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Carmen Villain

Posted on by nr

NR · Magazine
Published · Online

Feature · Subset Festival
Words · Melis Özek

Auditory Presence as Psychic Topography and the Politics of Listening

What does it mean to truly listen, not as a passive gesture but as a radical, embodied act of attention? In a culture shaped by speed, visibility, and extraction, listening offers a different kind of presence. One that resists control, invites transformation, and asks us to be changed in the process. This conversation begins with the ear: not just as a site of sonic perception, but as a threshold for memory, time, identity, and relation. What if the ear, long relegated to the background, became central to how we move through the world? What if listening could dissolve the boundaries between body and landscape, self and other, language and emotion? One rooted in care, intimacy, and attention. One that moves beneath language.

Carmen Villain moves through this space with rare clarity. As a composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist, her work resists resolution and leans into resonance. She scores what lingers in the in-between: ambient yet pointed, spectral yet grounded. Through layered textures and dilated time, she traces the emotional and psychic topographies of sound. In Villain’s world, listening is not a tool but a threshold, a portal into what slips beneath language, dissolves certainty, and refuses closure.

This interview unfolds within NR’s experimental series, a conceptual relay where three artistic voices respond to a unified theme. A living structure, each conversation blurs authorship, embracing intuition, curiosity, and the space between voices. What emerges is not a fixed exchange but a shared vibration.

This particular conversation unfolds following Villain’s live performance at Subset Festival in Athens on June 5, 2025, where she presented Music from The Living Monument, a durational piece that holds space for slowness, suspension, and subtle transformation. It asks the audience not to grasp but to dwell, not to consume but to become one with. In Villain’s work, listening becomes a site of encounter with the unseen architectures that shape how we relate to time, to space, to each other.

What happens when we reopen the ear, not only as a site of perception, but as a threshold for memory, identity, and transformation? How might deep, embodied listening allow us to access the invisible architectures that shape who we are , internal time, ritual, spiritual resonance, and reorient us toward a more fluid, post-human understanding of self? In a world saturated by visual dominance and extraction logics, can listening become a quiet form of resistance, a way to transmit emotion, reimagine presence, and dissolve boundaries between body, landscape, technology, and the unknown?

Those are big questions. I often think about these themes. Listening, for me, is something entirely different from hearing. I was actually just the other day reading Pauline Oliveros’ Quantum Listening, in which she talks about this distinction: hearing is passive, it just happens. But listening is a decision, an orientation. It unlocks entire worlds.

For example, when I’m outside and hear an unusual sound that catches my ear, the act of recording it forces me to actively listen, which shifts how I relate to the space around me. It sharpens my awareness and connects me to my environment in a deeper way. I become more present. But there’s also this internal listening connected to memory. I can hear or recall sounds in my head, like imagining a flute inside a cave. That imagined echo has a memory attached to it. It’s not just sound, it’s spatial, emotional, associative.

As a musician, deep listening is essential. It’s how I interact with my materials and make creative decisions. But beyond that, it feels like a way of being. A way of tracing memory through sound and finding identity in moments that are fleeting, dislocated, but still resonant.

In a time defined by overstimulation and hyper-visibility, can listening become a form of resistance — a counter-practice rooted in slowness, attention, and care?

Yes, I believe it can. Listening is a powerful tool for cultivating empathy. In a world that often feels overwhelming, with so much negativity, polarization, and noise, listening offers another route. A quieter one. A slower one.

Through listening, we can reach a different kind of understanding. Not just with people, but with landscapes, histories, and emotions. It’s a way of paying attention to what might otherwise go unnoticed. And in that attention, there is care.

Listening can bring us into contact with what lies beneath the surface. It cuts through the quick assumptions we tend to make. It invites us to pause, to receive, and to connect. That, to me, is a form of resistance. Especially now, when speed, distraction, and spectacle dominate. Listening asks something else from us and gives something back in return.

Your work often inhabits sonic in-betweens: fragile, suspended, undefined. What draws you to these liminal states, and how do they shape the emotional or spatial architectures of your compositions?

Honestly, I rarely know what the final result will be when I start. I might begin with a loose idea, a texture I want to explore, or a feeling I’m trying to reach. But I never map it out in a fixed way. It’s more like following sound and letting it guide me somewhere unexpected.

Take The Living Monument score, for example. It was created to accompany extremely slow movement by dancers. I had to imagine the choreography while still in the studio. That meant slowing everything down: sonically, emotionally, perceptually. I had to let the sounds expand and take their time.

I’m drawn to that space, the in-between where things feel suspended. It allows for a kind of openness. The boundaries dissolve a little, and you’re left with something that feels more intuitive than logical. I like not knowing exactly where I’m going. That uncertainty is where a lot of the magic lives.

There’s a temporal softness to your work: sounds stretch, blur, and become immersive. How does this slowing-down allow you to access more intuitive or unconscious states, both for yourself and the listener?

When I stretch a sound over time, I begin to notice details I wouldn’t otherwise hear. It’s like placing a magnifying lens over a moment. The texture opens up, and so does my ability to respond to it.

I enjoy sinking deeply into sounds, allowing them to breathe and unfold. My process is mostly intuitive. I might have some structural guidelines or ideas, but I try to stay flexible. Sometimes the best ideas emerge when I stop trying to control the outcome. It’s about listening to the sound, and listening to myself inside that process.

That slowing-down allows me to enter a different state. Less mental, more sensory. And I think it allows the listener to do the same.


Question from Cinna Peyghamy:
Do you consciously seek out the unheard, to create sounds that challenge expectations or dissolve the known edges of genre, voice, or instrument?

Absolutely. I love the challenge of morphing sounds, reshaping them until they become unrecognizable yet still intimate. It’s like a form of sonic treasure hunting.

In collaborating with visual artists I might start with a suggestion or a prompt. For example, for the Living Monument score, the choreographer Eszter Salamon gave me a feeling, a texture, even a color, and from there I begin trying to push the material beyond conventional limits. 

The goal in my music isn’t novelty for its own sake. It’s about arriving at something that feels emotionally specific, something that sounds like me. That search keeps me excited. It keeps the work alive.

You’re about to perform Music from The Living Monument at Subset Festival in Greece, your first time performing there. What does this performance mean to you, and how do you anticipate the work unfolding in that context?

I’m really looking forward to it. I’ve never played in Greece before, so it feels special. Performing The Living Monument in a live context is something I cherish. It’s a piece that invites me to go deep into the sound and let it sit, let it breathe for a long time.

I’m excited to see how it resonates in the space and how the audience listens with me. That mutual attention, that quiet exchange, is what makes these moments feel meaningful.

Discover more on aefestival.gr

Christina Vantzou

Posted on by nr

NR · Magazine
Published · Online

Feature · Subset Festival
Words · Melis Özek

Embodied Listening as Navigation and the Architecture of Time

What does it mean to truly listen, not as a passive gesture but as a radical, embodied act of attention? In a culture shaped by speed and spectacle, listening offers a slower kind of presence. One rooted in care, intimacy, and transformation. One that moves beneath language.

This conversation begins with the ear, not just as a site of sonic perception but as a threshold for memory, time, identity, and relation. What if the ear, long kept in the background, became central to how we move through the world? What if listening could dissolve the boundaries between self and other, body and landscape, language and emotion?

Christina Vantzou’s work moves through this space, where listening becomes a mode of relation, a method of inquiry, and a force of transformation. Through fragmented voices, field recordings, and intuition-led structures, she opens spaces where the sonic becomes psychic, where time dilates, and where meaning surfaces through sensation rather than explanation. Her practice offers a quiet refusal of the fixed and extractive, proposing instead attention, slowness, and presence as subtle forms of resistance and repair.

