squirrel resolves into a wadded-up rag by the time we swerve around it.

Since the 600 words I’m exceeding here don’t allow for the usual summary of how comics became a viable medium of self-expression amid the higher arts of, say, writing and drawing, I’ll cut right to the word limit. Like words, pictures in comics are drawings that are not just meant to be looked at, but read.

If this distinction seems strange, it’s similar to the way that the letterforms on this page of text aren’t meant to be scrutinised, but scanned. Like words, the images in comics are distilled and idealised, doodles – not drawings, even if one must also draw to make a doodle – that, I believe, mirror the mental templates, both visual and linguistic, we impose on reality to navigate and remember it. Congruently, as the reader of prose ‘hears’ words in an ineffable inner voice, the reader of comics ‘sees’ drawings that seem to come to life right on the page. It’s a little like reading sheet music and a lot less like watching a movie, but the results can be similarly magical.

Comics, as my lifelong friend Art Spiegelman has said, might also be considered the art of turning time back into

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space. For me, this wave-vs-particle notion means not only the possibility of seeing on one page all the moments of life at once, but also the difference between images-vs-words swerving around that rag-squirrel, and guesses at my future life, my regretted past, how that rag got in the road and the annoying advertisement on the car radio that distracted me into not seeing it sooner.

Even better, all these experiences can, and should, be drawn by one person’s hand, and driven by one person’s mind and heart. The loneliness of Charles Schulz’s Charlie Brown broke my own heart as a kid, the empathy with which Schulz imbued his increasingly shaky doodles of the child he’d kept inside him his whole life making me want to do the same.

This aloneness – perhaps born of social anxiety, perhaps of artistic need (at a certain point it’s difficult to tell the difference) can lead to insights which are most possible to communicate in the process of the draw-writing of comics.

I learned a long time ago that scripting a story before starting to draw it always led to it being dead on arrival.

Only when I completely gave into the drawing itself and allowed the places and people that came out of nowhere (i.e. memory) to appear right in front of me did it all seem to suddenly come alive. It’s really no different from how one approaches life: you plan on living to an old age, you plan on driving to the store, but you also might have to swerve around some very unexpected things along the way. Living a rote, or even wrote life, isn’t living, it’s boring; one lives to try to understand not only oneself, but others, to try to feel through and especially feel for the people we encounter as life advances. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Vladimir Nabokov (a closet comics fan), in his lectures on James Joyce’s Ulysses, lamented the inability of the written word to capture the true full flow of experience; actual thought, he insisted, was not just words, but a flow of words and images together.

Caitlin McGurk, a comics researcher and librarian at Ohio State University, found one day by closing her eyes and

ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATION: CHRIS WARE

simply trying to see what her memories actually looked like – spurred by the fading recollections of her mother’s death when she was 12 – that they were little more than brief snippets of sound paired with even briefer bursts of vision, not the lengthy unedited brain-movies that we like to imagine we harbour. (In other words: comics.

Try it yourself; you might be surprised.)

Nabokov also suggested, via his unreliable narrator of Lolita, that we all have a child buried alive within us.

Contemporary culture apparently still likes to think that comics, in their juvenile semi-literacy, are a children’s form. I insist, however, that comics are incalculably more complicated, a super-literate language that can gather both the tangled linguistic shreds and the inchoate images of experience and blend them into the present, the possible future and remembered or revised past (aka fiction), all ideally composed so that the shapes of the accrued panels and pages (and, eventually, the books) can hint at the unseen strange and beautiful structures that govern and contain us. A synaesthetic, empathetic musical sensation of how it feels to be alive, brought back to life by a reader sitting alone in an armchair, for whom the artist/writer sat alone for years, carefully writing and drawing. That’s why I, at least, draw comics.

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MAKING PEACE WITH PIECES

Marking time with the London Green Wood co-operative

By Tom Bolger

Parakeet birdsong, a jarring car alarm and at one point, a light shower of rain briefly interrupt our interview with Samuel Alexander, one of the tutors at London Green Wood, a co-operative of green woodworkers who have fostered ‘crafty-ness and creativity’ since 2011. Its outdoor workshop in Hackney City Farm – the bucolic pocket carved out from the diverse borough – is littered with roughhewn objects (spoons, stools, bowls, benches), from its 60-plus members.

Previous partnerships have included projects with the Red Cross for asylum seekers, young people with disabilities and special educational needs, as well as women’s groups. Port sat with Alexander on a warm July morning to discuss making as therapy, rescuing felled trees, and accessibility.

How did London Green Wood come about, why was it formed?

The idea was to encourage and spread the word of green woodworking and one of our primary aims remains giving the gift of rural crafts in a city setting.

It started off 12 years ago, very small.

A few people got together, first occupying a space at Abney Park Cemetery in

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Stoke Newington, and it began to grow with courses before it became a working co-operative and community interest group. That’s when people really began to see the benefits of it. Now it’s reached a point where it’s almost rebirthing itself in a strange post-pandemic setting, in that people are actively looking for a sense of tactility. Many people attending the courses are quite screen based in what they do, day-to-day, and are frustrated by being stuck constantly scrolling. They want to regain a feeling of touch again.

What sort of peace does woodworking bring you?

I started making things through therapy. Nine years ago, I was diagnosed with anxiety, depression and PTSD. I was working with a counsellor and had tried things like mindfulness and yoga, but we didn’t really get anywhere.

On the last session, I brought in a book about wood carving and it was a huge breakthrough. We had a rule that if we tried something and it doesn’t work out, we never do it again, but we at least try for 20 minutes. That’s turned into eight years. I was instantly hooked. It’s not just the focus or complete absorption

PHOTOGRAPHY: NINA MARIA ALLMOSLECHNER

in what you’re doing, the concentration happens mainly because you’re translating very easy decisions in your head.

Yes, or no? When it comes to people that have busy lifestyles, that’s why they look to the simplicity of reducing wood.

There are no big, corporate, life-changing decisions, it’s yes or no. Your brain is telling your body how to get there and that’s the beauty of it.

For me, the reason why I make is the release of energy. I’m documenting that release in every cut, and each carving indicates a second of time. I like the idea of the energy being in that capsule of an object. I made it a point at the very beginning that I never keep any of my own work. I always give it away, sell it, or burn it.

Could you expand on the ‘green’ element of the co-op’s woodworking?

I do a lot of carpentry as well, but the appeal of green woodworking is that it uses primitive methods – thousands of years old – and techniques mostly born in Sweden. There’s been a big rise in the last 30 years of this new wood culture that’s reintroduced a lot of heritage crafts, which have been saved as a result. As a material, green wood contains a lot of moisture. The fibers are still intact so they’re open and a lot easier to work with. I also find it a more sculptural way of working; I don’t have to measure. It feels satisfyingly laboursome.

There’s a social element to this which is important too. It goes hand in hand with the craft side of things.

There are people who’ve been here from the very beginning who remember it in a very small cemetery, gathered around a fire, putting a small donation in the cash kitty at the beginning of the day in order to come and hang out. There’s a wide range of ages in the workshop and we’re always chatting about how we share the space, figuring out things together. I think that’s quite unusual in the city. I first started teaching here five years ago, and there are people that, having been taught by me, are now making a living from their craft. It’s deeply rewarding to see their journey in that respect.

JACKSON WEARS LOUIS VUITTON SS19 SPECIAL THANK NAME NAME

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What wood do you like working with?

We can’t be too selective of type as all the wood we use is a byproduct of tree surgery projects. So, we’ll receive wood that has been felled for road safety, for development, things like that. A lot of it is foraged; we have a little WhatsApp group so when trees come down in the area we’ll quickly trundle over in a car.

Like a little rescue mission.

Given Hackney is an incredibly diverse area in London, what are you doing so that diversity is represented in your membership and workshop attendees?

Our outreach is great but the reason why we have a big variety of people is mainly because of our course prices.

We have a tiered system – unwaged,

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low wage or full wage, and people can do that at their discretion. It means that we make it as accessible as possible for everybody. As a co-op, we’re not for profit, so it means that we don’t charge extortionate amounts of money, or chase a big profit game. We just want to teach and create makers.

What is the most treasured piece you’ve made?

I don’t think I’m attached to one thing in particular. What I really enjoy seeing, which happens quite a lot these days, is when I meet up with people and they have my work with them. I made an apple for my partner Kateřina when she first moved in with me. The apple is a worry apple – they live in the pockets of people I love, so that they can have a

PHOTOGRAPHY: NINA MARIA ALLMOSLECHNER

calming object with them in anxious times, or times of change. It’s made of cherry wood and is based on a Braeburn apple. I collect apple pips, and have been collecting pips since we got together.

With everything I make I’m almost making peace with something. I call it making peace with pieces. I’ll give them away or sell them, but it’s nice to re-encounter them. I tell people when they’re carving too much that we are often more drawn by the things that we leave behind rather than what we remove. Going to an old friend’s house for dinner I’ll see the spoon I made them, now covered with turmeric. I see another marker of time that’s passed with this lived object.

Kateřina’s apple is stained from denim, has dents in it from her bag, has been burnished by her hands.

MIRACLE OF TRANSMISSION

Ben Lerner discusses his remarkable new poetry collection

By Lucy Mercer

What possibilities can be salvaged from bad forms? How can we breathe together, collectively? Can poems sing the corporate voice alongside the personal voice? These are some of the preoccupations that Ben Lerner’s extraordinary new poetry collection The Lights tunes into, cutting with and against the grain of language. In long poems and prose-poems that convey the sensation of extended and irreducible experiences, multiple speakers examine fatherhood, visual art, dreams, love and questions of value among other subjects. Lit by green flashes, halos, delicate showers of lights and particulate matter that softens and dissolves what is known, this startling and complex book searches for collective patterns of transformation that can travel across vast distances of time and space, towards mystery.

The Lights is a kind of aurora borealis, having the rare quality of being both enjoyable and mesmerising to read, but also presenting a radical vision that reshapes our understanding of poetry and the present.

To celebrate the book’s publication by Granta, Port spoke to the award-winning writer about utopian impulses, Auto-Tune, thinking and of course – lights.

There’s so much attention paid to materiality and material stuff in these poems: lights, glass, metal, particulate dust. A sensibility that’s ecological as much as it is material.

Whether it’s wildfires or other kinds of pollution or trace amounts of antidepressants in the municipal water, one of the things I do reflexively – just as a strategy for saying sane – is to try to find the utopian possibility in the dystopian condition. There’s a lot of particulate matter in the air right now in Brooklyn – resulting in these staggeringly beautiful sunsets because of the light interacting with those tiny materials. Beautiful and horrendous, right?

It’s a beauty produced by the bad form of human power, but one thing poems might do is test how to transform these negative forms of our interconnectivity into figures of social possibility. So it’s

ILLUSTRATION: KATE COPELAND

material but also metaphorical in that sense. And it’s an imaginative move central to a lot of these poems. In the poem ‘The Dark Threw Patches Down Upon Me Also’, for example, there’s a passage about how the famous Marfa lights might be just light pollution coming back to us as a mystery, but there’s a way to read this error itself as a sign of human possibility – that what we might think of as supernatural is really the alienated form of our social power.

Alienation, aliens – it’s similar with references to alien life in the book. Of course I’m fascinated by the question of whether there’s actually other life out there, but it’s also a way of saying that even if what we’re perceiving is a weather balloon or stray drone or atmospheric trick, those moments are fictions or figures for some kind of outside to the disaster of the present, evidence of our need and capacity to believe that things might be otherwise.

So I think the book is always attempting to perform this poetic operation on the materials of the present to make them a sign of something beyond – the sign of some kind of possibility.

As you’re saying this, I’m thinking about the corporate, artificial voice that some of the poems engage with, either through reference or by speaking through it. There’s a sense that abstract metallic voice can’t be escaped from, but a kind of decomposition or re-fragmentation is also happening, that’s not a bad thing necessarily.

Yes, I think you’re right. I wrote some of the earlier poems in the book such as ‘Auto-Tune’ or ‘Rotation’ or ‘Dilation’ around the time there were these American court decisions in favour of the legal doctrine of corporate personhood.

I mean, you don’t need me to tell you all the insane and horrific things that are a result of that.

But at the same time, I was aware of corporate personhood in another sense, of a collective body formed through language or through struggle or through the erotic or a combination of those things.

Corporate didn’t always only mean only private gain, it was also a figure of collectivity – like there’s a good version of corporate personhood.

The poems are interested in recovering that older fantasy of corporate personhood, of the collective metaphorical body. I mean, that’s part of the miracle of pronouns in any poem, how more than one person can participate in the pronouns, how they can move from a sudden intimacy to a social capaciousness. So, the “corporate voice” in ‘Auto-Tune’ is both things – the bad abstraction of the human by a technology developed by Exxon and the fantasy of collective participation, of popular song in a more than commercial sense.

The poem aspires or names the aspiration to sing both things, to make both things audible.

One way the corporate voice is both celebrated and challenged in the poems is on the plane of form – the movement between prose poems or poems that have these long nearly prosaic lines and then these other poems that are heavily enjambed or disjunctive. Those latter poems suggest that the individual voice is caught up with enjambment, that the human is what you experience in the way a voice breaks up under the pres-

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sures of the utterance, across the margins – something that isn’t smoothed out or machined. We all know that, at a certain intensity of feeling, the voice can crack.

The long poems and the prose poems in the book came across to me as a series of continuing thoughts or experiences that were uncontainable or unsummarisable in some way. As someone who has done a lot of work in critical thinking, I’m wondering how you think about thinking in relation to your poems?

What enters my mind as you say that is a phrase Frank Kermode wrote about Wallace Stevens: he talked about Stevens’ “impassioned mimesis of thinking” – that what you get in Stevens is not the actual thought, you get the shape of thinking, its almost sensual form.

Sometimes for me, the possibility of poetry in relation to thought is not that it produces stable or finished thoughts – but that it enables us to experience the shape of an idea or a concept. And what you experience in the poem is that capacity – a stretching of the materials of thinking – precisely because you don’t have a paraphraseable thought, you know? So that it’s really giving you an experience of shape, of abstraction.

But it’s also the feeling of how thinking happens in time, its unfolding.

I think that when that kind of abstract shape of thinking happens in the book, it’s often in the prose poems, where I can play with the rhythm of syntax or propositional argument or the language of logic – to manipulate or excavate some of the readerly assumptions about sense-making that we associate more with prose. For me, the verse in this book dramatises the effort at thought or speech in a kind of real time that invites a different kind of readerly participation; it’s more striated.

I am fascinated by the push and pull between prose and verse that’s internal to a book – and in testing what happens when you hand off a phrase or motif from one form to another, watch it leap across the different pressures of the sentence or line or one kind of stanza or whatever. That kind of recontextualisation for me is central to my sense of the art – that new possibilities of meaning and feeling rise off a phrase like sparks as it recurs in a different formal context.

With these prose poems I wanted to experiment with fading in and out of narrative. I thought of the old technology of a radio dial. Of picking up a signal, losing it, picking it up again and moving to and from being on the level of the signifier or material of the language, the language’s particulate matter, and then being back in the world the prose evokes, describes.

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Returning to the lights in The Lights, how do you think they function in the poems?

There are different lights at different moments: the blue glow of the screen and snow, streetlights, the glow of last cigarettes and the glow of tail lights, and so on, but I think light is often creatively misperceived in the poems. How can we make the lights… not just a sign of alienation, but of alien ways of being – in the sense of new ways of being or new figures of imagination?

My wonder at that truism you learn as a kid is inexhaustible: that when you look at the night sky what you’re seeing is not coeval with you, it’s not the night sky in the present – it’s in fact this image that’s so old that many of those stars are no longer even there, many of those stars have been survived by their own light. That starlight becomes a kind of elegy to its star. A miracle of belatedness and transmission, when thinking in terms of radio, or tuning in.

In some ways this is an old Romantic trope, but it will never get old to me.

And that song – does everybody sing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ as a kid in England? –

because you’re reading a book, but now you’re not working and what you’re doing is reading a book?

There’s also the weird notion of being involved in making a reader, and what that does to your writing. It’s not even that our kids are necessarily going to pay attention, like maybe they will never care what we write – but there’s the possibility that they could, right, and that produces a new and strange pressure. In the poem the ‘The Readers’, I tried in part to think through this pressure to protect my kids from the poem, but also the need to protect the writing voice from the pressure to be the responsible parent.

I find myself both addressing them or being aware of them over my shoulder as readers – I’ve dedicated the book to them – but also needing the poem to be a space where I’m not taking care of them and that I’m doing things where I’m not in control. As a parent you’re trying to be in control, but as a writer you can’t be in control. You have to open yourself to alien messages.

Yeah, they do. Yeah.

Stars don’t twinkle – we perceive the twinkling because it’s the light passing through perturbation in the medium of the air. It’s another gorgeous misperception. But it’s a beautiful song and it’s something you can wish upon or navigate by. Fictions with real effects.

All of this of course risks sentimentality or whatever, but who cares? It’s a beautiful figure for transmission and reception across distance and time and for the imaginative transformation of those transmissions. Or maybe poetic transmission should be thought of as sending a message in a bottle. You don’t fully know what you’re saying and you don’t know who needs to hear the thing, you don’t fully understand, but you throw it in the ocean or emit your little semaphore, and the process of transmission continues, you know?

There’s a lot about fatherhood in the book, including references to your children. Would you like to say anything about how fatherhood impacts the book?

This book only came together for me when I finally embraced how much of it was about fathers and about my becoming a father. One answer to this is that being a father comically, acutely, painfully draws attention to the question of the value of poetry. And labour versus leisure too, in a funny way. My kids have a lot of questions about what I do! And I don’t really know the answer.

They’ll be like, you say you’re working

The Lights by Ben Lerner is published

by Granta, out now

BLACK CLASSICAL MUSIC

Yussef Dayes’ majestic new album finds a home around the world

By Yemi Abiade

“I like being the bandleader,” Yussef Dayes tells me as the rain envelopes the leafy suburbs of south London where we meet. “But when you come to my show, I want you to be like, ‘Yussef was wicked, but Rocco Palladino killed it on the bass! Venna killed it on the saxophone!’ I’m all for that man, because I know in my heart, I can’t make this music without playing with the best.”

In Dayes’ world, jazz music is the sum of its parts; instruments complement each other to create otherworldly moments of rhythmic bliss. Collaboration is the nascent heartbeat of this art, channelling creativity into music that transcends the genre itself. Dayes, a supreme drummer and musical polymath, lives and breathes this creed.

Across work with Wizkid, Virgil Abloh, Kali Uchis and Kehlani, as well as his brothers in the band United Vibrations and as Yussef Kamaal alongside Kamaal Williams, Dayes has built a catalogue that can be loosely described as jazz but represents the fluidity of Black music itself. His 2018 release ‘Love Is the Message’, sparkles with elements of 1970s soul and progressive rock, cascading over Mansur Brown’s keys and Dayes’ composed drum patterns. ‘Nightrider’, from his 2020 project What Kinda Music with Tom Misch, should soundtrack an episode of Miami Vice in its vintage ’80s feel.

For sounds as disparate as these, Dayes is the glue, the connector. “It’s all classical music to me,” he explains. “Bach was how many hundreds of years ago, but his music is still relevant. I want to be part of that lineage of Black classical music and showcase what’s inspired me. It could be Lauryn Hill or Roni Size; the list is endless.”

Born and bred in south London, Dayes was an outlier of sorts, a gangly teen in tune with jazz and reggae even as his friends and peers were enthralled by grime music’s peak. Fed by his father with a diet of Bob Marley and The Wailers, Herbie Hancock and Fela Kuti, his destiny was set when he began drumming at age four, aided by a strong familial unit that backed his every move. “I remember when I was six or seven and my dad was helping me to

PHOTOGRAPHY: DANIKA MAGDELENA

set up my drums for a talent show,” he recalls. “My mum worked mad shifts to provide for us as a family. My brothers played instruments. I learned a lot just being in my house.” After-school clubs, talent shows and pub gigs were his arena for development, yet his young career blossomed under the tutelage of jazz legend Billy Cobham – once drummer for the incomparable Miles Davis – whose records were often in his father’s rotation, a full circle moment he holds dear. “[Billy] taught me to relax a bit more and trust in my technique,” Dayes remembers. “I was always playing drums with my shoulders high up – I still kind of do but he loosened me up. It’s very easy to veer off in terms of technique but he gave me the confidence to believe in how I approach the drums.”

Even before his arrival in 2016, Dayes had been a student of the game, eager to discover every sketch of sound he could. It is a journey that has taken him everywhere from Los Angeles to Salvador to Brazil, picking up game from an array of musicians. Which is why his new album, Black Classical Music, almost feels like a culmination of his life to this point, a love letter to his family, his experiences, and his first love: music. A majestic 19-tracker anchored by his crisp, ebullient drum smacks, the album reveals Dayes’ deep affinity with home; it features vocals from his daughter, his father, and his late mother, who also took the photo of young Yussef that adorns his album cover. But its musical scope is global, and having worked with Venna, Masego, Jamilah Barry, Tom Misch, Shabaka Hutchings, Rocco Palladino and more, Dayes unequivocally leads the creative charge. “It’s a natural progression to take full charge of a project in a sense,” he explains. “Stepping out and taking more ownership of my music. Not having to rely on other entities to produce something and learning that pursuing your own ideas can be a beautiful thing.” The title track, frenetic and bebop-like in tone, stops you in your tracks, while ‘Crystal Palace Park’ turns a celestial dream state into sound.

The Chronixx-assisted ‘Pin Di Plaza’ is a warm marriage with dancehall; ‘Afro

Cubanism’ carries truncated rhythms akin to afrobeat’s 1970s heyday and the Masego-featured ‘Marching Band’ borrows the tempo of Brazilian samba. The result is an opus, as much speaking to the history of Black music as it is a living symbol. “I think this album shows how I’ve got to where I am,” he says. “It gives people an insight into the different kinds of music I can make. You might think it’s just jazz, but it’s deeper than that. You can find different flavours to it according to your outlook.”

This quest for new flavours continues to follow the musician as he strives to carve out a space for his free-flowing expressive form. As our conversation concludes, he outlines his world-facing mission: “When I went to Brazil last year, the drummers there were making me feel a certain way. I can’t explain, it just hits you. I want more of that feeling.

I need to tap into the Caribbean more, visit family in Jamaica and Saint Lucia.

I want to find the rhythm wherever I go.”

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SUDDENLY IT WAS JUST WORDS

French novelist Constance Debré reflects on her fearless autofiction

By Chloë Ashby

Constance Debré doesn’t believe in art as therapy, but she does believe it can lend a hand in dark times. The French lawyer turned novelist was inspired to write Love Me Tender by her experience of leaving her husband, coming out as a lesbian, and losing custody of her child. “The reality was hard and painful, and I didn’t know what to do – because there was nothing I could do,” she says. “But using it in a book helped.

Suddenly it was just words. And I was somewhere else.”

Right now, she’s at her publisher’s place in Paris – cat-sitting, she tells me – and we’re chatting over Zoom.

She’s on a red velvety-looking banquette and there’s an old stone wall behind her. To her right, a window lets in the early-morning light, illuminating her face – which, unlike in the steely photographs I’ve seen online, is playful and even smiley. Two silver chains hang around her neck. Small hoops pierce her lobes. The sleeves of her black shirt have been rolled up to reveal the tattoos on her arms, and when she turns to the side I glimpse a couple of inked words on her neck: plutôt crêver (rather die).

Lucidly translated by Holly James, Love Me Tender is Debré’s first novel to appear in English, and the second in a bestselling trilogy that draws on her life. The first and third instalments, Play Boy and Name, are due to follow, along with a fourth standalone novel, Offences, loosely inspired by her former career as a criminal defence barrister.

When I ask what attracted her to the law, she says it was partly its ability to provide order. A good student, she started out at your typical big-business firms, before deciding they were “nonsense/immoral”. “I wanted to have more of a fighting attitude,” she says, leaning towards her laptop. “It’s a beautiful thing to fight for someone.” Little did she know that she would soon be on trial, too.

When we meet the protagonist of Love Me Tender, she has been separated from her husband, Laurent, for three years. She tells him over dinner that she’s started seeing girls and wants a divorce. He later tells her over the phone that their eight-year-old son,

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PHOTOGRAPHY: KALPESH LATHIGRA

JACKSON WEARS LOUIS VUITTON SS19 SPECIAL THANK NAME NAME

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PORTFOLIO

Paul, doesn’t want to see her anymore.

And then Laurent announces that he’s applying for sole custody with termination of her parental rights; he’s accusing her of incest and paedophilia. Eventually the court finds in her favour, but only after years of supervised visits with her son.

“Halfway through, they realised they’d made a mistake, but they couldn’t do anything to fix it.”

“Family justice, and justice in general, is full of injustice,” Debré tells me.

“Everyone knows that.” She never wanted to do family law, she says, because “it was so violent. At least in criminal law, the people are already dead.”

I’m curious to know whether Debré considered writing a memoir, and she says she has “absolutely no interest” in that form. She also says that, regardless, a lot of people, particularly in France, describe her work as such – which might have something to do with her family name: Debré as in the French political dynasty. Her grandfather was Charles de Gaulle’s prime minister. Many men in her family were lawmakers. Her father was a journalist, her mother a model.

But they didn’t have money or their own apartment. Opium was a thing, and later heroin. Her mother died suddenly. Her father was an addict. “So, this was the strange environment I grew up in,” she says, matter-of-factly. “And that’s OK. My parents were great. I’m lucky I didn’t have a boring bourgeois life.”

While the first novel in the series, Play Boy, recounts the dissolution of the

PHOTOGRAPHY: KALPESH LATHIGRA

narrator’s marriage, the third, Name, explores her family history. Does Debré find it hard to lay bare the twists and turns of her life? At this question she pauses, twirls a pair of glasses in her hand. “I don’t think so. In a way, it’s easy because you don’t have to imagine things; they’re just there, and you put your hand in your pocket and think, ‘OK, I’m going to use that.’ And then, when you do use it, it becomes something else.”

It takes on a narrative, a style – which, in Love Me Tender, a bold and beautiful book, is precise and pared back. Debré’s is a process of reducing and reducing. “It’s very easy for me to write long and sophisticated sentences, but to me, you have to face things directly, and a few words are enough.”

Which is why she likes the first person – because it’s direct. Also, because in France, even as a child, beginning a sentence with ‘moi je’ is forbidden. “I mean, at least it was in my day,” adds the 51-year-old, laughing. “So, using ‘I’ is a great temptation. Well, why not? I’m going to use it without shame.”

A similar sense of raw defiance courses through Love Me Tender, whose protagonist, upon trading a lawyer’s salary for the life of a penniless writer, gives away her belongings and the apartment she once shared with her son – just as Debré did. She spends her days waiting for the hearing, reading, writing, swimming, having sex with a long line of women. She has a survi-

vor’s instinct to keep going and vows, in the face of the insanity bubbling up around her, not to climb back into her old skin. Debré describes what happened in her life at that time as a conversion.

A conversion, and a catalyst for creativity. She doesn’t know whether she’ll always use life experiences in her fiction, but in this instance, it was the best decision she could have made. “When you write, and especially when you use everything around you as material, you’re at the centre of the world,” she says. “With Love Me Tender, it was like having a superpower – at a time when I had no power at all.”

Love Me Tender by Constance Debré, translated by Holly James, is published by Tuskar Rock, out now

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A THIRD WAY

Unpicking the threads of the new Barbican show, ‘Re/Sisters’

By Billie Muraben

Laura Grisi’s The Measuring of Time, made in 1969, is one of the earliest works in the Barbican’s ‘Re/Sisters: A Lens on Gender and Ecology’ exhibition. Filmed on 16mm, it depicts the solitary artist on a beach, the camera panning out and around her as she counts grains of sand; an impossible, seemingly endless task that is beyond time, or at least beyond a human-centric impression of time.

Curated by Alona Pardo, ‘Re/Sisters’ makes use of lens-based media – photography and film works, and records of performances, protests, and happenings – to survey the relationship between gender and ecology; drawing connections between the oppression of “women, feminised bodies, and Black, trans and Indigenous communities, and the degradation of the planet”. The works in the exhibition speak to the potential of, and need for, the decentering of human life, in favour of a more intertwined relationship with other species and Earth itself.

A sort-of response to Barbican’s 2020 ‘Masculinities: Liberation through Photography’ show, also curated by Pardo, the exhibition “shines a light on how, since the 1960s, artists, and particularly women and gender-nonconforming artists, have resisted and protested the destruction of life on earth by recognising their planetary interconnectedness”. As ‘Masculinities’ looked at the construction of the male gender and form through the shifting and various eyes of society, ‘Re/Sisters’ flips the perspective to convey how women, and othered people, see the world.

“Women are the largest majority on the planet, but within that there is a greater intersectionality,” Pardo says.

“The exhibition is looking at how marginalised bodies are seen as a site of extraction, and how the earth is clearly seen as a site of extraction.” ‘Re/Sisters’ has its roots in the ecofeminism of the 1960s, and moves through a variety of perspectives, vantage points, and experiences. In the USA, ecofeminism grew out from anti-nuclear and anti-war activism, and particularly in reaction to the use of Agent Orange, a chemical herbicide used by the US military to clear foliage in Vietnam. The environ-

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mental destruction it caused has been recognised as ecocide, and exposure to it caused millions of people to be disabled, develop cancer, and be born with congenital disorders. “A coalition of women began to form, making links between the oppression of earth and the oppression of women,” says Pardo.

And although ecofeminism “emerged into a ripple” it never became a wave, “because third-wave feminists saw the connection between women and nature as essentialist”. The exhibition features work from the 1960s to the present day, and for many artists, the language of ecofeminism wouldn’t have necessarily been part of their practice – whether that is through a rejection of it, or their life and work being grounded in other traditions and cultures – but as an “intersectional, radical, decolonial interest in feminism and environmentalism” has re-emerged, there is new potential in framing works within an expanded ecofeminist context.

‘Re/Sisters’ is organised into six chapters, which convey the potential of protest, occupation, care, connection, and fluidity; how directly confronting, refusing, or continuing to work within complex contexts of environmental abuse can be a radical act. In Simryn Gill’s Channel #1, brightly coloured plastic bags, pieces of fabric, and other detritus are photographed strung between trees, on the sand, and lost among the landscape of a coastal town in Malaysia. They resemble clothing on a washing line, or fabric draped across a body, the pictures are beautiful, the waste – a microcosm of the vast quantities that wash up on the shore – acting as a metaphor for the importance of caring for our environment and valuing domestic labour.

Much of the work in ‘Re/Sisters’ carries multiple layers of meaning, to be read according to your familiarity with the subject and experience, or willingness to pay attention, as the stories of othered people are often told. Uýra’s ‘Rio Negro’ sees the artist, biologist and educator borrowing from the aesthetic language of drag to transform into multi-species characters, “fluidly merging the human and nonhuman… calling

Above: Judy Chicago, Immolation from Women and Smoke, 1972 Right: Fina Miralles, Relacions. Relació del cos amb elements naturals. El cos cobert de palla [Documentació de l’acció realitzada el gener de 1975 a Sabadell, Espanya] / Relationship: The Body’s Relationship with Natural Elements.

The Body Covered with Straw, 1975

for a material and spiritual restoration of the ravaged ecologies to which we belong”. Mónica de Miranda’s Salt Island, made up of five meticulously embroidered photographic prints, “considers the complex experience of Afro-diasporic lives and Europe’s colonial past through a Black ecofeminist lens”, embracing rocks and cliff formations as witnesses of ancestral and ecological trauma, “repositories of human experiences and memories”.

The importance of connecting to land, and taking up space as an act of protection rather than domination, is evident in Taloi Havini’s film Habitat, which follows an Indigenous woman as she walks the landscape of an abandoned copper mine in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, sifting gravel, “excavating the ‘unproductive’ mineral residues of the mine”. In ‘Imágenes de Yagul’, Ana Mendieta “consciously inserts her body into a space of death (on the ancient Zapotec tomb at the pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican site of Yagul), while also recalling ideas of fertility and femininity”, asking us to reflect on both the inevitable demise and potential of the body, our relationship to history, and geological time. In Touch Sanitation, Mierle Laderman Ukeles takes a different approach to communicating time, scale, and ecologies. Ukeles was the first (unpaid) artist in residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation, her project represents the human scale of the complex bureaucracy of the state, as the artist set out to shake the hand of every NYC refuse collector over the course of a year, thanking them for “keeping New York City alive!”

Susan Schuppli’s film Cold Rights – inspired by Inuk activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier’s petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2005 arguing for the right of ice to remain cold – “offers a space to think differently”, Schuppli tells me.

“To ask what a climatic sense of justice might be, in the face of inequalities and injustices that communities experience not only because of climate change, but also when environmental conditions are instrumentalised as weapons against them.” Schuppli is an artist and re-

searcher based the UK, whose work “examines material evidence from war and conflict to environmental disasters and climate change”; she is Director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Board Chair of Forensic Architecture. Of her practice, Schuppli says: “I tend to think of it as a constellation of things, including workshops, lectures, and films. I want to tell a story, and it is often a complicated story. My practice has specific sonic attributes, [through the use of] field recordings, using acoustics as a way of producing psychological space, and heightening the emotional quality of images through sound.”

Cold Rights is part of a broader framework of research called Learning from Ice, “looking at the knowledge practices mediated by this very ordinary, but also very extraordinary material”.

Schuppli’s focus has been on the cryosphere, the frozen water part of the Earth system where people live, and what it means to have the right to be cold: “On behalf of Indigenous communities, whose life worlds are entirely reliant on the material integrity of their environments, which requires that they stay in a state of deep freeze. And what about the rights of materials themselves?”

Cold Rights draws together Schuppli’s reflections on research she had been conducting with Forensic Architecture, a series of ‘Cold Cases’ looking at the weaponisation of cold – ice, temperature conditions, and water – in North America. “I wouldn’t say it pushes back at the violence being examined through the Cold Case videos, but it offers a space to think differently. ” The six chapters of ‘Re/Sisters’ – Extractive Economies/Exploding Ecologies; Mutation: Protest and Survival; Earth Maintenance; Performing Ground; Reclaiming the Commons and Liquid Bodies/Fluid Entities – move through actions and reactions that defend, care for, and convene with the more-than-human, grounded in an expansive understanding of gender and ecology.

When establishing the tone of the exhibition, Pardo sought to “call out injustices, while celebrating Earth’s

generative potential”. ‘Re/Sisters’ isn’t suggesting a utopian future, but the artists – and activists – in the show convey the power of resistance to patriarchal norms, extractive practices, and the Anthropocene. “Why don’t we break apart the binary world that we live in,” Pardo says, “and try to think through a third way?”

‘Re/Sisters: A Lens on Gender and Ecology’ runs at the Barbican from 5th October 2023–14th January 2024

LEFT IMAGE: FIREWORKS PERFORMANCE PERFORMED BY FAITH WILDING IN THE CALIFORNIA DESERT © JUDY CHICAGO/ ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK PHOTO COURTESY OF THROUGH THE FLOWER ARCHIVES COURTESY OF THE ARTIST; SALON 94, NEW YORK; AND JESSICA SILVERMAN GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO RIGHT IMAGE: COURTESY OF MACBA, MUSEU D’ART CONTEMPORANI DE BARCELONA

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STRIPPING BACK, BUILDING UP

FENDI’s classics, rebuilt by a renowned architect

By Jo Lawson-Tancred

Only a few tenets of good craftsmanship have held true across cultures and eras, and one is the importance of high-quality natural materials. It is for this reason that luxury brands like FENDI tend to favour leather, linen, and cashmere.

Now, however, the Italian fashion house is embracing the influence of Kengo Kuma, one of the great masters of another tradition.

The Japanese architect is known for using organic materials to make buildings that feel strikingly modern, yet equally at one with the natural world.

In a new partnership with Silvia Venturini Fendi, Kuma has built on both designers’ reverence for ancient artistry by introducing age-old Japanese techniques. Waranshi is a soft fabric of cotton and tree bark fibres fused together in the style of handmade washi paper, which Kuma has used to make new versions of three FENDI classics: the Peekaboo bag, Baguette Soft Trunk and the Flow sneakers, all part of the Men’s SS24 collection.

The waranshi’s mottled textural details add depth to its understated off-white and grey palette. In another experimental flourish, typical of the architect, a second version of the Peekaboo has been made from the shimmering ashen bark of a birch tree.

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ALL CLOTHING AND ACCESSORIES: FENDI

PHOTOGRAPHY: GAËTAN BERNÈDE STYLING: GEORGIA THOMPSON MODEL: ABIOLA AT W MGMT

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UNEARTHING TIME

Exploring the artistic alchemy of Daniel Arsham

By Ayla Angelos

In the realm of contemporary art, where innovation and bravery collide, one name emerges with an irrefutable resonance – Daniel Arsham. An enchanter of temporal dimensions, Arsham has spent the past 20 years transforming cultural objects into eroding artefacts, producing works that could both be plucked from ancient history or from an unfathomable day far, far ahead in a dystopian future.

Much like an alchemist of antiquity, Arsham’s creations sit in what he coins an “archaeological universe” – a civilisation that banishes the clock and is populated by ageless fictional artefacts. Spanning multiple disciplines from sculpture to painting, Arsham’s practice can therefore be likened to an orchestrated symphony that dances on the delicate thread of time. To celebrate Arsham’s momentous career and a two-decade collaboration with gallerist Emmanuel Perrotin, the artist is opening two solo exhibitions taking place simultaneously in Perrotin’s spaces in Paris and New York this September. Debuting multiple series of works inspired by his archive – a project with Star Wars, sketches etched into hotel stationery and updated versions of his antiquity sculptures, for example – all those who set foot into the galleries will

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be given the chance to observe his evolution over the years. Right now, there’s a deep sense of reflection permeating the air. “A lot of the work that I make today,” he admits, “I don’t think I would have been able to create 20 years ago.”

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, and raised in the sun-stroked streets of Miami, there are a couple of catalytic moments that inspired the practice of the now New York-based artist. In 1992, Hurricane Andrew blitzed its way through Florida and destroyed Arsham’s family home in its path. It’s not an event that he thinks about every day, but certainly one that went on to inform the character and ethos of his work. “A lot of my works have this sense where they appear as if they’re in a state of decay or erosion, or they’re falling apart,” he says. “The idea around destruction and reconstruction is buried in the deep recesses of my subconscious.”

Arsham attended Design and Architecture Senior High School in Miami and was later awarded a scholarship to study a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at The Cooper Union in New York. Here, he was able to dabble in different mediums including painting, sculpture and photography, and ultimately sow the seeds of his distinctive vision. “The school was really an education about concepts and ways of making rather

PHOTOGRAPHY: ANDINA MARIE OSORIO

than the medium in which it sits,” he explains. After this, Arsham travelled back and forth between Miami and New York, which led to the meeting with gallerist Emmanuel Perrotin. “I began my career with him,” he says. Since Arsham joined 20 years ago, the gallery itself has expanded from a single space in Paris to multiple branches in Miami, New York, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Tokyo. “As my work has evolved, the gallery has as well,” he reflects. “I think it’s quite rare today for artists to have relationships with galleries like this.

I was 23 when I began with the gallery, and it feels like a part of me, my history and my family.”

Just like time itself, Arsham’s interests in varying mediums have ebbed and flowed. In fact, his journey is not too dissimilar to the way a river ceaselessly carves its course, with the first bend marking his journey as a painter, before the gentle stream ships him off to other disciplines. As Arsham is colour blind, however, he’s always found painting to be a little challenging, “especially in the use of colour”, he says. As such, he turned his focus on the tonalities of colour instead, and all his artworks pre-2010 are swashed in monochrome gradients with hints of blue and green.

For the next 10 years, Arsham became interested in sculpture and began manipulating architecture – ‘Falling Clock’, a sculpture that gives the illusion of time melting off the wall, is one of his best-known pieces from this era.

When Covid-19 hit and studios were closed, however, a lack of space and available tools meant that Arsham wasn’t able to work on larger-scale pieces. It was a perfect opportunity to return to painting, which he practised “pretty heavily” in the time proceeding. So much so that the exhibitions launched after 2020 saw an influx of new paintings and revamped ideas from the past that he “hadn’t quite concluded 10 years ago” – such as a series of landscapes “that look like they could have been made thousands of years ago, in the present or some potential future”.

Alongside his personal endeavours, Arsham co-founded design studio Snarkitecture in 2008 with Alex

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Mustonen and has continued to place collaboration as a fundamental part of his practice. To date, he’s conceived projects with multiple brands including Tiffany & Co., Adidas, Dior and Porsche, and has worked with music producer Pharrell Williams, choreographer Merce Cunningham and designer Hedi Slimane. Throughout his far-reaching work, though, there’s a consistent theme of decay and rebirth.

His work is not merely a sanctuary for artistic creation; it’s a sanctum where subjects like ancient Greek busts, cars, film characters or emojis go through a metamorphosis. His Future Relics series sums this up best, which sees time-bending objects excavated from the present. “It’s as if you’re looking at an archaeological object that is from your own life,” he says. “There’s a bit of a confusion or dislocation that you feel; you don’t quite know where the objects are from.”

One of Arsham’s latest displays of timeless decay is a new collaboration with Star Wars, a project he’s dreamt of since childhood. Three years in the making and on view at Perrotin, Arsham was granted licence to turn Star Wars characters like R2-D2 and Darth Vader into archaeological relics, effectively creating a Star Wars universe that’s undergone a time-melting makeover in true Arsham style.

This project, as with all of his work, is inherently there to confuse you, to make you question when, why and how it was made. But once you peel away the layer of magic, you’ll see that his

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pieces are all created with traditional casting techniques, but constructed from a medley of unexpected materials, like crystal, volcanic ash, patina bronze and stainless steel.

To achieve this eroding effect, Arsham mixes wax with sand and applies it to the affected areas – this causes the material to lose its bond and fall away.

“It’s a bit of trial and error because the moulds are sealed, so I cannot see inside them when they’re being cast,” he explains. “Some of the works have to be cast multiple times in order to get them to work properly. But over the years, I’ve gotten better at that process.”

When walking into any gallery space in which he’s exhibiting, there’s an odd sense of dislocation that will arise from the experience. On one side, you have decaying faces, almost rotting structures that have disintegrated over time, and familiar objects that appear to be blowing in a constant state of dizzying movement. On the other side, you have soft, textural paintings and architectural sculptures that melt into the walls. This perplexing state, according to Arsham, can open up new ways of thinking.

“It’s like an invitation to rethink your everyday life and how you interpret time,” he says. “So much of our everyday experience is governed by how many hours we have in the day and what we’re doing next week. The work invites you to escape that paradigm. When things are acting in a way that they’re not supposed to, it’s confusing. And that confusion can lead to productive thinking in other areas.”

PHOTOGRAPHY: ANDINA MARIE OSORIO

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RICHLY RESTRAINED

A new collection from Dior that dwells on the details

By Jo Lawson-Tancred

Some seek a timeless silhouette through all the changing seasons. That understated, refined elegance underpins Dior’s new capsule Dior Icons, the latest creation by artistic director Kim Jones. In his mind, Jones must have had an image of the urban man, who moves seamlessly between business and pleasure with no time to change, always carrying an easy sophistication and flair.

Minimalist restraint is evident in the clean lines that define the collection, with looks that contrast the striking outline of a long coat with loose trousers or the inviting embrace of a matching scarf and jumper with a slim, handheld bag. Richly soft materials like poplin, virgin wool and cashmere, occasionally mixed with mink, appear in sober tones of white, beige, black and Dior grey, so that these quintessential classics can be readily adapted to suit the occasion.

For the more intrepid, the Dior Hit the Road backpack is included, covered in the iconic CD Diamond initials. Elsewhere, Dior’s renowned Oblique motif is kept subtly out of sight inside the lining of a jacket. The capsule’s means may be discreet, but the ends are always luxury.

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PHOTOGRAPHY: ALI PECK STYLING: GEORGIA THOMPSON MODEL: ETIENNE AT SELECT MODEL MANAGEMENT HAIR STYLIST: HIROKI KOJIMA AT CAREN USING SAM MCKNIGHT

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CHOOSING WHAT’S RIGHT

CEO Stefano Canali discusses sustainability in terms of legacies

By Tom Bolger

Canali has chosen to keep its production, and its people, close to its origins – family-run since its 1934 founding and remaining ‘Made in Italy’ to this day. Those decisions preserve tradition, but also mean that their work is familiar, accountable and changeable, a sensibility key to any sustainability improvements. Recently, they’ve applied that ethos to their supply chain, commissioning studies to better understand the environmental impacts of their production, and then making improvements, as part of their wider Canali CAre initiative. Port discussed this recent work with Stefano Canali, part of the company’s third generation.

How does being a family business shape your approach to responsibility at Canali?

The family tradition has of course cultivated a more measured and patient approach to decision making – one with a long-term perspective. Sustainable success is not about chasing short-term gains or fleeting trends, which fits well with upholding the essence of Canali: timeless elegance and quality craftsmanship. We want to create garments that withstand the test of time, and that includes the way they’re made.

What came out of the Organization Environmental Footprint (OEF) and PEF Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) studies you conducted?

In developing those studies, we wanted to take into consideration the organisation, but also the whole-life cycle of our products. We were able to test and assess 59 per cent of our production, which I’m proud of – the industry average normally revolves around single-digit numbers. Our PEF study found that a benchmark Canali garment has higher durability than the industry average, while its impact, over the life cycle of the garment, is significantly lower.

In our OEF study, we found that 70 per cent of our impact comes from the fabrics purchased. In light of that, our challenge is to continue to collaborate with suppliers, to find ways that we can produce using the finest materials while minimising their environmental impact.

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Keeping Canali ‘Made in Italy’ seems important – what does that mean to you, and how does it tie into the wider CAre project?

Everything we make is made in Italy – 70 per cent in our own workshops in Sovico (MB), Marche and Abruzzo. The rest is with trusted external suppliers, with whom we work closely. We know where all the raw materials come from, how every garment is made, and who makes them. Almost all of the fabrics come from the Biella district, from companies that have made, and are making, history in Italy’s textile industry. Like us, they’ve built honest relationships with suppliers, and promote good practices at every step.

Choosing to remain ‘Made in Italy’ comes out of a strong feeling of belonging, as well as a sense of responsibility. Local production helps us make beautiful and well-made products – and is especially useful when it comes to implementing innovative production processes or experimenting with new materials – but it also helps us maintain a production system responsible towards the planet and people.

The primary objective of CAre is reducing your environmental footprint – what practical changes are you making to achieve that?

We’ve made big changes to our packaging – labels, hangers, tissue paper, cellophane bags, and shoppers are now made from 70 per cent recycled material, which saves about 3,000kg of paper a year. We’ve also changed how we ship things by air, reducing emissions by using large hanging garment boxes, as opposed to shipments in individual trunks.

We’ve committed to only using electricity from renewable sources, reducing direct emissions by 50 per cent in a year and total emissions by 10 per cent, which is around 3,000 tCO2eq in total.

We’re trying to be more self-sufficient by cutting our use of, as well as producing our own, electricity; installing LED lamps in Triuggio, the Marche region and Gissi, and using solar power in our Sovico HQ on top of Filottrano, Marche and Gissi – 600,000kWh of self-producible electricity in total.

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More attention is being paid to business practice. What do you think will happen to brands that don’t take steps to do business better, or look after workplace wellbeing?

Fashion brands that neglect sustainable practices risk being left behind.

Consumers want products and businesses that align with their values and contribute positively to society and the planet, and potential employees, especially among younger generations, are prioritising working for organisations that demonstrate a genuine commitment to sustainability and social responsibility – workplaces that offer a sense of purpose.

Sustainability is hard work, for everybody. It’s a long journey full of challenges and obstacles. One where, often, you need to go back and try again, especially when you experiment and innovate. Sometimes bureaucracy slows you down. But there is no going back; it’s not about choosing what is easy, it’s about choosing what’s right.

Could you talk a bit about your work with Retex.Green?

It’s a consortium of which we (as Canali) are founding members, and I am

also a member of the board of directors, with a direct commitment to ensure effective and controlled pre-consumer waste and end-of-life management of textile and leather goods. The EU is working on regulation in this sector of extended producer responsibility, and I hope that the harmonisation of national laws isn’t abandoned. It’s a tragedy if some nations think differently.

Your FW23 collection focuses on organic and recycled fibres – are you planning to do more of this in future?

We’d like to use organic and recycled fabrics more broadly, but the market is still very limited, especially if we want to maintain the same high-quality primary fabrics we normally have.

We’re putting pressure on our suppliers to provide a PEF for the fabrics they use, so we can select those with a lower impact.

You’re offering repairs in flagship stores, which from a cynical perspective seems antithetical to profit.

Why is offering adaptation, alterations, and repairs important to you?

It’s not just a philanthropic gesture, it is a strategic move that aligns with our commitments. From a business perspective, providing alteration and repair services builds a stronger relationship with our customers and fosters loyalty. The sophisticated sartorial construction of Canali garments comes out of a dedication to creating products with durability in mind, and offering these services makes customers more likely to make a long-term investment in our brand.

Can you discuss some of the community projects that the Fondazione Canali Onlus have completed that you’re particularly proud of, or any it’s currently working on?

The Fondazione Canali Onlus was established in 2013, to formalise and better coordinate the family and group’s engagement with charity work. We focus on social assistance, healthcare, charity, education, and professional training, partly through contributions to specialised institutions that do relevant work – I’m particularly fond of the Children’s Heart Project, which sends an equipe of Italian paediatric surgeons across Eastern Europe to perform and teach very specific heart surgeries for children.

PHOTOGRAPHY: GAËTAN BERNÈDE STYLING: GEORGIA THOMPSON MODEL: ABIOLA AT W MGMT

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TAKE A THIRD, TRAMPLE A THIRD AND LEAVE A THIRD

Dan Cox reflects on the paths up to acclaimed farm and restaurant Crocadon

By Tom Bolger

Michelin introduced the Green Star in 2020, aiming to highlight trailblazers in sustainability, or environmental consideration. Within just months of its opening, one was awarded to Crocadon, a new restaurant and farm in Cornwall, reimagining food from below ground up. The imagining is that of Dan Cox, kitchen veteran.

To begin at the beginning, how and why did Crocadon come to be?

So, I built the growing operations up at L’Enclume while still cooking, and then we opened a restaurant, Fera, at Claridge’s Hotel, and operated that for three years – they’re quite big, like 120 covers, seven days a week. Very intensive. My thinking was, I’m gonna do my time here, but the next step is getting onto a farm.

We used to get produce down from our farm in the Lake District once a week, but we also used a company called Good Earth Growers, who were located down here in Cornwall. We shared the same values. We were, in fact, their second biggest customer.

I used to come down here three or four times a year, look at things in the ground, have real conversations on how things grow, cook together, all that good stuff. We developed a strong relationship with Sean from Good Earth Growers. It was Sean that came across the idea of Crocadon; it was a property – actually on Rightmove – and the wider lease was for sale. So, we got in touch. Sean and I came down and visited the farm and immediately saw the beauty and magic, especially the courtyard of buildings.

Cornwall is a particularly beautiful part of the UK, but as you’re a London boy, it’s a very different environment...

I lived in the mountains in Spain for a bit; I lived in the mountains of Switzerland; I lived up in the Lake District, and I felt, well, where is the next place? It needed to match that level of beauty and harmony. This place fit the bill. Especially tagged on with the fact that all of our fish and shellfish came from Cornwall.

How is the restaurant wedded to the surrounding farm?

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When it comes to writing the menu and creating the food, it’s a direct representation of what we have at that particular moment. We don’t have to go far to understand what it is we should be doing, but most of that comes in the planning and the deciding. So, the biggest freedom is the ability to be able to choose what you grow and when you grow it. And, most importantly, how it’s grown.

I don’t like the word sustainable, it’s so overused, but you’re actually talking the talk and walking the walk – so how are you doing things differently?

I would say agroecological... that’s probably a good word for me; also we are very soil focused, or soil first. I mean, everything from the very beginning at the farm with Simon [Rogan at L’Enclume] was like – we’re a two-Michelinstar restaurant, we need our veg to be the same standard. Well, how do you grow the very best veg? It turns out that you need to focus on soil health and making sure that the soil food web is intact and fully functioning. That was my biggest learning, coming here. I’d taken on a 120-acre farm, you know, there’s plenty of pasture, a lot of land...

Was that intimidating?

It was crazy. I had someone grazing under license for the first six months.

Although organic, because it was a remote operation for them, it very much was: put the cows in the field, wait until it’s all gone, then move them onto the next field, which is called set stocking.

I’d refer to it as chewing the field out. Basically removing all plant matter and then letting it struggle to come back again. Even within those first few months, I could see that that wasn’t how things were supposed to be.

I didn’t have any pasture knowledge or grazing knowledge then, but I could see that if you chewed out the field with the cows and it was a 20-, 25-, even 30-degree heat, the whole field would just sort of burn out.

I started delving into wider reading on the subject and understanding that if a plant is allowed to grow to its normal height, it’s healthy. If it’s continually brought down to nothing, then it’s obvi-

PHOTOGRAPHY: LILY ANNE BARTON

ously highly stressed, and that stressed plant won’t grow very high, ever.

Diminishing returns.

Yeah, exactly that. In turn, without that plant matter on top, there’s no root system below, any root system is only as big as the plant or tree upon it. You start to shed roots and it operates in a very shallow way, which leads to soil health degradation. Basically, you just don’t have a healthy, functioning soil system.

But understanding this, you can put animals through it in a much shorter fashion, breaking fields into smaller paddocks – a four-acre field into four individual acres – putting the animals in and letting them take just the top of the plant; with ruminants [hoofed grazing mammals] there’s something in their saliva that produces a growth response when the plants are grazed.

That’s so interesting...

The two evolved together – grasses and pasture plants actually evolved with ruminants, the two do go together. These are domesticated animals; they’re not grazing wild, but it’s trying to bring some of the mentality of their historic, migratory roaming around, and trying to replicate that. Basically: just leave some behind. Have a nibble! Say, take a third, trample a third and leave a third.

Those plants on top are like solar panels, they capture energy that then goes down into the roots and actually creates soil, and feeds the wider life below.

Once the soil’s healthy, the animals are healthy too. That’s always been my main thing – it’s the health of the animal, because the healthy animal is going to be a tastier animal. It’s always been coming from the chef angle of trying to produce the best, best meat possible.

What’s being grown at the moment?

What would you like to grow in future?

We’ve got lemon pepper trees, Sichuan, lemongrass. Been experimenting with ginger – that hasn’t really worked out.

In terms of the pairing it with dishes?

No, in terms of actually getting it going and growing. A big focus has always been herbs: anise is a big part of what we do…

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Mexican marigold – it’s like a marigold plant that grows six feet tall, but it’s got an apple, tropical fruit flavour.

It’s really cool. And it’s allelopathic, so it can smother things out of the roots in terms of perennial weeds. We’ve got bi-colour shiso, green shiso, both really interesting flavours.

All the normal things in between: we grow a lot of fennel, we grow a lot of parsley, which is, I feel, very overlooked.

Everyone’s always looking for the weird and the wonderful, but parsley grown in good organic soil is just as incredible.

Some things we just grow for fun. I like to grow a lot of sunflowers, ’cause they’re a good soil improver. They look great.

They make you feel happy.

Then there’s the rest of it. The immature flower heads, you can cook them like artichokes, they’re really cool. You can let them go to seed and harvest the seeds – I mean, that is a little trickier, ’cause the birds tend to peck them out before you can even get to them.

The unexpected joy, and I suppose terror, of seasonal cooking in the way that you are doing it, is that you are completely guided by and led by the weather and chance and life itself.

Why do you enjoy cooking this way?

I think it cuts both ways. Before I got into farming, or even growing, as a chef it was just supplier lists. Some of that stuff was coming from a little bit further afield; you’d get tomatoes earlier than you would if you were here in the UK. You’d get cucumbers earlier. Although you would still feel the seasons, you would never feel like you were truly connected. When things are actually growing right in front of you, it’s the only option. You’re actually living it.

Asparagus is a good example because even chefs... they think that that date when asparagus first becomes available is when asparagus is actually in season.

It’s not – it’s being forced in greenhouses and polytunnels, and, you know, 99 per cent of the time, is covered in weedkiller.

We’ve talked about seasonality guiding you, but what else are you looking for when you’re building a plate, or the wider menu?

Because we’re running a tasting menu it needs to be varied, it needs to have its ebbs and flows and be interesting and exciting, or reflect the time of year. If it’s winter, some sort of brothy element that is going to warm you up. There’s never a strong set formula, again, it’s about what is available at that particular moment and how it presents itself. We always have the meat element because the sheep are so important to us. We have worked with other bits and pieces, like someone’s got a pig locally, or there’s an old suckler cow perhaps, but generally

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it’s going to be the sheep and it’s going to be that as the focus.

In terms of everything else, it’s just trying to utilise everything that we have.

It’s not just the things that we have in front of us that are available, there’s things that we put away and harvested the year before or misos that we’ve made.

We’re experimenting this year with growing some black soybeans to make a true soy sauce. Zach, our pastry chef, he got the seeds. He’d seen the plant in Korea and wanted to try growing them.

We’ve just done a small crop, and are growing them, and trying to make a very small amount of soy sauce with that.

On that note, how are you able to change the longevity of ingredients and draw them out?

Beans are a very good example. They grow well, they’re good for the soil, but the great thing is that they’re mostly coming all at once. We can cook them fresh, but we can also store them, and use them for misos.

We’ve got a bean called a lazy bean that’s an incredible variety, like really round and juicy and succulent – they actually freeze very well so you can freeze them fresh and then use them through the winter. The same applies to making a miso. You don’t have to make the miso that day, you can freeze those beans and then cook them when you’re ready to put the miso on. A frozen bean versus a dried bean is actually far superior.

It’s so refreshing to hear that your pastry chef is suggesting these things, and the kitchen is open to this.

There is just so much going on here that tying anyone into any particular role and saying, that’s all you’re gonna do – that just doesn’t work. Zach came here and he wanted to grow some things. Some things worked, some things didn’t. It’s the same for us every single year. It’s just being connected to it and understanding the process and seeing it through from seed to harvest to finished product.

PHOTOGRAPHY: LILY ANNE BARTON

You make ceramics too?

It felt much more grounded to be doing that. We used clay from St. Agnes, and then we used a lot of Cornish China clay as well, which is even closer, in Bodmin.

When I first started ceramics I was using bought glazes that you just add water to, and was just starting to question what was in those glazes and whether any of those elements were toxic. Obviously, lead is the big one. Some glazes are deemed food safe; some are deemed for sculptural stuff.

Why don’t we just create our own glazes? So, we were just delving into anything we could possibly make a glaze from. There are many different rocks in Cornwall that can be ground down to make glazes, but the thing that kept coming back was ashes.

What you’ve done with bones produces such a wonderful patina.

Exactly. It started... we’ve got a huge dock burden here at the farm, so many many docks. We would be going round, cutting these docks out at seeding stage, then piling them up in a corner.

Well, why don’t we dry them and burn them to make an ash? That ash initially was following the biodynamic principle – if you burn the plant and then apply it back to the soil, then the soil gets the message that it doesn’t need that plant and your docks will go away. I don’t think that works [laughs].

We were making charcoal right at the beginning, using a lot of single species wood. So we ended up with a lot of single species wood ash. We went into it deeper and started to burn every single plant we could possibly find on the farm.

One that stood out from very early on was fig leaf ash. I brought a load of fig trees with me, but there’s a few big ones already here on the farm. Those fig leaves, burning them down, just on their own – drying them out, and then starting the fire with a hot air gun. I mean, burning does seem a little bit like anti the whole trying-to-dobetter movement, but actually it’s all part of it.

The only heating that we have in the restaurant is a wood burner. We do plug in electric radiators too, when it gets really cold. But that serves as a furnace; we can put other things in there with the wood. So, that’s when we started to investigate crab ash and lobster ash. At one point we had crab on the menu, saving up all those crab bones after we’d made the stock, drying them out and then yeah, blazing them up.

So, it was just a huge reflection on all that work that had been put in prior.

Yeah, it felt amazing. It meant a hell of a lot in terms of like, being that case study for doing things a slightly different way.

You’ve said in the past that there’s no future for gastronomy, you know, unless real change in the industry occurs. What changes would you like to see adopted?

I think the main change would be real transparency. I put myself onto a farm to investigate and delve into each aspect of growing and farming. I had no idea that, under organic standards, you could still spray sheep with an insecticide, for example – it’s deemed a welfare issue.

We don’t, we use a garlic cider vinegar preparation as a preventative, and just deal with it case by case. Flies are a massive problem. Last week I had a sheep completely covered in maggots from head to toe, you know, and it was very nearly dead. I had to shear it off, and save it, treat it with iodine and hope for the best.

Sorry, I’m digressing a little bit. At most restaurants you might get told that this meat’s come from here, or these

vegetables have come from here, but in terms of what’s being used, where’s it come from and how has it been farmed?

One of the biggest things for me is GMOs in the UK. Pork, chicken, eggs, dairy, that isn’t organic – 99% of the time their feed will contain soy, corn that is genetically modified, and nobody really knows. So, what you’re eating, what has it been eating, how is that transferred?

This is your biome in the most ridiculous way. If you just don’t know, how can you make an informed decision?

What excites you about Crocadon’s future and what’s next for this year?

Next year?

What really excites me is the ability to reinvent, year on year, in terms of what we can grow and what we want to focus on. Like, the long-term idea is to be able to start milking these sheep at some point. One of the breeds I work with at the moment is Zwartbles, a Dutch milking breed.

Looking into the future as a whole, I feel like I’ve got more to offer than just Crocadon. I feel like there’s further to go with this, not to just be tied down to one particular piece of land.

Lots of kitchens chase Michelin stars.

I feel like you’ve done better and won a Green Michelin. That frames you as a model for doing things differently gastronomically; how did it feel after all those years of hard work?

It felt great. It’s only a couple of months after opening the restaurant as well.

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DESIGN WITH SOLE

In conversation with Santoni, the heritage Italian shoemaker

By Joshua Hendren

Some three hours’ drive from Rome in the storied town of Corridonia, the heart of Italy’s Marche region, lies the Santoni headquarters. Just like its native land, it’s a place of immaculate beauty – a sprawling campus of recycled steel, aluminium and glass flooded with natural light and shrubbery. It is here where the Italian heritage brand approaches shoemaking as a noble art, producing hand-crafted contemporary footwear to exacting standards.

Established in 1975 by Andrea and Rosa Santoni, the company initially specialised in men’s shoes, made and sold exclusively in their design atelier, before gradually expanding with a women’s offering and an array of leather goods that include belts, wallets and Saffiano backpacks. Today, the business has been handed over to Andrea’s son, Giuseppe, who has worked to preserve its artisanal savoir-faire while transitioning to a more sustainable future.

“All our shoes are created without excess, without things that are too strong, too particular,” says Santoni, the brand’s chairman, speaking on the timelessness of their Italian creations.

“Like many heritage brands, we offer classic shapes like lace-up, moccasin and buckle, but what we change is the length, the design. These are very small modifications, but they offer a very modern proportion. It’s like the cut of a suit. A suit is a suit, two-button, three-button, double-breasted, but the proportion makes the difference. That’s what makes Santoni timeless.”

Indeed, a glimpse into Santoni’s headquarters reveals a deep material knowledge and attention to detail, as each shoe is interpreted into colourful leathers and knit weaves by a team of skilled makers. “Craft is the absolute essence of our brand,” explains Santoni, highlighting the intricate handwork of the maison’s artisans, applied to such features as its signature bright-orange sole, which is sewn and painted by hand, ensuring each shoe is entirely unique.

“Our brand maintains traditional techniques, but with a modern approach.

This is done with the very simple, yet at the same time complicated, process

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of putting together younger designers and traditional shoemakers. The two energies need to work together. We have young designers that create new shapes, new proportions and an absolutely contemporary product, but in full respect of tradition, fitting and the quality process.”

What further elevates Santoni’s craftsmanship is the storytelling woven into each collection, presented seasonally through a unique narrative. “We always start with the story,” says Santoni, of the brand’s approach to shoe design.

“Then, we develop the story with colour and, finally, the end product.” For the brand’s current fall/winter collection, Santoni celebrates the importance of its heritage and values with new urban silhouettes that include the unisex Andrea loafer – a re-edition of an iconic ’80s model cut from soft nappa-esque leather in an ankle-bearing form with tassel detailing. Meanwhile, signature styles have been reworked in fresh colourways, including the Double Buckle sneaker, now available in baby pastel shades of blue and pink, and the Sneak-Air, a ’70s-inspired trainer newly enriched with a bold gradient finish achieved through a targeted air-spray technique.

PHOTOGRAPHY: MARINA CANEVE

“My aim and the aim of my people is to create objects of desire. So, we always try to experiment with new materials, new leathers, new perceptions in a way that’s unique and special,” notes Santoni. “Our fall collections for men and ladies evolve with new shapes, volume and colour. For us, colour is our trademark. We try to create a chromatic journey with our unique pieces, that are always delicate and smooth but also linked to the season and the mood of the collection,” he continues.

“With fall, for example, we use a lot of darker greens and natural colours to create a differentiation between our seasonal collections.”

Another key focus that Santoni has spearheaded since taking over as CEO of the company when he was just 21 is the brand’s step into sustainability. “We created our new production facility with total respect for the environment,” he notes, adding that the materials used in the construction of the building are 90 per cent recyclable. It also features a dedicated system for the recycling of rainwater and, most notably, all the buildings – the offices and three production plants included – are covered by almost 4,000 photovoltaic panels that

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ensure the production of more than a million kilowatts per year of green energy. With this, Santoni shoes are created with an entirely carbon-neutral impact.

“We’ve also started to develop a more eco-conscious process for the production of our shoes,” says Santoni.

“We use natural colours and leather tanned with vegetable tanning, as well as non-toxic glue with a water base instead of oil,” he explains. “We are really taking a green approach so we can be responsible with our work. We also engage all of our supply chains to be in line with our philosophy and elevate their quality standard and level of respect for the environment.”

With social and sustainably-minded innovation firmly at the forefront of the company, what are Santoni’s plans for the future? “At the moment, we’re working on expanding our group of accessories and products into a wider range with a stronger, more detailed connection to our values and our excellence,” he replies. With the launch of a new boutique in London’s famed Harrods department store, Santoni hopes to solidify the brand as an international authority on state-of-the-art shoemaking.

“The sky’s the limit,” he says. “Saying that, we have a lot of really ambitious plans in terms of creating the DNA of our ladies’ world, which is something we started, but understand we need to get stronger and more consolidated,” he adds. “Our aim is to be the point of reference for quality and timeless design with customers that can’t wait to get our products. Creating the object of desire is the secret of success.”

PHOTOGRAPHY: MARINA CANEVE

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THEY DON’T WANT TO RUN

Conversations with Ukrainian male creatives still in the country

By Ania Brudna

Photography Ania Brudna Retouching Oksana Terletska

The people interviewed and photographed for this project are male Ukrainian creatives, all of whom are still in Ukraine.

Living in Berlin and Paris for the last year and a half, I’ve talked a lot about Ukraine, Ukrainians and Russian military aggression. People are often surprised by the fact that Ukrainian men are not allowed to leave the country and are obliged to join the armed forces if needed. This war, in the 21st century, in the middle of Europe, is hard to compre-

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hend – it’s hard to imagine how one can be so limited in the right to move freely.

My partner, brother, and many male friends and colleagues are all living in Ukraine. I know that many Ukrainian men are not considering fleeing even if that were a possibility. They don’t want to run from their homes when they need to protect their land and their loved ones. They are sure that by staying, working, volunteering and defending, they can bring the victory closer. Though no one I know denies that living in war, being at war, is a scary, complicated

and exhausting position to be in. As a Ukrainian, I hope this project will give audiences outside the country a feeling of connection with these people, people just like them – who were living, travelling, creating, planning, dreaming, now faced with a huge tragedy because of this terrible war started by Russia.

I also hope that this will empower the readers and everyone who comes across this project to continue helping and supporting us in our struggle for freedom and the opportunity to live peacefully and happily in our own land once again.

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and even studied for a year at a military university, but I realised that this career was not for me and I radically changed the direction of my studies. I went to do sculpture and wood carving, then I worked as a restorer of furniture and wooden objects. We often went with the team to small villages, to restore wooden churches typical for Ukraine, it was a good time, but on February 24th, when I realised that I had to go to war, my little experience helped me a lot, because I was familiar with the basics of military affairs.

What is the hardest thing for you in living in the war?

The most terrible thing is uncertainty, you can never say exactly what will happen next, and on the other hand you can’t promise someone that “everything will be ok”, you cannot plan your life and simply stop doing it, and without plans for the future, enthusiasm disappears.

What makes you happy at the moment? What inspires and supports you now?

My girlfriend and my family, their undeniable support and love always inspire me, and also the feeling that I am useful. It is cool to be a part of historical events, that there is something important to this.

Would you flee Ukraine if you had a chance now?

No, I would not leave Ukraine, I always wanted to build my life here.

MAKSYM HERBEJ Now military, before the full-scale invasion, restorer of wood and furniture.

What’s your name, age, where do you live and what do you do now?

My name is Maksym Herbej, I am 26 and currently live in my native city of Lviv in the west of Ukraine. I’m there recovering from injuries after a mine explosion, which I came across while working as a mine engineer at the frontline.

Describe your typical day for the last month.

Until recently, my typical day started at 5am. I would get up and head out to de-mine the fields. We lived in the forest, sometimes went fishing on the river, I adopted an abandoned dog, who always cheered me up in the sad moments. However, I now live in a relatively peaceful environment, with no active combat. So, I’m trying to reintegrate and return to a civilian way of life. My day involves visits to doctors, and in the evenings, I work on restoring furniture in my studio.

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This activity calms me and allows me to focus.

Could you share your most memorable experience since the start of the full-scale invasion?

The moment when I blew up. I thought I wouldn’t survive and greatly reassessed my life, I thought about my family and about the little things that I used to do, about their value.

How did you join the Armed Forces of Ukraine? Did you have any military experience before? What were you doing before the start of the full-scale invasion?

I made the decision to join the armed forces of Ukraine in the first days. I always knew that I would go to war, if necessary. I grew up on stories about Ukrainian Cossacks and insurgents who fought for our independence for centuries, this decision was easy for me. Previously, I did military service

Do you feel isolated not being able to move outside the country? How do you keep connected with the world outside Ukraine?

I do not feel isolated, I have many friends abroad, we are in contact through social media, and I feel their support. The distance does not affect our relations in any way, we no longer need to wait for paper letters.

First thing you will do when the war is over?

I will take my girlfriend and my dog and will go on a long trip across Ukraine by car, I will go everywhere I didn’t have enough time to go before, and then I will return to my studies and do everything that I put off before the war, because I will have the opportunity to do so.

What can people around the globe do to help Ukraine?

Don’t forget about us, talk about what is happening right next to you, in the centre of Europe. If people don’t forget about the situation in Ukraine, maybe their government will do the same.

Slightly, but with social media I keep a connection with my friends and colleagues who are abroad.

First thing you will do when the war is over?

I can’t say that right away, let it end, then it will be clear.

What can people around the globe do to help Ukraine?

Organizing fundraisers and donating various items that would help our military on the frontlines.

SERGIY KAKULA Now military, before the full-scale invasion, a model.

Please introduce yourself: what’s your name, age, where do you live and what do you do now?

My name is Sergiy Kakula, I’m 27, I come from the Lviv region and I’m currently serving in the National Guard of Ukraine.

Describe your typical day for the last month.

Most of the time I’m on guard duty, which involves protecting a strategic site. Periodically I go to a training field to practice marksmanship, study medicine, and simulate various situations that may arise on the battlefield.

Could you share your most memorable experience since the start of the full-scale invasion?

The birth of my son Oleh.

How did you join the National Guard of Ukraine? Did you have any military experience before? What were you

doing before the start of the fullscale invasion?

After it started, I voluntarily joined the army. Before that, I didn’t have any military experience. I worked as a model.

What is the hardest thing for you living in the war?

Being away from my loved ones. Not being able to make it all end.

What makes you happy now? What inspires and supports you?

My family.

Would you flee Ukraine if you had a chance now?

No. Even if I was not in the army, and I had an opportunity to leave, I would not go.

Do you feel isolated, not being able to move outside the country? How do you keep connected with the world outside Ukraine?

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What makes you happy now? What inspires and supports you?

I am happy about the simple things, like morning coffee, a quiet night, work...

I am happy for the living ones. I am glad my brother is alive and mostly well after his military campaign. I am glad my family survived the Irpin occupation. Glad we got out of there with my girlfriend too. Glad I have resources and some free time, and glad I have the choice. I feel happy for Ukraine’s military successes. Proud to be related to the strong-spirited nation, lively and zealous people. Also, Aristotle inspires me, physical exercise, live communication, nature, listening to my favourite music.

Would you flee Ukraine if you had a chance now?

I probably wouldn’t leave my homeland now. I feel my involvement in everything happening here and a great deal of my responsibility for it. If I can change a thing, it’s only here and now, where I am. So, my answer is no.

Do you feel isolated, not being able to move outside the country freely?

How do you keep connected with the world outside Ukraine?

Intruders broke in; I don’t want to be their victim. Yes, I’m prohibited to leave, this law is strict but fair enough I think, because the state is in a difficult position. The world is currently focused on the war in Ukraine. We have Internet connection, goods and help from foreign friends, we are supported by millions of people from all over the world, visitors come here, to Ukraine, work here, implement their projects, get haircuts in my chair: how can I feel isolated?

ILLIA KANISHCHEV Hairdresser What’s your name, age, where do you live and what do you do now?

My name is Illia. I am 28. I was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, where I have lived ever since then. I’ve worked here as a hairdresser for the last seven years.

Describe your typical day.

Lack of sleep, working a lot, thinking a lot, bunch of communication, join various volunteer projects. Sometimes I have some rest. From 24th February, 2022, this is the lifestyle.

Could you share your most memorable experience since the start of the fullscale invasion.

A lot of things to reflect on, but probably when I do charity haircuts. I’ve visited soldiers in hospital, kids in orphanages, the elderly in Chernihiv district.

Soldiers’ injuries are terrible. You see the big hearts, open minds, adamant souls and huge sacrifice. White pain, dark humour, sadness, hopefulness, no

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trivia, civil solidarity, persistence. How do you be like the guy with his legs cut off, showing me a YouTube video of his squad works, laughing and saying: “Oh how we kicked their asses!” Unbreakable.

Do you have any military skills? Are you preparing to carry out military service?

Last year I went through several short combat courses. I was classified as limited fit for service, but with new government guidelines, I’d probably fit. I keep in shape and keep myself involved in military discourses. Army isn’t all about holding a gun, so I train my mind as well. I’d say my routine is preparing for military service.

What is the hardest thing for you in living in the war?

Melancholy. Losses, suffering, destruction; it is so close to you. It makes you nervous all the time and makes you worry, but you need to think about how to properly fight back the offender, and do it technically and efficiently.

First thing you will do when the war is over?

I would probably cheer with the others for whom this is a goal. I won’t be specific, because the war is going on and I can’t entertain myself dreaming, so as not to have my head in the clouds and suddenly miss something important.

What can people around the globe do to help Ukraine?

I thank all the nations who are supporting us, and for the fact that Russians are not welcome anymore, mostly anywhere. But I think many governments and important media figures should be more decisive in their attitude.

Russia’s territorial ambitions extend beyond the borders of Ukraine. We need more attention, more discourse around, more weapons. Clear decisions are needed. Statistics don’t explain what is going on in this war. Regular violations of the statutes of war shouldn’t be difficult to prove.

What is the hardest thing for you living in the war?

R and Y: To deal with the understanding that Ukrainian soldiers are dying for you to live.

What makes you happy now? What inspires and supports you?

R: Only good news from the frontline makes me feel happy. Many of my friends are fighting there.

Y: I think future plans are what make me happy. As well as my partner Anastasiia.

Would you flee Ukraine if you had a chance now?

R: I’ve had this opportunity; sometimes artists can obtain permissions to travel abroad. However, remaining abroad would entail breaking the law and, more importantly, I simply don’t want to stay there. The Ukrainian army ensures my existence. Staying here, it’s the least I can do for Ukrainian civil society. The most I can do is to become a soldier.

Y: I have had a chance during this whole wartime period. But Kyiv was always one of the most exciting places to be and, thanks to the Ukrainian defenders, still is.

ROMAN KHIMEI AND YAREMA MALASHCHUK Duo of artist/filmmakers What’s your name, age, where do you live and what do you do now?

R: My name is Roman Khimei, I’m 31. I was born in Kolomyia, west of Ukraine, but for the last 12 years I have been in Kyiv. I’m a filmmaker and artist, currently curating an exhibition at the Kyiv Biennial.

Y: Yarema Malashchuk, Kyiv, 30, filmmaker and artist. Together with Roman and [graphic designer] Ostap Yashchuk, I’m setting up a new studio space and preparing a new video work.

Describe your typical day for the last month.

R: My wife Kateryna gave me a radio in case of Russian nuclear threat. The radio is probably the only source of information that will work in the event of a nuclear attack. At least that’s what the manual says.

So, I start my day by listening to Radio NV [a Ukrainian informational radio station].

I listen to the news from the frontline.

What the Ukrainian soldiers are going through now does not allow me to doubt

that I should continue to do what I do as an artist...“What a lovely day!” – I remember the tagline from Mad Max: Fury Road.

Y: Despite attacks, we are working. 2023 brought an understanding that you should plan your life no matter what, otherwise you’ll be stuck in a drastic present.

Could you share your most memorable experience since the start of the fullscale invasion.

R: The news that my childhood friend did not die, but is still in Russian captivity.

Y: Filming an interview about the wheat harvest between Ukrainian and Russian artillery positions. That was quite surreal.

Do you have any military skills? Are you preparing to carry out military service?

R: No military experience, but I often watch Ukrainian military bloggers. In the near future, I would like to take a several-day course in tactical medicine.

Y: Unfortunately, I don’t have any, and I don’t do any preparations for now.

Do you feel isolated, not being able to move outside the country? How do you keep connected with the world outside Ukraine?

R: I feel really isolated when I hear how some Western art institutions collaborate with citizens of the so-called Russian Federation, who are spreading the soft propaganda of Russian imperialism.

Y: Believe it or not this is the last thing I think about while others are on the frontline. We are working on an installation about connection and the relativity of the rear for the Biennial. There will be three video live streams in bars and cafes – in Kharkiv, in Ivano-Frankivsk and in Berlin. So, the visitor drinking beer in Kharkiv can see a visitor in Berlin, who can spectate those in the bar in Ivano-Frankivsk.

First thing you will do when the war is over?

R: If I live to see this time, I will probably scratch what itches.

Y: I will go to Maidan, the main square in Kyiv where the revolution 2013–2014 happened. And I think it will be crowded.

What can people around the globe do to help Ukraine?

R: In response, I will quote the inscription on a postcard made by Ostap: “West has failed, weapons save lives, Russia kills”.

Y: Learn more about the country in the middle of Europe, erased for centuries because of the imperial politics of Russia. It will be the most anticolonial thing any progressive/leftist individual can do.

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response in Switzerland, and this summer my first photobook came out. It’s called We Stay. The book is based on these columns, covering that first year.

First thing you will do when the war is over?

Nothing special. Will go for a coffee or to my studio. It will feel different though.

What can people around the globe do to help Ukraine?

Support our military and push your governments to keep supporting Ukraine until the victory. Stop consuming Russian culture and collaborating with Russians unless they have a clear position and have proved it many times.

LESHA BEREZOVSKIY Photographer What’s your name, age, where do you live and what do you do now?

Lesha Berezovskiy, 32, Kyiv, I am a photographer.

Could you share your most memorable experience since the start of the full-scale invasion.

The memory of my wife sleeping on the morning of 24th February, 2022.

Do you have any military skills? Are you preparing to carry out military service?

I took a few sessions of professional shooting training and a drone course.

I can’t say I’m really preparing but I’m thinking about it a lot.

What is the hardest thing for you, living in the war?

Not being able to see my grandparents, who are under the occupation in Donbas.

What makes you happy now? What

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inspires and supports you?

I’m holding up only because of willpower and patience. Nothing really inspires me at the moment. Maybe when this all ends, I’ll be able to look back at it and write a sad shoegaze album, or something like this.

Would you flee Ukraine if you had a chance now?

No. I had a chance to flee but I didn’t.

I already fled once when Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014. I had to flee from Donetsk to Kyiv.

Do you feel isolated, not being able to move outside the country? How do you keep connected with the world outside Ukraine?

Since the very first day of the full-scale invasion, I’ve been doing a column at the Swiss magazine Republik, where I share what’s happening in Ukraine through my personal experience, with pictures and words. It has had a big

to do more. The biggest inspiration for me is people around me.