Framed by the context of her forthcoming performance at Subset Festival in Athens on June 6, 2025—where she will present The Reintegration of the Ear, a durational, ensemble-based composition that reimagines listening as a relational act—the article extends and deepens the conceptual threads that inform her practice. Originally commissioned by INA GRM, the renowned Parisian sound research institute where much of the material was recorded and first presented, the work lives at the intersection of experimental music and embodied inquiry. Neither spectacle nor score, the piece is a sustained invitation to attune: to place, to entanglement, to the quiet textures between bodies and environments.

What happens when we reopen the ear, not only as a site of perception, but as a threshold for memory, identity, and transformation? How might deep, embodied listening allow us to access the invisible architectures that shape who we are, internal time, ritual, spiritual resonance, and reorient us toward a more fluid, post-human understanding of self? In a world saturated by visual dominance and extraction logics, can listening become a quiet form of resistance, a way to transmit emotion, reimagine presence, and dissolve boundaries between body, landscape, technology, and the unknown?

This is a powerful question. One that opens up deep research into the nature of perception. We often forget just how dominant sight is in our culture. I’m someone who constantly records, both sound and image, and I’ve noticed something essential through field recording, particularly in nature. When I’m focused on video, my brain is busy: framing, composing, evaluating. But with sound, it’s different. Listening taps me into the present. It brings the moment into the body.

The eyes face forward; they frame and judge. The ears, on the other hand, are lateral. They open you up and make you porous to your surroundings. Listening inherently invites connection. When you’re truly listening, your body becomes part of the environment. It’s no longer about observation from a distance. It becomes participation. Even in conversation, when we only look, we risk staying on the surface and falling into judgment. But when we listen, we extend ourselves toward the other. We meet them. There’s something beautifully shared in listening. It’s a relational act: between you and another, you and the world, you and yourself.

You often work with voices that seem to arrive from somewhere distant or unknown: dislocated, layered, multiplied. What draws you to this fragmentation of the voice, and how does it reflect your relationship with space, memory, or selfhood?

I remember, even without a formal background in music or opera, how deeply moved I was by a moment in the opera in Belgium. A voice sang from offstage, unseen and disembodied. It drifted in like a phantom, and I found it to be the most powerful part of the entire performance. I later learned it’s a known technique, but the effect was profound. There’s something magical in the distant voice. Softness, absence, or quiet can activate more imagination than what is overt.

I’ve had similar moments while walking through cities such as Poland, France, and Austria, where I’d catch traces of a rehearsal through a building window. A faint opera voice or instrument barely reaching my ears. It’s often too soft to record, and too ethereal to locate. But I’d stop in my tracks, completely captivated. These fragile, fleeting moments, blended with city sounds, become living compositions that exist only in that time and place. They’ve deeply influenced how I approach mixing and composing today.

And again, it’s about presence. Anyone can experience this. You don’t need special training or tools. All it takes is noticing. Simply listening. It cuts through so much noise about who’s allowed to be a composer, or what counts as music. When you open yourself to the everyday as potential composition, it becomes a kind of liberation.

But in the rush of daily life, we often forget to listen. These small, shimmering moments slip by unnoticed. And yet, through music, through the act of deeply listening, we can return to them. Your work, your sound, has the power to bring us back. To remind us of the beauty in the everyday. That sense of wonder. The magic that still lives in the ordinary. It’s like rediscovering a kind of childlike joy. Brief, but real, and deeply human.



In your recent works, sound feels like a portal — opening onto spaces that are emotional, psychic, even elemental. What role do liminal states, deep listening, or field recording play in helping you access what’s beyond the visible or the tangible?

For me, sound is a gateway to altered states of consciousness. Deep, embodied listening helps me step outside the dominance of visual perception that’s so present in daily life. When I really focus on the auditory, I find I can access something quieter — internal rhythms, spiritual resonances, a more profound connection to place and presence.

Much of your work resists overt structure, yet it carries an undeniable sense of coherence — as if guided by internal tides. How do intuition, ritual, or bodily memory shape your compositional process? What’s happening beneath the form?

Intuition plays a central role. My process is entirely guided by feeling, an internal sense of knowing, step by step, what needs to happen next. When I’m working with recorded sounds and assembling a composition in the software, it’s never about formulas or rules. It’s always about what feels right. I listen, and something in me knows. This needs to be softened. That has to be removed. This transition matters. It’s a visceral process.

Time is also a crucial part of it. You can get very deep into something, but eventually you have to let it go. Step away. Forget it for a while. And then, when you return, intuition steps in again with fresh ears. That space in between, forgetting and returning, becomes part of the composition itself. It’s almost like a ritual of death and rediscovery.

I don’t build pieces using traditional musical structures. No bars, no beats. I don’t even open those grids in the software. I avoid anything that might constrain the process into something too rigid. Instead, I work in a kind of open time. Structureless, but not directionless.

And yet, as you noted, there’s coherence. It emerges through listening, through the way it feels to me as a listener. That embodied sense of rhythm and progression creates its own kind of form. So while I may resist overt structures, the shape of the piece arises from inside. It comes from intuition, ritual, and the memory held in the body.


Your work often stretches time until it almost dissolves. What kind of consciousness emerges in that expanded space? How does temporal distortion help you access emotional or spiritual dimensions in your practice?

I often hear the same comment after a concert: “I thought that was an hour, but it was only twenty minutes.” Or the opposite: “I can’t believe that much time passed.” People are surprised by how elastic time feels. They’re curious about the actual duration, because what they experienced was something completely different. To me, that’s a profound compliment.

When I’m working on music and I lose track of time myself, I take that as a sign I’m in the right place. That kind of absorption is a gift. In daily life, we’re so bound by time, by schedules, by structure. But to enter a space where time slips away, like having a picnic and suddenly it’s dusk without realizing it, that’s rare and precious.

You asked about consciousness in this expanded space, and I think it’s something close to dream logic. In dreams, fragments of memory, emotion, and experience collide in strange, surreal ways. And yet, sometimes a dream leaves you with a distinct clarity. Like it answered a question you didn’t even know how to ask. Music can work in that same way. It reaches beyond language or linear thought and allows for a kind of emotional resolution, or even healing, that bypasses rational understanding.

Letting go of structured time and logical sequencing opens a portal. In that temporal suspension, you can access deeper layers: emotional, spiritual, unconscious. I think that’s why music has always been part of ceremony and healing. It creates a space where we can feel something shift, release, or clarify, without needing to explain why.

So yes, stretching or dissolving time isn’t just a stylistic choice. It’s a way to enter another kind of awareness. One that invites depth, presence, and emotion.


‘The Reintegration of the Ear’ reflects a counter-statement to the extraction mentality that dominates contemporary society. Can you elaborate on how you hope the piece fosters a shift in the listener’s relationship to nature, both in terms of what they hear and what they feel?

The statement is a bit complex, but I understand the spirit behind it. I do think it’s relevant to how I approach sound and listening. Music, for me, is inherently a collective, communal practice. Even when I’m alone in the field recording, I’m very aware of what I’m doing. I’m conscious that I’m taking something, capturing the sound of birds, for example, and with that comes a responsibility. I’m leaving a trace, even if it’s an invisible one.

That awareness matters. For too long, we’ve taken from the environment without asking or even thinking. Practicing a different kind of relationship, one that considers what we take and what we give or share in return, is essential. Even something as subtle as being present in nature with a spirit of exchange, rather than extraction, is part of that shift. It starts with a simple awareness, but it’s deeply needed in today’s world.

We’re constantly surrounded by examples of extraction. It’s the default mindset we’re conditioned into. So to ask, “Can we think differently?” becomes a radical and urgent question. That’s part of what The Reintegration of the Earis about. It’s not just about hearing. It’s about participating. About cultivating an active, reciprocal relationship with sound, with each other, with the environment.