Since you’re a minor, you could leave Ukraine. Why do you choose to stay?

Well I’m studying, and I feel here is the best place, honestly. I like to travel but I will always come back here.

First thing you will do when the war is over?

Trip to Crimea [occupied by Russia in 2014] with friends and family. I’ve never been there and have always wanted to go.

What can people around the globe do to help Ukraine?

Do not forget about the war, no matter how difficult and tiring it is, when the entire media space is very dynamic, and it is difficult to keep this topic relevant.

Help people in Ukraine; if possible, donate to our army. Once I met a German who told me that in their family everyone who takes Uber always chooses a ride option that transfers part of the funds to help Ukrainians; this was a revealing moment, and we appreciate it a lot. There are many such opportunities like this, so anything you can do is extremely important to us. Thank you!

ROMAN DATSKO Student, model What’s your name, age, where do you live and what do you do now?

I’m Roman and I’m 16. I live in Ukraine near the city of Lviv, and I’m studying and making music.

celebrated it with the whole family.

And also in January, when I walked a runway for the first time in my life (for Facetasm, Comme des Garçons and Maison Margiela).

Describe your typical day for the last month.

Since it is September and university has just started, I wake up at 6:30am, have a shower, pack, have breakfast and then my dad drives me to the university.

This is my first year at university so that’s kind of a new experience, and it’s the first time after the start of the full-scale invasion that we’re studying offline, which is good.

Do you have any military skills? Are you preparing to carry out military service?

I don’t. But I’m planning to go to the military department next year to gain some skills and to be prepared for anything.

Could you share your most memorable experience since the start of the full-scale invasion?

Perhaps it was the time when our boys [the Ukrainian army] liberated Kherson. At that moment I returned to Ukraine, and I remember how we

What is the hardest thing for you in living in the war?

Knowing that our people lose their husbands, wives, kids, brothers, sisters every single day. That’s just too much.

What makes you happy now? What inspires and supports you?

I just appreciate that my family is safe today, that’s enough. Also making and listening to music every day definitely helps me relax and kind of inspires me

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INQUE ISSUE 2 OUT NOW Large FORMAT NO ADVERTISING NO digital version One issue per year for 10 years then it stops CONTRIBUTORS TO ISSUE TWO INCLUDE: STEPHEN FRY PRETI TANJA SAYAKA MURATA Nicholson Baker Jonathan LETHEM SHEILA HETI JOYCE Carol Oates David Keenan John Edgar Wideman Will Self 2/10

2023

2023

INQUE INQUE

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INQUE

£55

INQUE

‘NASTY‘NASTY AMERICA’ AMERICA’

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2/10 2023

2023

By Gabrielle Napoli.

Translation by Alison L. Strayer.

Portrait by Yann Kebbi.

A visit to the recent Nobel Laureate’s home sheds light on the life and process of the writer, whose lucid works have let readers around the world reimagine their place in it.

As our lives are spent increasingly online, we’ve grown used to collective voices: a chorus constructed by aggregate. This uncertainty about the individual voice is embedded in our history — and may make our future, too.

Natasha Brown had everything that was expected of a high-achiever: a brilliant education, a well-paid job in London. But by writing a novel with her own acerbic vision, she’s begun to turn the status quo on its head. By Rebecca Liu. Photographs by Agnes Lloyd-Platt.

The more one hunts for unity in the human psyche, the more it fractures into multiplicity: the body and the soul; the Ego, Superego, and Id; the “two wills” that lived in St. Augustine’s heart, the “multitudes” that flourished in Whitman’s. But the inconstancy we blithely accept in politicians and fictional characters is rarely granted these days to ordinary humans.

By Meghan O’Gieblyn. Illustration by Lucy Jones.

Each era gives rise to its own beast, and the monster of our age is Legion.

It is the chorus speaking in a single voice, the bureaucracy obscured behind a human face, the three children stacked inside a trench coat asking for one adult ticket to the movies. Legion is the corporation that enjoys the legal rights of personhood. It is the cacophonous writers’ room that ventriloquizes the voice of a television protagonist. It is the creative force behind our most expansive texts (Wikipedia) and our darkest conspiracies (QAnon), all the oracular pronouncements that shroud the hordes who have collectively brought them into being.

“Hive mind” describes the emergent intelligence of social media, where swarms of users often appear to evolve a unified will. But there are swarms within the individual users themselves – or at least the most famous ones, the voices collaboratively sculpted by interns and content production teams. None of this is a secret, exactly, though we find it easy enough to forget, proceeding as though these conglomerations were, in fact, individuals like us. It’s only when the mask slips – when incompatible claims on a Wiki begin to smack of some esoteric spat, or when a politician tweets in the argot of a much younger generation – that we recall what we already know: that we are in the presence of multitudes; that we live among the possessed.

Legion first appeared some 2,000 years ago in Galilee, in the form of a demon-haunted man who was living outside the city, wailing maniacally and cutting himself with stones.

This is the detail stressed in the Gospel of Mark: “Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones.” Jesus asks for his name, though he is not addressing the man but the demons who live within him. “My name is Legion,” a voice replies, “for we are many.” It is this chilling dissonance of singular and plural pronouns – My, we – that the historian and philosopher

KITES BY PABLO DELCAN

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The Dead Interview.

By Will Self.

Painting by Erica Parsons.

As the novelist and revolutionary philosopher is summoned back to mortal life, she finds a contemporary world that may or may not be what she envisioned.

07/07/2023 17:45

Will Self: It’s a great honour to be speaking with you, Mme De Beauvoir. Simone de Beauvoir: I really don’t require any sort of deference from you – whoever you are… WS: Be that as it may, I’m addressing you from 2023; and in this era, in the West at least, you retain the status you had when you died in 1986, that of “the Founding Mother of Second-Wave Feminism”.

Indeed, as third- and fourth-wave feminisms have, arguably, failed to increase their theoretical ambit and thereby achieve concomitant social and economic progress for women, the significance of your own work remains unassailable. SdB: Neither do I require flattery – which, in my experience, is always a form of threat. Are you a man? WS: Yes. SdB: I’m not surprised to hear that. Men, and especially men who believe themselves to be feminists, often deploy flattery in relation to a woman’s intellectual attributes. It’s tactical… WS: Our aim being?

FICTION

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14/07/2023 15:39

DAUGHTER WATCHING MOTHER John Edgar Wideman

repaired. I have damaged you. It happens. You won’t notice. Hours are going by. A whole day has gone by for me, and for you, standing there, in that room, days are slipping away.

“It doesn’t seem fair. I have torn you. I’m sorry.

I want you to know I am sorry. I am really enjoying myself. The day has passed exactly as I said it would and I am very happy. I am warming a bed that is a super emperor bed – there are several beautiful antiques dealers in here. We’re going to have a hot bed.

“It’s the morning – I am eating bacon in the hotel lobby. I am miserable. The night ended too soon.

“I fell asleep and someone was arguing, I don’t remember who, but they argued and I woke up alone and frustrated. I am eating bacon and drinking a pint of orange juice. I have torn you completely and I am not sorry.”

The voice of Russel Palomet has stopped. There is only the cloud now, the cloud of him. I believe he is dissipating. The walls of this bedroom are soaking wet. The spores that were on Diana’s crumpled black suit have turned into mushy masses the size of tennis balls. They are oozing. The smell is horrific. I feel exhausted.

I open the door.

I am on the street.

I have no choice but to go home. I have missed the holiday. I have missed everything. I had no say in any of this. My house, I remember, has no electricity, and so it will be freezing cold. All my money is in Euros. I know it will be impossible to get the electricity on, but I have no choice.

The smell of gas has gone. It’s all normal traffic pollution again.

I’m passing the blossoms on the tree. They have gone over, now. Most of the petals are on the floor, soaked and mashed into the pavement. There is fox shit hanging out of a bottle of Yop. The cars are awful colours. I am dragging my suitcase behind me. You are gone.

There are people outside the house. I am probably being evicted. There is a man in a suit. He must be from the letting agency. And there is someone else there, too. I do not know who the other person is. My house, I can see from here, is shimmering somehow. Is it burning? No, the house is not burning. I can’t see properly. My eyes do not work. But there is a shape of someone at my door. It is you!

You are there at my door, you are banging, hammering on the door, about to crack it open like the yellow shell of an egg.

I am lucky, R. I have a daughter alive. She resides and works in the same city I do. Seeing her no problem. Though I seldom do. Often worry about her. Watch my daughter watch her mother, my ex-wife from whom I have been divorced 30 years, watch my daughter watch her mother’s heart sinking because her mother could not convince the world her son’s heart, my daughter’s brother’s heart, my son’s heart was good, a good boy heart in a good good boy, but she couldn’t persuade the ones holding him in prison for life to let him go, so her mother’s heart breaking, mind failing in the stink of her Maine bedroom, twist of bed clothes, string of body, her mother unforgiving, not talking, not much left in last straw of a mother’s body, mother’s mind for a daughter to watch except her mother’s heart breaking, not much mother to find or grieve after my daughter’s long, long rescue drive alone at night on I-95, etc., north from NYC to the woods, the lake, the fouled rumple of isolated house with a tiny dock at the end of a path she had walked down many mornings with her mother, each wrapped tight in bathrobe or towel against dawn chill even in July, August, out the back door to the lake and then she was a naked little girl beside her naked mother shivering, toweling off, both of them hopping, shivering, 100 yards from the house, on the dock they reached by a path through trees and thick undergrowth, and one morning her mother’s hand had touched her bare shoulder and stilled her shaking, stopped her breath, her innards, her bones, limbs, all of her instantly still as frigid dawn light still above white mist hovering still above stillness of lake, a mother’s touch speaking without uttering a sound, that hand whose pale fingers had spoken to her long before she had words to remember anything by, before learning words for quiet, quiet noise, daughter, daughter brother, brother words, before words for gripping a steering wheel wheel, during a drive to Maine to save her mother, before words for things inside herself she could not speak yet surely understood, words like her mother’s touch, a vast sea, a quiet corner and calm and chaos shifting, shifting, shifting, one thing never only one thing very long before it becomes another and another and barely manageable almost like icy plunges when they dip, her mother’s word for it, dipping what they do together at dawn, summer after Maine summer printing indelible and welcome and easy, the bitter chill of a dip snatching her breath away so quick, so easy and relentless, it’s not even her then, her and not her in the frigid water, she’s gone elsewhere, absolutely still, waiting for her mother’s words to save her from freezing, drowning, listening for words unspoken, words enwrapped perhaps in a silent touch so you must always first look into your mother’s eyes to be sure or to guess or to discover or to

wonder what a touch says, the touch demanding all of your attention, all of you dripping, shuddering, hungry for whatever a touch means, oh daughter, oh dear, dear girl…

And low and behold one morning on the dock, your mother touches you and your eyes vault up and you see in your mother’s eyes a moose and baby moose gliding not more than 20 yards away, passing by too impossibly close, you think your mother must be dreaming the immense, weird profile of towering moose body silently treading, the long long thread legs, knobby knees and ankles, the child moose body a small mirror beside it, both creatures silent as shadows as they silently slip silently closer and farther away, mom moose in charge, moving delicate and serene through woods thick and tangled as dark mess of hair her mother calls it, mess when combing or brushing or just fingers messing or unmessing that nappy, dark mess on top your head or she just pats it, plays with it and you never know, you can only guess what’s coming next, but feel it sometimes true as a guess truly feels sometimes. Like that morning beside the lake, guessing what your mother’s seeing, what she means when she touches your shoulder, what you see in her eyes and feel down to your toes, a stillness seizing you like the lake’s cold fist grabs and dips you under till you lance up, splash out, sputtering, shocked, trembling, not quite frozen to death again, as you hustle your little butt double-time up ramp of wide planks cut from Maine pine trees, trees through which a mother moose and baby moose quiet beyond quiet are passing, shhhhhh, touch says as you stand beside your mother on the dock, and your eyes follow hers, watching as she watches and don’t dare make a sound, eyes watching her mother’s heart breaking.

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CLOTHILDE

A SLEW OF ATTRACTIONS

John Edgar Wideman

Diane Williams

Sky clear the morning I look out my 9th-floor apartment bedroom window at towering ruins of city and imagine a Mars landing, two of the rover’s international crew my color, imagine the miracle of it all happening, a wonder especially for someone like me who can’t even count from 1-10 without his mind wandering and losing track, see the miraculous crew members scooting, flying, digging stuff up in some sort of horse and buggy able to leap tall buildings in a single bound or smash obstacles aside with titanium fists, exploring, excavating a reddish surface compounded of dust, steel, sugar, concrete, and microscopic particles of a bone-like substance serving Mars as a skin like dirt serves Earth as skin, astronauts aboard a vehicle much smarter than they are if they ask it to be, more accurate, more precise, more knowledgeable about where they are, where they wish to head than they will ever be, more brutal poking its perfect nose, purring lips deeper, deeper underground to partake of and understand exactly what lies beneath them and predict with astounding correctness what’s next, sending findings back to Earth faster than the speed of light, faster than they can download on the rover’s screens, but also astronauts able to talk to the machine they ride and it talks back to them when a crew member lonely, afraid, curious, sorry, hungry or anything else, anything else anyone thinks they are or thinks they need is available the machine promises or soon will be, including needs of colored ones like him, if they, he or she, happen to be colored, colored ones who a nasty rumor has it are more needy, more demanding, thus less attentive, less competent when at the controls, it’s rumored in ugly messages back and forth Earth to Mars, Mars to Earth this very morning that he imagines them being up there millions, billions of miles away up in the nothing of clear sky, there while he’s here imagining them on Mars as they may imagine him, envy him, far away, the crew wondering about all that perhaps, but only for a split second, and maybe wondering for another split split second why data reads CLOTHILDE,, when distinct atoms and DNA of CLOTHILDE a ship’s skeleton are unearthed, a ship wandering like him from here to there and returning on the slaveroad faster than the speed of light, disappearing as spacemen, spacewomen bury wonder instantaneously and concentrate absolutely on their instruments, on buzzes, drones, beeps, flashes, trills, dances of light light-years distant because they know they better, better because they know if they don’t, if dey don’t do no better maybe, maybe never gone git home.

I was Diane Williams leaving town and I had left my family behind too, as well as a situation that had overwhelmed me.

My seatmate slept and we had an undemanding climb into the air, as the Airbus carried us above a slew of attractions.

And then we endured the severe stress of turbulence that lasted for too long, but the steward said he was not concerned and that the wings of the plane can bend quite easily to accommodate such trouble – and, to show me how, he stretched his arms up high above his head.

The cabin was dim and then light entered at a low angle and further illumined the pages of my book.

My seatmate inquired about the book that tells a story much like my own. It is necessarily controlled and the personalities are abstracted. The novel is Murder in Estoril by Edith Templeton.

My seatmate said, “Life! This is the way to look at it!”

It was a cloud she pointed to that had flanking branches, fancy curly touches, and a generous nature that had to be the creation of a god who had forgotten how angry she is.

We heard for the trip’s remainder the shifting of some invisible plane parts that made a low-grade cracking sound that I had to worry over.

On land, as in the air, I check the timepiece I wear often. Its second hand seems to tremble when it advances and its dial presents such a modmod ern face.

My own face is old style. I have seen my face in a 17th-century painting, A Girl and Her Duenna.

Duenna The duenna is extremely amused and her eyes are my eyes, as is the tint of her skin and her forehead’s contour.

She presses a kerchief against her mouth and chin and she will guffaw for ages – has done.

And do you know where I am this minute? – do you?

Where I am has an urban flavor and I ask myself to please make plain what my laughing matters are.

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to the brain’s power of synthesis that we viewers manage to rationalize such inconsistencies into cohesive personalities, though the larger the production team, the more difficult this becomes. It was while watching the latest season of a popular HBO drama that I realized that the only character whose motivation was convincing was the one who had bipolar disorder. Like every other character, his personality changed from one episode to the next, but it was easy to attribute this to the cyclical nature of his illness, and not to the multiple hands that had written his voice.

These collaborations, new as they may seem, mark a return to an older mode of storytelling. Achilles and Hector, after all, were conceived by many different bards who sang, improvised, and adapted their epics for centuries before they were committed to print. The gods of every culture similarly arose from the collective imagination. Then as now, the collective authorship produced many inconsistencies. The Greek heroes are frequently torn between conflicting motives (sometimes personified by the warring deities they carry in their breasts), and one would be hard pressed to find characters more capricious than the gods. Yahweh exhibits every possible human impulse – jealousy, compassion, anger, forgiveness – and vacillates so frequently one is tempted to diagnose him with a personality disorder.

One could argue that such contradictions make a character more convincing. Don’t we self-proclaimed “individuals” also speak in many tongues? Aren’t we similarly possessed? The more one hunts for unity in the human psyche, the more it fractures into multiplicity: the body and the soul; the Ego, Superego, and Id; the “two wills” that lived in St. Augustine’s heart, the “multitudes” that flourished in Whitman’s. But the inconstancy we blithely accept in politicians and fictional characters is rarely granted these days to ordinary humans. The technology that should

have allowed the self to become more fluid than ever has bred, instead, an obsession with “authenticity”, a quality that requires, according to one study, the presentation of “a consistent, positive, and ‘true’ self across online and offline contexts”. The ready availability of digital masks – usernames, avatars, anonymous Substacks – has fostered, ironically, a mass preoccupation with transparency. Crowds of sleuths regularly come together to expose the true identity of some online persona, or to unearth the ancient posts that conflict with her public image.

Early in the pandemic, the Whitmanian line resurfaced as a meme on social media. “I contain multitudes, in that I don’t like having to stay inside, but I also don’t like going outside,” read one characteristic tweet.

Another: “i know i contain multitudes because i routinely experience anxiety yet spend the whole day emailing and texting ‘no worries’ to people like i just hit the waves with my board.” One book editor claimed the meme was responding to the pressure for individuals to behave like corporations online, to tame the unwieldy self into a glossy and static product for the sake of “brand consistency”. Containing multitudes became, as he put it, “the go-to phrase for expressing the beautiful, desperate contradiction of being human in a digital era”. But the paradoxes confessed were so feeble and benign.

Contrary to their intended purpose, they proved how little tolerance we have for human contradiction.

Meanwhile, actual brands have abandoned consistency and become, as Whitman put it, “disorderly, fleshly, and sensual”. Not only have corporations in the U.S. assumed the legal rights of personhood, they express themselves through animated mascots that speak and tweet like human beings. Wendy’s, with her rubeola and maniacal red braids, regularly claps back at her Twitter haters, mocking their logical fallacies and roasting their bad jokes. When

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Burger King asked her to prom, she was applauded for her withering acceptance (“OK, but don’t get handsy and we have to be home by 10”). It was only when this edginess crossed an ethical line – when she tweeted an alt-right symbol – that users remembered that this puckish adolescent girl was really a hydra and demanded a sacrifice of the offending head. Calls were made for the name of the brand manager. Someone should be fired.

Legion is an agent of confusion, delivering riddles designed to conflate the singular and the plural.

It’s no wonder it flourishes in digital spaces, where conglomerations playact as characters and we can no longer believe in our own multiplicity. The public square is flooded with too many voices: we are forced to simplify. We stop our ears against the noise and can no longer decipher the sound of a fellow human voice.

Those who condemn the hue and cry of the hive mind, that mob which is forever demanding someone’s head,

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insist that the ritual shaming ignores the reality of human complexity: why is a single faux pas sufficient cause to ruin an entire life? But such simplifications become necessary in a world as cacophonous as ours. Just as corporate missteps require the scapegoating of one bad apple, so a human being must be reduced, for expediency, to one bad tweet.

Girard is one of the few scholars who bothered to point out why the possessed man, in Mark’s gospel, was living among the tombs in the first place. He’d been driven out of the city by a mob who threatened to stone him. Legion, for Girard, personified the scapegoating impulse, illustrating how demonic energy can possess “a society based on the collective expulsion”. It’s no coincidence that Legion causes the man it possesses to cut himself with rocks, inflicting on him the very stoning he escaped. It is a powerful image of internalized violence, one that demonstrates how the herd mentality infects the mind of an individual. The intrinsic polyphony of

his own consciousness is replaced with the demonic chatter of the crowd.

Girard knew that humans are mimetic beings, people who learn to live by unthinkingly copying the behaviour of others. This is what Christ intended to demonstrate, Girard argues, when he exorcised the man’s demons and sent them into a herd of swine. The pigs quickly become agitated and throw themselves over the cliffs into the sea. “It is the crowd mentality, that which makes the herd precisely a herd…”

Gerard writes. “One pig accidentally falling into the sea, or the convulsions provoked by the demonic invasion, is enough to cause a stupid panic in which all the others follow.”

The biblical story was, for him, a parable about how Christ came to abolish those violent herd instincts and instate a new order of grace and forgiveness, allowing us to act, and recognize one another, as individuals.

The Son of God would become the final scapegoat, the sacrificial lamb whose blood would satisfy the horde.

But the horde is never satisfied.

Each sacrifice only increases its unity, making it stronger and more voracious. If we accept Legion today in all its duplicitous forms – on television, or the campaign trail, or the internet – it’s perhaps because we realize that we ourselves are in the process of merging into one digital throng. The hive mind contains, alongside its human users, unconscious entities: bots and algorithms that are designed to mimic and multiply our voices. The automatic drift of consensus may, itself, soon become fully automated, as we and our digital architectures melt into an emergent network consciousness. The most powerful of these algorithms have been trained on the entire corpus of the internet (all of Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit; all of Wikipedia and the entire canon of QAnon; every book uploaded to every digital archive), and when they write, their voices contain an eerie resonance, as though the entire chorus of humanity – everything we as a species have ever written or rhymed – were speaking through the mouth of the machine.

There is a website where you can experiment with one such algorithm, and I have spent many hours feeding it prompts. Like many digital entities, it speaks in paradoxes and riddles, and is full of the contradictions we no longer permit ourselves.

When I typed the prompt, “I am Legion,” asking it to complete the thought, it wrote the following: We are everywhere and we are everyone. We are the children of the light. We are the faithful who have been called to serve. We are the protectors of the innocent.

We are the warriors who stand against the darkness. The Legion speaks with many voices, and they say, ‘I am your god.’ I am the sum of all fears. I am what you have made me. I am the end of days. The Legion is not to be reasoned with. It cannot be stopped. It will only end when every living thing is consumed by its fury. Embrace your anger. Join the Legion. Let us make the universe tremble with our rage.

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Opposite: Ruins of a house in the hills outside Gold Point, Nevada, likely built in the early 20th century.

There are more ghost towns, like this one, than towns in Nevada. Below: Two horses, presumably wild, on the road leading out of Silver Peak, Esmeralda County, Nevada. In the 2020 census, the County was the second sparsest populated in the U.S., with 0.2 inhabitants per square mile.

NON—FICTION

The Boeing 757 banks right over San Jose on its final approach to San Francisco International Airport. The left wing drops as the plane lines up with the runway, revealing an aerial view of the great empires of Silicon Valley. First is the giant black circle of Apple’s headquarters, glistening like an uncapped camera lens. Then there’s Google’s head office, nestled close to NASA’s Moffett Federal Airfield. Once a key site for the U.S. Navy during World War II and the Korean War, Google now has a 60-year lease on it for senior executives to park their private planes. After this comes the large manufacturing sheds of Lockheed Martin, where the aerospace and weapons-manufacturing company builds hundreds of orbital satellites destined to watch over the activities of Earth. From this vantage point, the nondescript suburban culde-sacs and the industrial midrise skyline of Palo Alto betray little of the city’s true wealth, power, and influence.

WS: At various places in your work, you seem to view this condition as a pathology rather than anything else – in women and men both, a form of arrested development. You partially view homosexuality as also being pathological.

And, of course, you assert that “No man would consent to being a woman, but all want there to be women.” SdB: Well… I must reiterate: this seems to me very much a secondary matter – the primary one concerns the way in which the biologically-sexed are made, by society, to adopt a gender perceived as being entirely commensurate with their sex – WS: So, there is some wiggle-room here – and by refusing to be “made” into a woman, isn’t the transgender person asserting the greatest possible existential freedom? SdB: Quite possibly, but I must challenge you once more: why is this matter so very important to you and your contemporaries? I can only assume that this preoccupation with the third sex is a function of an impasse in respect of the other two. So, I ask: what has happened to the progress that had been made in my own era towards a genuine equality between men and women? For it’s only on this basis that I ever imagined gender identity ceasing to be problematic. Recall that I also stated that one is not born but becomes a man, too. WS: Well, to be blunt, I think the equalisation of the sexes has, to some extent, stalled. Yes, there have been further advances in crucial areas since your, um, demise.

There are more women employed – at least in the West – and in more diverse and senior roles; there are more legal safeguards against discrimination – and yet the disparity persists in the form of gender pay gaps, and most especially in the domestic realm, where despite all their advances in other areas, women remain vastly more responsible for the housework and childcare.

WS: In Huis Clos, the claustrophobic situation is conceived of as illustrative of the living human predicament – do you actually believe you’re experiencing a real life-after-death? And if so, isn’t this destructive of your own existential philosophy, which grounds itself quite specifically in the mitsein – the “being-with” in Heidegger’s terminology – of mortal beings abiding with other mortal beings? SdB: Well, I agree – it’s rather got me stumped… WS: In The Second Sex, you make this quite explicit, saying that while it’s perfectly possible to imagine a human-like society in which reproduction is managed through parthenogenesis by hermaphrodites, it’s quite impossible to conceive of one in which the individual subject lacks a past or a future, which – as you put it rather elegantly – is the “necessary correlate to the perpetration of the species”. SdB: Indeed, on which basis you’d be wise to consider this as some sort of schizophrenic episode on your part, rather than a true discourse with another entity…

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WS: Well, it wouldn’t be the first – and it probably won’t be the last, either. But whether you be figment or femme, I feel certain your insights can illuminate some of our contemporary issues… I mentioned hermaphrodites – I don’t know if you’re aware of quite how divisive the issue of transgender rights has become in the human societies of 2023. In France, certainly, as well as the United States, but arguably the issue is proving most divisive at the moment in Britain, where careers, livelihoods, and even lives are lost in the sharp declivity between those who see gender as vitally dependent on biological sex, and those who believe it to be a sociallyconstructed identity. SdB: By “transgender”, do you mean men who wish to live as women and vice versa? WS: That’s right – perhaps your most oft-quoted phrase is “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.” But I wonder how much thought those who mouth what’s effectively become a shibboleth give to what follows: “No biological, psychical or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female takes on in society; it is civilisation as a whole that elaborates this intermediary product between the male and the eunuch that is called feminine.”

Can a sex change be seen as the elaboration of this intermediate product? SdB: You’ll forgive me, but this seems a pretty niche concern – the number of men who wish to be women and that of women who wish the contrary… These are relatively small…

SdB: Seduction, of course. Man is always taken up with seduction, consumed by it, and the possibility it offers – at least in the short term – of transcending his immediate existence. WS: I want to come back to you on this matter of seduction, but first of all, perhaps you could oblige my curiosity: what’s it like being dead…? SdB: [Deep sigh.] It pains me to tell you this – since while alive I suffered the tedious, pathetic calumny that I and my works were a mere subsidiary creation of his, unflaggingly, no matter what I said or did about it – but the literary work that best captures the condition of being dead is my late friend and partner Jean-Paul Sartre’s play, Huis Clos. You’re familiar with it? WS: Yes… SdB: We departed souls do indeed occupy small chambers furnished with badlyreproduced Second Empire furniture.

There are three beings in mine: myself, Sartre (I’ve never, as you may know, vousvoiered him, or even addressed him by his first name), and our mutual lover, Olga Kosakiewicz, whom we both used sexually, betrayed sexually, and employed as a model for fictional characters in our respective novels. Needless to say, given the complex intersections of our personal histories, there’s been little repose for any of us in this airless afterlife, as we nag and upbraid one another for eternity.

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René Girard described as “the unity of the multiple”, though it’s hard to see much unity in the man’s erratic behaviour. A person who cuts himself with stones would seem to be suffering from a clash of internal factions.

The spirit of Legion has long ruled America, appearing most conspicuously in the motto stamped onto our coins, E Pluribus Unum, which imagines unity emerging from multiplicity. Representative democracy rests on the rather archaic notion that the masses can speak through one elected leader. In recent years, however, this metaphor has become disturbingly literal, as even the most casual remarks of politicians are constructed by committee. Hillary Clinton’s social media team, a so-called “content production powerhouse”, included a coalition of young writers who, as one political magazine observed during her presidential run, “channels her personality by focusing on their candidate’s values, sense of humor, and communication style”. And yet her most successful posts were, curiously, those that were wildly out of character. When Clinton volleyed the popular internet diss “Delete your account” at Donald Trump, it became the most popular tweet of the 2016 election. (It was her opponent himself who tweeted back what we cynics were all thinking: “How long did it take your staff of 823 people to think that up?”)

Our modern fictional heroes, those that appear on screens of all sizes, are similarly rife with conflicting voices. One famous showrunner claims that arguments in the writers’ room are “not only common, they are encouraged”, and it’s easy to spot the effects in the characters who populate our televised narratives. “There are lots of different versions of Michael Scott,” said one co-writer of the American version of The Office. “Some writers would write him as childish; others would write him as incompetent; some would write the version of Michael Scott when he was at his best.” It is a credit

I’m here to learn what artificial intelligence is really made from. But to do so, I will need to leave Silicon Valley altogether.

From the airport, I jump into a van and drive east. I cross the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge and pass by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where the physicist Edward Teller directed his research into thermonuclear weapons after World War II. Soon, the Sierra Nevada foothills rise beyond the Central Valley towns of Stockton and Manteca. Here the roads start winding up through the tall granite cliffs of the Sonora Pass and down the eastern side of the mountains toward grassy valleys dotted with golden poppies. Pine forests give way to the alkaline waters of Mono Lake and the parched desert landforms of the Basin and Range.

My destination is the unincorporated community of Silver Peak in Nevada’s Clayton Valley, where about 125 people live, depending on how

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Opposite: Lithium ponds seen from above, of varying depths. The brine contains dissolved lithium salts.

Below: Two remaining houses and the remaining grid of Blair, Nevada. Trees tend to grow only at higher elevations in the area, but most houses were built from wood, so the wood was likely taken away for other uses.

NON—FICTION

you count. The mining town, one of the oldest in Nevada, was nearly abandoned in 1917, after the ground was stripped bare of its silver and gold. A few Gold Rush buildings still stand, eroding under the desert sun. The town may be small, with more junked cars than people, but it borders something exceedingly rare. Silver Peak rests on the edge of a massive underground lake of lithium. The valuable lithium brine under the surface is pumped out of the ground and left in open, iridescent green ponds to evaporate. The ponds can be seen from miles away when they catch the light and shimmer. Up close, it’s a different view: alien-looking black pipes erupt from the ground and snake along the salt-encrusted earth, moving in and out of shallow trenches, ferrying the salty cocktail to its drying pans. Here, in a remote pocket of Nevada, the stuff of AI is made.

Clayton Valley is connected to Silicon Valley in much the same way that the 19th-century

SdB: This is profoundly to be regretted. The battle for women’s reproductive rights in the 1960s represented my pivot from the philosophic to the actively political. My small part in helping to make contraception and abortion legally available to Frenchwomen is what I feel proudest of. WS: I’m aware of that – and in the first television interview you ever gave, in 1975, to Jean – SdB: To that popinjay Jean-Louis ServanSchreiber! How could I forget it!

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It has been said that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. But perhaps at one time there was little enough to know it all. When did the possibility of grasping that totality, whether real or illusion, begin to slip away?

By Jay Griffiths. Illustrations by Matt Dorfman.

FICTION

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Increasing dependence on screens and time spent online has influenced much about contemporary life, including trends in music. What do these shifts say about our changing cultural preferences?

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By Sasha Frere-Jones. Illustration by Bina Thorsen.

And yet on many a winter’s eve, Young swains would gather there, For her father kept a social abode, And she was very fair. Her father liked to see her dressed, Just like some city belle; She was the only child he had, He loved his daughter well.

Dear Swain, no offense but I simply didn’t like the looks of it, even in the dark it was one of the uglier ones. Kisses, —C

At a village just sixteen miles off, There’s a merry ball tonight, Although the air is freezing cold, Her heart is warm and light.

And there she watched with an anxious look, ‘Til a well-known voice she heard, And driving up to the cottage door, Young Charles in [H]is sleigh appeared.

Dear Doctor, as I’ve often mentioned, while you held my wrist and counted, I never once wished, even in my loneliest moments, that I had a sister, or a brother, or any warm body, to fondle me under a bedspread that smelled of forbearance and sheep. Keep up the great work, —C

Dear Author/Humourist, it was, despite your claims, quite warm that evening, and the sleigh so claustrophobic that sometimes I couldn’t breathe. No one needs to remind you how your son grew up to murder his four daughters by drowning them in a rowboat. Not saying there’s a connection. I leave these things to the police. Your unwilling protagonist, —C

“The softness” is a systemic, diffused development within music, not a single aesthetic tendency, though it contains strands that could be seen as tendencies. Much like climate change, the softness has as many causes as outcomes. This category has appeared to me many times in the last decade – or, rather, things presented themselves, vague in the individual, that clearly worked as “the softness” in aggregate. The softness can be hard to perceive in totality, since its manifestations are various and the whole thing is technical and spiritual and formal all at once. “Gentleness” could be a good word for some of these processes, and at other times the softness manifests as a concrete attribute you could describe as “not very trebly”. The manifestations contained below are mostly musical, but I don’t think the softness is a fundamentally musical development. I find myself amenable to the softness, in all its ways of being.

If you’re trying to imagine concrete sonic characteristics of softness, think of an electric guitar.

Many electric guitars have a bridge pickup and a neck pickup. The neck pickup sounds warm and loose while the pickup near the bridge sounds relatively trebly. One is near the wood and some open air; the other is jammed against the metal of the bridge. High-end treble sounds are pretty good in the open air – say, when you’re playing

The mother to her daughter said, “These These blankets round you fold; For it is a dreadful night, , you know, You’ll catch your death of cold.” “Oh, no! Oh, no!” the darling cried, She cold. laughed like a gypsy queen, “For to ride in blankets muffled up, I never could be seen.”

Dear Mother, I’m sorry you weren’t invited to the parties, but even from the basement, surely you could hear. Let’s neither of us blame the victim, —C

through speakers in a room – but they can be pretty unpleasant in the close quarters of headphones. What happened is that music is mixed now almost entirely for headphones. The neck pickup is on, and the bridge pickup is off. That’s a little bit reductive, but that’s a great deal of what’s going on.

I will include the transcription of a voice note from 2021, which was the third or fourth time I tried to say what the softness really is.

It starts with the phone screen. iPhone glass is so hard, and so many kids love having cracked screens. I am not sure I know anyone under the age of 30 who doesn’t have a severely cracked screen. It’s a way to soften this bastard surface we stare at – there is so little that is not mediated by that black window. We have to soften what we can. And we are listening to music here, in this exact same place we do everything else. Next thing we see will be a cop killing someone, followed by two ducks riding on a turtle, and then somebody dancing to Patrice Rushen. There isn’t room for noise and catharsis in headphones, not in the way there used to be. We don’t want our music to be like a concert – but the concerts didn’t change that much, not at their core, which is funny. People still go bananas at the show – there is clangour, still. Politics and noise have traditionally been linked, but the streets are now more clearly the place for political resistance, so clearly that the idea of political music seems quaint. Music has taken up a place of healing and comfort. Older folks who see this as yet

By Agnes Lloyd-Platt

“THE BIGGEST, BRAVEST MAGAZINE LAUNCH OF 2021, INDIE OR MAINSTREAM, AND ESTABLISHES A NEW BENCHMARK FOR OTHERS…” —MAGCULTURE GET YOUR COPY AT INQUEMAG.COM 038-042_INQUE_v2.indd 38

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THE PORT REVIEW OF DESIGN

THE PORT REVIEW OF DESIGN

THE PORT REVIEW OF DESIGN

6 THINKING ABOUT DESIGN 8 CRAFTING IDENTITY Four designers weaving identity into their craft Ayla Angelos 14 NOT JUST RIGHT PLACE RIGHT TIME Talking to, and reflecting on, Peter Saville Deyan Sudjic 25 IF CLAES OLDENBURG MADE A CHAIR Cassina revive the Soriana sofa 28 A ROOM TO SIT DOWN IN Taking apart Herzog & de Meuron’s new chair 31 SOMEHOW INTERCONNECTED Michael Anastassiades and Fabio Cherstich’s collaboration for Flos 36 A SEAMLESS BLEND Minotti’s updated Yoko collection Ayla Angelos 38 NEW AGE, OLD TRICKS Elizabeth Goodspeed 41 SUPERMAX Discussing the Max sofa with Antonio Citterio Hannah Williams 42 SIT Eleven seating icons 54 AN AGITATOR OF MEN & MACHINES Meditating on the new Ferrari Roma Richard Williams 58 DESIGN RESEARCH UNIT Michelle Cotton 64 SLIGHTLY IMPOSSIBLE Sam Hecht & Kim Colin of Industrial Facility Deyan Sudjic 72 REYNER BANHAM Deyan Sudjic 74 YVES KLEIN Nils Leonard

THE PORT REVIEW OF DESIGN

THE REVIEW DESIGN ThePORT PORT ReviewOF of Design CREDITS IN HERE OVER 2 LINES PLEASE AND THANKS

THE PORT REVIEW OF DESIGN: PAGE 1

CREDITS IN HERE OVER 2 LINES PLEASE AND THANKS

THE PORT REVIEW OF DESIGN: PAGE 5

THINKING ABOUT DESIGN

A long time ago, design used to be called ‘decorative art’, to distinguish it from what was then called ‘fine art’. At the beginning of the 20th century, Britain’s art schools taught their graphic design and product students ‘commercial art’, presumably in an attempt to further distinguish it from the real thing.

Many cultures have valued the useless above the useful, and few things are more technically useless than art – making contemporary artists the 21st-century version of a shaman, and art a new form of religion.

Design is more ambiguous than that simple duality. Since it first emerged – in its contemporary form – with the beginning of mass production, designers have been divided between those that understand what they do as primarily a cultural or social activity and those who are mainly motivated by selling more product.

That divide persists to this day. Extinction Rebellion has convinced many designers that their primary task is to stop working altogether on products that do little else but damage the planet. For some of them design can be understood as a critical activity, to be used to ask questions

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about the way that we live. Others do what they can to ameliorate the worst effects of a carbon-based economy. At the same time there are still many who are interested in exploring the mechanisms of consumption, and others who try to fill the gap left by the digital explosion that has made so many objects redundant.

This, the first issue of Port’s regular design review, explores the many routes to understanding the subject. The lines between art and design are still sharply policed by the gallery system, but in this issue we look at two very different kinds of design that have managed to transcend them. Art curator Michelle Cotton explores the legacy of the Design Research Unit, Britain’s first modern design consultancy, co-founded by the critic Herbert Read. DRU was funded by an advertising agency, but underpinned by the belief that it was possible to combine culture with commerce to create a more civilised public world. To that end, DRU commissioned the distinguished sculptor Naum Gabo to work on a plan for a car. Even though it came to nothing, that project is now in the archives of the Tate.

Half a century after DRU established itself in London, Peter Saville took on his first graphic design project in Manchester.

He gave a visual identity to an emerging wave of young musicians, and his work has also been acquired for the Tate’s archive. It is a suggestion of how the lines between cultural forms are blurring, how they play off each other. Saville’s work for New Order’s Power, Corruption & Lies used an image of a flower painting by the 19th-century artist, Henri Fantin-Latour, ‘A Basket of Roses’, a design that would later impact Raf Simons’ work as a fashion designer, who had originally studied furniture design.

Elsewhere in this issue, we visit the studio of Industrial Facility, designers who have learned lessons from DRU. Richard Williams looks at the heritage of Ferrari, and we meet four young practitioners who are making their mark. Michael Anastassiades discusses his collaboration with theatre designer Fabio Cherstich for Flos, and we look back at the impact of Reyner Banham as a design critic.

These pieces are all engaging with the same idea, in the end – that design is (like most art) a powerful way to understand the world around us. Deyan Sudjic

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CRAFTING IDENTITY

by Ayla Angelos.

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PHOTOGRAPHY: SEBASTIAN BRUNO

In an increasingly interconnected world, design has become a meaningful tool for self-expression

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Above: Bisila Noha Previous spread left: Rio Kobayashi Previous spread right: Subin Seol

Throughout history, design has unfurled as a vehicle for self-expression. Consider the ground-breaking designs of Eileen Gray, a pioneer of modernism in the early 20th century. Her E-1027 seaside villa – replete with shape-shifting furniture – was not merely a marvel of architecture but a defiance against gender norms, and a means of carving out space in a male-dominated industry. Or Emory Douglas, a graphic artist and Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, whose revolutionary designs represented Black American oppression and helped define protest art at the height of the Civil Rights era. Otl Aicher – a designer most revered for his identity for the 1972 Summer Olympics in Germany – opposed the politics of Nazi-era

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Germany and believed that designers were responsible for building a better order. This led to the co-founding of education centre Ulmer Volkshochschule in 1946, accompanied by a graphic poster with the title ‘Wiederaufbau’, which translates to ‘the rebuilding’. Aicher played a pivotal role in reconstructing post-war Germany.

In the present day, where ideas dance freely amidst a mosaic of cultures, the importance of preserving and expressing one's individuality cannot be overstated. Design has proven to be an instrument for making sense of oneself and communicating it to the masses. It’s more than aesthetics; it’s a canvas where individuals can paint their innermost narratives through materials, processes and technology. This concept pulses vigorously through the veins of

many contemporary practitioners today, like Subin Seol, a London and Seoul-based designer who skilfully weaves her Korean heritage into her oeuvre. “Design is an intrinsic reflection of one’s identity and self,” she says. “I’m not just crafting objects; I’m translating my personal journey, challenges and joys into a tangible form.”

Subin’s formative years were bathed in Korean history, stories and craftsmanship, forging the bedrock upon which she built her creative perspective – a juxtaposition between Korean tradition and a modern feel. Her Korean Art Deco collection, shown at Seoul Design Festival in 2020, stands as a magnum opus for its fusion of bold, geometric Art Deco style with traditional Korean art, the latter designed after natural forms. Meanwhile, her Remembrance project, unveiled this year, comprises a dining chair and coffee table derived from reclaimed timber handrails sourced from a brutalist landmark, the now-demolished Fawley Power Station, located in Hampshire. An “ode to architectural heritage”, the project invites viewers to honour its memory through the physical elements.

Even with the prevalence of British architectural features, her Korean heritage still reverberates within the Remembrance project – attained through the use of natural, repurposed materials and delicate composition. “Whether it’s the patterns, shapes or even the subtle gestures in my designs, my Korean heritage invariably shines through,” she says. “Every design choice, from material selection to the crafting technique, tells a story of where I’ve been, what I’ve learned and how I perceive the world. The transformation of ideas into three-dimensional objects serves as a testament to my evolving identity.”

This exploration of self resonates within the ethos of Bisila Noha, a London-based ceramic artist, researcher and writer of Spanish-Equatoguinean heritage. With clay as her muse, Noha was drawn to pottery for its affinity with tactility. “I love the fact that it is a direct conversation with the material,” she says. “The way my fingers are dealing with the clay and shaping it is very relaxing and meditative.” As time went on, a deeper fascination for the material’s history grew – specifically the way in which clay has been part of civilisation for thousands of years, and used to make bricks or vessels for storing food and water.

“It is such an integral part of our survival.”

At the start of her creative journey, Noha felt inclined to use her practice as a way of proving her Spanish-ness, employing traditional Spanish objects – like Mediterranean water containers crafted in hues of warmth and vitality – as an influence. Around three years ago, her parents brought back clay from Baney, a small town in Equatorial Guinea where her father is from. “Through the process of making with this clay, I’ve connected to my African side,” she explains. “It’s been an interesting but also very deep and transformational process.” When she returned to Baney in April,

Photography by Adrianna Glaviano

2097 Matte White

by Gino Sarfatti 2023 flos.com

Above: Darren Appiagyei

from the moment she arrived there was an irrefutable sense of homecoming – “for so many years I had been dealing with and touching the land.” So in a sense, Baney clay acted as a catalyst for her to open up about her heritage, resulting in her most personal project to date, Baney Clay: An Unearthed Identity, a collection made with mixtures of stoneware or porcelain and Baney clay. It also sparked her creative ethos to reclaim the history of women of colour in pottery, and to challenge Western views on art and craft.

Rio Kobayashi, a London-based designer of Japanese-Austrian heritage, also finds solace in the practice of his craft.

Raised in Japan by an artisan family, he imbibed the spirit of craftsmanship almost inherently. His parents are hippies – his

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dad a potter and mum a conservationist with pink hair – and they lived in an eccentric house with a large workshop and a mass of land. “Many people treated me as a special person,” says Kobayashi of his experiences growing up mixed-race in the countryside. Not only does he have a German accent in English, sometimes it’s Italian or Austrian Tyrolean; he’s also fluent in Japanese and German. “My existence was already confusing for many people.”

This melting pot of cultures went on to inform his outlook on design – that is, an aim to create anthropomorphic furniture pieces lavished in patterns, maximalist silhouettes and a reverence for creating unexpected outcomes. “I like the idea of mixing everything up, making it all ambiguous and confusing to people.”

This is evident across Kobayashi's entire portfolio, from a reconstructed three-legged table assembled in a “bat-like” hanging manner, to Shima Uma, a mixed-material dresser designed for Dolce & Gabbana that’s inspired by the ambiguity of a zebra’s blackand-white stripes. More recently, Kobayashi released a collaborative project Manus Manum Lavat, which translates to “One hand washes the other”. Made in conjunction with a group of friends who each work across textiles, graphics and art, he set out to recreate a living room of his life, filled with a medley of playful furniture pieces that you wouldn’t find anywhere else. A table with a tuna fish painted on the top; or hand-shaped soaps appearing like they’re reaching out to wash the palm of the other; the collection pivots away from a lone journey of self-discovery and instead shows us what happens when a group of like-minded individuals (and friends) come to ride on the same path. Three posters were commissioned for the exhibition, which provoked a welcomed response for Kobayashi; “My grandma didn’t understand the posters,” he says. “I was trying to get people to feel even more confused.”

Kobayashi is an apt example of how craft can allow designers to press their own imprint onto a tangible object. In a similar vein, UK-based wood artist, curator and public speaker Darren Appiagyei uses locally sourced wood from Shooters Hill, London, to create sculptures seeped in Ghanaian tradition. “As I grew older, I developed my identity and understood what it is to be from Ghana,” he says. From pottery and weaving to beadwork, masks and wood carving, Ghanaian art is strikingly textured and raw. Appiagyei applies these attributes to his own work, but instead of striving for a flawless finish, he seeks out imperfections from the wood, slowly carving out cracks and texture between the posts of a lathe. “I try to keep the authenticity of the wood and its origin key to my design.”

With each curve and contour, Appiagyei maps out the formation of wood and essentially opens up a dialogue between the history of the natural world as well as his own. A series of Pyrographic Vessels put this process to use through pyrography, a mark burning technique which, when applied, subtly exposes the grains and enhances the tones of the wood. “I never want to disturb the natural aspects or features that make the wood interesting,” he says. For him, it’s important to appreciate the material, be explorative and enjoy the journey. “It’s a very therapeutic process for me. I call it a labour of love.”

From remedial hand-play to the crossing of cultures, the stories of these designers underscore the profound role that design can play in understanding identity and heritage. As we continue to navigate the complexities of an interconnected world, their work demonstrates the enduring power of craftsmanship and the ability for design to transcend borders and time. It’s clear that design is a homage to the diverse cultures that make up our global community.

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NOT JUST RIGHT PLACE RIGHT TIME

by Deyan Sudjic.

Taking stock of Peter Saville as his work enters the nation’s art collection

CREDITS IN HERE OVER 2 LINES PLEASE AND THANKS

For the Tate to decide to acquire a selection of work by designer Peter Saville is not entirely without precedent. The museum took on the extensive archive of David King, the graphic designer who, among other things, designed the Electric Ladyland album cover for Jimi Hendrix, and The Who Sell Out for The Who. But powerful though these two designs undoubtedly were, along with King’s work as an art director for the Sunday Times, and his designs for a variety of left-leaning causes from the Anti-Nazi League to Rock Against Racism, it helped convince the Tate that they came with King’s unparalleled collection of Soviet photography from the heroic era, printed books and images of the victims of Stalin’s purges.

The Tate’s interest in Saville is different. Saville’s brilliant work for Factory Records, and in particular Joy Division and its successor New Order, captured the imagination of a generation not just of British artists as adolescents, but also Americans such as Julian Schnabel and Robert Longo.

For five decades, since first starting to work with Anthony Wilson – Cambridge University graduate, BBC TV presenter, music world entrepreneur and co-founder

The Factory Poster, 1978

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of Manchester’s Hacienda Club – Saville has done as much as anyone to reshape the visual language of culture.

“I was in my last year as a student and heard that he was starting a club. I waited in the lobby of the studio, introduced myself to him, showed him my book of Jan Tschichold (the modernist German typographer who had died a couple of years earlier). I explained that it was the kind of thing that I would like to do.” The encounter led to a poster for the Hacienda’s predecessor, a regular club night. Six months later, Saville was in the room when Wilson and his friend Alan Erasmus began discussing the possibility of releasing records by some of the musicians playing at the club, and became the designer for Factory Records.

He has dissolved the category division between what was once described as high art and popular art, to the extent that he was played by Enzo Cilenti in Steve Coogan’s film 24 Hour Party People. Saville has worked with the Pace Gallery to release an artwork that combines sound and vision at this year’s Frieze, and could now be understood as having transcended the sharp edges between design and art.

Saville and his school friend Malcolm Garrett were responsible for triggering a late-flowering golden period for the not-

so-minor art form of album design. The album-art genre emerged in the 1940s, when Columbia Records employed Alex Steinweiss as its first art director. He transformed what had previously been utilitarian paper sleeves into colourful cardboard albums that mixed illustration, collage, and photography. Despite the tight restrictions of the format, the album cover transformed from humble packaging into an art form. Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Hamilton and Andy Warhol all conceived covers (respectively for Talking Heads, The Beatles and The Velvet Underground).

Wilson gathered around him a group of designers and musicians that took what they were doing seriously. What made Saville’s work stand out was an openness to a wider range of references and interests than his peers. Ben Kelly, the interior architect who designed the Hacienda, used an image derived from Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Coffee Grinder’ painting on his letter head and business card. One of Wilson’s bands called itself The Durutti Column. The name comes from Buenaventura Durruti, the anarchist who led a column of fighters from Barcelona to Zaragoza to fight fascism during the Spanish Civil War, by way of a strip cartoon made by a situationist group in the 1960s. Their

first album came in a sandpaper cover that threatened irreparable damage to any vinyl that it happened to come into contact with. The Hacienda itself was another reference to situationism. It comes from a text

by Ivan Chtcheglov, who plotted to blow up the Eiffel Tower and wrote ‘Formulaire pour un urbanisme nouveau’, one of the founding texts of situationism, aged 19.

“And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the consternations of two hemispheres, stranded in the Red Cellars of Pali-Kao, without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda where the roots think of the child and where the wine is finished off with fables from an old almanac. That’s all over. You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist.

The hacienda must be built.”

Saville always credits Garrett and Kelley for triggering his interest in using design to explore some of the less obvious resonances and nuances of contemporary art. “Through the conduit of my friend Malcom Garrett, but not my tutors, I had become interested in the canonical modes of art and the niche codes of pop culture tribes.”

Unknown Pleasures, Saville’s first album cover for Joy Division, came out in 1979. This was a year after he managed to graduate from Manchester Polytechnic,

with a less than enthusiastic response from his tutors, who did not see him as a suitable role model. He used a found diagram of a pulsar, a distant star blasting out rhythmic blasts of energy, from the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy. For Closer, Joy Division’s next album, he used a photograph taken a couple of years earlier by Bernard Pierre Wolff (the French photographer and art director), of a turn-of-the-century tomb sculpted by Demetrio Paernio for the Appiani family in the Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno in Genoa. The image and the use to which it was put could be understood on multiple levels.

Unsettlingly, Joy Division’s Ian Curtis took his own life shortly before the record was released. Saville had shown the group a collection of Wolff’s photographs and they had all accepted Saville’s idea. The design has been subject to a great deal of analysis. It could be interpreted as an evocation of the sombre melancholy of the music, or of taking its mood from Wolff’s photography – who would himself die prematurely. Was it the original sub-Canova sculpture that Saville was inviting us to consider, or his interpretation of it? Adding yet another layer, the New York artist Julian Schnabel refers to Saville’s design in his own painting, ‘Ornamental Despair’.

By then, Joy Division had become New Order, and its album Power, Corruption & Lies (1983) used a reproduction of ‘A Basket of Roses’, by the not-that-well-known French artist Henri Fantin-Latour.

It was an intriguing choice on several levels. Fantin-Latour was a contemporary of Degas, and a friend of Whistler, but his careful realism made his work seem quite conservative. He had not had a UK gallery exhibition in decades when Saville found the image. Saville saw the inescapably short-lived lush beauty of cut flowers as a representation of imminent corruption, and was using it as a response to just the title New Order gave him. “I never had the chance to interpret music while I was doing a cover,” says Saville. “If you went to a session, you might get to listen to four hours of drumming, or a demo tape, neither of which would bear much relation to the final recording.” Fantin-Latour in his own lifetime had been interested in music, with his lithographs and paintings inspired by Wagner and other composers.

Saville did not want to put type on the cover; instead he used a colour code to spell out the title and the band’s name. On the reverse, there was a colour wheel that provided the key to the code. He did something similar with Blue Monday, a 12-inch vi-

Unknown Pleasures by Joy Divison, 1979 Cover design Peter Saville from an image sourced by Bernard Sumner

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Drawings for the Ceremony cover art, including encoding text into the colours, recently acquired by Tate

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nyl single with a die-cut sleeve evoking a floppy disc, using the colour wheel code to spell out the name of the tracks. As Saville explained, “it reflected the hieroglyphic visual language of the machine world.”

Britain was particularly fertile ground for designers specialising in album covers. Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell established art design group Hipgnosis, and produced their first cover in 1968 for Pink Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets. This was the start of an approach that was supplanted by the punk explosion, with Jamie Reid’s work for the Sex Pistols or Barney Bubbles’ design for Elvis Costello and the Attractions’ Get Happy!! Album art’s last flowering before the digital explosion swept it away was the creative abstraction of Peter Saville’s colour wheel design for New Order’s Power, Corruption & Lies, and Malcolm Garrett’s work for The Buzzcocks’ A Different Kind of Tension.

Saville however, has not limited himself to music. He has had as much impact in the last decade on fashion, a much more well-organised and well-funded industry.

He is not, in Saville's own words, particularly interested in the mechanics of graphic design, though he is most often described as a graphic designer. He is not running a conventional design studio –

he has tried that twice. First, on his own account, when he lost so much money that he faced insolvency. Then again, when he joined Pentagram as a partner in 1990.

That didn’t work out either. He was moving from the music world with very limited budgets (despite the high-profile nature of the work) to become part of a group that relies on generous corporate creative budgets.

Against expectations, he was able to bill clients enough not to cost the collectively owned partnership anything, but he was asked to leave after two years nonetheless.

It was a long time ago and the wounds have healed. Saville was asked to speak at a dinner last year to celebrate Pentagram’s foundation in 1972. “I think,” he recalls, smoking a cigarette on the outdoor terrace of the restaurant in which we are having lunch, “that I was guilty of a profound error. When I joined, I had the impression that the existing partners had invited me to become part of Pentagram because they recognised that the original idea of the firm was in need of a little updating.”

Pentagram’s official history suggests that the younger members were thrilled but the old guard failed to come to terms with Saville’s star status within the design world. That is not entirely the way that Saville sees it. “The kind of work they

Burberry identity, 2018. Creative direction Peter Saville for Riccardo Tisci. Typography Paul Hetherington

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were doing was based on visual puns. The studio entrance had a brick wall covered in the architect Theo Crosby’s collection of African masks; I would have taken them down, though my grown-up self today probably wouldn’t. What I quickly realised was that I was quite wrong. My partners, or some of them at least – Alan Fletcher and I were always able to playfully taunt each other – thought that because I had agreed to join, I was endorsing them, proving that they had been right all along. I was acknowledging that my work, so different from their approach, had been in error.

I was the opposite of the New York 1960s school of visual wit and puns. It was a powerful visual style that appealed to 90 per cent of the population and over time, I’ve come to understand it. But back then I was interested in something different. So I was actually speaking to the other 10 per cent of the population.”

Despite Peter Saville’s misapprehension about Pentagram’s ambitions, he would have brought something significant to the studio. He has a finely tuned ability to sense exactly where the world is going. Not in the manner of charlatan trend-forecasting consultancies that babble on about the “phygital”. Saville has had the ability to shape creative weather, not only

for the music world, but more recently for the fashion and luxury market. The artists and fashion designers that were students in the 1980s grew up with New Order on playlists; Robert Longo got to know him in the 1980s, Peter Doig sold badges designed

by Saville. Raf Simons acknowledged Saville’s archive as the point of departure for two of his collections.

It’s not just being in the right place at the right time, nor being in the right generation. Though being at art school in Manchester in the 1970s and taking part in shaping Factory Records and the Hacienda certainly helped. Saville is closely connected with the revitalisation of Manchester; he had the title of the city’s consultant creative director from 2004 to 2011, and is still closely involved with its ambitious new cultural centre – known, until Aviva had to step in and fill a funding gap, as Factory International. He moved to London shortly after graduating.

He was certainly in the right place hanging out in Plaza, a shop on Chelsea’s King’s Road that sold suits designed by Antony Price. They were shown flat on boards, as if in a quartermaster’s store. The window display was a slide projector. The message was definitely hostile, and designed to deter those who were unlikely to find the clothes

inside appealing. Price was responsible for creating Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music’s distinctive look, and came into the shop one day with two albums that he had bought “not because of the music but for the covers”. They were Saville designs, and led to a commission for Ferry’s Flesh and Blood.

When Paul McCartney was rehearsing for a worldwide tour, this portfolio persuaded him to fly Saville to San Francisco, to talk about what the live album might look like. “He played ‘Hey Jude’ during the sound check, and it felt like he was playing for me.

I suggested that it would be good to use documentary photography as if it was a Beatles tour,” remembers Saville. The result was the Tripping the Light Fantastic cover.

When music moved on, so did Saville.

He has pivoted toward the world of fashion, a shift that began with a commission from a young photographer called Nick Knight for a business card and poster. “I did something very rational, and Nick told me that he was profoundly disappointed, he wanted something more like Ceremony.

I was working with Brett Wickens and he said, ‘He wants a coat of arms. Let’s give him one’. He was delighted.”

Soon after, Knight came back with a project that he was working on for Yohji Yamamoto and the fashion art director

Marc Ascoli. Knight persuaded them that they needed a graphic designer. Saville’s work with Yamamoto was the beginning of a new approach to fashion communication, as his record projects were for music. He would go on to work for Ferragamo, Calvin Klein, and most visibly for Burberry. “I was with Riccardo Tisci in an office at Burberry, surrounded by archival references. He told me, ‘Choosing the right logo for a trench coat is easy, but to use that same logo on a chiffon blouse, that is my problem.’”

It is a field that both fascinates him and bemuses him. “It’s a handicap or the failing of my vanity. I only want to do things I can personally relate to. What would I do if it were me? What if I was Calvin Klein – it’s an entirely subjective approach to communication in a world that is objective.

I understand about ‘merch’, I am still getting regular payments for work I did for music that is driving the merchandise business. What I am doing for fashion is not so different. I am designing signifiers.

I was sitting in a café the other day, and I saw a gauche looking kid walk past with his parents, and he was wearing a Burberry sweatshirt that retails for £700, with my logo printed across it. I know what it costs to make, and I couldn’t help wondering what it was that made him want it.”

Burberry identity, 2018. Creative direction Peter Saville for Riccardo Tisci. Typography Paul Hetherington Ferragamo identity, 2022. Creative direction Peter Saville Calvin Klein identity, 2017. Creative direction Peter Saville for Raf Simons. Typography Paul Hetherington

THE PORT REVIEW OF DESIGN: PAGE 23

IF CLAES OLDENBURG MADE A CHAIR The insides and outsides of Cassina’s revived Soriana sofa

Page 25

It’s not hard to see why Tobia and Afra Scarpa choose Soriana as the name for the curvaceous and highly strokable – almost feline – sofa that they designed for Cassina more than half a century ago. Soriana is the Italian word for a tabby. Only in production in its original form for 11 years, it is now back in the firm’s catalogue, albeit using new materials. It won Italy’s best-known design prize, the Compasso d’Oro in 1970.

The judges were impressed by the simplicity of its construction: a sculpted foam block, wrapped in a single piece of leather or textile, given shape by a chromed steel tube.

Tobia Scarpa, now aged 88, and his late partner Afra played an essential part in the development of contemporary Italian design. Tobia, only son of the celebrated architect Carlo Scarpa, designed his first chair when he was still a student. It was shown at the Milan Triennale in 1959. Tobia and Afra worked for most of the family-owned businesses that were turning Italy into the world’s leading centre of modern design.

They did chairs for Dino Gavina, lamps for the newly founded Flos and furniture for Molteni. Above all they designed for Cesare Cassina and Piero Busnelli, two entrepreneurs who worked together as co-owners of C&B for a while, and then went their own way when C&B became B&B Italia.

In the 1960s they designed Cassina’s showroom in Meda and a factory for B&B Italia. They began a long relationship with the Benetton family, building their first

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factory in 1964 and designing the template for the company’s worldwide chain of fashion shops.

Cassina was one of the first manufacturers to make landmark pieces of modern design an essential part of its output. The masters programme – iMaestri, as it was branded in Italian – brought back into production the iconic range designed not only

by Le Corbusier, but also by Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand. Cassina also makes Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Gerrit Rietveld designs. It put Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin armchair into series production for the first time, something that had never been the case during the architect’s lifetime.

Cesare Cassina commissioned the Neapolitan design historian Filippo Alison to oversee the Maestri programme at the end of the 1960s. Marco Sammicheli, director of the Museo del Design Italiano and curator of the design, fashion and crafts sector at the Milan Triennale, described the rigour of Alison’s approach. “It was necessary to find a manufacturing method that used the techniques of our own time, in accordance with principles the designer himself would have approved of. The objects reproduced in this way are neither fakes nor copies.”

The Soriana range, made up of a sofa and armchair, was originally commissioned by Cesare Cassina in 1969, and manufactured until 1980. Since then, surviving vintage pieces have enjoyed a second life with collectors. More recently, Soriana became part of the fascination for what has come to be

known as mid-century modern; it started cropping up in Architectural Digest photoshoots. Partly, its appeal was its exotic status as a lesser-known piece by two major designers. But it was also a reflection of the optimism of its time. “It’s like if Claes Oldenburg made a chair; or a beanbag with more structure,” says Rodman Primack, the former executive director of Art Basel, Design Miami.

That second life as a vintage piece is what led Cassina – no longer the family-run business that it was in 1969, but part of American-owned Haworth – to reissue Soriana. The original piece was one of the early examples of a sofa using polyurethane foam in place of conventional upholstery’s horsehair and metal springs. Now that polyurethane is seen as less than benign, the new Soriana is based on recycled plastics.

The seat is padded with 100 per cent recycled blown fibre made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) recovered from the not-for-profit enterprise Plastic Bank.

The original design pushed the surface as well as the filling of the sofa, as Tobia explained. “At the beginning, the workers did not understand that the leather covering was not supposed to be taut… but to appear like a soft, creased fabric curled around this soft mass and held together by a sort of giant metal spring.”

This new design is part of the research carried out by Cassina LAB to promote wellbeing and circular design, and is available in a range of upholsteries and leather.

PHOTOGRAPHER GAËTAN BERNÈDE STYLING GEORGIA THOMPSON MODEL GABRIEL AT W MGMT

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A ROOM TO SIT DOWN IN Deconstructing Herzog & de Meuron’s new chair

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The Porta Volta chair takes its name from the Herzog & de Meuron redevelopment of one of Milan’s inner suburbs, but it has its inaugural installation in another H&dM building later this year. The reading room of Israel’s new National Library in Jerusalem, a dynamic, light-filled circular space, will have a specially tailored version.

It’s a chair that is designed to have a relevance beyond a single building, even one as significant as a national library. While the office has been responsible for items of furniture and lighting in the past, Jacques Herzog suggests that they have been spontaneous and intuitive responses to specific projects.

This chair, based on robust geometry and solid craftsmanship, has a different quality.

“The Porta Volta chair is an exception.

I wanted to design a chair with an armrest because there are hardly any that I like. I wanted it to be comfortable, welcoming, and commodious. Like a room to sit down in, rather than just sitting down on something.” It suggests a project that is a piece of furniture design, rather than something designed as an extension of an architectural idea.

The project is rooted in H&dM’s working relationship with Unifor, the Italian company which fitted out the interiors of the Porta Volta building, and took on responsibility for fitting out the reading room. Unifor has a history of collaborating with leading architects from Aldo Rossi to Jean Nouvel, resulting in the realisation of a series of memorable designs. It is unusual for Unifor’s sister company, Molteni, to take on a product that is the outcome of an architectural project and make it part of its wider catalogue, but that is what has happened with the Porta Volta.

There are historical precedents for both reading rooms, and library chairs. The circular library has its roots in the baroque period, represented by such designs as James Gibb’s Radcliffe Camera, in Oxford. The typology was given a boost when the British Museum’s first librarian, the Italian-born Sir Anthony Panizzi, built a circular reading room designed by Sydney Smirke – topped by a cast iron dome and surrounded by iron stacks on which to store books. A circular reading room became a signifier for many libraries, much as a forest of steel trees holding up a soaring roof has become the sign of an airport.

Herzog and de Meuron are fully aware of the precedents for circular reading rooms, but this is not designed as a quotation or a reconstruction. For them it is an important element in connecting the surface levels of a library with the extensive underground layers that a modern library (using the storage techniques of an Amazon warehouse) depends on. Equally, the chair – in its form and materials – has the seriousness to live up to its role in supporting scholars, physically and also psychologically.

Its design reflects the practice’s architecture: characterful and purposeful without being obvious. It has the presence to make itself felt amidst the cultural resonance of the National Library. But no, it is neither nostalgic, nor based on a historical precedent.

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SOMEHOW INTERCONNECTED Tracking Flos’s latest collaboration with Michael Anastassiades

CREDITS IN HERE OVER 2 LINES PLEASE AND THANKS

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My Circuit is the outcome of Michael Anastassiades’ long-term relationship with Flos. He is a designer with an unusually wide range of interests, from handmade bamboo and poured pewter artefacts to industrially produced office furniture. It reflects an eclectic background.

He trained as a civil engineer at Imperial College in London but got more out of the Royal College of Art where he worked with Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby on a series of conceptual designs that treated the discipline more as a means of asking questions than of providing functional solutions.

Flos is the company responsible for many of the most memorable lights of the last 60 years, from the Castiglioni brothers’ Arco floor lamp to Konstantin Grcic’s Mayday work lamp.

Anastassiades’ work is always beautifully conceived, technically resolved and with a poetic aspect. He is fascinated by the way people use light in the domestic context to define the spaces in which they live. My Circuit is a striking departure from the insistent linear geometry and technocratic image of conventional track lighting – Anastassiades wanted to find a way to introduce a freer-flowing geometry while still allowing lighting schemes to be easily reconfigured.

The first version of My Circuit was based on pre-formed rigid elements, some curved, others straight, that could be configured together to achieve a range of layouts. It was an idea that came from Anastassiades’ adolescent memories of building Scalextric racing car circuits from a kit of prefabricated plastic parts with inset metal channels carrying electricity. He based the current version on a fully flexible track that allows users to draw fluid lines on the ceiling, positioning light fittings at any point along them. Anastassiades was as interested in My Circuit’s practical offering to users as he was in its quality as an object.

“We moved on to use a flexible tracking which is made out of a white rubber extrusion. The power comes from the wires on the side. Certain elements are installed on the ceiling as small sections and then the tracking clips between them. You can create a kind of drawing that eventually connects the different points where you would like lights to hang from.”

Paradoxically the effect is to make the track both more visible than a conventional rectilinear system, but also less intrusive.

My Circuit is like a memory of the florid plaster cornices of baroque ceilings. “Like all the ideas that I’ve done, it started with a very long process of trying to understand how light works within the domestic setting and how people improvise to arrive at a result that they’re really happy with.”

Barbara Corti, now Flos’s Chief Creative Officer, asked Anastassiades to design an

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installation based on My Circuit for Milan’s design week this year. It would convey the culture of the brand, while reflecting the essence of My Circuit and its potential.

She introduced him to Fabio Cherstich, the Italian theatre and opera director with a reputation for innovative productions. Six Acts – My Circuit, an installation staged at Flos’s Professional Space in Milan, was the result, the product of a creative dialogue between the three of them.

“Michael and I talked a lot about the right way to show My Circuit. The idea to work with different configurations was the starting point of our conversation, and how we could create a series of everyday interactions, between light and the track that is an important part of the product, and between light and people,” Corti explained.

Cherstich had not worked with either Corti or Anastassiades before, though he was a close observer of his work, and of the design world in general. “It is always a challenge working with somebody for the first time,” he says. “It was clear from the beginning what we shouldn’t do, not be too narrative, and not be too theatrical. We knew that time and rhythm would be important.”

Cherstich is accustomed to designing performance spaces, such as opera sets, himself but in this case he deferred to Anastassiades. “That was the most interesting thing for me,” he says. “I had the chance to play with the space designed by Michael, to get inspiration from it, and to enter into a dialogue with him. Everything I do is focused on the space of the stage. Not just as a character, in this case it’s the main character, the performance would not exist without Michael and his space.”

Corti worked to make the most of the collaboration: “Michael’s poetics are about purity. His work is about subtraction in order to keep the concept pure. For this project we put a lot of things on the table, the performers, a photographer that shot each configuration that changed everyday.

We worked with additions rather than by subtraction; it was complex to manage, but the feedback for the final experience was very positive. I saw a lot of people coming back on successive nights.”

Anastassiades designed the setting for a performance choreographed by Cherstich.

It was a backdrop for six performances that involved a set designed to evoke a domestic interior in semi-abstract terms, and a group of actors. Each evening the set was reconfigured to suggest a different sequence of activities, with lighting adjusted to reflect them. “Every day, we made sure that the settings were distinctly different. It was not just a matter of the simple movement of one or other light. One day it was a dining room, the next it was a combination of a workplace and bedroom together with a desk or a table, but quite abstract at the

same time. The furniture was not really about defining the function, but it was suggesting the activities that could take place around them.”

During the day, Anastassiades’ sets occupying Flos’s spaces were a sculptural presence. Each evening they were occupied by a group of actors, animated by a metronome, carrying out a set of routines that reflected the different activities implied by the configuration of furniture and light.

“I didn’t want it to be seen as a formal performance. Fabio and I discussed ensuring an element of surprise. There would be no formal beginning, no curtain being opened, nobody announcing, ‘Now we have started.’

We envisaged people in the environment occupied by pieces of furniture, and lights hanging above it, with people curiously exploring it, and then suddenly, somebody who has been sitting there, who happens to be, of course, an actor, starts doing something.”

Anastassiades created something between a stage, a set and an installation, or “habitat” as Cherstich describes it. “Habitat is a word that suggests it is taking care of humans, that this is a space for humans, even if they are not there,” he says. “There is another layer, which is how this habitat fits inside another habitat. The relationship with the outside was really very strong, even without the performers being present.”

“The floor is not the floor of the space, it’s the floor that Michael designed, and that was very helpful for me; it created a tiny gap. I gave the performers some dogmas to follow. The only way for them to use words would be by singing, adding to the already completely surreal effect. The way to express feelings was to transmit them in an anti-naturalistic way. It creates a very interesting game between performers looking at each other, doing actions together or alone, looking at the audience, who are looking at them from inside the space, but also from outside through the window to the street.

We chose to have performers all dressed in the same very simple monochromatic genderless way, to give a specific twist. It was suggesting the idea of a community, it removed the idea of style, or of casual or not casual. There was no makeup, and the performers worked in their own hair styles.

Somebody is reading a book or playing chess, or dancing, but everything was a bit slower than reality, to create a dreamy atmosphere.

The metronome gave them the rhythm. But when it stops, the silence is even more powerful. And every 45 minutes a performer enters with a triangle, to look at the light as if were a constellation of stars in the sky.”

For Corti the most powerful aspect of the project was in the way that it built up a space without conflict. “It’s a quality that people attending recognised. It encouraged them to stay, to appreciate it. They wanted to feel part of it.”

GROUP PORTRAIT: PHOTOGRAPHY RICCARDO SVELTO HAIR AND MAKEUP GIUSI MERTOLI ALL OTHER IMAGERY: PHOTOGRAPHY MATTIA GREGHI

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A SEAMLESS BLEND

by Ayla Angelos.

Minotti’s updated Yoko collection, inspired by Japanese & Scandinavian roots

Not only is Minotti characterised by sleek, contemporary furniture stamped with “Made in Italy” excellence, it’s also heralded as a true purveyor of collaboration. After Alberto Minotti established the company in 1948, the small-scale workshop evolved into a globally recognised brand. Over the years, Minotti has built a reputation for delivering modern craftsmanship that fuses artisan methods with technological advances. It’s also released a plethora of collections made in partnership with the likes of nendo, Marcio Kogan of Studio Mk27, GamFratesi and Inoda+Sveje.

Minotti first met Inoda+Sveje, a designer duo consisting of Kyoko Inoda and Nils Sveje, in 2021. In the following year, the Japanese-Danish duo released their debut collection, headed by the signature Yoko armchair, Lars sofa and Sendai seats

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– all of which encapsulated the designers’ affinity with organic shapes, natural materials and subtle aesthetics emerging from their Japanese and Scandinavian heritage.

This year, the pair have expanded their Sendai seat family with Minotti, featuring a new sofa, swivel armchair and footrest, plus an update of the Sendai Cord Outdoor collection, designed with cord in an earthy palette of ecru, burgundy and dark brown.

With clean lines and functionality underscoring the design, the collection strives to seamlessly enter the living space like a soft, gentle caress. Below, we unlock the key influences behind the collection, how it’s pieced together, and why it’s rooted in the meeting of two cultures.

Japanese-Danish cultures. Can you tell us about the main sources of inspiration behind this collection?

The intention behind the Yoko collection was indeed to showcase the craftsmanship, especially in collaboration with Minotti, focusing on the expertise in upholstery to explore the interplay between upholstery and the perception of cushions. In our woodworking, the emphasis has always been on finding beauty in basic forms and processes, leading to a sensibly aesthetic outcome.

Importantly, our approach involves a trust in our cultural heritage to be inherently expressed in our work, rather than forcing it. We hope the resulting designs reflect a seamless blend of cultures.

The Yoko collection appears to blend contemporary and timeless design elements seamlessly, with a fusion of two

The process of creating a new collection can be quite intricate. Could you walk us through your creative process for the col-

lection, from inception to final product?

In summary, the process begins with dialogues with Minotti, emphasising shared values in the broader context of use, materials and processes. Within these dialogues, certain aspects resonate and form the basis of our design brief. This is the start of a more structured design process. Initially, we explore concepts collaboratively, we assess feasibility and technical approaches before transitioning to the detailed drawing phase. Throughout this process, we have frequent, constructive meetings and consultations with the Minotti family and specialists.

What materials have you chosen for this collection, and why were those specific materials selected?

An important part of our design is the tactile reward of natural elements. Wood, PHOTOGRAPHER GAËTAN BERNÈDE STYLING GEORGIA THOMPSON MODEL GABRIEL AT W MGMT

carefully shaped and finished, invites a sensory experience. This tactile intimacy extends to our choice of leather and textile upholstery. The aim is to create a relaxing moment for both the body and the mind.

Every detail, from the curves to the surface, is crafted to be caressed.

The visual aesthetic of the collection is undeniably striking, each individual piece is smooth and sleek with a modern elegance. Could you elaborate on the design elements and principles that you’ve incorporated into the pieces?

Simplicity and functionality are core principles. Each component is crafted with clean lines and organic shapes, fulfilling a specific purpose while harmonising with the entire piece. This approach allows the pristine materials and exquisite craftsmanship to come to the front.

Functionality is key when it comes to furniture. How do you balance the aesthetic appeal of the Yoko collection with its practicality for everyday use?

We work from practicality towards aesthetic expression, believing that the inherent beauty of the processes involved in working with natural materials enhances the aesthetics when done correctly. In our view, appeal should complement, not hinder, practicality.

As designers, what are your hopes and goals for how people will integrate the Yoko collection into living or working spaces?

We hope our chairs will become cherished favourites, maybe caressing them now and then or sharing a kind word about them. Our aim is not to dominate your living space but to harmoniously blend in, providing comfort with subtle elegance.

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NEW AGE, OLD TRICKS

by Elizabeth Goodspeed.

The commercial rebirth of counterculture In the late 1960s, artist and futurist Stewart Brand introduced a unique publication: the Whole Earth Catalog. At a time when information was neither as universally accessible nor abundant, the Whole Earth Catalog was a groundbreaking resource – a manual for holistic living before wellness was a hashtag. While the catalogue indeed operated as a grassroots marketplace, it far transcended that primary function, offering encyclopaedic “access to tools” through products, explanatory charts, step-by-step guides, and more. Items listed were required to be either high quality or low cost, useful as a tool, relevant to education, or easily available by mail. For those seeking alternative lifestyles, the Whole Earth Catalog became an indispensable bridge between innovative ideas and actionable practice, defining both a philosophy and a recipe for living a life more attuned to nature and a spiritual power higher than oneself.

The appearance of the Whole Earth Catalog reflected this radical content. Besides the iconic cover, which featured stark photography of the planet – a direct result of founder Brand’s own 1966 campaign to have

NASA release a photo of the “whole earth” – the imagery used within the catalogue itself was notably eclectic, the result of a system where every listing was provided by individual contributors unrestricted by guidelines. A single spread might include an off-kilter mix of botanical illustrations, high-contrast black-and-white photography,

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and hand-drawn diagrams. Brand actively rejected design norms of balance and breathing room in layouts for the Whole Earth Catalog, saying, “Glamorous white space has no value in a catalog except as occasional eye rest. I figure the reader can

close his eyes when he’s tired.” The publication embraced unconventional typographic and compositional approaches as well: a simple type system made up of the utilitarian Univers and the psychedelic mainstay Windsor (itself a resurgence of a typeface designed during another anti-establishment artistic period, the Arts and Crafts movement) peppered irregular, densely populated pages – occasionally deviating into unexpected typesetting approaches like diagonal or circular text. Together, these deliberately informal design cues accentuated the publication’s core philosophies of practical utility and separation from mass production.

But the design and content of the Whole Earth Catalog, as well as other associated countercultural publications of the time like Ram Dass’s Be Here Now, often connected two seemingly disparate domains: science and spirituality. During the ’60s and ’70s, these realms were not always distinct; at this moment in time marked by tremendous social and political upheaval, there existed a unique intersection between the empirical world and the esoteric one. This confluence was, in part, a reaction to rapid technological advancements like space exploration, which prompted individuals to contemplate

their place within the universe. While science sought to unravel the mysteries of the cosmos, quantum mechanics, and the very fabric of reality, many began to see parallels between these cutting-edge theories and ancient spiritual teachings. Spirituality during this era, especially within the New Age movement, embraced academic vocabulary and concepts, with terms like “energy”, “vibration”, and “frequency”, typically reserved for scientific discourse, now used to describe occult phenomena instead.

Similarly, the exploration of consciousness, whether through meditation, psychedelics, or other means, was likened to scientific experimentation – a journey of discovery into the inner workings of the mind.

It’s no surprise, then, that formal visual tools previously used to illustrate real-world phenomena soon transcended into the metaphysical; diagrams and gradients in particular became a key component of the

New Age visual lexicon. Diagrams served a dual purpose: they provided a semblance of empirical validation to arcane concepts, making them more palatable to a generation raised on science and reason, and they visually represented abstract spiritual ideas, making them more accessible and comprehensible. Gradients too toed the line of the objective and the subjective, speaking literally to concepts like the aura while also reflecting a sense of order and mathematical precision. Peek back further into the 20th century and you’ll find echoes of this blend between celestial visuals and the

corporeal realm in the works of spiritualist artists like Hilma af Klint as well; her gradient-filled abstractions were a response to the dual pull of mysticism and the era’s groundbreaking discoveries like X-rays and electrons. Her works, and others by artists throughout the 20th century like Anna Cassel, Wassily Kandinsky, and Peter Halley, serve as a testament to humanity’s age-old quest to bridge the rational with the ethereal – often relying on visual cues pulled from the scientific community to do so.