And this carries over into collaboration too. Much of my work is ensemble-based, and The Reintegration of the Ear is no exception. When I collaborate with other musicians, it becomes an exercise in deep listening, mutual exchange, and co-creation. That experience, of building something together through attentive presence, feels like the opposite of extraction. It’s generous. It’s shared. And it’s essential.


The collaboration in ‘The Reintegration of the Ear’ involves a diverse ensemble of musicians, including Irene Kurka, John Also Bennett, and Oliver Coates. How does this dynamic influence the unfolding of the piece, especially when integrating such different sound sources , from synthesizers to live instruments to hydrophone recordings?

The ensemble is a huge part of the sound. I’m working with people whose sonic language I love, artists whose contributions are deeply meaningful and whose voices are distinct. This is the first time I’m collaborating with Oliver Coates, and I’ve been a fan of his work for years. His presence brings an entire world of detail. His cello playing, even the smallest gestures, becomes part of the piece’s atmosphere. It’s a deeply generous act to bring that kind of intimacy into a group context, and it makes the work feel alive in new ways.

John Also Bennett, who plays flute and synthesizer and who is also my partner, has a long personal and musical history with me. His way of playing has developed across time, and that shared evolution adds something subtle but powerful to the work. There’s an intuitive understanding between us that naturally informs the unfolding of the piece.

And then there’s Irene Kurka. Her voice and the way she delivers both text and melody drew me in through recordings. I didn’t know her personally, but I reached out simply because I loved the way she sounded. That’s really the core of how I collaborate, falling in love with a sound and following that instinct.

This will be the first time the four of us come together as a quartet. Until now, we’ve presented the piece as a trio. So Athens will be the debut of this full formation, and that adds another layer of excitement and intimacy to the performance.

Question from Carmen Villain:
In your work, how do you approach the relationship between listening and seeing?

For me, it’s through observing this relationship in nature.  I like paying attention to how the sound of wind through leaves, for example, is embedded in the visual of a tree. Still, it’s tempting to try to focus on one or the other and sort of feel around for what happens.  Sound travels instantly into feeling for me.  I don’t sense any gap whatsoever. Seeing takes me to a feeling too, but in a reflective way, passing through thoughts first. 


Subset Festival brings together a wide array of experimental artists. In a setting where sound, technology, and space are explored in depth, what do you hope audiences will take away from experiencing ‘The Reintegration of the Ear’ in this context, where the concept of “reconciliation” might resonate on a personal and collective level?

On a personal level, performing in Athens holds special meaning. My father is Greek, and though I haven’t performed much in Greece, returning to my roots and having my work exist in that landscape carries emotional weight. It feels like a kind of homecoming.

I’m especially excited about the context of the Subset Festival. It’s a beautifully curated program that brings together experimental artists in ways that feel both accessible and sensual. I hope that audiences, especially local ones, come away realizing that experimental sound doesn’t have to be abstract or difficult. There’s beauty, there’s feeling, and there’s a quiet invitation to listen differently.

The venue, the Athens Conservatory, is also ideal. Our set will be immersive. And while we’re using instruments often associated with classical traditions, such as cello, flute, and soprano voice, we’re blending them with environmental recordings, subtle textures, and a non-traditional approach to form. That juxtaposition can be disarming in the best way, opening people up to new ways of experiencing sound.

Ultimately, what I hope is that the music doesn’t just stay within the frame of the concert. That it lingers. That it sparks curiosity or reflection, maybe even reconnection. Whether it’s with the environment, with memory, or with each other. And especially in a city like Athens, where a new scene is emerging, anything that fosters deeper listening and a more vibrant community feels important. Music, at its best, can be a part of that cultural evolution: something more than just a performance, something shared.

Photography · Julie Calbert
Discover more on aefestival.gr

Banks Violette 

Posted on by nr

NR 19 Detour · 2025
Published · Print Page 130

Feature · Banks Violette
Words · Daria Miricola

A Kind Of Martyrdom

Banks Violette’s world is one of collapse—landscapes eroding, subcultures dissolving, symbols drained of irony and filled with raw sincerity. Raised in Ithaca, a town haunted by its name, his work blurs devotion and destruction: suicide sites turned icons, death metal aesthetics treated with the reverence of illuminated manuscripts, American hardcore and true crime folded into the language of high art. 

Daria Miricola Today, I’d like to discuss the very beginnings of your practice and some of your early shows and inspirations. But to kick off, I would like to talk a bit about your hometown Ithaca, I guess its name is inspired by the Greek Ithaca, the motherland of Odysseus. 

Banks Violette Ithaca is on the southern end of one of the Finger Lakes, a glacial valley that is a sort of dead center in New York State. There are these big gorges, these big ravines that have been essentially hacked in the earth. The bedrock is made out of shale and slate, almost like compressed mud. So the landscape looks sort of rotting out, and it’s decaying. The best word to describe it is entropic. Coming to its name, there are a lot of towns in New York State that are named after Greco-Roman, classical cities. There’s a Rome, there’s a Syracuse, and there’s Ithaca. I’m sure that a lot of people who live in this area have no fucking clue that there’s a connection to something beyond, and it’s a sign of how bad American education is. Despite this, we also have a huge Ivy League university. 

DM Recently, I was intrigued by a story about a scientist from Cornell University, the Ivy League university you just mentioned. His name was G. S. Moler, and apparently, he did one of the earliest movie experiments to date, featuring a moving skeleton. This immediately reminded me of the presence of skeletons, and skeleton-like shapes within your work. But I should add that my curiosity about Ithaca was also fostered by an incredibly fascinating early painting series you did, titled Ithaca Suicide Drawings (2004). 

BV When I was growing up there were a lot of people committing suicide in this town. So those drawings represent suicide spots that are really fundamental features of the landscape here, like the holes in the ground and ravines, that became sites for recurring suicides. There is an inescapably aesthetic component to sites that become associated with suicide, you know? 

DM There is a profound connection between the aesthetic dimension of a place and suicide. And this, let’s say, aesthetic of suicide, can equally characterize natural and urban landscapes. 

BV Well, this is an oddball piece of trivia but, apparently, the railings on the side of the Golden Gate Bridge are lower than you would find in any other bridge because the engineer who designed it was a little bit shorter than average. He scaled parts of the Golden Gate Bridge to his height, which allows it to be a little bit more accessible for somebody who wants to commit suicide. 

DM So coming back to Ithaca and to your formation years. I found out that your grandmother was an illustrator, so I wonder if her work has somehow influenced your imagination and sensibility while growing up. 

BV She was extraordinary. I only had the opportunity to meet her a couple of times but for sure her influence was seminal. She raised my mom as a single mother living in North Carolina. She worked as an illustrator and she made it a functional occupation at a time and in a place where it wasn’t a really practical thing. She was one of the first sort of King Features Syndicate-published cartoon artists who are in all the Sunday papers in the US and she also illustrated books like Wizard of Oz and things like that. But she also, with my grandfather, wrote a couple of children’s books for my mom that they never published. These illustrations really are the sweetest thing possible and they stem from a tragic history that I don’t have access to—these are the only records of that—but they are just utterly sweet and lovely. So, yeah, that’s pretty significant. 

DM This reminds me of something pretty recurring in your practice—the idea of recasting, especially through charming and attractive plastic qualities, something that actually has to do with the realm of the horrific, or the evil. And since the very beginning, this modus operandi has been considered a very precise iconography that owns a lot of specific music subcultures. 

BV While growing up, my friends and I were in bands and were heavily tattooed at a time when it was not a normal thing, so the subcultures I was associated with at that time— American hardcore, punk rock, metal, and much more—still inform the image selection I use. You were mentioning an oddball figure from Cornell University who had this history of doing animations. There was another academic, Harold Craft, who published this little sort of sine wave in his PhD thesis in 1970. This image was then used by Peter Saville for the cover of the Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures. So the intent behind using that particular iconography is from that kind of background, that kind of personal history, that relationship to both subcultures and seemingly marginal activities. As a 51-year-old man, it still informs everything I do and the way I look at the world. 