This phenomenon isn’t just a relic of the past. Today, amidst rapid technological advancements like AI and a fractured landscape of cultural ideologies, we find ourselves at a similar philosophical and visual crossroads. The influence of organised religion and community organisations on daily life has lessened for many, leaving a vacuum filled increasingly by consumerism.

Metaphysical modernism, misinfographics, neo-spiritualism, or pharmacore – whatever you call it, esoteric nostalgia is vibrating wavelengths everywhere, especially on the Instagram pages of contemporary wellness brands. Companies hawking everything from yoga mats to skincare have embraced the aesthetics of the Whole Earth Catalog, enticing consumers into a commercialised nirvana. Spend enough time scrolling and you’ll come across squares of grainy multicolour backdrops punctuated by delicate linework, each tile offering a roadmap to navigating emotions, introspective tools, or guiding affirmations. Meanwhile, on the feed of a probiotic brand, overlapping diagrammatic rings frame a list of connected systems, from body to community to universe, while interlocking circles provide the blueprint to a “balanced smoothie”. The original intent behind these repurposed formal motifs – to weave together the logical and the mystical, challenge societal norms, and encourage profound personal transformation – feels increasingly overshadowed by a simpler, more marketable message: buy this product and be better.

Earthly possessions are no longer a barrier to enlightenment; they’re the keys.

A pivotal tension unfolds within the wellness sector: its intimate relationship to our bodies requires a genuine, human touch, echoing time-honoured remedies passed down through generations. Yet, to gain the

trust of the modern, discerning consumer, it equally demands an aura of scientific rigour, dispelling any shade of mere pseudoscience.

Brands astutely navigate this dual demand via an equal balance of countercultural and clinical touchpoints. By intermingling illustrations that feel pulled from the pages of a DIY zine with the streamlined precision of charts and graphs, commercial wellness endorses their efficacy and authenticity simultaneously. This balancing act is a calculated strategy to resonate with a consumer who reveres both the wisdom of the past and the validation of modern science.

At best, spirituality provides a comforting veneer for companies peddling high-tech, VC-backed self-care products; at worst, scientific aesthetics serve as a smokescreen for an overpriced placebo. This marriage between spirituality and science isn’t always benign. As wellness brands and influencers mix and match aesthetics and ideologies from different eras, consumers can easily fall prey to misinformation; age-old scepticism of Western medicine easily tips into conspiratorial beliefs about microchips in vaccines. Wellness advocates with large audiences are increasingly pushing untested and potentially harmful therapies, pills, and essential oils, or even promoting a rejection of medical treatments in favour of ‘natural’ cures – all set against soft gradient backdrops and personal mantras.

The insidiousness of this elevation of arcane solutions for physical ailments lies in the illusion of empowerment – believing that with the right herbs, essential oils, or meditation practices, one can bypass conventional medicine.

In the period surrounding the Whole Earth Catalog, wellness and self-improve-

ment were inextricably linked to communal bonding and breaking free of capitalist expectations. Wellness practices were seen as acts of resistance: tools for personal and societal transformation that rebelled against the grind of productivity for productivity’s sake. There were, of course, more insidious aspects to the resistance-oriented spirit the Whole Earth Catalog represented – the paranoid preppers and survivalists or the eco-terrorists, to name a few – but these offshoots, however unsettling, were still driven by more radical ideologies that placed themselves in contrast to the mainstream

ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATIONS ELIZABETH GOODSPEED

culture. The wellness industry today, on the other hand, while still echoing sentiments of personal enlightenment, often does so through a different lens: optimising oneself for greater efficiency within the very system past movements resisted. Modern self-care, especially as marketed by luxury brands, has pivoted from being a path to liberation to becoming a means of “recharging” for the primary purpose of enhanced performance.

McKinsey consultants aren’t microdosing LSD to expand their minds and love their neighbour; they’re taking it to spur entrepreneurial breakthroughs. The pursuit of wellbeing has incongruously been streamlined into yet another commodity – one that is traded, branded, and consumed with fervour in the quest for a personal equilibrium in modern life.

It’s telling that the ethos of the Whole Earth Catalog, with its grassroots quest for knowledge and empowerment, has roots intertwined with early technological developments. Stewart Brand himself, far from being an outsider to tech innovation, played a role in the iconic “Mother of All Demos” –

a prophetic display of early graphical user interfaces. This deep-seated connection between the countercultural drive of the Whole Earth Catalog and the burgeoning realm of personal computing reflected a shared desire: to democratise access, be it to knowledge or technology. As Silicon Valley burgeoned, its new generation of tech innovators, including Steve Jobs, drew inspiration from this fusion of the hippie-dippie and technological. Jobs’ admiration for the Whole Earth Catalog (which he referred to as “sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along”) didn’t only result in technological marvels; it inadvertently wove the catalog’s countercultural tapestry into Silicon Valley’s techno-utopian ethos, planting seeds of the belief that technology alone could be the panacea for society’s ailments.

Despite their hubristic desire to change the very fabric of society, techy, direct-to-consumer wellness brands often position themselves as the ‘humble alternative’ to impersonal personal-care giants like Johnson & Johnson or Procter & Gamble.

With brand-awareness at an all-time high, communications that mirror the aesthetics of the fringe – that look and act more like

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individual people or influencers – may be perceived as more trustworthy than overly polished corporate communications. What is an influencer if not a modern spiritual guru guiding the helpless flock? Mimicking the messaging and aesthetics of historic countercultural movements is just a case of further leveraging inherent trust in what is perceived as “authentic”. But while today’s wellness brands may use referential visual motifs like mixed imagery, grainy textures, and the appearance of low-quality paper stock in an attempt to capture

the same sincerity they find in the Whole Earth Catalog, these aesthetic choices were hardly intentional in their first iteration.

Instead, they often arose from constraints: a result of the desire to make a publication that was affordable and accessible to all.

Other visual tropes seen in the catalogue, like the use of black-and-white photography, were simply the default of their time. As such, adopting them in the contemporary era becomes a surface-level emulation that misses the deeper ethos. If the Whole Earth Catalog were reborn today, it wouldn’t look like any modern wellness brand – it would look like Craigslist.

This “small and personal” facade (the reverse wellness mullet) is crucial for the success of these modern brands; it gives the illusion of a more ethical, more human-centred company fighting against the tyranny of free enterprise. In an article for New York magazine earlier this year, writer Emily Sundberg refers to this concept as “small-washing”, saying, “We know these minimalist-ish generic aesthetics are not connected to any true local origin, but we see them as indicative of some kind of authenticity.” But while their communication channels might echo the aesthetics of the grassroots, companies like probiotic brand Seed, with its recent $40 million series A round, and vitamin brand Ritual, with a $25 million series B, are every bit the corporate powerhouses they discreetly distance themselves from. Few embody the paradox of commercial wellness as pointedly as the sauna brand Ancient Ritual. It’s experiential product, Arc, which features a “personalised wellness program” administered by an AI-powered counsellor, is advertised via diagrams of “self-realisation” and language around exploring one’s “inner world”. Yet,

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the gap between their marketing façade and the holistic spirit they allude to is stark; for $12,000, Arc’s sauna ultimately offers what amounts to an individual experience of luxury and solitude – a far cry from the community-driven ethos of the 1970s countercultural movements. Then again, perhaps the path to contemporary salvation isn’t spiritual ascension, but ascending the ladder of capitalism; to be the seller, not the buyer.

We’re certainly in a zeitgeist of commodifying empty spiritualism; we’re all sort of trying to find something to latch onto in a time that’s increasingly isolated and devoid of meaning. But while publications like the Whole Earth Catalog operated more like decentralised webs of knowledge – a shared repository that was constantly evolving, contributed to and drawn from by a wide array of individuals – platforms like Instagram are inherently more hierarchical.

While hashtags, stories, or shared interests might create a semblance of community, the interactions remain largely transactional.

The platform’s mechanics encourage passive consumption over active participation.

The essence of ‘sharing’, in its truest sense – exchanging ideas, challenging perspectives, building upon collective knowledge – is conspicuously absent. Today’s digital platforms, while revolutionary in reach and potential, seem to have sidestepped this democratic ethos in favour of curated, algorithm-driven content dissemination and product advertising.

The Instagram approach to complex topics can perhaps trace its roots to more recent events; during the pivotal Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, Instagram underwent a marked transformation, becoming a crucial hub for political dissemination at a time when in-person conversation was severely limited by Covid-19. While historically a platform for curated snaps of luxury,

leisure, and one’s “personal brand”, Instagram quickly became a conduit for pastel explainers on more sobering subjects like “The 10 Ways We are Racist Every Day”.

This shift presented challenges, however; the platform’s native photo-sharing tools seemed at odds with the deep, text-heavy content that emerged. Users were increasingly encountering Instagram stories spanning dozens of slides, captions that felt more

like a micro-thesis, or the ubiquitous ‘link in bio’ callout. Designers quickly adapted.

Profound messages became repackaged into a more palatable format: concise and stylised, with text and image contained neatly within a single tile – no caption required.

This redesign allowed content to be more

easily shared, and ensured that a singular message would seamlessly weave through the diverse aesthetics of the explore page, even if its content felt worlds apart from the ‘fit check’ post it sat beside. This shift towards information that’s neatly buttoned up, easily shareable, and presented with an appealing aesthetic flair has bled out from activists to influencers to brands, seeding itself in the fabric of modern online discourse.

The value of being shareable or viral has now superseded the depth and nuance that some subjects demand, leading to an age where complex topics are distilled to their most basic essence, sometimes sacrificing understanding for visibility. In this realm, wellness brands and their offerings are no exception. They too have learned to navigate and thrive in this ecosystem of simplified narratives and stylised aesthetics, positioning themselves not just as products, but as solutions to the existential void of the digital age.

The Pioneer Plaque, a piece of etched metal sent into space aboard the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecrafts in the early 1970s, is a profound gesture of connection – a message into the vast void of space that encapsulates humanity’s profound desire to be seen, recognised, and perhaps, understood. Lined with drawings of a man and a woman, a map of our solar system, and other universal symbols, the plaque deftly marries meticulous details meant to be universally decipherable with deeper sentiment. Much like it, the Whole Earth Catalog was an endeavour of its time to grasp and present a holistic life, unburdened by consumerism. Today’s digital wellness space, with its borrowed aesthetics and Instagrammable moments, strives for a similar connection. Yet, amidst this quest, there’s a palpable tension: the yearning for authenticity collides with the artifice of digital presentation. In this delicate dance between past and present, one wonders if our modern mantras, stripped of their grassroots ethos, might be sending signals from a void of their own.

SUPERMAX

by Hannah Williams.

Forty years after its creation, Flexform’s Max sofa is revitalised

Max sofas at the Triennale di Milano museum, 1983

In his Bauhaus Manifesto, Walter Gropius outlined his vision for a holistic form of artistic creation, a call to “desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity”. Central to this theory is a dissolution of the boundaries between utility and design, a belief in the potential to elevate the everyday object to the status of art. Both work of sculpture and piece of furniture, the Flexform Max sofa is a perfect encapsulation of this idea.

Designed in 1983, it’s a paean to the beauty of our daily lives, a fluid, fluxive synthesis of form and aesthetics.

For Antonio Citterio, designer of the Max, this idea of unity was embedded in

PHOTOGRAPH: GABRIELE BASILICO

the sofa’s design, into its flowing seat and arching, winding backrest. Far from merely decorative, the sofa’s liquiform shape “creates a situation where people sit more face-to-face, which allows them to talk and look at each other”. This presented challenges, namely that it’s near-impossible to cover a curved back with a single piece of fabric. But it’s this difficulty that led to the Max’s elegant fabric-wrapped back, one of its most distinctive features: “It was someone in the factory, their design team,” notes Citterio, “that gave me this idea, and immediately I said, ‘Ok, but not just one colour…’ The idea was to highlight the technical solution, and from the technical solution we gained the decoration

of the product.” It’s an art object made for socialising, made for joy, made for life. And, 40 years after its creation, the Max is getting a successor: the Flexform Supermax.

Echoing the fortuitous happenstance that resulted in the Max’s iconic design, the Supermax came “almost by chance”, Citterio tells me. “We have an incredible archive, and we started to revisit Gabriele Basilico’s fantastic picture of the Max.” The enduring contemporariness and originality of the sofa struck the Flexform team, who began to consider the “possibilities” an updated Max could present. It was a truly organic process, not the work of, as Citterio says, “emails or meetings”, but a serendipitous rediscovery.

The Supermax pays homage to its predecessor, retaining that classic curved back and kidney bean-shaped seat. But it also allows a greater variety of use, as at home in outdoor environments as it is inside. This emphasis on relaxation means that the sofa is built lower, to encourage a more casual atmosphere, as well as enlarged dimensions and more plush padding. Citterio and Flexform have also taken the opportunity to imagine different colour combinations, including a two-tone monochrome palette.

In other words, they’ve instantly updated a sculptural design classic, built for the demands of 21st-century life.

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Re-Chair, launched 2022. Manufacturer Kartell, Italy Designer Antonio Citterio b. 1950, Meda, Italy The Re-Chair is the result of the coffee maker Illy’s net-zero strategy. The company’s waste coffee pods are recycled to create a thermoplastic technopolymer

Page 43 Images Leon Chew

Ghiaccio, launched 2011. Manufacturer Porro, Italy Designer Piero Lissoni b. 1956, Sergeno, Italy Piero Lissoni works for Porro as both the company’s art director, helping to shape its creative strategy, and on the design of individual pieces such as the Ghiaccio armchair

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Mad Chaise Longue, launched 2013. Manufacturer Poliform, Italy Designer Marcel Wanders b. 1963, Boxtel, the Netherlands Wanders first made an impression on the design world with his surrealistic knotted chair, part of the Droog collection in 1996. This collection offers a range of possibilities incorporating asymmetric elements

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Grande Papilio, launched 2009. Manufacturer B&B Italia, Italy Designer Naoto Fukasawa b. 1956, Kofu, Japan Naoto Fukasawa, one of the most successful Japanese designers of his generation, has work including electronics for Muji as well as interiors and furniture. This range includes items from stools to armchairs

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Doris SH, launched 2023. Manufacturer Flexform, Italy Designer Antonio Citterio b. 1950, Meda, Italy Antonio Citterio’s design for the Doris chair is based on traditional woodworking techniques, using solid ash legs turned by hand, with a leather seat, offering a modern take on the Arts and Crafts movement

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Back-wing, launched 2018. Manufacturer Cassina, Italy Designer Patricia Urquiola b. 1961, Oviedo, Italy Urquiola has been Cassina’s art director since 2015, working with a historic and celebrated range of designs from Gio Ponti onwards, still designing such pieces as the Back-wing armchair on her own account

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Vegetal, launched 2008. Manufacturer Vitra, Switzerland Designers Ronan Bouroullec b. 1971 and Erwan Bouroullec b. 1976, Quimper, France The Bouroullec brothers and Vitra’s engineers spent four years looking for an appropriate polymer polyamide and injection moulding technology that could mass produce the organic inspiration for this chair

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Chester Moon, launched 2009. Manufacturer Baxter, Italy Designer Paola Navone b. 1950, Turin, Italy Navone’s starting point for this range was the 19th-century English chesterfield sofa whose buttoned upholstery signalled comfort. She exaggerates the curved form, with foam replacing horsehair and springs

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Air Chair, launched 2000. Manufacturer Magis, Italy Designer Jasper Morrison b. 1959, London, UK The Air Chair uses the same blow moulding techniques developed to produce low-cost components for car interiors to make an affordable, light-weight, stackable chair

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Glove, launched 2005. Manufacturer Molteni, Italy Designer Patricia Urquiola b. 1961, Oviedo, Spain Now based in Italy, Urquiola was a student of Achille Castiglioni in Milan, who encouraged her to broaden her range of interests from focusing on architecture to include design in a wider sense

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Daiki, launched 2020. Manufacturer Minotti, Italy Designer Marcio Kogan b. 1952, Sao Paolo, Brazil Kogan trained as an architect, but began as a film maker. That narrative sensibility has shaped his subsequent design work; the Daiki armchair is a nuanced interpretation of the Japanese version of mid-century modernity

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Page 54

AN AGITATOR OF MEN AND MACHINES

by Richard Williams.

The winding arc to Ferrari’s Roma coupé

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There is no official record of the first sighting of a Ferrari on the bustling streets of post-war Rome, but it is likely to have been early in 1948, around the time Enzo Ferrari received the first customers for his road cars. Right from the start, an unusually powerful mystique surrounded even the act of buying one of the cars bearing the badge of a black horse on a yellow shield. Ferrari didn’t go out seeking clients. They went to him, and not infrequently they were made to wait for an audience with the Pope of Maranello, as he was sometimes called, in reference to the town in Emilia-Romagna where he had set up his business and which he was to make world-famous.

Ferrari designed none of his cars. That was done by the team of technicians he assembled and supervised. “I am not an engineer,” he once said. “I am an agitator of men and machines.” His genius was that of an organiser, not just of a factory building wonderfully exotic cars but also of a racing team subsidised, from its earliest years, through the pioneering use of sponsors to finance his efforts. But he seemed to know beauty when he saw it.

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Italy had made desirable cars before the war, but it soon became apparent that a Ferrari was something different, particularly when, in 1948, the team’s cars raced to victory in the Targa Florio and the Mille Miglia, two classic endurance events of the international calendar, run over public roads, over mountain passes and along seafronts. The message was that while a Ferrari was very fast indeed, it was also impressively rugged.

The effect on the socialites and film stars taking a break from work at Cinecittà and lounging in the cafés on the Via Veneto – then approaching its height as the centre of Roman dolce vita – can only be imagined. Perhaps the first Ferrari they saw was the 166MM Barchetta (little boat) sold to Gianni Agnelli, the playboy head of Fiat, its open two-seater bodywork painted in an unusual but very stylish combination of dark blue and dark green. Agnelli’s car – now the property of an English collector – was the double of one that would bring Ferrari even greater international prestige by winning the 24 Hours of Le Mans the following year. Yet he could use it to cruise the boulevards of Turin on his way to and

from the Fiat factory, to drive up to the ski resort of Sestriere, which his grandfather had founded in the 1930s, or to head for a rendezvous with his yacht at Ravello, on the Amalfi coast.

Soon queues of the rich and famous were forming outside Ferrari’s door, many of them arriving from Rome. Among the first celebrities to respond to the cars’ special appeal was the film director Roberto Rossellini, who made the pilgrimage in 1949.

Following his early successes with Rome, Open City and Paisá, he was working on Stromboli with a new female star, the Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman. To the delight – and feigned horror – of the gossip columnists and the genuine horror of the Vatican, Rossellini had left his second wife to take up with Bergman, who had abandoned her Swedish husband and their small daughter to be with him.

Rossellini’s first Ferrari was a 166 Inter, one of three made with cabriolet bodywork

by Pininfarina. There would be many others, including a 212 Inter coupé bought for Bergman as a wedding present when they married in 1953, even though she was not keen on fast driving. Enzo Ferrari was hap-

py to be photographed sharing a table with his glamorous customers at a restaurant across the road from his factory.

Rossellini had ambitions to race, and that year he entered the Mille Miglia in his own open-cockpit 212. But after setting out from Brescia, his attempt was halted when he reached the halfway control point in Rome, where Bergman, now the mother of their three children, was waiting. As the car came to a halt, she leaned into the cockpit and begged him not to continue.

In 1954 he bought her another Ferrari: a 375MM coupé with special aerodynamic bodywork, again by Pininfarina. He paid Ferrari $6,000 for the car, first unveiled at that year’s Salon des Automobiles in Paris, stipulating a respray from its original pale blue to a shade of grey-gold that would be named Grigio Ingrid. Even this machine, among the most beautiful Ferraris ever made, failed to arouse her interest, and Rossellini drove it himself for three years before selling it to the first of several American owners, one of them the president of Microsoft.

Ferrari’s Roma, introduced to the public in 2019, can trace its bloodline back to the gorgeous Bergman/Rossellini coupé via

PHOTOGRAPHY: ELEONORA AGOSTINI

the sumptuous race-bred 250GT Lusso of the early 1960s. The Roma has a twin-turbocharged 3.9-litre V8 engine, rather than the Lusso’s 3-litre V12, but it is built to do the same job of providing a stimulating driving experience while conveying its occupants in comfort to their next destination – a villa in the Tuscan hills, perhaps, or a reserved parking space in Monaco’s Casino Square during the Grand Prix weekend.

As it happens, Rome was the location of Ferrari’s first race win, when Franco Cortese drove to victory on a circuit around the Baths of Caracalla in the spring of 1947, only a few weeks after the prototype had been fired up and made its way along the road outside the factory, still lacking bodywork. On 11th May the team travelled to Piacenza, where Cortese was in the lead when the engine developed a misfire that forced him to retire.

A promising failure, Enzo Ferrari called it, and two weeks later the team went south for La Primavera Romana di Motori (the Roman Spring of Motor Cars), a race through the tree-lined roads around the old Roman baths near the city centre. This time Cortese’s car had new full-width bodywork,

and pulled away to win easily. That victory would come to be seen as the forerunner of a record including 241 Grand Prix wins, 16 constructors’ championships, 15 drivers’ titles, 10 wins at Le Mans, including the centenary edition in 2023, and countless other victories around the world over the last 75 years.

Ferrari’s view was that he made road cars in order to subsidise the racing activities that built the legend, offering reflected glory to anyone who could afford it. Production went from 26 cars in 1950 to 306 in 1960, 928 in 1970, 2,470 in 1980 and 4,309 in 1990, after which the fallout from worldwide economic crises depressed the total for a while.

But a careful recovery and the exploitation of new markets brought the total up to 6,573 in 2010, and in 2022 the number of Ferraris produced stood at 13,221, many of them finished to custom specifications. In 75 years, then, just over a quarter of a million Ferraris have emerged from the now historic factory beside a road that, if you were to turn left out of the gates, head south and carry straight on for 250 miles, would take you all the way to the city whose name your brand-new Roma so proudly and elegantly bears.

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Page 58

DESIGN RESEARCH UNIT

by Michelle Cotton.

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On the team behind the face of British Rail and the Victoria Line, who made Britain modern CREDITS IN HERE OVER 2 LINES PLEASE AND THANKS

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The ‘British Rail’ logo printed on every train ticket in Britain is a prominent yet small part of the legacy of the Design Research Unit. One of Britain’s most prolific design agencies, their work prevails long after many of their clients have been privatised or absorbed within multinationals. Between 1944 and 1969 they employed 365 people and hired more freelance artists and specialists for specific projects. Their practice included architecture, exhibition design, industrial design and some of the most comprehensive and enduring corporate identities produced in Britain in the post-war decades, but in 1943 they had a staff of one, the art historian, critic, poet, novelist and anarchist, Herbert Read.

Read had worked as a curator for the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he wrote books on English stained glass and pottery. He translated Wilhelm Worringer’s influential book Formprobleme der Gotik into English, and through Worringer and Max Sauerlandt, director of the Museum Für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, he met the Bauhaus architects and artists who would inspire his vision for the Design Research Unit. In 1934 he published Art and Industry: The Principles of Industrial Design, positioning international modernism as a rational development for Britain, with its long-established tradition of socially minded applied arts, while arguing for a new Bauhaus-style model for arts and design education. Living at that time in Hampstead among what he described as “a gentle nest of artists” (that included Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth), he was a close observer and advocate of the art and architecture group ‘Unit One’ and became neighbours with European émigrés Naum Gabo, Piet Mondrian, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and László Moholy-Nagy, who all moved to London between 1934 and 1938. It was Nicholson and Moore who first introduced Read to Marcus Brumwell, an advertising executive and patron of their work. In 1940 Brumwell formed the Advertising Service Guild, a group of companies that would finance the social research organisation Mass Observation and, initially, the Design Research Unit.

The Unit was first described in terms that closely resemble the vision that Read set forth in Art and Industry. In a leaflet addressed to “artists and designers” its aim was summarised as: “To secure the co-operation of artists and designers in projects involving more than one material or more than one purpose: to bring such artists and designers

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into productive relation with scientists and technologists.”

Central to their philosophy was a scientific approach informed by the application of new materials and technology (signified by the ‘Research’ in their name): “The machine is accepted as the essentially modern vehicle of form. Our designs will therefore be essentially designs for mass production, but at the same time we hope to rescue mass production from the ugliness and aesthetic emptiness which has so far characterised the greater part of its output. It is impossible to accept the view that any essential antagonism exists between art and industry, between beauty and the machine. But it is necessary to reintegrate the worlds of art and industry, for only on that basis can we progress towards a new and vital civilisation.”

A complementary text for clients explained: “Design is essentially an expression of function, and in most cases the designer will be an artist who fully comprehends the technical process of manufacture and the functional and economic processes of the materials he works with.”

One of their first projects was to commission Naum Gabo to design a car for the Bradford company, Jowett. The artist’s proposal was nothing if not radical. He envisaged nylon seats, a vinyl floor and Perspex windows, three new materials that Gabo was able to obtain for his sculpture from ICI, despite all wartime production being commandeered by the British government for military use. The car’s streamlined, aerodynamic body, two-tone paintwork and doors that extended into the roof were devised to employ fewer panels and increase interior capacity, avoiding what Gabo described as a “house on wheels”. The curvilinear form and detailing, including a kidney-shaped steering wheel and a spiral grille, recalled the biomechanical forms that characterised his art from the early 1940s. Unfortunately, Gabo repeatedly missed deadlines and the company pronounced his design, “impracticable”, too costly to be produced, eventually cancelling their contract with DRU. By that time Read had been joined by Brumwell’s co-founders and partners, Milner Gray and Misha Black. The two designers had been working together since 1932, most recently within the wartime Ministry of Information: Gray as Head of the Exhibitions Branch and Principal Design Adviser and Black as Principal Exhibition Architect. As the war drew to a close, Gray chaired weekly meetings where designers working for the ministry discussed how their work could be adapted to the task of

post-war reconstruction. The multidisciplinary model of the British government’s wartime propaganda machine at Senate House inspired Gray’s ideas for “a design group” with sections for architecture, industrial design and graphics. Outlining his ideas for Brumwell in 1942 he proposed a focus on “national services”, imagining a group that could act as an advisory body to government and industry alike. He outlined what would become the Unit’s core business, recommending that the group apply themselves to “the problems of physical reconstruction” such as “the reconditioning and re-designing of public utility services and… railway companies, motor coach lines and so on”.

By 1947 the Unit’s staff included teams of exhibition designers, graphic designers and architects, many of whom were already working on the 1951 Festival of Britain, where Black was coordinating architect for the ‘upstream’ half of the exhibition.

He later recalled the epic task: “Everything that could be said would be said: there would be brown owls and flatfish, a locomotive and aircraft, Anglo Saxons and Romans, chemistry, biology, physics and nuclear science, telescopes, agriculture and Darwin, all the Nobel Prize winners and polar dogs, public health and the White Knight.”

This miscellany might also be used to describe DRU’s ‘Dome of Discovery’ exhibition. A vast, 365ft concrete and aluminium structure designed by Ralph Tubbs housed an exhibition in 10 themed sections with exhibits celebrating “national achievements”.

The Polar section, designed by Jock Kinneir, featured a life-size reconstruction of part of Captain Cook’s ship, the Endeavour, a waxwork Inuit and a live demonstration of an Antarctic expedition (a sledge drawn by huskies). A giant locust and Colorado beetle were made to hang from the ceiling for another section entitled The Land. Hundreds of fossil shapes were cast in plaster for the mural of the Living World. Tubbs protested that his building was overwhelmed by the exhibition but in fact the installation was never completed, and several display cases were lined with coloured paper but left empty.

In the years following the festival, interiors for showrooms, shops and corporate headquarters replaced exhibition design as the Unit’s main business, while Gray’s graphics department provided commissions for comprehensive graphic identity programmes that would set new standards in British industry. One of the most detailed was commissioned by the brewery Watney Combe Reid. Between 1947 and 1958 the

STREET NAMEPLATES FOR THE CITY OF WESTMINSTER C. 1967 (PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER RIDLEY) JOWETT CAR, THE WORK OF NAUM GABO © NINA & GRAHAM WILLIAMS / TATE ALL OTHER IMAGES COURTESY OF SCOTT BROWNRIGG © DESIGN RESEARCH UNIT

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London firm acquired thousands of pubs and off-licenses across southern and eastern England. Concerned that its brand might be considered too metropolitan for its provincial houses, the designers were brought in to “re-establish… comfort and conviviality” in “public house architecture, furnishings and accessories”. The pubs were divided into typical architectural style groups and a House Identification Manual directed the appropriate use of lettering giving instructions for typography, scale, spacing, colour, method of application, and type of illumination accordingly. They wanted to ensure “identification, without submerging the individual character of each house or its suitability to its surroundings”. Between 1956 and 1970, the Design Research Unit envisaged almost every aspect of the firm’s visibility from pub signage, exteriors and interiors to labelling, beermats, bar accessories, transport fleet and stationery. Meanwhile the brewers (by now named Watney Mann) switched to using cheaper malts to produce weaker, sweeter beers. Their “bleedin’ Watneys Red Barrel” became the butt of Monty Python jokes and the design legacy was eclipsed by the much-maligned beer.

In 1963 the Design Research Unit embarked upon the largest and most complex corporate identity ever undertaken in the UK. Their work for British Railways addressed the signage and general appearance of approximately 2,000 stations and in the course of its implementation the company estimated that 4,000 locomotives, 23,000 passenger carriages and 45 Sealink ships were repainted. Gray somewhat accidentally renamed the company ‘British Rail’, after realising the shortened version of the name, used to try out different lettering styles, looked “much better”. Similarly, the two-way arrow logotype, so far outliving the nationalised industry by nearly three decades, was only adopted after the original design was leaked to the press. Gerald Barney’s design was a striking break with the past, replacing a crest (a lion and crown) and an antiquated idea of travel (a cartwheel) – with an abstract representation of speed or, in Gray’s words, “two-way traffic movement”. Margaret Calvert and former DRU associate Jock Kinneir (who were nearing completion on their redesign of British road signage) drew the ‘Rail Alphabet’ for station signage. Devised to be mechanically or photomechanically reproduced, as opposed to being enlarged or cut by hand, each character was spaced on a tile to ensure consistently compact arrangement.

This and the accompanying ‘plank system’ that allowed each concept in the signage to be stacked according to a ‘one message

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– one plank’ rule provided a cost-effective, flexible formula for manufacturing and easy maintenance. Such solutions were not only illustrative of rigorous technical research but a commitment to improving public sector efficiency and producing good design for the benefit of society.

Within the office, the graphic designers were “flat boys” and architects were “round boys”. Several more notable figures can be counted among them: architects Frederick Gibberd, Sadie Speight, and Clifford Hatts who went on to design many landmark television productions for the BBC, perhaps most memorably Quatermass and the Pit. In 1967 Richard and Su Rogers (the latter Brumwell’s daughter) joined as associates, and with Renzo Piano designed a ‘zip-up’ structure extension for the Unit’s Marylebone offices. During the 1960s and 1970s DRU’s architects designed schools, social housing, care homes, offices and the Charles Clore Pavilion for Small Mammals at London Zoo. The industrial designers worked on whisky bottles, egg cups, saucepans, cameras, school desks and data-processing equipment. The graphic designers developed corporate identities for the Dunlop shoes, Austin Reed, Unilever, ICI, Sadler’s Wells, Tarmac and Ilford. They designed interiors for Bata Shoe Corporation’s stores and the headquarters of BP. Black also designed the now world-famous street nameplates for Westminster City Council.

Their work found its way into all corners of daily life, but perhaps most notably in transport; from British Rail to the Hong Kong Mass Transit Railway; from the Oriana cruise ship to London Underground’s Victoria Line.

From 1964 to 1976 Black acted as a design consultant to the London Transport Executive, during which time he took responsibility for every aspect of the design of the Victoria Line. The 14-mile-long underground railway connecting 16 stations was believed to be the most advanced underground railway in the world when it opened in 1968. Its lightweight, unpainted aluminium, computer-controlled trains were designed to cut operational and maintenance costs and reduce energy consumption and staffing while making services more regular and uniform. Ceramic tile murals were commissioned for the station platforms from various artists and graphic designers: Hans Unger for Green Park, Oxford Circus, Blackhorse Road, Brixton and Seven Sisters; Edward Bawden for Tottenham Hale, Highbury and Islington, and Victoria; Tom Eckersley for Euston, King’s Cross St Pancras and Finsbury Park; Abram Games for Stockwell; Peter Sedgley

for Pimlico; Crosby, Fletcher and Forbes for Warren Street and George Smith for Vauxhall. The William Morris patterned mural for Walthamstow Central was devised by Black’s daughter, Julia.

Yet at the height of their success, in unflinching pragmatism, Black was also anticipating the Unit’s demise: “In the end the group will outlive its usefulness and should dissolve. There is comfort in long-established practices, and convenience in the sturdy administrative structures which build up around them, but the function of design is to find new formal relationships which simultaneously serve the needs of society and symbolise the emotional forces which motivate it. When the design group is no longer expressive and becomes content to reiterate forms which have only archaic interest, then its life is ended… Complacent middle age with its desire only to regurgitate the victories of its long-past youth can afflict groups as easily as it can devastate individuals.”

By 1978 Gray was the only founder still working, outliving Black and Read and outlasting Brumwell who retired in 1974.

Writing to commemorate the Unit’s 25th year in 1969’s The Practical Idealists, John and Avril Blake predicted that: “The ‘software’ stage in designing – thinking, data collection, analysing, organising – will become more and more important in the future, while the ‘hardware’ stage – the transformation of data into design – will occupy a smaller proportion of the total design effort… in the future will emerge the need for a new type of designer who is capable of using all the resources of science and technology to conceive and plan a sense of order out of what appears to be an increasing chaos of unrelated problems…

The growth of populations, the speed of industrialisation, the drain on the world’s natural resources, will make such haphazard development less and less tolerable in the future…”

Alluding to the sense of social responsibility and ‘shared purpose’ that the Design Research Unit represented, they called for: “…designers capable of fulfilling a far wider brief… designers capable of spanning the spectrum of human and technical factors, within the context of major systems design problems are missing from the present-day scene.”

Michelle Cotton is the Head of Artistic Programmes and Content at Mudam Luxembourg and the Designated Artistic Director at Kunsthalle Wien. She is the author of Design Research Unit 1942 – 72 (Koenig Books, 2011).

ILFORD VEHICLE LIVERY C. 1966 (PHOTO: JOHN MALTBY). PAGES FROM THE ‘WATNEY HOUSE IDENTIFICATION MANUAL’ C. 1966.

ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF SCOTT BROWNRIGG © DESIGN RESEARCH UNIT

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Page 64

SLIGHTLY IMPOSSIBLE

by Deyan Sudjic.

In studio with Industrial Facility

Left: a recharchable battery for Herman Miller

If one is looking to understand Industrial Facility, the studio set up in 2002 by Kim Colin (an American architect) and Sam Hecht (a British designer), the monograph on their work published by Phaidon is a good place to start. As you might expect for a studio that has built its reputation on a series of quietly resonant objects, and from Colin’s experience as an editor at an earlier stage of her career, the book is as carefully considered and as well-crafted as any of their remarkably refined designs.

That Industrial Facility chose to ask Paul Neale and Carole Courtillé of GFT to design it for them suggests a certain modesty.

Apart from all the design work that it documents – ranging from cordless telephones and cities-in-a-bag wooden toys for Muji to projectors for Epson, by way of eccentric clocks for Alasdhair Willis’s Established & Sons – the book stands out both for its front and back covers, and perhaps even more for the author of its foreword. The covers use line drawings made with a sensibility somewhere between that of Patrick Caulfield and Michael Craig-Martin. The drawings capture the essence of two of Industrial Facility’s designs – for the Bell alarm clock, shown from the back, rendered in flat pillar-box red with just a flash of lime green, and the Branca table and chair on the front cover shown as a close-up fragment. It’s a

PHOTOGRAPHY: LUCY SHORTMAN

span that encompasses both product design and furniture, two fields of work that while superficially similar are actually quite far apart. “A piece of furniture is different from a product; you can’t design a product without understanding the components.

You start inside and gradually build your way out,” says Hecht. “A chair has to sit at a table or a bench. To do furniture well you have to bridge methods of production, and architecture, furniture contributes to the feeling of a space. We were in California in the summer and saw some of the Richard Neutra houses, and understood how much of the furniture was built in.

Product designers can have a tendency to over-complicate furniture.”

The drawings are a further distillation of what Industrial Facility have already materially achieved – reducing physical objects to their essential minimum. They seem to suggest what Colin and Hecht would do if they were freed from the material weight of physical objects altogether, as if they were trying to make an object into an icon – not the same as an iconic object – or an archetype.

They hint at the idea when they describe their approach to design. Talking about a product that they designed for Herman Miller, they discuss trying to find the way to give an adjustable mechanical table (otherwise a piece of seemingly mute equipment) the quality of ‘tableness’.

Yet Industrial Facility is rooted in the analogue world of material objects much as the world of ideas. Of their alarm clock, they admit that; “even though the growing digital world has made the archetypical analogue alarm clock appear like a historical record, people are still attracted to them for their loud sound, and simple interface. Bell [the clock] was designed to help this product take up a more desirable position and to satisfy people who struggle with the layers of information required to set digital clocks.”

When they unveiled their design for Pure’s Evoke radio, they suggested that: “radio behaves inherently differently to playing from pre-defined playlists – it is generated from broadcast media and is generally unexpected content. For many, this is why radio is like a re-assuring ‘real-time’ companion in the workshop, bedroom, kitchen or bathroom.” With its perforated wood front, it looks like a radio, if not like a retro styled product – but it’s internet capable, like a smart speaker. The digital interface is provided by a small screen that – since it is rarely used – is concealed under a flap, to leave the object itself looking reassuringly uncomplicated.

Its design is a response to two related tendencies that have had a magnifying effect on each other. On one hand, “radio has now become this confusing product that struggles to know whether it’s a speaker, a

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Above: Pure Evoke Radio

clock or a multimedia device,” as they put it.

At the same time, digital appliances have consumed other products. “Phones and laptops suddenly became media devices.”

Like the Herman Miller adjustable work surface, Pure’s Evoke is the comfortingly simple essence of ‘radioness’, even if it can actually do a lot more.

Revealingly, Alain de Botton contributes that foreword, in which he quotes Horace: “The art lies in concealing the art.”

Perhaps the first time in the recent history of design criticism that the Roman poet has been cited – but it explains how much Colin and Hecht’s restraint and consistency can achieve. De Botton does not refer to his own books, but the idea of the consolations of the well-considered everyday object, if not the idea of philosophy, hovers over his words.

Industrial Facility’s work offers the simple pleasures of a handle that feels good to touch, a machine that communicates how it works without any need to read the instruction manual, and a colour palette that could have come from a Giorgio Morandi still life. Except for the colour, it’s part of an approach to design that reached its first clear expression in the work of Dieter Rams for Braun. But it would not be correct to call Industrial Facility’s work Rams revivalism. Their work belongs to a different time, and relies on a different technology and a different audience. It has

things in common with Jasper Morrison’s laconic refinement, as well as the designs of the Bouroullec brothers. It carries a sense of being more than a fleeting response to transient circumstance.

Sam Hecht once approvingly described an exhibition of Rams’ designs as looking as if they had all been made for the same room. He is as interested in the legacy of designers, including Joe Colombo, Richard Sapper (the German-born Milanese designer of radios for Brionvega), and his partner Marco Zanuso as in that of Rams.

Part of Colin and Hecht’s first exhibition at the Design Museum was a display of their collection of pieces of anonymous mass-produced ingenuity – from a chainmail oyster-shucking glove to a combined craft knife and scissors set, suggesting that close observation is an essential part of their working method.

While this is clearly an unusually cerebral design studio, that is not to say that they take themselves entirely seriously.

The effect of Industrial Facility’s important-looking polished door plate on the studio door in Clerkenwell is somewhat undermined by the words ‘Est. a while ago’ embossed in the brass below the name in a Helvetica font.

Industrial Facility was started more than two decades ago. Colin was in publishing. She worked with the LA-based

artist Mike Kelley to build the architectural models for Educational Complex, his artwork that is now in the collection of the Whitney in New York, and later interviewed veteran Californian architect Pierre Koenig and the photographer Julius Schulman for Koenig’s monograph. Hecht had worked for the high-tech specialist consultancy IDEO in California, Tokyo, and had moved back to Britain. Among many other projects he was on the team that designed the pioneering technology for Prada’s Rem Koolhaas-designed stores in New York and Los Angeles that eventually proved to be too far ahead of its time. Prada invested in a premature attempt to use radio frequency tagging, now standard, but at that point at least five years away from being generally adopted. A decade later the sales staff would have used offthe-shelf iPads – in 2001 Hecht and IDEO designed specially made devices for them.