DM This perpetual lingering of your personal background within your work draws me to a recent conversation you had with curator Neville Wakefield. In it, you mentioned that there was a particular moment, between the end of the 90s and the beginning of the new millennium, where there was a certain fixation within the art scene with the notions of purity versus the one of impurity. 

BV So for me, a more accurate way of describing a pure vs. impure kind of relationship to something would be sincere vs. insincere. After the Pictures Generation and the 80s criticality with their ironic relationship to mass culture, many artists started ironically referencing popular culture, pulling it into a different context, with this kind of critical distance. For me, there’s something very off-putting and alienating about that. So formatively, on one hand, you have Richard Prince and his use of American outlaw biker culture imagery, and, on the other hand, you have Stephen Parrino’s use of American outlaw biker imagery, which is informed by a sincere, loving relationship to that. It’s a hugely important distinction. And as well, I had a sincere relationship to the history that I reference. I was interested in appropriating my own history and pulling it into a different context sincerely, without treating it ironically, without that critical distance. I still am very interested in sincerity. 

DM And sincerity, I suppose, can be expressed in many ways, I’m thinking for instance to your most ambitious, labor-intensive installations, like the church’s skeleton you presented at the Whitney Biennial in 2004—you always have fabricated everything on your own and this studio practice is a crucial component to understand your poetic. There is something inherently ritual within this approach because, in a certain perspective, which is opposite to the one of pop art, of the picture generation, and of appropriation art that you just mentioned, you are setting zero distance between you and your work, so a viewer can really feel that there is this sense of devotion, almost a sodality between you and your own work. 

BV You know, when you’re talking about minimalism or pop art, or any dominant post-war contemporary art-making strains, they all revolve around a couple of polls like seriality, repetition, and mechanical production. The church specifically, has a lot to do with that. What happens if you take a form and you repeat it again and again and again? It collapses. So that was in a literal sense like taking the conventional skeleton of post-war art making—in a broad sense—and just allowing it to do exactly that. Repeat itself again and again. But it was more than an art conversation, it also had a resonance to real-world things like the human devotional relationship to music and culture, and how it can blur the line between something that is a fact and a fiction, to the point where, by repeating a gesture, humans can enact something potentially horrific, and they can dissolve and disappear within this kind of fiction. 

DM These perpetual rebounds between cultural production and murders or suicide were also treated very in-depth through a few collective art shows at the beginning of the 2000s. I’m thinking in particular of an exhibition you curated in 2001 titled “Dear Dead Person,” whose title referenced a book by Benjamin Weissman. The whole show seemed to provide an archetypical reading, or psychogeography of American violent crimes, from teen sex addicts to religious fanatics, to create the portrayal of a collective, national psychosis. I think my generation could relate so much to an exhibition like this because we are also quite deeply interested in such themes: We watch Netflix series about Jeffrey Dahmer in bed to go to sleep and listen to Sword and Scale in the morning while we do our skincare routine. I guess my question would then be—if violent crimes can act as a mirror of the generations that commit them, which are the ones that you think better define your own? 

BV I remember there was this huge hysteria and paranoia about heavy metal music, punk rock, gangsta rap, or whatever. There were Senate hearings about “how this was going to destroy our children.” This happened for the preceding generation as well. Every generation experiences this, because the culture that they produce is antagonistic by necessity. So when I was growing up, there were members of heavy metal band who dragged a female classmate into a eucalyptus grove in Arroyo Grande and they stabbed her to death, or this kid who committed suicide, theoretically, because of Judas Priest subliminal suicide messages, that’s a famous example.. Clearly heavy metal seemed like the bane of your children.. It’s a tale as old as time. In the 19th fucking century Goethe wrote an epistolary novel called “The Sorrows of Young Werther” which was held up as responsible for creating a series of copycat suicides, because people found it such an influential text that I think it was eventually banned. So just the same way, when I was a kid, if you listened to Judas Priest you were going to commit suicide and in the 19th century you would have committed suicide if you read Goethe. There’s always that kind of threat implied by one generation’s cultural output. 

DM And speaking about the opposite movement, namely when there’s something so shocking and disturbing about certain crimes that they enter the cultural realm and gain cult status, it was always in that year that artists’ work started encapsulating a certain morbid or violent imagery and language, for example with the artist using pictures and details of crime scenes, reporting sentences from murder news, or even adopting a drawing style that evoked the ones of the vignettes used to chronicle trials or to identify serial killers. One of the artists you included in “Dear Dead Person” is called Marlene McCarty, I’m not sure whether she’s still active today or not however, she did an amazing drawing series with a strong forensic inspiration, depicting very attractive young girls with huge wounds on their bodies. The drawings were accompanied by a cold, objective description of how they were murdered. 

BV She’s still around, as far as I know. But the fact that we’re not talking a lot about Marlene McCarty today is a crime in proof that the art world is a fucking terrible place because she did an amazing rock-solid corpus of work. It is way ahead of its time. I’m happy that you looked into her work and you liked it because she’s amazing. 

DM Likewise. And you know, it is always worthy researching into this milieu of very underground group shows happening across the 90s and the 2000s in the US, because it allows younger generations to discover so many, almost forgotten, incredible artists, that in those years were exhibiting next to the more successful ones that later became highly recognized—names in the art world are written in pencil. However, the other two very peculiar shows you took part in that I wanted to ask you about are Transnational Monster League (2001) and another one curated by Bob Nickas that was dedicated to the Melvins and their cult fandom among artists. 

BV “Transnational Monster League” was cast around two centerpieces, two artworks I really wanted to show together. One was a Stephen Parrino painting that was just fucking mind-boggling, incredibly beautiful. And another one was a video by an artist, operating at that time under the name Matthew Greene, where he dressed up as a witch in a Los Angeles garage. He had crappy makeup on that was falling off, and was playing a guitar just slowly over and over and over. It was an amazing video. 

DM And Stephen Parrino was featured too in the other show I mentioned about the Melvins. This show captured my attention for the same reason why I was curious about those art practices borrowing from murderous or deadly languages and aesthetics. It is something that your generation has kind of initiated and mine has continued. I’m referring to the idea of creating fine art pieces that employ the very visual codes and poetics of fan art, a peculiar aesthetic realm that nuances a sense of romantic sublime, a religious devotion, and the cheesiest consumer culture. And this artist-fan attitude is, like you said before, a warmer approach radically opposed to more detached, critical attitudes towards pop or celebrity culture. A fan is forever. And so this Melvins show was really about artists-fans of the band paying homage to its iconic visual legacy, picking fav albums, and producing a lot of graphic art. Your generation was also pioneering this kind of interest in graphic design as a fine art medium to express higher conceptual values. A narration that in those same years was becoming central for the development of the history of streetwear: Legendary, at times controversial brands like Fuct sedimented precisely in that period. 

BV It’s funny that you mentioned Erik Brunetti as I just did a radio session thing for Fuct. Anyway, absolutely. We mentioned Steven Parrino, Marlene McCarty, my musical influences and heroes..the way I relate with these artists and their work is less close to that of a “proper” art viewer than it is to how a fan relates to who he admires. I understand art in that way—it is part of the music I listen to, of what I wear in the morning, and of what’s on my body and all that kind of stuff. Going back to something I was trying to articulate a little bit earlier, I think this is exactly that sort of difference between the sincere and the insincere. You can tell when somebody doesn’t have a relationship to the culture that they’re referencing when they’re doing it just as an ironic kind of quotation of something that doesn’t have anything to do with their life. I think that there’s a hugely important distinction between an ironic quotation and a sincere reflection on something, which is, as you said, something very religious. You know, one of the reasons why all the things I reference have kind of a true crime dimension is because pretty much every religion revolves around martyrdoms to a certain point. You know what I mean? The true crime resonance within my work is because there’s an almost inevitable level of devotion within it, a kind of martyrdom. 