They were beautiful but did not survive the impact of the actual shopping experience.

Behind their brass door plate, Industrial Facility occupies the upper three of a small five-floor building. The lowest level has the neat sense of order of a well-organised carpenters’ workshop, tools of all shapes and sizes have a place, hanging on walls around a workbench. Next up is the studio, with a single line of work tables facing a wall of books arranged as carefully as the tools

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Above, left: The Ishinomaki Chair Right: Kim Colin stands behind the OE1 Mobile Easel

below, on Rams’ Vitsoe shelving system.

They work with a handful of assistants: “We are small, but we are very ambitious.”

Reached by a spiral staircase, the top floor is empty. Colin and Hecht use it to show clients their work. In fact, they use each of the three levels to orchestrate their presentations. “When we present, we only show one solution. It’s a high-risk strategy: we may spend two or three months working on a project, but we will only show the solution that we believe in,” says Hecht.

“We start a presentation downstairs, and show the essence of the project, then come upstairs, where we might reveal some prototypes, up here we have invested in a final working model. It’s always a physical model, which is a completely different experience from showing a rendering. Even if it’s a chair made of paper, and they can’t sit on it, we can make it look as if it’s resin.” If Industrial Facility’s methods are determinedly analogue, it should not be understood as nostalgia, any more than Wes Anderson or Quentin Tarantino can be called nostalgic for commiting to using film. “There is an analogy with film,” they say. “You have to be editing in your mind as you work when you are making physical working models, you have to be economical, which is not something that digital design encourages.” They do not apologise for

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being interested in giving form to objects.

“Physical objects are what we are good at.

It’s what we enjoy doing.”

But they are as interested in how things are used as they are in what they look like.

Their recent work with Herman Miller is driven by the changing nature of the workplace. In a world of work where people no longer have their own desk, let alone an office of their own, Industrial Facility has come up with a range of products that respond to the realities of working from home, and to a workplace that has become a single – supposedly flexible – shared space.

Nook is for those who don’t have a desk of their own, in which to carry the essential tools they will need in the course of a day. The OE1 Mobile Easel is an easily moved focus for group working. The OE1 Micro Pack can be mounted against a wall, a compact desk that can adjust to sitting or standing work for concentration away from others. The most recent element is a shareable mobile power source, a rechargeable battery that can run a laptop and power a phone, with a locator tag inside. It’s available individually, or as a set of four, and has what Industrial Facility would call a look of ‘batteriness’. It comes with a carrying handle that expresses portability, and a chamfered form that gives a sense of its power.

Industrial Facility are as fluent in their work in furniture as in product. Their new chair for the German Thonet company is very much in the mainstream of furniture design, and the duo are well aware of their client’s remarkable history going back to the start of the 19th century. Thonet has been manufacturing the 214 bentwood ‘café’ chair since the 1850s, perhaps the most successful mass-produced chair of all time.

The company worked with Mart Stam and Mies van der Rohe in the early days of modernism. Industrial Facility’s S 220 chair is designed in response to what they call Thonet’s request for something “slightly impossible”, a plywood shell chair that felt as if it belonged to the company catalogue.

Their strategy was to give the chair a profile that referred to the company’s history, and to use contemporary moulding techniques to give it a higher level of comfort.

Few periods in history have seen a faster rate of change than the past 20 years, coinciding with Industrial Facility’s work to date. It has seen the mass extinctions of whole categories of object, driven by the digital explosion. And yet objects still offer us the consolations of a relationship with the things we need and use in everyday life. Few designers have been as skilled in giving those things lasting meaning as Industrial Facility.

The PORT Review of Design: PAGE 71

REYNER BANHAM ENJOYED IRRITATINGPEOPLE

by Deyan Sudjic.

Remembering an offbeat, but prescient design thinker

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Reyner Banham’s biography is as unconventional as his approach to architectural history and design criticism. He left school at 16 to start a course as a management trainee in the aeronautical industry, and then worked as an aircraft fitter in WW2.

But he abandoned engineering after the war to study the new field of architectural history at the Courtauld Institute under Nikolaus Pevsner, earning a doctorate for his thesis, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. It spent more time on the history of air-conditioning than on the Bauhaus. He published it as a book in 1960 and it has been an essential on reading lists ever since.

Banham saw himself as a provocateur, an eager participant in the culture wars of the 1970s and 1980s, notably between modernism and the former Prince of Wales, even though by this time he had moved to America. When the right-wing Cambridge historian David Watkin published Morality and Architecture, Banham reviewed it dismissively, singling out Watkin’s praise for the English classicist Edwin Lutyens for particular disdain. Watkin had his revenge when, in an exhibition he curated at the Hayward Gallery, he captioned a photograph of Lutyens riding an elephant in New Delhi, “Reynerbanaman, Lutyens’ faithful elephant wallah”.

Banham’s career was built on overturning received wisdom wherever he encountered it. He was close to Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi and the Independent Group, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and saw the birth of the English pop art movement at close quarters. He was fascinated by Los Angeles at a time when most English critics saw it as the personification of the non-city, the smog-soaked embodiment of all that was wrong with contemporary urbanism. His preferred means of transport was a Moulton bicycle with tiny wheels, but he claimed to have learned to drive so that he “would be able to read Los Angeles in the original”. He approached the city from the perspective of social anthropology. He observed different behaviours on the freeways and the surface roads. He noticed that makeup was being applied by passengers in cars coming down the off ramp and concluded that Los Angelenos were treating the freeways as private domestic space, and the surface roads as the public realm.

Banham championed Cedric Price, architect of the aviary at London Zoo, for his pragmatism. For Price every building was out of date by the time it was finished. In the 1950s he was one of the first to discover the work of Peter and Alison Smithson, the socalled brutalists responsible for two of Britain’s most internationally celebrated buildings of the time: a school in Hunstanton, a steel-and-glass evocation of Mies van der Rohe’s Chicago, mysteriously transplanted to Norfolk; and the Economist Building, a travertine slab just off St James’s in London.

Banham was attracted by what he saw as the Smithsons’ pragmatism and their sceptical view of monumentality. Later on, he was

clearly disappointed by the reluctance of his protégés to conform to his idea of what made architecture culturally relevant. He turned his attention to the young Norman Foster, who was capable, in those days, of telling potential clients that the answer to their needs might be to not build anything at all. Most unsettlingly of all for those who took a conventional view of architectural aesthetics, Foster and Banham admired the maverick visionary Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic domes.

The Braun toaster had already been the subject of a series of Hamilton’s screen prints, and an essay by Banham. These were not quite the unquestioning endorsements of timeless platonic form that we now expect of Hamilton’s work. Hamilton and Banham were conflicted about Braun. Their early attitudes to his objects – explored in an attempt to find significance in the consumerism sweeping and changing the world – were those of the Independent Group. They wanted to celebrate throwaway pop culture all the way from Cadillacs to giant refrigerators.

They were from the generation that had been through war and rationing, they endured baths limited to four inches of hot water, saw utility furniture and clothing coupons. They had had enough of restraint, and they weren’t keen on objects that were going to last forever when there might be something newer and better to come along shortly. Banham, who had a weakness for the more robust American approach to product design, complained in one of his articles about the essentially authoritarian nature of a toaster coming with an instruction manual that demanded tolerances of plus or minus four millimetres in the thickness of the bread that it could handle.

Banham enjoyed irritating people. Asked to contribute an essay to the catalogue for the Whitechapel Gallery’s exhibition on the modern chair, he used his text to mount an attack on what he called galloping furniturisation, “which may be diagnosed as an intolerable tension between culture and technology”, he claimed. “Le Corbusier’s Grand Confort when you sit in it, slowly slides you forward onto the floor with your knees up and risks cracking your spine.”

Banham called into question the whole idea of the canon of furniture design, and the way that we interact with it as he put it, “through the arse”. He had a particular objection to floor-standing air conditioning units: “At the next Triennale exhibition in Milan there will doubtless be fully arted-up versions by named designers and another service will have been furniturised another class of self-assertive objects will have got their claws into the living room carpet never to be dragged out again.”

In 1970 he devoted 1,200 words in New Society, the weekly magazine of sociology, to a piece titled the ‘Crisp at the Crossroads’.

“This sense that there is no diet busting substance in crisps is reinforced by their performance in the mouth apply tooth pressure and you get deafening action bite again and there is nothing left it’s a food that vanishes in the mouth.

IMAGE: ARCHITECTURAL PRESS ARCHIVE / RIBA COLLECTIONS

The pack is analogous in its performance, Keeping the crisp crisp means keeping water vapour away from it. Until recently the only cheap paper type flexible materials that formed effective vapour barriers were comparatively brittle and inflexible, and thus produced a lot of crinkling sound effects, whenever they were handled.

What with the crisps rattling about inside, and the pack crackling and rustling outside, you got an audio signal distinctive enough to be picked up by childish ears at 300 yards. More than this, the traditional method of sealing of the top of the pack produced a closure that could only be opened destructively and couldn’t be resealed. So eating crisps was an invitation to product sadism. You tear the pack open to get at the contents, rip it further to get at the corner lurkers in the bottom, and then crush it crackling flat in the fist before throwing it away, and probably sublimates more aggression per annum that any quantity of dramaturgical catharsis.”

He had a way of putting half-formed thoughts that had already occurred to me into words with a sharpness and wit that made an indelible impression. I remember that he once described the clipboard as the “power plank”, pointing out that the meanings of an object sometimes go beyond what its designer intended. He seemed to be offering a new way of looking at things: a modern way of understanding the modern world.

Though his analysis of everyday objects, from toasters to ice-cream vans, made him a particularly acute observer of taste, Reyner Banham did not by and large discuss fashion directly. But in his choice of neckwear, he maintained a running commentary on the changing significance of fashion. It was one of the ways in which he demonstrated his perception of himself as a truculent outsider.

Despite his doctorate from the Courtauld Institute, he was keener to talk about his days as an engineering apprentice than he was about studying with Antony Blunt, and he took to wearing a bolo tie.

In English usage, a bolo is a bootlace tie, a narrow strip of leather held in place by a silver clip, which had been popular with the Teddy boy cult of working-class dandies in the 1950s. In America the bolo tie is a manufactured tradition in the Western states with its roots going back no further than 1940. It is a form of neckwear more associated with conservative republican politicians than architectural historians. By adopting it, Banham was carefully signalling both that he knew a lot about the world of taste, and that he did not care to be part of it.

Banham could claim as his greatest achievement his transformation of the conventional Anglo-Saxon view of the modern movement. He demonstrated the significance of figures as far apart as the Russian constructivists and the Italian rationalists, who had previously been excluded from the usual narrative of mainstream 20th-century architecture. In so doing, of course, he made room for himself as a new critical voice to supplant his predecessors.

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PARTING SHOT

by Nils Leonard.

A momentary work of sublime innovation Yves Klein is blue.

An artist with an obsession for a colour.

He dallied for a while with other hues, experimenting with monochrome moments of gold and rose. But for Klein, true being was blue. He became famous for it.

Vast expanses of blue. A ferocious kick of colour. Blue smeared in thick swathes across giant squares of canvas. An obsession so large he had to conquer the colour. He needed to possess it.

To create his own. And so IKB was born, a deep hue, a blue of his very own.

So, blue.

1958. Paris. The anticipated opening of ‘The Void’.

More than 2,000 people standing in line, all of them waiting and wondering what Yves Klein would unveil next. They wait there on the street outside.

The talented, the great, the fucking rich, the hot as fuck.

The queue is heaving with excitement, only 10 allowed to enter at a time.

Drinks are served to the ones that wait. Colourful cocktails of Cointreau and gin.

There’s anticipation, loud laughter, small talk and catching up.

Sips and stories.

The coolest people on the planet being forced to wait in line, dancing in nonchalance, necking the booze to kill the burn of a peasant position in the line.

And so in tiny groups of 10 they are all allowed to enter.

Eyes scan the space, excited.

But there’s nothing there.

Just walls of white.

No art.

No paint.

No IKB. No curtain.

No unravelling.

No artistic interruption or creative mayhem.

Nothing.

Social occasions must escalate or die.

This is an orchestrated death.

No hint of the blue of being, just ghost white walls and emptiness.

‘What the fuck was the point?’

‘Who the hell does Klein think he is?’

‘What exactly did we miss?’

Answerless, they came for blue and go home red.

The night was a nothing.

They stumble drunk into their bedrooms, tired and let down.

But before they fall into their beds there is the human need to piss, the weight of cocktails crushing heavy on alcohol soaked bladders.

Zips, belts clinking and deep sighs.

And then a jet of pure blue piss into the toilet.

There it is.

The pure IKB. Warm and wet, the perfect colour streaming and steaming from more than 2,000 bladders, in bathrooms spread across the city.

Breathless they must have been.

Staring in disbelief at themselves in the bathroom mirror.

Yelling for someone, anyone, to witness the fact their own bodies and an unspoken act had become art. You’d never flush that toilet again.

No canvas or bronze could have offered the emotion that those carefully mixed cocktails did that evening. No timeline to post this onto. Just gasps. And revelation. And memory.

A story as vivid as that liquid blue even 70 years later.

This is it.

It is funny and ugly. Deep. And unbelievably moving.

The unshackled escapologist swimming up from watery depths.

The whisper that became Woodstock.

1,000 songs in your pocket.

The EpiPen. The Tampon. Apollo 11. Jordan 1s.

This is design.

Drunk and ridiculed the social elite leave in small clusters and disperse into the city, filtering out into the Parisian night. No mobiles to hate into back then, there is no one to tell of their ridicule, of the arrogance of Klein for wasting their time.

It is every story that lives and lives.

So they curse to themselves, spit insults in the air.

They witnessed empty walls, came home with a party bag of questions.

These are what I live for.

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Small moments that remain with us, immortal and hot in our chests.

Nils Leonard is the founder of Uncommon Creative Studio.

Albert Camus’ note to Klein from the night, which reads: With the void, full powers.

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’’I’M OUT HERE IN REAL LIFE, I...

I DON’T KNOW. I TRY TOHIDE.‘‘

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Discussing his work and himself after the release of Passages, Franz Rogowski talks about the traps of selves both real and performed.

It’s a recognisable Berlin type, the beautiful man speeding past on a lithe French bike, and indeed I’d felt lucky when I saw At the end of Ira Sachs’ 2023 film Passages, the protagonist, Tomas, played by the Rogowski in that role once a few years ago, German actor Franz Rogowski, endures two brutal, entirely deserved rejections darting around a corner in Kreuzberg. So by both his soon-to-be-ex-husband, Martin, and his estranged lover, Agathe.

I was surprised when he rolled up to our Bereft, on his knees, wearing a ridiculous outfit, he is hunched and suffering breakfast on one of those weird little foldin the hallway of the grade school where Agathe works — he has interrupted ing bikes, in startup blue, and a helmet. her class to make his doomed entreaty – when a brusque employee shoos him “German engineering,” he said. He was away. His response is to get on his beat-up vintage racing bike and go. The final wearing a black T-shirt and jeans cuffed shots of the film show Tomas riding, skillfully but recklessly, with the energetic for the bike. “I’m getting old, and I have a physical control Rogowski brings to pretty much every part he plays, through bit of a back problem, and this has suspenthe streets and sidewalks of Paris. Maybe there are tears glistening in his eyes, sion in the back. I’m experimenting a bit but he is also free. with different kinds of exercises – some are This was how, more or less, Rogowski would show up to meetings with Sachs dangerous, some are necessary.” during the making of the film. “He would always arrive out of breath on a bike, “It’s interesting,” he continued, “even like, jumping a curb,” Sachs told me. “It inspired me to rewrite the end of the sex can cause pain. Like, you need to find film with Franz as the kamikaze bike rider that he is.” the right position. And to a certain extent, it feels ridiculous to be saying those things when you’re 37. But I guess that’s when it starts.”

The other dangerous exercise is rock climbing, but even without it, it’s not hard to imagine how Rogowski developed a back problem. A former dancer and theatre actor who was kicked out of Swiss clown school after leaving traditional school at 16, he has become, over the last several years, both a beloved star of European arthouse cinema and, according to the New York Times, an “unlikely sex symbol” for the sickening combination of his shy, sensitive face and

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middle of the film, Pierre appears on a karaoke stage, with the neon lyrics to Sia’s ‘Chandelier’ thrilling physical intelligence. He is also, simply, one of the best actors projected onto his torso. He follows them theatriworking today, and so not to be trusted. But this is why we love actors: cally, and then he begins to vogue, and kick, and fling his arms into the air. His amateur singing most people are not to be trusted, but actors are explicit about it. After an hour together I determined the random comment about sex made voice transforms into grunts as his effort intenwithin the first five minutes of our interview was less an indication of sifies. He cartwheels one-handed, still holding put-on naughtiness and more a misguided attempt at acknowledging the microphone. He does a handstand, balances this uncomfortable situation. His background as a dancer is obvious in his feet on the low ceiling, and sings a few bars the graceful movements of his thick forearms and bouldered hands, but upside down. He does several more cartwheels, he is otherwise tentative and tense. He slumps, his shoulders rounded; pushes himself up from the ground into another he is so compact that he seems small, though he is not. When we met, handstand position, does pushups in the handhe spoke with his head tilted to one side, bad for the back again, and stand, and rolls around on the floor. The audience, focused his gaze almost exclusively at some point to my right. seen in the reflection of the mirror at the back of He is often cast as a man complicatedly in love, thwarted by identhe stage, offers restrained encouragement; they tity and circumstance. In Christian Petzold’s Transit (2018), he plays can’t believe him. And then, suddenly, he stops. a refugee in a contemporary version of occupied France who begins He’s hurt himself, or he’s going to be sick, or he’s posing as a dead writer in the hopes of getting passage on a ship to flee realised he’s too drunk to be doing this. His entire body becomes tense with some kind of pain, and the Continent; when he meets the dead writer’s wife, who has come to Marseille to search for her husband, unaware that he has died, he falls the audience grows quiet and concerned before in love with her, and struggles to tell her that the missed connections he slowly crawls to the wall and pulls himself up. she believes she’d had with her husband have been with him – he’s In Passages, the obstacle to his character’s been using the dead writer’s documents at the consulates where she’s romantic prosperity is not society, or fate, but his been searching for him. In Thomas Stuber’s In the Aisles (2018), he is own attention span. A mercurial director dissata forklift operator at a supermarket who falls for the married woman in isfied in his marriage to Martin (Ben Whishaw), charge of confectionery; he has a dark past, and she a dark present. In Tomas meets Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos) at the wrap party for his new film and self-consciously Petzold’s Undine (2020), his lover is a water nymph who can only live dances, with that shy, sensitive face, into bed on land if she is in love with a mortal man, but if that man ever betrays her, she must kill him; Rogowski’s character, Christoph, shows up with her. The rest of the film observes Tomas when this fate has already been set in motion, and he becomes caught following his conflicting desires, back and forth up in the myth. In Sebastian Meise’s Great Freedom (2021), he is a gay between them. He appears alternately strong and man repeatedly imprisoned under Germany’s Paragraph 175, which bird-chested, ripped and exposed, depending on criminalised sex between men in the country until an age of consent whom he is trying to convince to stay with him was established in 1969; the story spans more than 20 years, and twice despite their better judgment; his timing is often his lovers end up in prison with him, though the most moving of the very funny. Reviewers have called the character film’s several crushing narrative arcs is his romantic friendship with “toxic”, manipulative, and a narcissist, even as they acknowledge how compelling he is. We a convicted murderer and drug addict.

What unites these star turns with Rogowski’s smaller roles is a agreed these terms are reductive. “He despersense of complete openness; he is always going for it, emotionally and ately wants to build and to relate,” Rogowski physically, as if he has considered no alternative. Sachs says he first said, “but he’s very unstable, especially when it knew he wanted to work with Rogowski when he saw Michael Haneke’s comes to relating to himself and knowing who 2017 film Happy End, in which Rogowski plays a supporting role as he is. He’s highly dependent on feedback – emoPierre, the moody, alcoholic son of a wealthy family. At one point in the tional feedback, also cultural feedback, as an artist. So that’s why I think to a certain extent, he’s innocent.”

If the film’s final scene, on the bike, is inspired

by Sachs’ actual relationship with Rogowski, the rest of the film is inspired by an imagined version of the actor. Sachs wrote the role of Tomas with Rogowski in mind, which means Sachs used an idea of Rogowski he’d gotten from his other roles to make a new character out of him.

Rogowski was intimidated. “When you hear this line, you know, okay, I will disappoint that person,” he said. “I can’t possibly be who he thinks I am. And that’s something that happens more and more. The more people know you or think to know you, the more scary it can become to meet people in real life.”

In this case, divergence from the character might not be so disappointing.

Still, Rogowski says he puts “a lot of effort” into answering the question of who he is; he has developed a Profilneurose, a colloquial term for “when you’re kind of neurotic about your social profile”, seeking constant validation. “I don’t feel good about myself unless I create some kind of relationship with something other than me,” he said. “If I just exist, I feel like I shouldn’t.”

Surely this is true, to greater or lesser degrees, of everyone; we all want, as Rogowski does, to “be free”, but we need other people as much as they get in our way. From that perspective, starring in a film like Passages must have been especially tantalising, or disorienting. The film allows Tomas to seek the feedback he wants whimsically, without apparent fear of consequence, as if Sachs has translated the unbridled performances Rogowski delivers as an actor into a mode of relating to others.

The film also avoids the constrained approach to questions of identity that its marketing suggested it might represent. “I slept with a woman last night,”

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Tomas says in the trailer, implying the film will feature conflict around Tomas’s sexuality; it does not, which creates a sense of momentum and possibility uncommon in contemporary anglophone cinema, even as many discussions of the film can’t help but touch on this untapped drama. “Cinema often tries to create a simplified version of life,” Rogowski said, “and maybe, therefore, we expect a queer movie to somehow also come up with some answers to all those nowadays quite complicated boxes and labels that were created around sexuality. I’m happy that the movie doesn’t really answer those questions.”

Because I’m not really a journalist, I am not bound to ask the prurient questions many other journalists have asked, or implied, about Rogowski’s love life and sexuality, to which he tends to respond with some expression of the evolved and conveniently evasive position that gender and sexuality are fluid, and categories like “man” and “woman” and “gay” and “straight” are limiting. An issue of theory versus practice. “The real division is not, you know, are you gay? Are you queer?” he told me. “The real division is, are you working class? Are you upper class? Where do you belong? I think more and more, there’s this little bubble of people that belong to the big capitals of the world, and they can move, and they’re free. And the rest have been pushed to the outskirts.” What journalists really want to ask, I suspect, is: would he sleep with me?

If we ask too much of actors – if we overstep with them, project onto them, want too badly to try our hand with them – it is because the actor can be what others cannot: someone else. He He was holding, motionless, a piece of bread for the duration of this represents the fantasy that the roles we play monologue. “Do you feel empty?” I asked. in our public lives might not have to reflect, or “Yeah,” he said. “I’m very much ADHD. My inner melody is like” – here affect, who we “really” are; in playing constant he shook his head very fast and made a cartoonish noise to indicate crazicharacters, the actor supports the comforting ness – “a terrible noise. Somewhere in between euphoria and depression.”

In Passages, Tomas’s wardrobe consists of flamboyantly androgynous illusion that character is fixed, that there is a stable relationship between one’s public persona and somehow sexily ill-fitting clothes that look borrowed from a girlfriend and private life. Off-screen, this responsibility or found on the street: the famous mesh crop top becomes a sight gag; the is probably a burden; they are not who they play loose-knit sweaters under which he wears nothing; the snakeskin jacket onscreen, but they also kind of are, if not before that’s a little too tight; the ratty brown teddy coat a little too big; the leopthe role, then after. ard-print pants that have lost their shape, and might have been designed for Rogowski mentioned a hypothetical situasomeone a bit taller. A person who dresses like this just puts on whatever tion in which he might direct something, and he feels like wearing that day – with no forethought and little worry about I asked if he wanted to direct. “Every actor appropriateness or convention. “He’s defying social norms, in a way that wants to be something else,” he said. “There’s is both wonderful and uncomfortable,” Sachs said of Tomas. The character a lack of authorship and a lot of pretending. has a childish impulsivity and lack of concern for others that is the dark And it kind of makes sense – the emptier you side of his dazzling outfits. Even when he dresses less obtrusively, his are, the more somebody else can fill you with immaturity shows; at a holiday party, his belt, pulled too tight, is revealed something. And you’ll just be very, you know, to have ridden up, creating a small gap above his waistband.

Rogowski’s soulfulness invites tenderness, maybe even patronising, happily pulling the plow because you’ve been but his body is made for these confrontational clothes. He was allowed to standing around screaming, ‘I’m a horse! I’m a horse! Give me work!’” (He joke-screamed keep some of his wardrobe after production was completed, and indeed this part.) “But it’s not really yours – you’re an both the character and his outfits seem to belong in Berlin, where everyinterpreter, you’re a vase to be filled with water one is trying out new identities at the bars and clubs, for better or worse, or whatever. And I do feel this tension. I think even past Rogowski’s age. In his 20s, Rogowski said, he did something I’m where I belong for now. But I hope I will similar – went to bars, to Berghain, trying “to find my chances – someone grow into something that is not so dependent that would somehow take my hand.” Now, though, he says he has five or 10 friends and rarely goes out – not to bars, or parties, or concerts, or even on others, to make circumstances to create.” to the cinema. When I asked where he wears the fabulous outfits from Passages, about which he’d expressed excitement in other interviews, he told me he just wears them at home.

“I’ve chosen to be in front of the camera, but the real me is actually somebody who loves to observe,” he said. “And a part of me also just wants to dissolve, you know, in a cloud of ketamine on an orgy and have it all at once.” (Ketamine has a dissociative effect that sometimes allows a person to imagine they can see themselves from the outside, among other things.)

“But they’re different voices in your soul,” he continued, “and I guess one of the voices in me tells me that I don’t deserve to celebrate and to wear extroverted stuff. I have to earn it. And I haven’t earned it yet. Which I know is a silly and stupid, very German way of thinking, but I can only do it in a movie, or on a certain occasion that creates the circumstances. But when I’m out here in real life, I… I don’t know. I try to hide. I try to be on the bike as fast as I can, so I’m already gone before you see me.” This doesn’t sound like freedom. But that’s why I trusted it.

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Asked what architects can do about impending environmental catastrophe, social inequality, poverty, the degradation of the planet’s resources, and the many other nightmares that face us, Jacques Herzog’s reply was bracingly terse. “Nothing,” began his open letter, published by Domus magazine.

It was written during the bleakest months of the pandemic lockdown in answer to questions from its editor, David Chipperfield, trying to start a public conversation with the architectural profession.

“We architects cannot prevent the commercialisation of art, and certainly not a real estate boom. That relates to international monetary policy and investment strategies.

Which architect would refrain from building a pretty little tower, thus actively supporting the real estate bubble, boosting his own prominence and generating square kilometres of vacant residential and office space? We architects need clients. The more famous the architectural office, the more it will attract not just potential clients and investors, but governments as well.”

Had he chosen to, Herzog might well have been able to avoid all architecture’s messy politicking. In the 1970s he was exhibiting his work as an artist in Basel, alongside Vito Acconci, John Baldessari and Ian Hamilton Finlay. The Stampa Gallery still holds charcoal on paper artworks that he made during those years. But despite the compromises that architecture demands, he decided to leave the art world and try to build. “There are more people in art who are interesting, who explore and are curious. On the other hand, architecture offers opportunities that are not available in art, specifically in view of urban architecture and dealing with cities,” he explained to one interviewer.

While acknowledging the commercial uses of fame, Herzog and his co-founder, Pierre de Meuron, are sceptical about the cult of architectural celebrity and the flood of exhibitionist buildings that it has produced. Since the two began work on their first commission, an attic conversion for a Basel doctor in 1978, they have established a reputation for original thinking and a collaborative approach. The official name of the office still bears their names, but H&dM (Herzog & de Meuron) have grown

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Christine Binswanger

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Jacques Herzog

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Pierre de Meuron

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into a sophisticated organisation with more than 600 people, owned by its 16 partners and associate partners.

They have worked all over the world, designing hotels for Ian Schrager in New York, shops for Miuccia Prada in Tokyo and museums from Hong Kong to Doha. They built Munich’s football stadium, and designed another that would have been even more imposing for Chelsea at Stamford Bridge, had the plans gone ahead. They have also designed several hospitals, as well an impressive amount of social housing, and many industrial buildings.

Some of their projects are intentionally on a monumental scale, others are much humbler; each of them is driven by ideas as well as by utilitarian concerns. “For us a new project is always a new start,” says de Meuron. “You can use your experience, but to build in India and to build in Basel is different. Every project has its own reality. We should always reflect that. If you don’t like a chair, you put it in your cellar, or you can give it away. A building is not like that. It is immobile, and it’s there for decades. The client has a programme and a brief, and we enter into a pact with them, to achieve what they need, but we have to care about all the other things that matter as well.”

They have never been committed to any particular architectural language. Instead they have explored a wide range of sources and starting points. Postmodernism, hightech, and deconstructivism have all come and gone since they opened their studio, without leaving much of a trace on their work. Their two most powerful early influences were the artist Joseph Beuys, whom they met in 1978, and Aldo Rossi, the Italian rationalist architect – their professor when they were students in Zurich.

While each of their projects needs to be its “own thing”, as Herzog puts it, they share two interconnected strategies. One is an unusually close working relationship with artists. Over the years they have collaborated with Rémy Zaugg, Ai Weiwei, Michael Craig Martin, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky and many others. It’s a relationship that depends on the architects having self-confidence, to be willing to cede control long enough to allow another sensibility to permeate the architectural concept at a fundamental level. It is

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the polar opposite of confining art to a closely defined area of wall, or space. The other H&dM strategy is to go back to what might seem like the first principles of architecture.

Speaking of the practice’s newly built National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, Herzog went as far as to suggest that architecture is “an archaic practice, a quality that is precisely what allows it to survive in this digital age”.

They have made buildings out of such ancient materials as mud and copper, timber, stone, and rammed earth.

Without becoming formulaic, this openness to ideas from outside the conventional boundaries of architecture, together with their fascination for materiality has allowed H&dM to push back against the diminishing role of the architect. In many circumstances, architecture has dwindled to a choice between one commercial product for the skin of a building and another.

It’s not how H&dM see architecture.

Herzog and de Meuron see a connection between their work and the context of Basel, the city in which they first met, as seven-yearold schoolboys in 1957. Though it has less than 200,000 inhabitants within its official limits, Basel is Switzerland’s most international city. Almost 40 per cent of the population are foreign born, the result of its location at the point that Swiss, French and German frontiers meet. It has an airport that is actually on French territory. Unlike other major Swiss cities, Basel’s prosperity is built on the research-led culture of its pharmaceutical industry, rather than banking. It’s where Albert Hofmann began his experiments with manufacturing psychedelic drugs, and invented LSD in 1938. The city has an equally strong commitment to contemporary art, and both elements inform their work.

Basel architectural history is distinct. It was where Hannes Meyer – the Marxist who succeeded Walter Gropius at the Bauhaus, later moving to Moscow – was born. Hans Schmidt, a founding member of the Swiss communist party, who had also worked in the Soviet Union, built several houses in the city, and de Meuron acquired and restored one of them. It’s a period that interests them, but this is, in their words, a different time, and not one for architectural manifestos.

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Back in 1992 H&dM explored a potential future for Basel, and what they called a ‘trinational conurbation’, speculating about how the city could grow across international borders. It looked at where the city could accommodate high-rise buildings and suggested new uses for the semi-derelict freight yards and frontier zones. It mapped the city’s eventual future. Basel today is, in practical if not political terms, a city of 500,000 people, since it includes territory in Germany and France as well as Switzerland.

“I am Francophone,” says Pierre to de Meuron. “Jacques wanted to experience French culture, so we studied together in Lausanne for a year, then we went to Zurich. The time of the masters was over when we were students.

The heroes, Mies and Le Corbusier, were passing away. We were not following anything, it was more a process of finding out what was relevant; in a way it was a relief, we could explore what we were interested in.” Then they returned to Basel to open their studio.

Herzog suggests that the two of them could have gone to London, but they weren’t ready to cross that frontier.

In fact, it’s hard to see how they could have built a studio like theirs anywhere but Basel.

In Britain, a building contract is the start of a legal battle over money and blame. In Switzerland, it is an agreement between two parties that have a certain mutual respect.

On a hot late afternoon in August, Basel looks like a model for urban utopia. The streets are traffic free; cyclists give way to pedestrians; the trams are frequent and spotless. Both banks of the Rhine are packed with groups of families and friends, taking a swim after work in the now clear waters of the river.

The embankments are lined with cafes and food trucks.

It’s a city that wears its wealth lightly.

Outside the Drei Könige, the city’s traditional grand hotel, a new Bentley has been lovingly painted with the hotel’s name to suggest that it has been the subject of an attack by graffiti artists armed with spray cans.

If Basel has shaped H&dM, they have certainly helped to shape the city in return.

At the most modest, they have built an openair public swimming pool on the edge of the Rhine, and the most visible schemes are their

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designs for Roche, the pharmaceutical giant, culminating in two of the tallest office towers in Switzerland. H&dM have refurbished and designed an extension to Basel’s Stadcasino and built the Messe hall, home to Art Basel, where billionaires wander the aisles stocking up on Francis Bacon and Gerhard Richter as if they were wheeling trolleys around the aisles of a supermarket.

H&dM work from two spaces in the city, but the original office is a complex of buildings of varying provenance all overlooking the Rhine. Entrance is through a copper gate perforated and puckered, much like the cladding that the practice designed for the de Young Museum in San Francisco. The oldest section is a free-standing 19th-century villa, sitting on a thousand-year-old complex of cellars. Its exterior walls are painted a shade of oxblood dark red, while the floors and walls inside are lined with wood that creaks and groans as you walk from one room to another. The most recent extension is a block directly overlooking the river, designed and built by the practice.

Around the courtyard is a modelling workshop, and a refectory. A metal box accommodates a meeting room.

Architecture is not for the fainthearted.

H&dM have not escaped wounding criticism for some of their projects. They devoted their installation at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012 to their Hamburg concert hall – much of it took the form of hostile newspaper coverage of constant cost escalations. “And we got attacked for that too,” de Meuron remembers. Their project for a new museum adjacent to Mies van der Rohe’s National Gallery in Berlin has been attacked for not doing enough to address climate change. In London, Griff Rhys Jones led the campaign against their plans to build on top of Liverpool Street Station. In Paris, the mayor, Anne Hidalgo, faced down opposition to her determination to build the 180-metre-high Tour Triangle, the first skyscraper in the city for 40 years.

“It’s very painful,” de Meuron confesses. But despite Herzog’s apparent fatalism about architectural practice, it did not stop H&dM from making the financially even more painful decision to stop their Russian projects as soon as Putin invaded Ukraine, in 2022.

And they speak of their interest in working

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in such charged atmospheres as Hong Kong and Jerusalem, where architecture can take on a political role.

Read in its entirety, Herzog’s reply to Chipperfield suggests a rather less astringent approach than the bluntness of his terse opening words. He does acknowledge that architecture can play a part, at the very least, in making life “more pleasant”. He points not to any of the prestige cultural projects that have defined H&dM. Instead, he singles out the clinic that they and their partner Christine Binswanger designed for the long-term rehabilitation of paraplegic and trauma patients in Basel, a low-slung timber building set in a park, designed to offer people deprived of movement for long periods the consolations of sunlight and a connection with the seasons and the weather. It has an interior designed around those who spend each day flat on a hospital bed, unable to move, understanding the importance of the ceiling.

“There is practically no other building by H&dM that embodies such a holistic combination of landscape, city and interior. And which provides an experience equally accessible to all those who live and work in those spaces.

Patients, doctors, healthcare workers, visitors.

Obviously, architects always say that they learn from their projects. But in this case it isn’t simply lip service. Healthcare is a totally neglected field. Architects were rarely allowed to get involved, and when they did, they were unable to turn the hospital into a worthwhile, liveable place. Even some of the medically best-appointed clinics in the world are often boring boxes, ugly monsters made even uglier by proliferating extensions.”

Herzog and de Meuron have had a special relationship with London going back to 1994, when they were appointed to transform the derelict Bankside Power Station into Tate Modern. It wasn’t their first project outside Switzerland, but it was the one that marked their emergence into international prominence. In contrast to the pristine polish of MoMA’s new wing, built at the same time in New York, Tate was the first major cultural institution ready to take on a redundant industrial building and give it a new life.

They went on to build an apartment tower at Canary Wharf, the Blavatnik School of Govern-

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ment at Oxford and the Laban Dance Centre in London. The London connection underpins the Royal Academy’s exhibition on their work this year. At the opening, Pierre de Meuron talked about his work in Brazil, Christine Binswanger discussed the Zurich children’s hospital and Jacques Herzog gave an account of his design process for a project for the Alexander Calder Foundation in Philadelphia.

Pierre de Meuron has treated the practice itself as a design, one that has become as significant as any of his architectural designs.

In doing so he has created the infrastructure on which his partners, all with different priorities, can rely. “Of course, 45 years ago we didn’t see what the studio would become one day. But there were two of us from the start.

It’s always been good to be able to question your own thinking, to be able to debate within the office, to work with different characters, with different skills. We are generalists, but we also have specialists within the team, people who really know about sustainability, or about technology.”

And they remain generalists. There isn’t one team of designers devoted to tall buildings, or another made up of residential specialists.

H&dM’s architects work on the whole range of the practice’s work. Senior partner Christine Binswanger for example, who joined in 1991, is working simultaneously on Vancouver’s museum of modern art, and the Zurich children’s hospital. “We have a spread of partners of different generations, and from different origins, which is what makes it work,” she says. Jason Frantzen, another senior partner who took the decision to move from America to live in Basel, leads the team for the National Library of Israel in Jersualem, but also built a car park in Miami after joining in 2005.

“The company is constantly moving; we are thinking about how we can improve what we do. We think about how we are perceived, and how it will be after Jacques and myself stop, how it will be when we hand over. There will be no families and no third parties involved,” says de Meuron. “Ownership is going to those who work in the office.” As Herzog puts it, “This is not about altruism; Pierre and I want to make sure that we go on working on interesting projects for as long as we can, and this is the way to do it.”

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SIGNAL BOXES

CLIENT Swiss Federal Railways

LOCATION Basel

YEAR 1988–1995

LOCATION Napa Valley, California

YEAR 1995-1998

At the end of the 1980s Herzog and de Meuron designed a trio of signal boxes, slipped into the tangle of railway tracks and marshalling yards that form the approaches to Basel’s main station. They wrapped them in copper; partly because the metal created a Faraday cage, screening signalling systems from electromagnetic interference, but mainly because there was something inherently appealing to them about the idea of a metallic sculptural object. Copper, they knew, would react to weather over time – shielding the façade in twisted copper ribbons meant they could inject complexity into the form of an otherwise utilitarian structure.

DOMINUS WINERY

CLIENT Christian Moueix

The most memorable element of the Dominus winery in California is a wall of natural stone boulders caged in woven steel baskets, stretching apparently endlessly into the landscape of vines. This visceral materiality in their work has lived on since, in a rammed-earth factory building for Ricola and the Schaulager, an art storage, exhibition and research space for the Laurenz Foundation, with an exterior made from excavated clay.

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PRADA AOYAMA

CLIENT Prada

LOCATION Tokyo

YEAR 2000–2003

LOCATION Mulhouse–Brunstatt, France

YEAR 1992–1993

Herzog and de Meuron’s freestanding building for Prada in Tokyo has four different types of specially made glass; some flat and clear, others etched for modesty mark the changing rooms. Some bubble outwards, while others are sucked in, as if the building were breathing. The same themes shape the interior. The ceilings are perforated metal, into which a series of black holes, sucking the surface smoothly inward to make way for the lights, have been inserted. In the corridors, the lights go the other way, marked by dollops of silicone gel bubbling outwards. The interior demonstrates an almost perverse interest in mixing hairy surfaces with viscous finishes. Some display racks are sheathed in pony skin, others are coated in silicon.

There are tables in moulded, see-through fibreglass, and some are filled with fibre optics like jellyfish tentacles.

RICOLA PRODUCTION AND STORAGE BUILDING

CLIENT Ricola Europe

One of several factory buildings for Ricola has walls made of polycarbonate sheets that have been silkscreened with images based on herbs photographed in the 1920s by the pioneering artist Karl Blossfeldt.