DM Yes! And you also extended this analysis to movies and cinema in certain cases. A very cool case study is this pretty crazy show called “Screams” 2004 where you participated. Every artist was picking a movie to base their work on. And then all the artists and their works were assigned to a writer. The title you chose was Martin (1977), a horror movie about this 70s narco-vampire creature. 

BV Martin is a George Romero movie, one of my favorite movies of all time. It’s about this kid in Pittsburgh. For the entire movie, you cannot tell whether he’s really a vampire or he’s just a sick kid who totally believes he’s a vampire, just because everybody else kind of believes he’s a vampire. The whole thing’s super weird, it revolves around a central question: what happens if you lose yourself in fictions and narratives you have built yourself? And it’s both a great and a fucking clumsy and bad movie because a lot of the footage was lost for it. But when you watch it, you’re aware throughout that if somebody found the missing five minutes, this would be the greatest movie ever made, super good. 

DM Even in Romero’s most legendary movie, The Night of the Living Dead (1968) the horror genre becomes a container for a crazy fine, exquisitely allegoric cultural critique. Because there was this idea of the zombie’s figure being used to address the human condition under capitalism. Some scenes were even set in a mall in Pennsylvania. And so there is this kind of never-ending circle where real horrors inspire songs, movies, and novels, which in turn are mimicked to the point that they inspire real crimes because people lose themself in the fiction. 

BV And also, you know, there’s something really interesting that brings me back to your very first question. George Romero is from Pittsburgh, and both of those movies are set in Pittsburgh. He uses the backdrop of his personal history for his work, especially for “Night of the Living Dead.” You know this is a movie that was played in cheap theaters. It was a schlocky horror film, and, at the same time, it’s one of the only movies from that era that talked about how fucked up American domestic politics was. You know the actor who played Ben, the black character, who’s the central figure in the movie and ends up dying in the end. And so wow, this movie was really actually talking about civil rights and how fucked up America actually is on a fundamental level, and he was employing a vehicle that allows that conversation to reach not just a rarefied audience, but a bunch of kids you know, stumbling in for, like a midnight matinee to get scared and accidentally receive an incredibly progressive political message. 

DM There is something sublime within this subliminal level of communicating. 

BV There’s something kind of fascinating about the correspondence between sublime and subliminal. As I mentioned earlier, a lot of the music and culture that I was involved with as a teenager, was looked at as a threat, like it had subliminal messaging. All these things were coded to communicate something vile, evil, and anti-statist, which is interesting, and sublime by itself. It is similar to the Burkean concept of terror because the sublime is awe and majesty, it is terrifying. You know, romanticism seems like such a benign term when you use it, except when you start thinking that Caspar David Friedrich was talking about this sort of spiritual connection with his landscape and, oh shit. That’s pretty close to blood and soil ideology ideas where, like, there is an ugliness to get skipped over somehow in our conversation about these things, I’m interested in the conversation with the ugliness included. I’m not interested in a casual subcultural or aesthetic definition for a moment in time but in the fully expansive notion of romantic or sublime. I’m absolutely interested in that. 

Credits

Talent · Banks Violette
Photography · Jeton Bakalli
Styling · Jungle Lin

  1. Full Look CELINE
  2. Shirt ZEGNA, Trousers ACNE STUDIOS
  3. Full Look CELINE

Violent Magic Orchestra

Posted on by nr

NR Video Premiere · WARP
Artists · VMO

Directed by · Rafael Bicalho
Release Date · 13.03.24

WARP

NR presents Soundsights, Track Etymology’s sister column: An inquiry into the convergence between sound, its visual expressions, investigating music’s intrinsically visual narrative quality.

Hello guys, thank you for being here, it must be pretty late now in Japan. How are you feeling about the upcoming release? It is your first LP since 2016! It’s been quite a journey! Global tours, several collaborations, a lot of experimentation. There is this restless component to your work, always evolving and shifting both sonically and conceptually. Is this record your way of crystallizing what you’ve been up to these last 8 years? What made you finally settle down?

Our music has always flirted with genre-bending, but for this record in particular, we aimed to incorporate various genres into our sound more than ever. Perhaps what has changed the most is that this time, we aimed to capture what we think is the essence of our live shows, rather than focusing on a specific sound, having toured a lot since the release of our previous album —Our main inspiration for this record stems from physicality and the ways our audience interacts in a live setting with our sound. Of course, Techno and Black Metal are still our two sonic compasses, but this time we drew from a wider plethora of music genres like hardcore, noise, and industrial. It is also the first record where we have a female lead vocalist, Zastar, the last member to join us!

The experiential referentiality of your music is definitely felt in the new record, and its presence makes even more sense considering that you describe yourselves as a performance art collective. I was listening to Warp while watching the visuals Rafael Bicalho created for it, and I almost felt like I was in a 3.0 musical drama. There is a sort of lingering quality to it, those almost fading vocals mixed with the track’s physicality and the alternating moments of calm and soaring. It was as if I was listening to source music for a film. What was the concept behind it? Is it one act of a longer narrative that continues throughout the whole record?

Self-consciousness is definitely a recurrent theme throughout the record, at least in its narrative aspects. In “Warp,” we depicted Zastar swimming in an abstract, undefined space, searching for objects to anchor her sense of reality and body. The goal we had in mind was to convey the feeling of a mind and body that had been separated and are now attempting to reunite in a quest to reinstate a feeling of individual wholeness. Rafael is one of the many visual artists we collaborate with; it is very important to us working with these incredible artists who help us give a visual body to our ideas.

I am very curious about the artistic direction of the release. There is an incredible emphasis on the aesthetic component of all your projects, your live gigs, the way you communicate online —All these visual elements seem to form a unicum with your sound, and, as you said, you collaborate a lot in order to achieve it. What fuels this curatorial approach that you have?

We always check Instagram! Scrolling, exploring all the time. We usually brainstorm a lot so that very precise images of what we want form in our minds. Those will then inform our research, and down the rabbit hole we go. The same thing applies to our collaboration with other musicians; we want to keep aesthetics and sonics parallel, informed by the same general idea.

You describe VMO as a multimedia performance art project. How do you approach creation? Does music come first or Is it about feeling and aesthetic rather than songwriting?

We operate precisely as an art collective, only our media is primarily music, trying to aggregate conceptual structures to sonic palettes. Visual and music, concepts and sounds. Everything usually starts with a visual idea of what we want to portray, and then from there, we work it into a sound and choose the people to work with on that overarching concept, musically and visually.

Interesting. Considering the multitude of influences you have and the collaborative nature of VMO, how do you function as a collective?

We work, well..collectively! [they laugh.] We usually gather inspiration from a variety of sources, books, poetry, films, music, nature..anything really. K, who functions as a sort of “chief curator” explains his influences and what he wants to do to all of us and then we work together to achieve the final result we want to go for.

You mentioned movies, literature, poetry. What were some of the extra-musical references for this particular record? 

Each of us has his own individual inspiration, of course; we have a lot of different interests and media, drawing from various inspirations that manifest in our work. There are numerous histories occurring around the world all the time. For instance, Black Metal is influenced by Christianity, Afrofuturism is deeply ingrained in Detroit Techno —Different histories influence each other and are simultaneously distant yet close. Cross-pollination might very well be another of the main themes of the record. Think of “Stranger Things’ ‘; An incredibly pop show presenting a clear 80s aura, but mixing it with horror tropes in a quotational yet twisted manner.