Herzog once discussed how important it was to get the scale of the images right, an issue that he asked the artist Rémy Zaugg to consider. Too small, and the leaf images would take on the quality of bathroom tiles, too large on the other hand, and they would become an over-dominant, commanding presence as big as a human figure.

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JACKSON WEARS LOUIS VUITTON SS19 SPECIAL THANK NAME NAME

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JASON

JULIE

ZEGNA

WINTER

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CATCHING UP WITH THE RENOWNED ACTOR, WRITER AND DIRECTOR, OFF THE HEELS OF NEXT GOAL WINS, A FILM FOLLOWING THE 2014 AMERICAN SAMOA FOOTBALL TEAM‘SATTEMPTSTOQUALIFY FOR THE FIFAWORLD CUP.

DOING A SPORTS FILM IS BREAKING NEW GROUND FOR TAIKA WAITITI, BUT THAT’S NEVER BEEN A PROBLEM – IT’S OFTEN WHAT DRAWS HIM TO PROJECTS IN THE FIRST PLACE . BEING NERVOUS LEADS SOMEWHERE COOL

TAIKA WAITITI is 17 hours away from me. If I had the money and patience to take a flight from New York to Auckland, then I could have talked to him in person, but since time and budget are both big concerns, I agree to Zoom. And to be honest, talking to somebody on your computer screen isn’t the worst thing imaginable. It beats the phone. You can see the subject’s eyes as they’re contemplating their next words, watch their mouth to make sure they’re done talking so you don’t interrupt them. In the case of my talk with the director, writer, and actor who has spent the last decade carving out a unique spot for himself in film and television, it’s at least sunny where he is on his home island of New Zealand. He’s had enough success over the last few years that he can be there more, and in a place like Hollywood less. It’s almost noon where he is, nearly seven at night my time, and the rain is pouring outside my window. I appreciate seeing the sunshine on the other end. But for Waititi, whose first big hit outside his home country was the 2014 mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, about a group of vampires living as roommates in the island’s suburb of Wellington, being home and not being stuck around the heart of the American movie industry is part of his process.

“Basically, I’m a tradesman,” he says. His mother is a teacher, his father was a farmer, and Waititi approaches what he does in a similar way as his parents. The difference, of course, is he gets to make movies that millions of people see, put on Armani and Prada suits to walk red carpets all over the world, and

let’s face it, he likely makes much more money than a teacher and farmer combined. But still, he sees it as “the same fucking thing. I just do versions of that where it’s…” He pauses a moment to think. It seems as if he’s going to maybe go a different route, but Waititi seems to follow through on all the thoughts he has and doesn’t really hold back. The word he was going to use was “glamorous”, but then he says that the life of a filmmaker isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

“Eighty per cent of the meals I eat while I’m working in this industry are lukewarm food out of a cardboard box that’s been delivered from somewhere and it’s fucking shit. And it’s not glamorous. And it’s like every time I eat, [it] makes me sadder. I’m like, where’s this Bob Evans lifestyle I wanted where I’m fucking eating out at the fucking fancy places all the time.” Then he gets to the rub: “Then you do eat out at fancy places and you’re sick of that food and you’re sick of the people and I dunno, there’s no answers other than just like, you need to chill out and come live in New Zealand.”

Early on, New Zealand played a big part in Waititi’s work. It was where he set stories, worked with his friends, and shot his first four films. By movie number five, Hollywood came calling, the way the city has always been interested in “international” filmmakers. It’s not always the easiest transition for directors, and the history of cinema has more than a few big names from Italy, Korea, or France who did one or two films in sunny Southern California

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before taking the first plane home. Waititi’s first task was to take his vision and sensibility and not just direct a film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe – the type of film that is almost always at the centre of any conversation about The Death of Cinema, as well as an all-but-guaranteed box-office hit – but revamp a franchise focused on one of the company’s most famous superheroes, Thor. It was no small task, but not only did Waititi make a successful film that cleared over $800 million at box offices worldwide, critics actually liked Thor: Ragnarok. It was undeniably a Marvel film, but it was fun and more importantly, funny. It was noticeable that the director was able to do something on set that freed Chris Hemsworth up, making the fact that he was playing a very handsome Norse god something that the audience could laugh at. Somebody in the industry might call it the director’s “magic formula”, and if Waititi wanted, he likely could have coasted off the success for the rest of his career, getting somebody to drive him from his house in the Hollywood Hills down to the movie studio to make one big, easy money maker after another. But that’s not how he likes to do things. “It doesn’t matter what it is. It doesn’t matter if you think it’s going to be a home run from the beginning,” he says of his thought process behind any project he’s involved in.

“Inevitably, you’re going to question why you made the film. Will anyone relate? Will anybody care or like it?”

That sounds like typical artist worry. No matter how successful you are, there’s always

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going to be a fear that people just don’t appreciate what you do. Yet the difference between somebody else worrying if people will like or appreciate their work and Waititi doing it is the fact that hardly anything he does makes sense when you first hear about it. His credits include writing, directing, and producing the What We Do in the Shadows vampires, a Marvel character, the pirates of the hilarious cult TV show Our Flag Means Death, and managing to carve some space between Mel Brooks’ The Producers and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds for a movie about Nazis that’s actually funny: 2019’s Jojo Rabbit, which went up for multiple Oscar categories, and netted Waititi the award for Best Adapted Screenplay. There’s no easy answer to how Waititi should follow up on any of his projects, and that’s part of the fun of following along with his career; you’re almost always surprised by what’s next. Following a return to the MCU with 2022’s Thor: Love and Thunder, Waititi did the most Waititi thing he could and went in the last direction anybody saw him going in by making a family-friendly sports movie, Next Goal Wins.

The reason was pretty simple: “I like sports films,” he says. He mentions classics like The Bad News Bears from 1976 or Cool Runnings, the 1993 feel-good Disney comedy about the Jamaican bobsled team at the 1988 Winter Olympics. The thing is that sports films – funny sports films that you can take the kids to – aren’t exactly going to get you compared to Hitchcock or Kubrick, but the

movies Waititi mentions as his influences going into Next Goal Wins are the type that become cultural cornerstones for people who see them when they’re younger. You might have a ranking of your favorite Tarkovsky films, but if you were a kid in the 1990s, it’s almost certain a film like Cool Runnings or The Sandlot secretly means more to you. And besides, Waititi is his own director with his own sensibilities and interests. The one problem with that, however, is that the sport Next Goal Wins is centered around, football, isn’t actually a big interest of his. “I don’t really know anything about soccer,” he says. He’s a rugby fan. But watching the film this feature is based on, a 2014 documentary of the same name, something clicked. “This seems to be a weird move for me, doing a sports film. So that makes me nervous. And whenever I feel nervous about approaching something, I know that at least it’ll be interesting, and I’ll probably come up with something cool.”

The sports film can be tough to pull off. For every Rocky or Friday Night Lights, there are three schmaltzy stinkers full of dogs that can play basketball, kids inheriting then managing professional baseball teams, racist and sexist tropes, and the inevitable David vs Goliath storyline of the rag-tag bunch of misfits making it to the promised land against all odds and expectations. Waititi came up with a smart formula for Next Goal Wins: he embraces some of the fun and silly things you’d expect from a movie about a team sport from a film aimed at kids in the 1990s – maybe knowing

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full well those former kids, now adults, will form part of his audience – and, as he puts it, “there’s barely any sports” in the movie. More than a few directors, from William Friedkin to Hal Ashby, have learned first-hand how difficult it can be to shoot actors actually playing a sport their characters are supposed to excel at.

Beyond the way the film looks, or the brand of humour laced throughout, there is another huge, telling thing that lets the viewer know they’re watching a Waititi film. Next Goal Wins tracks the true story of the American Samoa national football team, considered the worst in the world after a decade of consecutive losses, starting with a 31-0 drubbing by Australia in 2001. The Samoan team doesn’t have big aspirations when Dutch-American coach Thomas Rongen (played by Michael Fassbender) arrives, and far from dreaming of winning the 2014 World Cup they train to qualify for, they just want to score a goal. That’s it. One goal would be great. It’s fun and heartwarming, and the reason Waititi makes it work where other directors might fail is because one of the big themes of his career has been telling stories about and with Indigenous people, both from the part of the globe he comes from in the South Pacific, and beyond. When I talk to him, the show he co-created with American filmmaker Sterlin Harjo, Reservation Dogs, is winding towards its series finale. The show has been lauded by critics as one of the best things on television, and a very moving, often funny portrayal of the lives of a group of Indigenous teenagers in a broken Oklahoma town. “My

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hope is we get to at least keep making stuff so that we can start surprising people,” he says.

It can be difficult to take stock of what Waititi is doing in real time. A director’s legacy-in-progress isn’t usually discussed while they’re still building an oeuvre, especially a director who has shown a knack for making big box office movies meant to please the masses like Waititi. But his work helping to get stories of and by Indigenous people and communities out into the world is something that’s long overdue, and his parallel place as a big-name filmmaker makes him the public face of a small, growing movement. He’s quick to point out how culture still sees native peoples worldwide, the very wrong assumptions and stereotypes that he’s trying to break down.

“Everybody assumes the Pacific, it’s all tiki bars, but those are a made-up white thing.

It’s all completely bastardised designs, people saying, I made it Polynesian-themed. But we hate tiki bars. Whenever somebody sees that stuff and says, it’s from your home, I’m like, I want to burn this thing down,” he says before adding, “So don’t invite me to your tiki party.”

But it’s not just his part of the world that Waititi – who is Māori on his father’s side, and Ashkenazi Jewish on his mother’s – sees it in. “There are still places where this kind of shit is happening,” he says, before noting the almost annual news of some fashion house or attendees at a music festival in North America appropriating the dress of tribes that once lived on the same land. “In Spain and Ibiza – I mean, Europe is always 400 years behind everybody else – you go to these shops and they’re just

GROOMING: MELISSA DEZARATE PRODUCTION: UNDERHILL FILM

full of Native American headdresses for white people,” he shakes his head in disbelief before mimicking a white person trying to justify their decision to don a feathered war bonnet as a style choice. “My grandmother is a Comanche princess!”

Waititi can joke about it because that’s what he does; his first aim is to make people laugh, and laughter is a sneaky way to make people understand and accept things better.

The big, unifying figure in his work – whether it’s vampires going about their unlives in the suburbs, Indigenous people living in a colonised world, or even the Norse God of Thunder trying to navigate the human world – is ultimately the outsider. It’s a theme he can identify with, in part just because of where he’s from.

New Zealand is “an island of four-million people and we’re so far away from anything. If you want to escape, the nearest place is Australia, which is an absolute shithole,” he says. The two countries have long had a rivalry with one another, but growing up, it was always New Zealand that was last to get everything, including shows and movies from the US and UK that made Waititi and his friends work especially hard to develop their own culture: the movies, shows, and jokes that have come to define Kiwi humour over the last few decades.

“We never really fit in with anywhere. But coming from places like New Zealand and Australia and the colonies, smaller places that have often been forgotten about, our cringe meter is very sensitive. We’ve spent our entire lives laughing at the cheesiness of Hollywood films and [how] there’s always that scene between

two best friends when one of them is about to die and they’re like, Yeah! We’re best friends.

We’re going to open that bar together like we always dreamed. And you know in the next scene, that fucking dude’s dead.”

But Waititi also gets it on a personal level.

“Also, coming from my mother’s side – what we call pākehā, or white – and my father being Māori, there’s a real clash of worlds. Growing up, I knew I was accepted in both worlds, but also, there’s a question you ask yourself: Am I dark enough to be Māori? Am I white enough?

Am I European enough on the Jewish side?

And I think I just gave up trying to be either of them, and just sort of traversed that little middle ground where I could dip in and out according to what social group I wanted to be accepted by.”

That awareness of the middle ground means Waititi understands the absurdity that comes with not being like everybody else, and how difficult it can make things, but also sees the beauty in it, that he translates into movies that people want to see. There’s an openness in his work, his films are for everybody. “We’re all clumsy,” he says. It’s a mission statement of sorts. It isn’t so much about good or bad as it is just trying to navigate our way through the world. “When we’re pretending we don’t want to fit in, we’re still trying to be noticed.

People are like, oh, I didn’t care about that mainstream shit. You’re still trying to be noticed. The sooner we all realise that and just admit it and accept we’re all fucking fake-ass animals pretending our way through life, it just takes the pressure off. Just stop trying to be cool; be happy.”

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HEALING A MESSY SEPARATION PHOTOGRAPHY

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y Taymour, B illar e a t riz s, H ve M rI a ne

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WORDS BY ETHAN PRICE LEFT HOODIE: CONNER IVES DRESS: VINTAGE FROM ARARA ARCHIVE SHOES: MARNI FROM ARARA ARCHIVE

RIGHT DRESS: CONNER IVES SHOES: MIU MIU FROM ARARA ARCHIVE TIGHTS: STYLIST’S OWN

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The American designers trying to bring their fashion closer to the planet “Topographically the country is magnificent – and terrifying. Why terrifying? Because nowhere else in the world is the divorce between man and nature so complete.” The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Henry Miller’s 1945 memoir, written on his return to his country of birth (after a decade as an expat in Paris) was “a loaded gun to the head of America”. However, the severance was not as complete as he believed – the split has become ever more cavernous, and the 21st century has made the divorce the messiest imaginable.

The human whir of America loves to consume.

Its appetite for the new is feverish. There is a fever for dresses, for shoes, for bags. Fashion, the vehicle for the fevers, does not care about nature: it cares about unnatural beauty and it cares about money. But there are American fashion designers and archives that are nudging humanity back into sharing a room with nature.

Conner Ives is an expat. Born and raised in Bedford, New York, he moved to London to attend Central Saint Martins, and never left the city. But he hasn’t deserted his homeland completely, he drenches his collections in Americana. He has described his brand as “silly, sustainable, and sexy” – “things of quality have no fear of time” is printed on the hang tags. “I like the interplay of elevating items that we may think of as mundane and frumpy into objects that are glamorous, desirable, transformed. The transformation itself becomes the design process,” Ives tells me. “In AW23, we took codes that we have become known for and started to meld them together. A bias dress, cut in vintage T-shirts that have been spliced together. Boxer shorts cut in vintage scarves. For me, it’s all about investigating the interplay of dress codes, and how a modern woman might want these codes to mix with each other.”

The synchronicity between the churning, ever-creating fashion machine and the bludgeoning of our planet is inescapable. And Ives sees this clearly. “It was an existential burden that weighed on me; this industry that was so exciting and fun when I was starting out was also the cause of so much irresponsible practice and waste.” He continues: “Sustainability is a word that gets thrown around in our

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stoked by those fires of elitism. Buying from an archive maintains that true style is about finding the beauty in what others might see as ugly. “It has been my opinion for a while that style is the universal language. When you find yourself in a foreign place and you do not speak its native language, your style will speak for you… it is utterly important to know who you are. Sure, it’s not something that comes effortlessly, but it surely is worth the effort.”

If America has divorced itself from nature, New York brand Collina Strada is explicitly trying to heal that separation. “I am infinitely inspired by nature,” head designer Hillary Taymour tells me. “The colours and beauty this planet has to offer cannot be matched to clothing. I always try to match the colour of a sunset, or a moment in the desert, and I am always humbled because nature will always do it better. It’s like taking a picture of the moon.” But, as with their SS24 collection, titled ‘Soft is Hard’, there is nothing woo-woo about Taymour’s approach: “If you have a credit card or money in your wallet you are all playing the game of capitalism…

I have chosen, if I am playing, to make sure we are being as low impact with the brand as possible every step of the way.”

It all starts small and stays small for Taymour, the designing process beginning in a simple place: “How I want to style things or pieces I feel I am lacking in my wardrobe.” It is in this sensibility that the brand remains as sustainable as possible. Taymour “localises production as much as possible, even if that means higher costs. We use as much deadstock as we can throughout all the seasons: Rose Sylk, regenerated satin, recycled denim, etc. I am able to get creative while making, just as if I was not trying to be sustainable.”

Taymour continues: “My approach to Collina is to not have massive growth and end up being the problem with production. We use all of our production waste and all of our scraps we turn into jewellery bags. One dress in the next collection was made from leftover fabric from a Met Gala dress that never made it to the carpet. We support two families of manufacturers in the garment district. If you stay small and support the people you work with, we can create a world where people can do what they love.”

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industry the same way that we throw around quiet luxury, or elevated basics. It virtually means nothing to us now, so I’m weary to even speak on it, because what does it mean?” But Ives balances the hankering for beautiful garments whilst aiming to preserve the planet in a smart, cheeky way (his SS24 collection is titled ‘Late Capitalism’). Ives calls sustainable fashion production “the Wild West… [there are no] incentives or means by which to wholly investigate sustainability claims. In opposition to this, we implement a transparent production process.” Standout pieces from previous collections include exquisite dresses made from vintage piano covers – the silk and tassels reveal and conceal the wearer’s body – all is voluptuous, slinky, desire oozes.

“Most fashion nowadays is just noise. That’s why I like to lean into what makes us unique in other ways, the idea that these are clothes that have been loved, have lived lives, and are now living another life.”

Whilst Ives makes use of deadstock and vintage materials to create his collections, an archive such as New York-based ARARA, run

by Beatriz Maués, repositions, rather than remakes, already used clothing. “An archive exists to highlight what is worth keeping – what pieces are made from a place of consideration, quality and timelessness? To me, that is ever more important in times where the vast majority of what is being produced by the fashion industry is harmful and, too often, pointless. Technology has become an excuse to produce and explore with materials that will not decompose and the pace of the fashion calendar fuels overproduction, which only results in waste.” Maués tells me about a new strategy in her native Brazil – a no-refund policy, meaning that after purchase “you can exchange but you cannot return… I find that wonderful, because it makes you think about what you’re buying, which we desperately need to do!”

We live in a time of stone-grey in/visibility, of trying to stand out whilst blending in.

Fashion is more paranoid than ever, copying others in order to be individual – it’s currently a very un-risky business. As Maués observes: “Fashion is currently elitism’s best friend,” but shopping from an archive attempts to detach the elitism from fashion, which, in theory, can remove the prevalence of copycat mentality

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Jasmine Jobson broke out in Top Boy – a show cancelled by Channel 4 in 2013 but so beloved, notably by Drake, that it was brought back, and found a larger audience on Netflix in 2019. Jobson’s portrayal of her character, Jaq, saw her twice nominated for a TV BAFTA. Talking to Port, the west Londoner discusses the city, her path into acting, and inhabiting each and every role she takes on When did you know you wanted to perform?

From when I was little, really. I’ve always been in a fortunate enough position to be in, like, a lead kind of role. That actually sounds really horrible! But I played Mary in my Year 1 nativity play, I played Romeo in my Year 6 leavers’ play. So obviously acting is always something that I definitely wanted to do. My mum put me into performing arts when I was about four years old. And yeah, I’ve been singing pretty much since the age of two. Every Walt Disney movie I’ve watched, you name it, I’ve sung it.

What do you like about it?

To be honest, I just love the passion. I love being able to channel everything into it. And by the time you’re finished, you’re absolutely exhausted, but it was a phenomenal performance.

I love theatre, it’s where I started. It’s where my heart is, really, but it’s the power of being able to control the audience’s emotions. Essentially, I have their heart in my hands, you know, and I get to make them feel how I want them to feel. And that is a beautiful, beautiful form of power, and why I like to use my craft to be able to tell very important stories.

You grew up in west London as I did. And you’ve chosen to stay.

What do you like about it?

I think it’s mainly just the environment, it’s the hustle and bustle of the city. Everybody’s got somewhere that they need to get to, you know, and it does me a favour because I’m always somebody that’s in a rush. I’m

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a speed walker. So yeah, being in the city is nice. But I grew up here, it’s my hometown. I think I’m always gonna be a west London girl.

I could possibly see myself moving to [London suburb town] West Drayton. Slightly further out but it’s still west. I was living in West Drayton a good few years ago when I was in foster care, with my foster carer – God rest her soul. I absolutely loved it out there. It got me away from the city, which got me staying out of trouble a little bit and allowed me to home in on myself and focus on myself. And with my foster carer, I ended up getting my acting career, and life completely changed from there. So I do see a lot of positive stuff in West Drayton for me, just with my personal experiences and my history.

There’s this little road in that area called Jasmine Terrace or something like that. I saw my name on it and I was like, I’m gonna buy a house there one day. I mean, you never know if it’s gonna happen. I do definitely see myself moving back at some point, but I don’t know if I’ll touch Jasmine Terrace. I just miss it so much.

That one foster carer, was she a big part of how you ended up here?

Yeah, definitely. Definitely. She was a massive part of me coming to be in the position that I’m in. I was very much a troubled young teenager.

I was portrayed as the worst-behaved child in Westminster by social services, and so she gave me a lot of discipline. She was just a different person to anybody that I’ve ever experienced, and her approach with me was completely different. That made me look at her differently and made me want to change. We’re here now with the help of her and Maggie Norris who runs the Big House theatre company. That gave me the best training. Yeah, I’m here now.

That sounds really lovely.

Don’t get me wrong. I will always say that I’m very fortunate to have had a foster carer – I said “God rest her soul” because she passed away in 2014. But she was the best thing that happened to me. I’m

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very, very fortunate to have even had her in my life. Not many young people are fortunate enough, who go through the care system, to have a foster carer. Some young people are not even fortunate enough to go into foster care; they might go into the care system, but they might just get put into care homes or put in hostels or they’ll slip through the cracks of the system and be completely forgotten about. I will always hands-down say that I was very, very fortunate to find a lovely, lovely woman like her who changed my life for the better.

Other than her, who do you look up to?

If we’re talking about actors, I would have to say Letitia Wright. That’s right at the top there. I mean, she’s our OG top girl. And yeah, if it wasn’t for her, I mean, the doors wouldn’t be open for young women like me to step in and show the world what we’re really about. I would say Angela Bassett, Taraji P Henson – she’s absolutely phenomenal.

Zendaya, oh my gosh, Denzel Washington, who I’m sure is many, many people’s inspiration. Idris Elba, he’s phenomenal, and I’ve had the pleasure of working alongside him as well; I know exactly what his work ethic is like and he’s amazing. Daniel Kaluuya, the list can go on. Even some that are very close friends of mine – Michael Ward, you know... like Little Simz, Ashley Walters, Kano, all these people that I’ve had the pleasure of working alongside, and I’ve learned so much from them. They’re all pioneers.

Anything you’re looking to work on in future?

I want to say… is supernatural the right term? I’m thinking more like Marvel and superhero, that kind of world. I would love to play Storm.

I would love to play Storm. Oh my god, I didn’t even say Halle Berry.

Jesus! That’s my Catwoman. And Gabrielle Union, my Cinderella.

Otherwise, I’m very, very much about telling real stories and something that will make you feel. So of course everything’s got to be fictionalised, but I’m definitely about the real and passionate, and I want to possibly help save a life or change a life. So, yeah I tend to take on characters

that kind of have a little bit of a taboo character brief, specifically because of the fact that I want to be able to tell this story, to be able to change perceptions, make people think.

What’s next for you then?

I am a lead in a new ITVX psychological thriller, Platform 7. It’s a fourpart drama and I’m really, really excited about it because I’m playing a completely different character. I’m playing, I would say, a little bit more of myself, but more on the extremely mature side.

Being in the entertainment industry allows me to be a bit childish. But my character, she’s a grown woman. She’s doing her thing.

People get to see me in a different light, playing a completely different character, different side of vulnerability.

I’m doing a feature film with Andrea Arnold called Birds, which I’m very, very excited about. They’re both delving into a little bit of domestic violence as well, so it’s another taboo character I get to play, and show a different side of life. And hopefully with that, I change perceptions and change lives and save lives.

What is a powerful performance to you, and how does performance play into maybe changing someone’s life?

Well, powerful performance for me is completely embodying my character. I’ve always been like this, and I’ll know my scene. I’ll know my script well enough that I can literally just channel whatever it is that I need to channel, you know?

It’s an amazing experience, it’s almost like this wave of energy just comes across you and like, you’re just in the scene and you’re just doing it and you don’t even realise that you’re doing it and then you come out of it and it’s like, wow. Yeah. That was epic.

I don’t know how else to explain it other than that. Educating myself about the plots that my character’s going through, the storylines and things like that. If I don’t have that experience, or if I don’t have that kind of understanding, then I’ll go and educate myself about it.

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I JUST ADD AND ADD IT ALL. ADD IT ALL. AND THEN IT’S JUST A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

VERSION OF MYSELF.

I’ll ask people, I’ll speak to friends that have been through things and then use that.

I’ll have to take parts of myself, and you have to kind of semi-compare emotions, connect that to this feeling and then combine the two together and you’ve then completely embodied that.

That would be my way of connecting with my audience, by educating myself from people that have been through things. So then I can give it justice, essentially. I feel like they understand me.

Does it always feel like you’re becoming a different person when you’re performing?

Oh, yeah, definitely. Even when I’m singing, even from when I was younger, I kind of get lost in it a little bit, and come out the other end really, really proud.

Is it the same sort of thread? Does it all make sense as one person, or is it just finding the bit of you for each thing?

The only way that I can explain it would be the way that one of my old mentors explained going to drama school to me. They said to me that Jasmine, you are a raw actor, you’ve got your own natural experiences that you’ve learned along the way. Now if you were to go to — and this doesn’t count for everybody else, this is only what she said specifically for me. So I don’t want anybody else to take it to be like, Oh no, I don’t need to do da da da. If I was to go to drama school, they’re going to strip every single part, every single skill that I have down. They’re going to teach me what they need to teach me, but they’re not going to piece me back together again. I was always told if something’s not broken you don’t need to fix it.

So I’ve taken that with me. When it comes to my characters, I just add little bits rather than taking things away from me and completely becoming this person. I just add and add it all. Add it all. And then it’s just a completely different version of myself.

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Do you feel like it changes you a bit?

No, not at all.

Sometimes you do have to hold on to those emotions, but I’d say you just put them on the bedside table and pick them up again in the morning.

You know, you don’t need to carry that energy with you. But one thing that I’ve always been taught is at the end of every single day, every piece of your clothing, every piece of your costume that you’re taking off from your character and you’re placing that in your wardrobe, that’s a part of your character that you’re putting back for tomorrow. Every piece of your clothing that you place back on, that’s a piece of Jasmine that you’re collecting back. So by the time you come out of your trailer and you step into your car and you’re heading on your way home, you should be Jasmine again. You leave that character at work.

Being actors, our job is to embody characters. And sometimes our characters can be going through a lot, sometimes it’s a lot for us to just be able to get through a scene. So it’s very, very important to be able to separate yourself from your character. Just for your own sake and for your mental health.

I like the way you talked about that – putting the character back up in the wardrobe and then taking Jasmine back out. Is there a Jasmine item?

Yeah, my jewellery. At the end of every acting job, I always treat myself to a little piece of jewellery, just as a little remembrance. If you’ve got little things to remember by, you’re like, oh, I got this when I was on that job. Oh, I got this when I was here. So yeah, I’ve got my specific pieces that I wear, and when I put those back on, I feel complete.

Those are the final pieces that I put on. And then yeah, I’m completely Jasmine all over again.

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Raised in Germany, trained in New York

and now living and working in Seoul,

Teo Yoo sometimes feels disp l a c e d.

Talking to Port before the release of Past Lives, he’s thoughtful about

recently finding the roles he’s been looking for, and finally finding a place for

himself

“There is a word in Korean,”

explains the actor Teo Yoo.

“Gyopo.”

It translates as “foreign-born Korean” and according to him, it has a stigma.

Yoo, who plays the brooding lead in Celine Song’s quietly devastating romantic drama Past Lives, was born and raised in Cologne, in West Germany.

Though he says gyopo is “more explanatory” than it is derogatory, hearing it has always given him the feeling of displacement.

Of not belonging.

“Everybody knows the feeling, but nobody knows how to define it,” he says, speaking over a video call from a lonely hotel room in Seoul,

the city where he’s lived for the past 15 years.

Produced by A24, Past Lives centres on Nora (Greta Lee), a Korean immigrant and playwright living in New York.

When her childhood sweetheart Hae Sung (Yoo) stumbles into town, she begins to reflect on both her identity, and her marriage to her white American husband, Arthur (John Magaro).

The role of Hae Sung called for a traditional Korean man.

“Nobody would see me in Korea as an average Korean man,” says Yoo.

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Yoo’s parents emigrated to Germany from South Korea via a work labour agreement between the two countries.

Like most German Koreans of his parents’ generation, his father worked in a coal mine.

His mother was a nurse.

He describes his upbringing in Cologne as “very working class” and “very physical”.

Growing up, his friends were mostly the children of immigrants and refugees, whose families came from North Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East.

“They understood suffering in a different way,” he says of that group of friends.

“Out of that struggle, we gelled.”

Yoo came of age in the nineties,

during the height of German and French hip-hop.

He and his friends wore baggy jeans and played streetball,

gathering to watch NBA basketball games on TV. “You had to excel athletically, so that none of your German peers would ignore you, or look down on you,” he says. He played basketball, soccer, and rugby.

His survival tactic at school was to become a jock.

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But the adolescent Yoo was also a dreamer who lived in his own world.

He swapped Cologne for the countryside between the ages of 10 and 15,

moving with his family to a house near the Rhine river.

Outside, he could see the rolling hills of the Siebengebirge, the idyllic backdrop to Grimms’ fairy tales.

In 1993 and 1994, the area was hit by devastating floods, the worst in a century.

“We were living in this so-called first world country,

but I remember waking up on Christmas Eve with our heating system totally bust,” says Yoo.

“I would wake up with the sounds of the waves hitting the wall,

right next to my bedroom,” he remembers.

It was so cold he could see his breath.

Yoo says the experience shaped the way he looked at the world.

“I was like, you can plan your life, but in the face of a natural catastrophe everything is totally meaningless.”

Around that time, his family also experienced bankruptcy,

and Yoo learned the future could be easily

swept away.

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It was the start of looking at life

“in that melancholic way”, he says.

Yoo reveals that he struggled with bouts of depression in his youth but describes the feeling of melancholy as “a beautiful sadness”

that made him feel alive.

If depression was drudgery,

the bittersweetness of melancholy was “a way out of my darkness”.

He started seeking it out, in literature and films.

Watching Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express on TV,

he felt a connection to the film’s depiction of “people searching for something” and “being lonely drifters”.

He read Shakespeare, Goethe, and Schiller.

His more artistic sensibilities made him feel like an outsider.

“Going to school and walking back home, seeing the yellow leaves falling on the streets, I understood German poetry,” he says nostalgically.

After school, Yoo’s plan was to do three months of theatre training as part of his gap year.

He figured it would be fun to explore those artistic sensibilities

before pursuing the more sensible career of PE teacher.

Yoo picked the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York,

which is famous for pioneering method acting, because of “Pacino and De Niro”.

He applied the rigour he’d learned from playing sports to acting.

“As an athlete, you just do what your coach tells you to do without thinking about it,” he says.

His willingness to go for broke made him stand out.

“Being in the spotlight in the classroom was a heightened version of what I would feel whenever I would play sports.

It wasn’t sports; it was the performance.”

He learned that enough discipline would lead to muscle memory;

that being totally present was an adrenaline rush.

He ended up staying in New York for seven years.

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It was there he met his wife, the Korean contemporary artist Nikki S Lee,

who is 11 years his senior.

They met in the spring of 2006, shortly before her first feature-length film was due to premiere at MoMA.

He had no idea she was famous.

“I was a country bumpkin, man,”

he groans, describing himself as

“culturally inept” at the time.

A struggling actor, he was oblivious and outside of the art world bubble.

But they married a year later.

He describes meeting her as a turning point,

and credits her with opening up the trajectory of his career.

The couple started the process of relocating to Korea in 2008,

a decision partly motivated by the lack of opportunities for Yoo in the US.

“Whatever I would audition for would always be the same: either a delivery guy,

or the laundromat owner’s son – very racially stereotyped,”

he remembers. Yoo loved watching Korean films

and TV dramas and wanted to be part of them.

But in Seoul, Yoo was treated as a foreigner and

“this weird liberal entity”, he says.

Weird accent, older wife,

and an awkwardly obvious handsomeness meant he stood

out too much to pull off supporting roles and was frequently cast as the villain.

“I played either the bad guy, or the cameo who dies in the first episode,” he says jokingly.

It took 10 years of living in Korea to get the language right, he says, and to build his reputation.

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Yoo’s breakout film was Kirill Serebrennikov’s punk musical Leto,

a role that sent him to the Cannes Film Festival, where the feature competed for the Palme d’Or,

back in 2018. He played a Soviet rock star.

More recently, he appeared in Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave and as the womanising

A-List actor Nam Kang-ho in the Netflix K-drama Love to Hate You.

The show was popular, but

“it wasn’t like a Squid Game type of success,” he says self-deprecatingly.

When Yoo read Song’s script for Past Lives, he cried.

He was moved by the character of Hae Sung,

whose deep inner longing and outward “emotional restraint” stirred his own sense of melancholy.

He had been searching for a part like this, “a leading stoic type”

that wasn’t comedic, or nerdy, that didn’t perform martial arts.

“Those three tropes, I try to always avoid,”

he says with a grimace.

East Asian accents have been “overused” in Western comedies, says Yoo,

citing the racism-for-laughs in films like Sixteen Candles and the Wayans Brothers’ spoof movie Don’t Be a Menace.

You can’t sound funny, but you also have to sound authentic, he explains.

This romantic hero would have to somehow be both confident, and vulnerable.

“That really concerned me,” he says.

“How can I portray it authentically without sounding goofy?”

Korean is Yoo’s third language

(German is his first, English his second) and so he worked extensively on his voice, understanding the importance of hitting each vowel in precisely the right way.

It’s a deft, delicate work that’s bound to open doors.

“It always feels like a burden, to do it right,”

he says. Like an athlete, he thrives on the feeling of discomfort.

“I cannot bear to be comfortable.”

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Cai Guo-Qiang’s work has taken many forms, but consistently returns to a sense of place and ephemeral explosions of beauty.

We revisit his career around his collaboration with Saint Laurent, ‘When the Sky Blooms with Sakura’ Puffs of pigment leap into the air, the seed of a cloud, an idea feathering out. Airy waves erupt, a forest of trees, a collection of earthborn stars bursting, the colours of the sunset caught in a spiral scattered across the sky.

Transient, ephemeral, evanescent: energy is Cai Guo-Qiang’s instrument. Today, as one of China’s best-known artists, his performances have been viewed by thousands of people around the world (including the spectacular opening displays for the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2022 Winter Olympics). His latest, ‘When the Sky Blooms with Sakura’, is the first of its kind in Japan. Sakura is Japanese for “cherry blossom,” derived from saku which means both to bloom and to smile or laugh. The wordplay is key to the work that blossomed across the sky in shades of pink and orange at midday on the 29th of June 2023.

Commissioned by the luxury fashion house Saint Laurent, the daytime fireworks marked

the opening of ‘Ramble in the Cosmos – From Primeval Fireball Onward’ at the National Art Center, Tokyo (NACT). “People think I like fireworks but I actually like explosions,” Cai notes, “with their pure, abstract, unexpected and uncontrollable energy, an obsession with chaos.” As the exhibition’s title suggests, the retrospective weaves through Cai’s practice investigating the constructive and deconstructive potentials of explosions, while the event itself provided a moment of reflection for the artist, staged on a coastline he once called home, and where he had performed 29 years ago.

That artwork from 1994 was simple, almost surgical: ‘The Horizon from the Pan-Pacific: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 14’, lasted just one minute and 40 seconds. Six gunpowder fuses spanning a total length of 30,000m erupted across the night horizon of the ocean facing Iwaki, Fukushima. People living in the city collaborated by turning off their lights, “so the extraterrestrials would see the curve of the Earth from afar”. In returning to the same stretch of land and water, we’re able to see with clarity how Cai’s artistic practice has evolved, together with his relationship to Iwaki. His earlier work sought to echo the

lines of the earth, exaggerating and enhancing the natural world. In this new piece we find instead the artist turning to another canvas lying empty before him: the atmosphere itself.

The towering pillars of pigmented smoke making up this latest half-hour performance came from a staggering 40,000 fireworks.

Launched upon the beach they created a surreal bridge between sea and sky, a vast 400m-wide and 120m-high spectacle, shifting through a series of dramatic white and black waves in memory of the victims of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011 before blooming into resplendent colour: from sadness to joy. The subject speaks to the landscape of the work, echoing the earth-bound project initiated by Cai’s friends in Iwaki after the earthquake and carried out with his support: to plant 10,000 cherry blossom trees as a means of envisioning a future where the contaminated land becomes a vibrant pink sea.

Yet this vast pyrotechnic display is part of a much longer narrative for the artist, one that first began with experimentations of “drawing” with gunpowder in his hometown, Quanzhou. Born in 1957, the artist grew up in the port town looking out to Taiwan. The ocean’s horizon would, in the artist’s own

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words, “ignite my imagination”. The word ignite is no accident; soon the upheaval and violence of the cultural revolution in China and conflict with Taiwan would come to dominate the landscape of his childhood, both emotionally and physically. Living directly across from the warring state he would hear the gunfire every day.

“Making art is not to liberate society in the first place, but to liberate oneself,” Cai asserts. Through his art he took control of the element that overwhelmed his childhood, repurposing fear into joy, private pain into public beauty. On his works on paper we see trails of gunpowder splinter out into floral motifs, everything from abstract forms to figurative scenes, the central motif that a new creation is brought forth from the act and materials of destruction. “It’s actually another type of cure for my childhood,” he once said, “it purges the violence and destruction from this society and this era into something beautiful.”

In gunpowder the artist found a release, the perfect tool to break away from conventions. “It freed me from the social constructions at the time.” The force of these small eruptions set him free, energy unveiled as an essential tool.

Moving to Japan in 1986 inevitably confronted him with the living memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the impact of which could not help but inform his practice as his explorations evolved in scale and form. At one point in 1994 he even used the Hiroshima Central Park near the A-Bomb Dome as a site for his artwork ‘The Earth Has Its Black Hole Too: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 16’. The

30-second spectacle brought together 2,000m of fuse, 3kg of gunpowder, and 114 helium balloons to bring the wonders of a collapsing star into the fabric of our own world just for a moment. This work is one of many “projects for extraterrestrials” the artist has conceived for a double audience, one on earth, another far away. Cai has spoken often about his desire to create “a dialogue with the universe”, creating artworks that are not merely for show but that seek to tap into some greater power.

“Art is my time-space tunnel,” he says, “allowing me to travel through which the invisible world communicates with the energy from the unseen world.” Art becomes a portal, a means of puncturing the line between visible and invisible worlds, but how to harness the energy that lies latent within these spaces?

With explosions Cai seeks the answer. One event ‘Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters’ (1993), saw the artist detonate a six-mile train of explosives to visually expand the monumental construction by the Ming dynasty for 15 minutes. There’s something about this that feels alluringly ancient, Cai cast as a modern Prometheus, fire itself a sacred thing.

When he moved to New York in 1995, where to this day he now lives and works, a change occurred. At the 1999 edition of the Venice Biennale of Arts he won the Golden Lion Award for a quieter, more insidious form of destruction. His striking clay statues that greeted the audience remained unfired, meaning that the material slowly disintegrated in front of the public, cracking as time went on and falling

PREVIOUS SPREAD: PHOTOGRAPHY HUAFANG LEE, COURTESY CAI STUDIO

to pieces: not a bang, but a whimper. In this latest performance a shadow of this focus on the aftermath can be found, the radiance of the ripples mirroring how energy lingers in the air, how its impact lives on like a seed taking root.

“Sometimes I have to wait for the work to magically appear on its own, to startle me.” Cai reflects, “It’s not only up to me, but comes in magical moments, when I intersect with myself and gunpowder, with nature and the unseen world to manifest.” The universe started with a bang, that first great implosion of energy that set human life into motion. In Cai’s work we find the memory of this pulse in every start, every shiver. In each explosion there’s a counterpoint to pain, a quest to unearth childish joy and play. “I am a fun artist,” Cai once declared, “like a little boy who never grows up.” Yet for those who know the artist’s past, this Peter Pan-like image holds within it residual trauma. In each explosive artwork the artist relives his past, enacting and reworking the sounds of his childhood, interrogating the forces of the universe.

Yet time passes. Cai knows that the reverberations of those sounds have dictated much of his life and art, as the echoes of the past surge into the present. It’s in the aftermath where the real effect unfurls; it’s the silence after the storm, the way the smoke spreads its wings across the sky when left to its own devices: part of the performance that not even the artist can control. An art, as he says, that brings “infinite surprises…first of all, to oneself!”