There’s an almost reassembled-collage quality to how you operate, exploring sonic dichotomies, musical and visual tropes, featuring elements  that are at the same time disorienting but familiar —Yours is an almost unheimlich sound. How do you manage to keep all these different inputs together in a coherent result?

In a sense, it’s almost complete experimentation, and there’s a lot of trial and error. We take the time that we need to create something we believe its worthwhile, mixing focused work and abstraction. We try to convey abstract idea in precise sonic and visual coordinates, mixing the two up from time to time.

Another very important element in your work is saturation, both musically and visually. Your music challenges the listener, and I mean this in the best possible way. What made you gravitate towards such a confrontational sound?

We always were drawn to the physicality of certain music genres. Metal, gabber, techno: It’s kind of a natural thing for us to seek abstract ideas expressed through “violent” music. It is what we have always liked as listeners and artists. 

Before we say goodbye, I wanted to ask: What’s a VMO live experience? Prepare us for the upcoming world tour!

We aim to create an environment that everyone can enjoy, almost like a theme park. However, we also improvise a lot, as every crowd is different and reacts differently, and we always try to go with the flow. It’s curious that we have this very, at times, complicated sound. However, what we want is to present and offer our performances to audiences in the most accommodating way possible. We aim to provide people with the easiest way possible for them to enjoy the experience itself.

Interview · Andrea Bratta
Photography (in order of appearance) · Genki Arata and Tatsuya Higuchi
Follow VMO on Instagram and Spotify
Follow NR on Instagram and Soundcloud

VTSS

Posted on by nr

NR 17 Global Virtue · Spring Summer 2023
Published · Print Page 070

Cover Feature · VTSS
Words · Juule Kay

After the release of her EP Circulus Vitiosus, the London-based artist has proved one thing: never let them know your next move!

‘I guess I’m ready to get married,’ Martyna Maja, better known as VTSS, jokes over video call after she fell down the stairs of her apartment last night. No cause for concern — it takes more than a stiff neck to get her worked up. As a matter of fact, the Polish techno misfit has been taking care of herself lately. She took a one month break and now takes life one existential crisis after another. Frankly, Maja has never been feeling better. ‘I finally like where I am and who I am,’ she says of a stellar career since her breakthrough in 2018. 

Ever since her EP Circulus Vitiosus was released at the end of last year on Ninja Tunes, the Polish-born artist showed the world that VTSS is more than just your favourite DJ. It’s an exploration of different alter egos –– never the same, always surprising. Not only for herself but also for her loyal stans, who are rightfully obsessed with her virtuosity and the way she feels utterly relatable, cracking jokes while constantly refining her very own take on techno music. ‘The idea of not pleasing anyone and not pleasing older generations was a bit of a breakthrough for me,’ she admits, knowing perfectly well what she’s doing behind the decks and not taking any hate from some internet troll hiding within the cracks of anonymity. 

VTSS has been growing up — she found her superpower and the answers that have been inside her all these years. 

Let’s start with some self-reflection. What’s something you learned about yourself recently?

That I’m not invincible. I learned how fragile we are as humans, how this nightclub lifestyle I’ve been living for almost half of my life really takes a toll on my health. With this career path, it’s normalised to tour 52 weeks a year. I feel like I’ve been lying to myself, telling myself, ‘it’s just one more week, and then you get a break’, but you can’t fix yourself when you’re physically exhausted. That’s why I called January off, which was the first time I ever had a holiday in 5 years. Now, I’m trying to figure out a balance of living this hedonistic lifestyle and not making myself feel worse. 

You’re hugely inspired by the process of becoming and self-healing. Could you share a bit of your journey? Where did you start, and how did you end up where you are now?

As a kid, I was quite good at everything, so I never really found this one thing I’m exceptional at. When you put all your eggs in different baskets, you’re kind of a social butterfly. As a result, I never really found myself until I found my purpose, and my purpose turned out to be work. That was probably when I was 20. Until then, I have been doing random shit I felt I was supposed to do. I went to law school and economics school just because I had a bit of interest, but back then I didn’t know what I really wanted to do. I fell in love with clubs, and music turned out to be the answer to missing some part of my identity. It has been a bumpy ride, we all know how careers in music are. Now, after almost 15 years since I started clubbing, I’m trying to find a purpose outside of work.

“It feels great to also be a person outside of being a musician and my work.”

I imagine it to be quite difficult when people put you in a box and expect you to be that one thing, no in-betweens.

Absolutely, and if this is your whole identity, it will really affect you when someone says something bad or mean. I guess that’s the case for a lot of people, and it’s a scary and dangerous place. When it’s all your life and all who you are, there’s nothing left if anything goes wrong. I’ve been working on this for the last 3 years, and it feels great to also be a person outside of being a musician and my work. It’s a process that is going to last forever, but it’s fun to go on this journey and to feel like finding this identity that I’ve been looking for, and finding the answers that have been inside me all those years. 

Your EP, Circulus Vitiosus wasreleased at the end of last year on Ninja Tune. What feels like a vicious circle in your life?

At one point, everything felt like a vicious circle. It’s been a journey to break all of them, so it doesn’t feel like that anymore. With this EP, VTSS got her voice –– it’s not just beats, there is a story behind it. I realised that VTSS is an exploration of all the versions of me if I had made different choices at some point. Some of those might hit closer to the truth than others, but I guess this really helped me to figure out what the truth is for myself. 

This issue is all about virtuosity. Have you always believed in yourself and your skills, or do you have moments when you don’t feel good enough?

It took me years and years of active practicing, touring and working every single week to be where I am and what I do the way I do it. I’m quite comfortable DJing in front of people, but last year when I started to go in the studio for the first time, I was absolutely terrified. It was the first time I started to make music with other people, not by myself at home, or sending stems back and forth. It was also my first session as a vocalist in front of strangers, which is such a new thing for me. I did my first session with Boys Noize, and we made an amazing track I’m really excited about. At the beginning I was so insecure and scared of going into these sessions that I don’t know enough, that I’m not technical enough, and that I will be so embarrassed. Afterwards, I learned that it’s actually OK to admit you don’t know stuff. It’s not like anyone is going to laugh at you, and if they do, it means they are mean people, and you never want to have anything to do with them anyway. Everyone does stuff in their own way and that’s the magic of it –– even the most DIY ‘unprofessional’ ways can be incredibly inspiring to others. 

When I think about my first Boiler Room for example, I might cringe about some technical aspects or mistakes that I hear, but skill comes with practice! Especially in creative arts, there are so many ways to do stuff. There’s no rulebook.

“Even if user10735 will tell you this is not the right way to do stuff, it doesn’t mean anything. You just have to keep going, get better and find your way.”

While we’re at it, what’s a secret skill of yours not everyone knows about?

I give amazing relationship advice. That has always been my obsession. You know, if someone says something silly, I’m holding it in — so I don’t give unsolicited advice. 

Imagine, you start all over and become a therapist…

Maybe at one point! That would be fun. Let’s see where music gets me and if I have the capacity to do it for the rest of my life, or at least for the next 20 years. But if not, this is the closest of what I probably would get into. When I speak to my therapist, I’m always like, ‘rate my coping mechanism!’

“Sometimes it’s really hard to work on yourself when your friends expect you to be who they know you are.”

You’re someone who embraces change, and not only moved from Berlin to London, but also shifted direction with your music. Do you feel like change comes easy for you, or is it a certain feeling you just have to act on? 

For me, change always felt natural. When I was a kid, I changed schools quite a lot. As I said before, I didn’t know my place and nothing really felt significant enough for me. I guess this is also my ADHD, which I didn’t know I had back then. It has always been very easy for me to move on, and I always loved the idea of starting over. That’s why London is so great because it’s so big that if I’m done with it, I can just move south and might not even run into anyone I know. I do love a little reset, getting rid of all the expectations and ideas of you, even the ideas your friends have about who you are. Sometimes it’s really hard to work on yourself when your friends expect you to be who they know you are. Sometimes it’s nice to have a clean slate, especially if you have many identity crises like I had, apparently. I had always lived by this quote from Sharpay of High School Musical fame: ‘It’s out with the old and in with the new.’ Now that I’m growing up, I don’t have the energy and time to play that game anymore. I finally like where I am and who I am, so maybe I don’t need to run away that much.

How do you manage to be your unapologetic self throughout this journey? 

It took me a long time to find out who I am, and I obviously made a lot of mistakes and burned a lot of bridges along the way. But you shouldn’t be scared of disappointing people if it’s for the greater good, and you shouldn’t let people’s expectations of you hold you back in any way.

That’s one of the most important things I learned in my whole career. Especially where I come from, there has always been this one idea of what techno music or what a DJ was supposed to be like. When I was younger, I tried to please a lot of people with my sound, because I knew if I would play too like this or that I would get hate for it. The idea of not pleasing anyone and not pleasing older generations was a bit of a breakthrough for me. I’m not Gen Z, sadly, but what I love about this generation so much is this unapologetic attitude of just doing your own thing.

“It was a really stressful process knowing this is who I am, but the whole world doesn’t know about it yet.”

There will always be haters, you can never please everyone.

Exactly. Even if there were moments when I was really affected by what was being said online, I got through it, because I knew the end goal and the only reason this is going to work out was authenticity. For me, it was also the courage to use my own voice with the last EP and release the music that wasn’t expected from me. I let go of my shell, and that was the breaking point for my identity process. I have always been struggling with vulnerability in everything –– in public spaces, but also in social relationships. It was a really stressful process knowing this is who I am, but the whole world doesn’t know about it yet. It’s been interesting to release something unexpected and invite all the hate. It made me feel stronger and helped me to be more vulnerable. You can’t be authentic without being vulnerable.

What’s your advice to help push yourself out of your comfort zone instead of postponing your ideas and dreams to the perfect moment, which doesn’t exist in the first place?

There will never be the perfect time, and waiting for hard things to get easier is not going to make us any stronger. I know that when you’re struggling to survive every day, it’s incredibly hard to see the potential in yourself and in your life. When you see people who share the same qualities do well on social media, it can either be inspiring or often make you feel so much worse because it seems like they are so much ahead of you. When I started to make music, I just had an old laptop I couldn’t even install Ableton on. So I borrowed an old white MacBook from a friend –– absolute vintage vibes –– and cracked the program. I didn’t have production headphones, so I just used random earpods and watched YouTube tutorials. It was an absolute nightmare, and I wanted to quit because I couldn’t get anything to work. None of the channels could hold more than one (even built-in) plugin, so I had to freeze and flatten every stem after every move. There will always be obstacles — what you have to do is nurture the drive inside you. Your mind will try to distract you, it doesn’t want to change stuff, it wants to keep the safe routine of the bare minimum. 

There’s nothing sexier than saying no. What’s the last thing you’ve been saying no to?

I’ve been saying no to alcohol for like a month and a half now. I realised how it was sabotaging the love for my work. When I woke up after a gig, the hangxiety was the only thing I remembered after a few days. I also said no to a work relationship, which was really hard to say no to because it felt like a good idea, and we’ve been nurturing it for a second. With stuff like that, it’s an act of kindness to let go and move on. I highly recommend saying no! If they don’t come back with a better opportunity, someone else will. It’s not the end of the world. If you don’t feel it, you shouldn’t push it. The universe has a way to find the right thing for you! 

Team

Talent · VTSS
Creative Direction and Photography · Erika Kamano  
Styling · Natacha Voranger
Hair · Chrissy Hutton
Makeup · Mathilda Mace
Set Design · Louis Gibson
Photography Assistant · Steve Braiden
Styling Assistant · Aoife Akue
Retouching · Anna Pinigina
Location · Little Big Studios London
Interview · Juule Kay
Special thanks to Ludovica Ludinatrice at Modern Matters

Designers

  1.  Dress RUI ZHOU, shoes SINI SAAVALA and earring ROHAN MIRZA
  2.  Necklace ZWYRTECH, dress ANNA HEIM, panties SEHNSUCHT, leg warmers ANNA HEIM and shoes MATHILDE FENOLL
  3.  Dress LOUISE RICHARDSON and shoes BBSMITH
  4.  Dress SINI SAAVALA, shoes MATHILDE FENOLL, gloves MATHILDE FENOLL and pendant ZWYRTECH 
  5.  Head piece SOMA FAITANIN, leather piece SOMA FAITANIN and bodysuit PATRYCJA PAGAS 
  6.  Full look JOYCE BAO, shoes SINI SAAVALA  and earrings MILKO BOYAROV 

Joselito Verschaeve

Posted on by nr

NR · WORLD
PUBLISHED · ONLINE

Feature · Joselito Verschaeve
Words · Matthew Burgos

“sometimes you do not have the vocabulary to pinpoint your feelings towards a project, a place, an object, or a person”

The ambition to photograph the purity of isolation in nature infiltrates the images of Joselito Verschaeve. In his works, the fog clothes the rock formations, a hand soaks in the color of the coals, the sea laps over the grainy shore, the crescent-shaped sun ray filters through the cracks, and Joselito grips the camera in his hands. In every image, the unspoken longing to form a bond with nature, or perhaps become Mother Nature herself, tugs a wandering soul to embark on a pilgrimage with the Belgian photographer.

As one skims through the works Joselito has captured so far, they may deduce them as a meditative perception of the environment, a narrative-infested series that touches on a myriad of undefined themes with nature at the heart of his philosophy. Joselito may have just commenced his journey, but he has already left an imprint in those who gaze at his images, and now, in NR Magazine.

I would love to learn your background in photography. How did you end up taking photographs? Has this always been your first choice of medium, and why? Did you try other artistic mediums before this?

Before studying photography, I had studied 3D animation where we had to create a series of environments that were often dystopian-themed. We had to go out and create images out of worn-out objects to source our aimed textures. After a while, I realized I enjoyed image-making more and the world-building you could imply with sequencing.

Let us get into your philosophy in photography. Your work leans on day-to-day encounters. Why do you draw your photographic influences from this well? What encounters do you remark as the most significant to you, and why?

It leans on day-to-day encounters because it is the most honest way through which I can show my work. These are the moments that tend to take place in my life, but I happen to have my camera with me during these times. After these moments, the ball keeps rolling, and I can reminisce the places that I have discovered through these events, or be happy with what I got from that day. The most significant encounters I recall are the images that I captured.

You also turn to narratively driven images. Could you elaborate more on this? What kind of stories do you want to narrate through your images?

Part of my practice is the day-to-day encounters; another part is just my general fascination for dystopia, nature, history, and future events. The influences of the photographs I capture from this mindset: How can I make this newfound scene fit in these themes? I think this also forms part of my practice, just seeing if I can transform these set scenes into different ones. That is where the narration and sequencing of images come into place to tie the story together.

You have shared that you are building an archive that can fit different themes. Other than the ones already mentioned above, what other themes are you exploring? Do you have certain topics that you want to dive into soon? Why?

I would like to stay dedicated to these themes. What I do want is to narrow it down to certain topics. Now, I’m leaning towards places that see repetitions in natural events, or man-made places that withstand the test of time and nature. For me, these places come closest to my idea of dystopia where nature has the upper hand.

I want us to talk about If I Call Stones Blue, It Is Because Blue Is The Precise Word (2020 – 2021). First, how did you come up with the title? What is your relationship with it? Did you plan it, or did it pop up after the series finished?

It is from a Raymond Carver book, which echoes ‘day-to-day encounters’ in the best way. I think it categorizes under ‘honest fiction’ which sounds amazing on its own. Anyway, he uses it to write a poem, but the line is originally from Flaubert. My relationship with it is that sometimes you do not have the vocabulary to pinpoint your feelings towards a project, a place, an object, or a person. However, this does not stop you from understanding the significance of your emotions, so you compare them to the closest feeling that you do know. This is what I feel and do.