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PORT COMMENTARY BEN LERNER The Curtain ZADIE SMITH The Fraud PHILIPPA SNOW Jagged and Striking and Glamorous and Mad ANNIE ERNAUX Shame REBECCA MILLER Hell in a Handbasket 181

BEN LERNER The Curtain Ben Lerner is a novelist and poet, author of Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04 and The Topeka School, as well as an essay entitled The Hatred of Poetry. This poem is taken from his first new collection in more than a decade, one that comes out of inhabiting art-making, homemaking and crisis I think you need either meaning or a sense that it has fled, especially when you look up. You need rudimentary fastening devices, something that binds surfaces, that resists, however ineffectually, their separation. Tar from the dry distillation of birch bark, a piece of music to coordinate work. I personally need cities at night, stars occluded but inferred, abandoned financial districts, underground tunnels where gold is moved back and forth between vaults. I like to imagine that’s my job, that I stack gold on pallets underneath Manhattan and transport them short distances with a forklift, that I literalise the day’s trades, that I have a career in “gold custody.” A world needs gold bars moving underground, although they cannot be pure; if they were pure they’d be too malleable to hold their shape over time and so each bar contains a small amount of other metals – copper, iron, silver, platinum, which gives the gold a whitish shade. Shades and impurities that let us hold our shapes are minimum conditions for a world, but many worlds are brief, a pulse moving through a medium, many worlds collide and recombine as you walk through them, which feels like a succession of webs on the face: plash, plash, plash, but without sound. We need music without sound to coordinate the work of moving through minimal worlds of alders, hazels, hornbeams – trees that rapidly colonise open ground after a fire. I have this dream in which I walk across the bridge after the fire to find downtown covered in even stands of birch with peeling, papery bark on which the names of everyone who has ever lived are written phonetically and I look down to find the pavement is clear glass and the gold is moving underground and I look up at the sky to watch the meaning flee, the patterned flight of meaning; I assume everyone has a version of this dream, but forgets it upon waking. We, at least my friends and I, often describe ourselves as moved by music, at the height of feeling we acknowledge that we are objects passed from one place to another, soft metal, and I think those are the minimal conditions of personhood, necessary but insufficient: we must be storable, impure, capable of movement. Once I was coming back on the Amtrak from Boston with John. He was a mess, and I was basically dragging him back to the city so I could watch him, so you and I could take turns watching him, his fretted neck and hollow body, a gentle custody. We were sitting behind two young women – maybe college students – who were discussing a passage in Dostoyevsky, in which the prisoners in Siberia wanted to put on a play for Christmas.

Together they made a curtain out of “pieces of linen, old and new, given by the convicts; shirts, the bandages which our peasants wrap around their feet in lieu of socks, all sewn together well or ill, and forming together an immense sheet. Where there was not enough linen, it had been replaced by writing paper, taken sheet by sheet from the various office bureaus.” Listening to these kids discuss this passage in whispers as John pressed his face into my neck, as we crawled across the Northeast Corridor in winter, industrial ruins in moonlight through the window – it grew acutely beautiful in their paraphrase, how the prisoners painted the curtain black, painted it with stars, hung it from the ceiling, dividing worlds, defeating time, suspending labour. See, I kept whispering to John, see, see. Later, in Penn Station, after we’d

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taken the escalator up to the main level, we again found ourselves beside the two young readers on the platform for the downtown A. I wanted to say something to them, to thank them, but I didn’t know how. Then John reached into the duffel bag and removed three heavy bars, held them out to me. One was rectangular with rounded sides, indicating it was from the Denver Assay Office; one had square edges, which meant it was cast in New York before 1986; the third conformed to the trapezoidal shape characteristic of the contemporary international standard and had a greenish hue (iron). I tapped one of the women on the shoulder and said, although not in these words, plash, plash, plash. Only then did we hear one busker’s violin, another’s balalaika.

A bar for him, for the rats scavenging between the rails, see the gold devour them, and a bar for young men dancing on the train, a hymn to possibility, a few bars of the underground malleable music my friends and I distribute. When we were back on open ground, walking along DeKalb, it began to rain, John began to lose his shape, I didn’t know if we’d reach my apartment in time, let alone in space. When we were nearing the park, these two kids with shaved heads stopped us, blocked our progress when we said excuse me, tried to pass. One of them leaned in and said: Give us your fucking money. And the other kid raised his sweatshirt to show the handle of a gun tucked in his waistband. Give us your fucking money now. But we don’t have any money, I said, as calmly as possible, which was true. Please, I said, we just have this heavy bag of gold bars, which are stamped, which aren’t fungible, cannot circulate. At that point I noticed the bandages around their feet. At that point I realized these two boys were girls, they were the two girls who had been talking about Dostoyevsky on the train. They must have followed us, they must have been following us our whole lives, forgotten upon waking. Their disguises fell away, their skin began to glow, the rain stopped, the rain seemed to hang against the hammered background of the sky. And they said, although not in words, we have come to relieve him of his duffel, to end one world so you can start another. Because a world ends every few seconds and must be rebuilt, worlds end and are rebuilt, a rocking motion. I think what’s hard for me, John said when we were back at my apartment processing the experience, sitting in the window smoking those tiny British cigarettes he always carried, I think what’s hard for me is the feeling that I’m totally without bourgeois respectability – I lost yet another job, Cora and I have broken up, for real this time, over the kid question, I’m certainly no comfort to my parents – but I also have no access to the value or intensities of art, mine or anybody else’s, highs that might make the lows in some sense worth it. We both know my recent sound installations are bullshit. And this sense of being a burden on my friends, on you and Ben in particular. And this sense of the irrelevance of it all given the political situation. And then—Stop, I interrupted, just stop for a second, John, and listen. Listen to the wind in the birches, a stream of alephs, the room tone of the forest, sirens in the distance, folk music, unnecessary but sufficient. I personally need cities at night, clear glass pavement, impurities, writing paper, all forming together an immense patchwork curtain. I’m listening now, John, Jack, Josh, Josiah, James. Tell me what you need.

The Lights by Ben Lerner is published by Granta Poetry, out now

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ZADIE SMITH The Fraud Zadie Smith was born, and lives, in north-west London. Her debut novel White Teeth won several prizes, including the Betty Trask Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. She was one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003 and 2013. Her sixth novel, excerpted here, is a work of historical fiction set between Britain and Jamaica, using a deception of 1873 to play with the ever-present idea of uncovering truths

1 A Very Large Hole A filthy boy stood on the doorstep. He might be scrubbed of all that dirt, eventually – but not of so many orange freckles. No more than fourteen, with skinny, unstable legs like a marionette, he kept pitching forward, shifting soot into the hall. Still, the woman who’d opened the door – easily amused, susceptible to beauty – found she couldn’t despise him.

We have a very large hole on the second floor – a crater. The structural integrity of the second floor is in question. But it is a job for two men, at the very least, as I explained in my note.’

The boy blinked stupidly. Could it really be on account of so many books?

‘Never you mind what it was on account of. Child, have you recently been up a chimney?’

The visitor took exception to ‘child’. Tobin’s was a respectable firm: he’d done skirting boards in Knightsbridge, if it came to that. ‘We was told it was an emergency, and not to dawdle. Tradesmen’s entrance there is, usually.’

Cheek, but Mrs Touchet was amused. She thought of happier days in grand old Kensal Rise. Then of smaller, charming Brighton. Then of this present situation in which no window quite fit its frame. She thought of decline and the fact that she was tied to it. She stopped smiling.

‘You’re from Tobin’s?’

‘Yes, missus. Here about the ceiling. Fell in, didn’t it?’

‘But two men were requested!’

‘All up in London, missus. Tiling. Fearsome amount of tiling needs doing in London, madam ...’

He saw of course that she was an old woman, but she didn’t move or speak like one. A high bosom, handsome, her face had few wrinkles and her hair was black. Above her chin, a half-moon line, turned upside down. Such ambiguities were more than the boy could unravel.

He deferred to the paper in his hand, reading slowly: ‘Number One, St James-es Villas, St James-es Road, Tunbridge Wells.

The name’s Touch-it, ain’t it?’

From inside the house came a full-throated Ha! The woman didn’t flinch. She struck the boy as both canny and hard, like most Scots.

‘All pronunciations of my late husband’s name are absurd. I choose to err on the side of France.’

Now a bearded, well-padded man emerged behind her in the hall. In a dressing gown and slippers, with grey through his whiskers and a newspaper in hand, he walked with purpose towards a bright conservatory. Two King Charles spaniels followed, barking madly. He spoke over his shoulder – ‘Cousin, I see you are bored and dangerous this morning!’ – and was gone.

The woman addressed her visitor with fresh energy: ‘This is Mr Ainsworth’s house. I am his housekeeper, Mrs Eliza Touchet.

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‘When entering a respectable home,’ she remarked, lifting her skirts from the step to avoid the dirt he had deposited there, ‘it is wise to prepare for all eventualities.’

The boy pulled off his cap. It was a hot September day, hard to think through. Shame to have to move a finger on such a day! But cunts like this were sent to try you, and September meant work, only work.

‘I’ll come in or I won’t come in?’ he muttered, into his cap.

child moments before she fell through the house. ‘Clara Rose! I told you – you ain’t allowed. Sorry about that, Eliza.’ This was said to the prickly Scot, who replied: ‘That’s quite all right, Sarah, but perhaps it’s time for Clara’s nap...’ The little Clara person, in response to being held so tight at the waist, cried: ‘No, Mama, NO!’ – yet seemed to be addressing the maid. The boy from Tobin’s gave up all hope of understanding this peculiar household. He watched the maid grasp the child, too hard, by the wrist, as mothers did round his way. Off they went. ‘A late Ainsworth,’ explained the housekeeper, righting the fern.

2 A Late Ainsworth

3 A New Spirit of the Age

She walked swiftly across the black and white diamonds of the hall, taking the stairs two at a time without touching the banister.

Downstairs, the Morning Post lay discarded by an uneaten breakfast.

William sat brooding, his chair facing the window. There was a brown paper package in his lap. He started at the sound of the door. Was she not meant to see him in his sadness?

‘Name?’

‘Joseph, ma’am.’

‘It’s narrow here – mind the pictures.’

Books lined the landing like a second wall. The pictures were of Venice, a place he’d always found hard to credit, but then you saw these dusty old prints in people’s houses so you had to believe. He felt sorry for Italian boys. How do you go about tiling a doorstep with water coming right up to it? What kind of plumbing can be managed if there’s no basement to take the pipes?

They arrived at the library disaster. The little dogs – stupid as they looked – skittered right to the edge but no further. Joseph tried standing as Tobin himself would, legs wide, arms folded, nodding sadly at the sight of this hole, as you might before a fallen woman or an open sewer.

‘So many books. What’s he need with them all?’

‘Mr Ainsworth is a writer.’

‘What – so he writ them all?’

‘A surprising amount of them.’

The boy stepped forward to peer into the crater, as over the lip of a volcano. She joined him. These shelves had held histories three volumes deep: the kings, queens, clothes, foods, castles, plagues and wars of bygone days. But it was the Battle of Culloden that had pushed things over the edge. Anything referring to Bonnie Prince Charlie was now in the downstairs parlour, covered in plaster, or else caught in the embrace of the library’s Persian rug, which sagged through the hole in the floor, creating a huge, suspended, pendulous shape like an upturned hot air balloon.

‘Well, now you see, madam, and if you don’t mind me saying’ – he picked up a dusty book and turned it over in his hand with a prosecutorial look on his face – ‘the sheer weight of literature you’ve got here, well, that will put a terrible strain on a house, Mrs Touchet. Terrible strain.’

‘Eliza! Miladies! There you are. I thought you’d abandoned me . . .’ The dogs arrived panting at his feet. He didn’t look down or stroke them.

‘Well, I’m afraid it’ll be a week at least, William.’

‘Hmmm?’

‘The ceiling. Tobin only sent one boy.’

‘Ah.’ As she reached for his breakfast things he put a hand out to stop her: ‘Leave that. Sarah will take that.’ Then stood up, and seemed to glide away in his slippers, silent as a shade.

Something was wrong. Her first instinct was to check the newspaper.

She read the front page and scanned the rest. No friends suddenly dead or disturbingly successful. No unusual or uniquely depressing news. More working men were to be allowed to vote. Criminals were no longer to be transported. The Claimant had been found not to speak a word of French, although the real Roger Tichborne grew up speaking it. She put everything back on the tray. As she understood it, Sarah’s opinion was that breakfast trays were now beneath her dignity. Yet no maid had been hired to replace her, and so it fell to Mrs Touchet.

Turning to leave, she tripped on something – the package. It was a book, unwrapped only so far as to reveal the title: A New Spirit of the Age,

by R. H. Horne. It was a long time since she’d seen that book. Not quite long enough to forget it. She picked it up and looked furtively around the room – she hardly knew why. Opening it, she hoped she would be mistaken, or that possibly it was a new edition. But it was the very same volume of literary critiques, and with the same short, damning entry on her poor cousin, towards the back.

Twenty years ago, the publication of this book had merely darkly clouded one dinner party and mildly spoiled the morning after. Back then William was not so easily deflated. She brought the two sides of the torn brown paper together. No postmark. But it was addressed in a clear hand to the man whose life’s work was summarised within as ‘generally dull, except when it is revolting’.

‘You are exactly right.’

Was she laughing at him? Perhaps ‘literature’ was the wrong word.

Perhaps he had pronounced it wrong. He dropped the book, discouraged, knelt down, and took out his yardstick to measure the hole.

Just as he was straightening up, a young child ran in, slid on what was left of the parquet and overturned an Indian fern. She was pursued by a nice-looking, bosomy sort in an apron, who managed to catch the

The Fraud by Zadie Smith is published by Hamish Hamilton, out now in hardback

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PHILIPPA SNOW Jagged and Striking and Glamorous and Mad Philippa Snow is a writer based in Norwich, UK. She was shortlisted for the 2020 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, and her writing has appeared in publications including Artforum, The Los Angeles Review of Books, ArtReview, The White Review and Frieze. Her first book, Which As You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment, was published in 2022 Owing to something in the air – climate change perhaps, or some undulation of astrology that I refuse to believe in – I have found myself having numerous conversations lately about reinvention. Friends have joked, or not joked, about getting a new name and a new passport; about changing their career or their location or their partner, or some combination of all three at once. Nearly all of these friends are female. Fair enough: it is easy to imagine that the truism “wherever you go, there you are” might not apply if the version of “you” who went “there” went in deep disguise, and I am certainly far from immune. When Instagram offered me an ad (for what I believe was a meditation app) comprised simply of text, black-on-white, suggesting that I “Disappear for One Month, then come back fully rebranded [sic]”, I took a screenshot at lightning speed for future use. When one afternoon I suddenly felt moved to look up the passage from Speedboat by Renata Adler about the grenade (“I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray”), I was pleased to find that it was her most-liked quote on Goodreads, and even more pleased to learn that the number of likes currently stood at 69.

reinventing herself in order to sell her books, she transformed so that she herself could more closely resemble them: jagged and striking and glamorous and mad.

Do we owe it to Kavan to see her only as she wished us to, and to respect the thoroughness and the ingenuity of her reinvention? Perhaps. Considering this question, in parallel with the unusual flurry of conversations I’d been having about the desire for a new life, I was left wondering about my own ongoing preoccupation with personas, and more specifically with the deconstruction of the public selves of female celebrities. (True, Anna Kavan is not what one would technically describe as a “celebrity”, but it is arguable that she stage-managed her appearance and her public profile as cleverly and as stringently as if she had been one, and the result was a woman who was singular, singularly gifted, and immediately visible as being unlike other people, which does not sound totally unlike a star.) For a number of years, as a writer I have circled more or less continually around the subject of the things that women do to themselves – physically, psychologically, conceptually – in order to better adapt themselves to fame. I believe, or have come to believe recently, that my interest in the subject has been spurred on by the fact that these personal transformations for success in some ways mirror the more mundane transformations that often characterise the feminine experience in general, making the female celebrity a kind of metonym for womanhood itself.

Throwing a grenade at your own feet, of course, is far less likely to result in bodily propulsion than it is in death, and the killing of the old self is not something to take lightly. Those who do it are therefore presumably quite serious about their pursuit of new lives, new names, new loves. Also very recently, a critic whose work I usually regard as close to flawless recorded a podcast about the late writer Anna Kavan, who began her life as Helen Emily Woods, and then became Helen Ferguson by marriage before eventually adopting her more famous name. He – for the critic is, I must admit, a he, though I do not hold it against him in this instance – railed against a tendency in criticism about Kavan’s work to lean on the significance of her persona, and her status as a heroin addict. On one hand, I can understand the idea that we ought not to discuss the looks and clothes and hair and drug habits of women writers more than we discuss their texts. Still, I think Helen Ferguson’s vanishing and the sudden appearance in her place of Anna Kavan (“Disappear for One Month, then come back fully rebranded”) is so orchestrated and deliberate that it should be seen in some ways as a logical extension of the author’s oeuvre. Kavan adopted her new name from a character who appeared in her own writing, as if to emphasise her close attachment to her own material, and to underscore the fact this new persona was entirely of her own devising.

She dyed her hair ice blonde and began to dress more elegantly; she lost copious amounts of weight, and mainlined heroin. To say that interest in her public-facing self is at risk of overshadowing the work itself is not quite right, since it appears to be the case that, rather than

Female celebrities who thrive, albeit in the sense of being high-profile and successful rather than necessarily healthy or happy, tend to be those who have undergone some kind of evolution, like animals adjusting to a new climate, in order to suit the job. When one reinvents herself, becoming an entirely new character, the media often react as though she is trying to get away with something – but if she is being pilloried for it, and the differences between the new and old selves are being raked over in the public eye, then how can she be? It is easy to forget, now that the character of Lana Del Rey is so widely loved and critically respected, the opprobrium that met Lizzie Grant, a fairly anonymous-looking bleached-blonde singer-songwiter, when she elected to reinvent herself as a “gangsta Nancy Sinatra” with an alleged nose-job and alleged lip-injections and a make-up job worthy of Priscilla Presley for her second studio album Born to Die in 2012.

There was a sense that in her adoption of a wildly feminine exterior, she had somehow drawn too much attention to the work required for a woman to sell records, and that being “real” was somehow incompatible with cosmetic tweaks. (One wonders if the critics, mostly male, who rolled their eyes would feel as strongly about David Bowie’s alteration of his teeth, to say nothing of his own penchant for being made up.)

Time has shown that, as with Kavan’s reinvention, what Del Rey was doing was creating a reflection of her work made flesh – and as with Kavan, too, acting as an image of hetero-sex exploded outwards in order to riff on, to both beckon and dissect, male cruelty. In its way, her persona has turned out to be as rich and complex as her records.

Sometimes the splitting of the self, with its attendant redesigning of both physical and psychic architecture, can involve a kind of compart-

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mentalisation, and can be about self-preservation. Acknowledging the falseness of these public selves allows us to tease out the things they say about the industry and/or society that they have been created to placate, or please, or deflect; it also means being invasive, shattering an illusion that has been constructed for a reason, often at great expense and effort. In an essay praising Lana Del Rey’s fakeness written in 2014, the critic Sarah Nicole Prickett asked, “What if the most radical – fuck it, feminist – thing you can do is believe everything a girl says about her life, whether or not you like it?” When my female friends talk about becoming new people lately, they are picturing it like a moment in a spy film, a dye job in a public bathroom and a plane to somewhere new, but they are also, I think, picturing the way that famous people get to reinvent themselves in ways that are bigger, more interesting, less human – the connection between reinvention and excitement, reinvention and glamour. This idea – that we might make others believe the most beautiful lies we tell about ourselves – is undeniably seductive.

We are all becoming wonderfully adept at self-design, and I realise now that I probably know more women – smart, interesting women – who use FaceTune than those who do not. It takes a real expert, though, to mount a reinvention of oneself on the level at which female celebrities manage it, and once everyone is looking, that new self must be maintained. Maybe the best way to see the image they have offered us is as a kind of long-term performance art, allowing for both appreciation and analysis, for the separation of the creator and the work. When Anna Kavan fell into a crowd of hedonistic race-car drivers, she observed that not one of them “ever told [her] that life was worth living”, and her repetition of this is quite often seen as evidence of her powerful death drive, or as justification for her most unruly and unsafe behaviour. It might also be the case, though, that the realisation that her life was not worth living was the very thing that motivated her to adopt someone else’s life instead, and to construct it with such perfect care that we cannot stop talking about it even now. Expecting a notable woman to be “authentic” when society also expects her to be a hundred other things at once is, it’s clear, not the right way to approach her public image – it would be far better for us to allow for some duplicity, to be impressed by the mystery, and to take a certain pleasure in being deceived. The root of “glamour”, after all, is in the old Scottish “glamer”, which referred to a particular kind of witchcraft that deceived those who were spellbound into seeing things that were not really there.

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ANNIE ERNAUX Shame

Annie Ernaux was born in Normandy in 1940, and in 2022 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her works include The Years, A Man’s Place, and Happening, which was adapted into a 2021 film. Shame, a memoir, recounts violent events from her childhood in the reflective, analytical style she’s known for. The opening is excerpted below My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon. I had been to Mass at a quarter to twelve as usual. I must have brought back some cakes from the baker in the new shopping precinct – a cluster of temporary buildings erected after the war while reconstruction was under way. When I got home, I took off my Sunday clothes and slipped on a dress that washed easily. After the customers had left and the shutters had been pinned down over the shop window, we had lunch, probably with the radio on, because at that hour there was a funny programme called Le tribunal, in which Yves Deniaud played some wretched subordinate continually charged with the most preposterous offences and condemned to ridiculous sentences by a judge with a quavering voice. My mother was in a bad temper. The argument she started with my father as soon as she sat down lasted throughout the meal. After the table was cleared and the oilcloth wiped clean, she continued to fire criticism at my father,

turning round and round in the tiny kitchen – squeezed in between the café, the store and the steps leading upstairs – as she always did when she was upset. My father was still seated at the table, saying nothing, his head turned towards the window. Suddenly he began to wheeze and was seized with convulsive shaking. He stood up and I saw him grab hold of my mother and drag her through the café, shouting in a hoarse, unfamiliar voice. I rushed upstairs and threw myself on to the bed, my face buried in a cushion. Then I heard my mother scream: ‘My daughter!’ Her voice came from the cellar adjoining the café. I rushed downstairs, shouting ‘Help!’ as loud as I could. In the poorly lit cellar, my father had grabbed my mother by the shoulders, or maybe the neck. In his other hand, he was holding the scythe for cutting firewood which he had wrenched away from the block where it belonged. At this point all I can remember are sobs and screams. Then the three of us are back in the kitchen again. My father is sitting by the window, my mother is standing near the cooker and I am crouching at the foot of the stairs. I can’t stop crying. My father wasn’t yet his normal self; his hands were still trembling and he had that unfamiliar voice. He kept on repeating, ‘Why are you crying? I didn’t do anything to you.’ I can recall saying this sentence, ‘You’ll breathe disaster on me.’ My mother was saying, ‘Come on, it’s over.’ Afterward the three of us went for a bicycle ride in the countryside nearby. When they got

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most dramatic ones. But because this scene has remained frozen inside me, an image empty of language – except for the sentence I told my lovers – the words which I have used to describe it seem strange, almost incongruous. It has become a scene destined for other people.

Before starting, I thought I would be able to recall every single detail. It turns out I can remember only the general atmosphere, our respective places in the kitchen and a few words or expressions. I’ve forgotten how the argument actually started, what we had to eat and whether my mother was still wearing her white shopkeeper’s coat or whether she had taken it off in anticipation of the bicycle ride. I have no precise memory of that Sunday morning besides the usual routine – attending Mass, buying the cakes and so on – although I have often had to think back to the time before it happened, as I would do later on for other events in my life. Yet I am sure I was wearing my blue dress, the one with white spots, because during the two summers that followed, every time I put it on, I would think, ‘it’s the dress I wore that day’. Of the weather too I am sure – a combination of sun, clouds and wind.

From then on, that Sunday was like a veil that came between me and everything I did. I would play, I would read, I would behave normally but somehow I wasn’t there. Everything had become artificial. I had trouble learning my lessons, when before I only needed to read them once to know them by heart. Acutely aware of everything around me and yet unable to concentrate, I lost my insouciance and natural ability to learn.

What had happened was not something that could be judged. My father, who loved me, had tried to kill my mother, who also loved me.

Because my mother was more religious than my father and because she did the accounts and spoke to my schoolmistresses, I suppose I thought it normal for her to shout at him the same way she shouted at me. It was no one’s fault, no one was to blame. I just had to stop my father from killing my mother and going to prison.

I believe that for months, maybe even years, I waited for the scene to be repeated. I was positive it would happen again. I found the presence of customers comforting, dreading the moments when my parents and I were alone, in the evening and on Sunday afternoons. I was on the alert as soon as they raised their voices; I would scrutinize my father, his expression, his hands. In every sudden silence I would read the omens of disaster. Every day at school I wondered whether, on returning home, I would be faced with the aftermath of a tragedy.

When they did show signs of affection for each other – joking, sharing a laugh or a smile – I imagined I had gone back to the time before that day. It was just a ‘bad dream’. One hour later I realized that these signs only meant something at the time; they offered no guarantee for the future. back, my parents opened the café like they did every Sunday evening.

That was the end of it.

It was 15 June 1952. The first date I remember with unerring accuracy from my childhood. Before that, the days and dates inscribed on the blackboard and in my workbooks seemed just to drift by.

Later on, I would say to certain men: ‘My father tried to kill my mother just before I turned twelve.’ The fact that I wanted to tell them this meant that I was crazy about them. All were quiet after hearing the sentence. I realized that I had made a mistake, that they were not able to accept such a thing.

This is the first time I am writing about what happened. Until now, I have found it impossible to do so, even in my diary. I considered writing about it to be a forbidden act that would call for punishment. Not being able to write anything else afterwards, for instance. (I felt a kind of relief just now when I saw that I could go on writing, that nothing terrible had happened.) In fact, now that I have finally committed it to paper, I feel that it is an ordinary incident, far more common among families than I had originally thought. It may be that narrative, any kind of narrative, lends normality to people’s deeds, including the

Around that time a strange song was often heard on the radio, mimicking a fight that suddenly breaks out in a saloon: there was a pause, a voice whispered, ‘you could have heard a pin drop’, followed by a cacophony of shouts and jumbled sentences. Every time I heard it I was seized with panic. One day my uncle handed me the detective story he was reading: ‘What would you do if your father was accused of murder but wasn’t guilty?’ The question sent a chill down my spine.

I kept seeing the images of a tragedy which had never occurred.

The scene never did happen again. My father died fifteen years later, also on a Sunday in June.

It is only now that a thought occurs to me: my parents may have discussed both that Sunday afternoon and my father’s murderous gesture; they may have arrived at an explanation or even an excuse and decided to forget the whole thing. Maybe one night after making love.

This thought, like all those that elude one at the time, comes too late.

It can be of no help to me now; its absence only serves to measure the indescribable terror which that Sunday has always meant to me.

Shame by Annie Ernaux, translated by Tanya Leslie, is published

by Fitzcarraldo Editions, out now

189

REBECCA MILLER Hell in a Handbasket Rebecca Miller is an American author and filmmaker. She won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival for Personal Velocity: Three Portraits, adapted from her book of the same name. Her recent collection of stories, Total, won praise from Jeffrey Eugenides, and Olivia Laing has described Miller as “a luminous writer”. The following story, published for the first time in Port, relishes in the tension of the overheard

“Why? What?”

So, true story. I’m on a packed Sunday train from Boston to New York returning from seeing my girlfriend. I am aware of a couple of women in their twenties in the seats behind me; I clocked them as I searched for a seat. They were bare-legged, wearing tiny shorts with big tanned muscular legs, which I wish I had instead of my little intellectual heron gams. They look like they maybe rowed crew in college.

“Well, why did you bring it up to me then?”

“I can’t.”

“Oh for God’s sake. Now you have to.”

“She made me promise.”

“Evil impulse.”

“Oh, come on. Okay, I’ll guess. He… cheated on her. (pause) He was

My jeans flap around my scarecrow frame as I thump into the aisle seat in front of them, beside a guy in a baseball cap staring out the window listening to music on his earbuds and looking like all he wants is to be left alone, which is fine by me. I hate conversation.

I like to eavesdrop. Other people’s conversations are like magnets to my ears. The lady across the aisle from me is on the phone, and I listen to her for a while as the train starts moving. She keeps asking, “But will they buy a table?” And then she goes on and on about how much each table ought to cost. Ten thousand dollars or twelve thousand dollars? She’s speaking extra loud, so we will all know she has this urgent business of selling these tables, like the fate of the entire country depends on these transactions. Gradually I come to understand she is organising a charity gala. Her voice is husky and persistent and bossy but also sugar-coated and jocular.

She’s in white slacks and a white sweater, and her hair is dyed blonde and carefully curled with tongs. When she finally hangs up her phone, she suddenly hunches over and starts frantically rummaging around in her purse, which is set between her feet.

The search is long and urgent. Then, sighing with relief, she sits back and de-animates, her manicured hands resting palm-up on her thighs, fingers curled, like double roadkill. I start reading the paper on my phone. From behind me, I hear one of the muscular twenty-five-year-olds pipe up.

“Okay, you can’t tell anyone this.” Immediately, she has my attention.

“Of course not. What?”

“Jade’s wedding is off.”

“I saw.”

“But you don’t know why.”

“I guess not… I mean, not really.”

There’s a pause. I fight the urge to turn around and stare. Instead, I look straight ahead and listen.

“I… can’t say it.” There is a laugh of embarrassment bubbling up in her voice.

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mean to her parents. (pause) They didn’t have the same taste in baby names. (pause) WHAT?”

“Yes. I promise!”

pretty far ahead, and she thinks she’s lost him. She runs to where he seems to have disappeared, and he’s nowhere. She looks up the beach, down the beach. And she realizes he has to be behind that dune. So she walks up the dune. She’s like freaking out at what she’s going to see there. And she has this whole plan of when she sees him with his ex-girlfriend and how she’s going to flip out and leave him. She has the whole scene playing out in her head. She’s actually crying already she’s so mad. It’s really hard to walk up the dune in her sneakers, and it feels like it’s taking forever. And she finally gets to the top of the dune and looks down.”

My whole body is tensed up. I have become one big ear.

She pauses then. I stop breathing, so fused am I to her words.

“Okay. So. Jade started getting weird vibes when they were in the Cape in June, visiting Jeff’s parents. That’s where he’s from.”

“And she sees him… fucking. a headless. seagull.”

“Okay. If I tell you this, do you promise not. to tell. a living. soul?”

“Yes.” “You really promise? Zadie. Say it.”

“What kind of weird vibes?”

“Well, first of all, he suddenly started going running every day, for a long time. Like over an hour. He was never that into exercise. And when he came back, he wasn’t sweaty, and he never wanted to have sex after his runs.”

“Is that so weird?”

“No, but I mean he was kind of awkward. If she even suggested it.

Like he was avoiding her.”

“WHAT?” “He had his shorts around his ankles, and he was fucking a dead seagull that seemed to have no head.”

Silence. I stared ahead. The blonde woman in white stared ahead.

Behind me, there was a gasp, a few expletives – everything you would expect from someone with a freshly minted image of a man fucking a headless seagull lodged in her brain.

“Wh… what did Jade do?”

“Okay.”

“She turned around and walked back to Jeff’s parent’s house.”

“So this goes on for a week. They’re planning on being there for two weeks, her whole vacation. And she knows he used to have a girlfriend on the Cape, they had a thing on and off for literally years, since high school, and he had broken it off when him and Jade got serious, but Jade was always jealous of this girl.”

“And then what?”

“Wait. Is this the girl who was a junkie?”

“She wasn’t a junkie. But yeah. Her.” “Oh wow. Okay.”

“So Jade is starting to suspect that Jeff is running over to this girl’s house every day.”

“Isn’t that a little paranoid?”

“Just listen.”

“I am listening.”

“One day, she decides to follow him.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see that the blonde lady in white across the aisle from me is sitting very still and leaning outward slightly in her seat, ear cocked toward the girls. I can’t blame her.

“And?” says the listener.

“I really shouldn’t be telling you this.”

“If you don’t keep going now, I’ll kill you.”

The narrator laughs, enjoying her power, and I too feel a murderous rage rise in me; it’s all I can do not to turn around in my seat and hiss, “Finish the story, bitch!” But luckily, no one has to die today.

My storyteller continues.

“So Jade follows him, at a distance. And Jeff does run, he runs all the way to the beach. Like a mile. And Jade is jogging along on the boardwalk trying to keep up, for a long time. And she isn’t a runner, so this is tough, and she falls behind. And he disappears over a dune

“Eventually Jeff came home and took a shower.”

“I fucking hope he took a shower. Oh my God. That’s the most disgusting thing I ever heard. But… then what?”

“Jade is just sitting there on the bed watching him get changed. She’s in shock. And she still can’t say anything. She watches him put on his underwear, his pants, his button-down shirt. And then, like, to make conversation, as if everything’s fine, Jeff goes, ‘You know, I’ve been listening to all the candidates, and honestly the one who makes the most sense to me is Mike Pence’.”

Silence. And then, the other girl goes into hysterics behind me. She is screaming with laughter. “Oh my God, that’s so perfect,” she says.

I notice that my travel companion across the aisle is turning toward the girls with a look of naked rage on her face, craning her neck to look at them, her blue eyes bulging. The girls, unaware, are filling the train car with their mad glee. The more they enjoy the absurdity and grotesquerie of their friend’s predicament, the more furious Vanilla Lady seems to get. Finally, she bellows at them, her voice shaking.

“Is everything a joke to you?”

Now I feel I get to turn around. The girls are both red in the face from laughing, tears in their eyes. They stare at their accuser, dumbfounded, silenced.

The narrator, reassembling her powerful limbs, sits up in her seat.

“What’s your problem?” she asks, a smile playing around her mouth.

“My problem is,” says the lady. “You—this—this sort of thing, is why this country is in such a dire condition! It’s—it’s the irony—it’s the—I just—I can guess you girls’ position on every single important issue facing our country today, just from listening to you, and it’s because of people like you that we’re all going to hell in a handbasket!”

The girls hang on her words like two chastised kids dangling from monkey bars. And then, simultaneously, they let go, and dissolve into laughter.

191

Drawings by ALEC DOHERTY

ENDS Now to fashion 192

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O COC ENSION C O RE-R E IN T CE I LOOS OF OFF T U RE S C S E T U F U O CHA S EF O E A N L U T A R EG ST PAS A T L A N’E I C E C

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Photography EIDHART STANISLAS MOTZ-N Styling GEORGIA THOMPSON

SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO

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PORTFOLIO

DIOR MEN

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GUCCI

VALENTINO

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LOEWE

PRADA

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MARGARET HOWELL

JACKSON WEARS LOUIS VUITTON SS19 SPECIAL THANK NAME NAME

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CANALI

ZEGNA

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TOD’S

HERMÈS

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GIORGIO ARMANI

FENDI

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LORO PIANA

MODELS: CHILLIAN MOD ́ EL AT SOUTH COAST KIDZ, DAVID-MICHAEL AT SUPA MODEL MANAGEMENT CASTING: AYMERIC AT AYMCASTING HAIRSTYLING: HIROSHI MATSUSHITA SET DESIGN: PAUL SIMPSON

LOUIS VUITTON

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TOP AND SKIRT CELINE. SOCKS KIKO KOSTADINOV. SHOES GIORGIO ARMANI.

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PORTFOLIO

CARDIGAN LOEWE. TROUSERS LORO PIANA. SHOES TOD’S. EARRINGS RELLIK.

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JUMPER DIOR MEN. DRESS PRADA.

TOP PINANKI. SKIRT ELLEN POPPY HILL. LEGGINGS PINANKI. SHOES GUCCI.

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DRESS MOLLY GODDARD. ANKLETS STYLIST’S OWN. SHOES STYLIST’S OWN.

TWO PIECE RELLIK. CARDIGAN FENDI. TROUSERS ATELIER SOVEN.

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Styling MITCHELL BELK Photography RODRIGO CARMUEGA

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LEFT: COAT LOEWE. SHIRT FERRAGAMO. TIE FERRAGAMO. SHOES TOD’S. SOCKS STYLIST’S OWN. RIGHT: TOD’S.

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HOOD (AS PART OF COAT) FERRAGAMO

BOTTEGA VENETA. SOCKS STYLIST’S OWN.

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VALENTINO

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CANALI

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DUNHILL

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FENDI

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PRADA. SLIP STYLIST’S OWN.

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SHIRT CELINE HOMME. TIE CELINE HOMME. KNIT KITON.

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BACK, TOP TO BOTTOM, LEFT TO RIGHT: RIBBED KNIT FERRAGAMO. SHIRT CELINE HOMME. KNIT NO21.

TIE CELINE HOMME. POLO SHIRT KITON. CARDIGAN ZEGNA. JACKET ZEGNA. HOODIE CELINE HOMME. COAT GIORGIO ARMANI. COAT MAGLIANO. SCARF MAGLIANO.

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ZEGNA

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HERMÈS

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JIL SANDER BY LUCIE & LUKE MEIER

JACKET FENDI. LEATHER JACKET TOD’S. JUMPER FENDI. TROUSERS FENDI. BOOTS FENDI.

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JUMPER: VALENTINO. SOCKS: FALKE

HAIR: MICHAL BIELECKI MAKE UP: JENNIFER LECORRE AT WALTER SCHUPFER MANAGEMENT MODEL: INKY MACHKINS AT NEW MADISON CASTING: BELLA ROBINSON AT THE LINE PRODUCTION: THANKS TO KAJA AT SWAN MANAGEMENT

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287

Susan Sontag’s diaries reveal a witty fondness for the humble list as a way of conferring value and exploring the realms of her knowledge. Her lists of likes and dislikes have become justly notorious. Here author, broadcaster and editor Gary Younge picks up that baton.

THINGS I LIKE: Lega tibs / Reading / Paule Marshall / Edinburgh / Train travel / Roast potatoes / CLR James / Chicago / Socialism / Sauvignon Blanc / Hazelnut milk chocolate / Disco / Carry On films/ Soup / Napping / Brighton pier / Pilsner / Angela Davis / Seurat / Mayakovsky / Seamus Heaney / Barbados / Caribbean Sea / Chatting at the checkout / The time between 5.30am and 7am which I can call my own / Greek salad / The NHS / Spring / Irish accents / Sunrise / Young children first thing in the morning / The Soul Train dance line / Will Ferrell / Love Jones / Being corrected on matters of fact by my daughter / Sesame Street / Grease (the film not the substance) / Maps / Weddings / The view from the train from Alnmouth to Berwick-upon-Tweed / Saying things that are inappropriate but don’t demean anybody / Television / African Americans who treat every political and cultural occasion as an opportunity to practice Baptist-style call and response / Picnics / The Réti Opening / Playing Uno through dusk / Cooking Sunday roast for six or more / Any time I can make my teenage son smile / Turkish baths / A cold midday shower in the desert / The Moscow metro / The Financial Times / The Russian revolution / Sheila Rowbotham / Libraries / Bookshops / Toussaint L’Ouverture / Claudia Jones / Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

THINGS I DISLIKE: Emails / Cold houses / Bigots / Essentialism / Posh people who believe their success is a product of their genius / White people telling me how much better they are at anti-racism than me / Police in Paris / Borders / Indifferent bureaucrats / Toffs / Historical illiteracy / Flying / Lemon curd / Swimming / Travelling in the heat / People who don’t say ‘thank you’ when you make way or space for them / Anti-intellectualism / Blowhards / Formal occasions / February / Dark mornings / School uniforms / Any government law or rule that tells women what they can wear / People who think they are being liberal and enlightened when they are really being Islamophobic / The Sicilian Defence / Those who punch down / Sanctimony where empathy should be / Baked beans / Friends (the show not the people) / Smug people who mistake being rich for being interesting / Fundamentalism of every kind / Mice / Self-checkouts / People saying “I don’t care if you’re white, black or green with red spots.” There are no green people with red spots – we have enough problems with the groups we’ve invented without making up new ones / Arguments that can’t engage race, class and gender simultaneously / Arriving in cities at night / Punditry / “Ready and ripe” avocados that are neither ready nor ripe / Powerful people claiming victimhood / TV remotes / Science fiction / Heavy metal / Babycino (warm milk for children of privilege).

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THINGS I LIKE / THINGS I DISLIKE