All images are black and white. Do you feel a deeper connection with this style rather than the colored ones? Is it more of a personal choice or a conscious one to tap into your audience’s emotions? 

There are a few reasons for this. Of course, the images I make share common thoughts, but the black and white style helps my images grow on each other. They may be at completely different times and places, but this variety causes interesting dialogues. To simply put it: the monochromatic style causes timelessness.

I see a lot of images deriving from nature: the uneven formations of rock, the silhouettes of forest trees, the gentle laps of the sea’s waves, and a bird trapped between the branches of trees. Does nature have a healing effect on you? Do you find it meditative? What do you think and feel whenever you place yourself in nature?

I think it is more on the idea of nature that piques my interest. It is in itself timeless and independent, which is how I would like my images to appear and be like. The balance between being comforting and intimidating is something that I admire. It is why I am so fascinated by the dynamic between nature and man-made: having the power to tear down sound and established structures versus life designs that have adapted foundations to withstand this former’s power.

What is next for Joselito?

I have an upcoming book with VOID, a publisher based in Athens. I am looking forward to this. Other than that, I will keep doing what I do and work on other projects. I have always worked on the “we will see what happens next” philosophy, so let us see what will happen next.

Sumayya Vally

Posted on by nr

NR Vol. 13 Growth · Spring Summer 2021
Published · Print Page Unnumbered

Feature · Sumayya Vally
Words · Ellie Brown

Sumayya Vally From The Johannesburg-Based Architectural Studio, Counterspace, On Amplifying The Lived Experiences Of Those Who Have Historically Been Overlooked

When Sumayya Vally founded the Johannesburg-based architectural studio Counterspace in 2015, it was against the backdrop of a deeply entrenched narrative of western hegemony. As an architectural student in South Africa, at the University of Pretoria and then the University of the Witwatersrand, Sumayya found the curriculum pivoted around a western worldview. And as the name implies, Counterspace seeks to redefine such a narrative, to amplify the lived experiences of those who have, historically, been overlooked. Earlier this year, Sumayya’s efforts to incorporate marginalised and underrepresented architectural ideas into an existing lexicon were internationally recognised when she was included as one of the TIME100’s most influential people.

Sumayya’s architectural perspective is one shaped by her experience growing up in a place less openly inclusive, though equally diverse. Now 30, Sumayya’s early life was spent in the final years of Apartheid-era Pretoria. And as child, she experienced first-hand the impact that architecture and design can have on people’s lives. As South Africa nears 30 years since Apartheid’s end, it’s a country that remains deeply segregated by race, class and wealth. Architecture and city planning is not an innocent bystander here and have been used throughout history as tools for control, subordination, and exclusion. Sumayya’s exposure to this complicated reality informs the interdisciplinary, and often imaginative, work that Counterspace does.

In 2019, the studio unveiled Folded Skies – a series of three sculptural structures made from interlocking tinted mirrors. The iridescent glow captured in the surfaces of the structures appears to represent the history of a city built on the vast gold deposits discovered in Johannesburg in the 1880s. While the legacy of this glittering past is reflected in the city’s colonial architecture, Folded Skies recalls instead the ecological aftermath of the gold rush. The city remains blighted by toxic pollution emanating from the equally vast number of waste dumps left behind from abandoned gold mines. The presence of these dumps is a reminder both of the aphorism that ‘everything that glitters is not gold’ and of the country’s history of segregation and suffering.

Johannesburg was a city divided right from the start, with mine-owners, wealthy from the gold rush, living separated, then segregated, lives from a black population who were eventually forced into townships in the city’s suburbs. The hangover of that gold discovery continues to wreak havoc. The large domineering heaps act as a physical barrier between rich and poor, black and white neighbourhoods; a reminder that segregation still exists. Toxic fumes from the dumps, which are themselves now being mined for the fragments of gold they may contain, are carried south by the wind, poisoning the black communities who live in their path – environmental racism in practise. Though human-made, the waste heaps demonstrate how materials can be used to control, to divide, to enslave people; as tools to construct a built environment, or as resources to build global trade.

By engaging with Johannesburg’s complicated history, Sumayya and Counterspace’s practice is as much social history as it is about designing for a better future. Uhmlaba, a film made in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum, will explore South Africa’s history of segregation using soil (as land) as both its catalyst and focus. The studio often uses film and photography (archival and contemporary) to animate their ideas; visual evidence to demonstrate the fluidity of life and people in an urban environment. And if Johannesburg exemplifies how the architecture is used to control and segregate, the architect’s plan cannot always anticipate the unpredictability of the lived city experience. Counterspace celebrates, and designs, with small acts of subversion in mind. And so, as Sumayya explains in our conversation below, a new approach to architecture and the way we look and engage with urban spaces begins with interweaving unheard and overlooked histories into the fabric of our built environments.

Would you be able to share some insight into the upcoming film Umhlaba?

Umhlaba translates to land in Zulu. The land in South Africa, like many places in the majority world has been implicated in our histories of movement, dispossession and displacement, empire and extraction. The film considers the depths, scales and layers of connection (and violences) in our relations to land – through the narration of recipes, stories and ingredients that become part of our cultures and constructions of belonging – to the violence of breathing toxic dust and the zoomed out segregation and separation of bodies from land in Apartheid city planning. The film is a collage of these various scales and entities, and weaves together connections and links between what was assumed unconnected and innocent.

How did you develop the approach that Counterspace takes through research, practice and pedagogy?

Johannesburg has served as a source of immense inspiration for the practice. Because so much of the city exists below the surface, so many ritual, economic and other practices have developed incredible resistances and are able to surface and exist, despite being excluded by our city’s histories and infrastructures. There is so much that lives beyond the limits of traditional planning, design and beyond the tools of the architectural plan, section and elevation. These ways of being invite us to imagine different ways to draw – to find tools to learn, absorb, understand, listen to and interpret our conditions. Many of them are aural, oral, atmospheric – which has given rise to drawing through film, performance, choreography, the digital, sonic and atmospheric field notes, temperature, colour, etc., to develop an expanded lexicon and ways of reading and seeing Johannesburg.

What informs your approach as an architect to incorporate performance, the medium of video/film, cultural histories into the practice?

Rituals, ways of being and the lives of people in my city – and this intent to draw, make visible, amplify and sharpen aspects of our histories and cultures that cannot be included in the traditional tools and ways of archiving that the discipline and the profession of architecture has inherited.

Counterspace’s work delves into materials like sand, soil, everyday detritus, so I’d love to know what you see as the cultural importance of “material”? 

I very much see materials as shifting earth and land; constantly being negotiated, reconstituted and reconfigured. Whether implicit or explicit, all projects stake a political claim in their approach to materials. I am very interested in the use of detritus, in traces and reconfigured leftovers, in how these give us a reading of our relationships to the earth. Materials are not neutral – everything, from cane and cotton, to concrete and gold – is a reading of our ties to each other and our histories (and consequential futures). I am also interested in blurring the binaries that we have drawn between ourselves and the world we are in, and a part of. Johannesburg has also given me an implicit desire to be resourceful and to piece together a lot with very little.

How do you navigate the kinds of architectural malpractices/Western authority that shaped the studio’s raison d’être?

I see my practice as an effort to realise design languages from places of difference – different ways of being and seeing, different histories and stories – and in that sense it has always existed tangentially to the dominant canon. I think things are changing now, but for a long time this meant that the work was quite invisible to the dominant canon. I very much see myself as part of a generation and a movement working to translate and embody our own positions of difference and bring a critical mass of them into the world. Any identity that is different to the dominant discourse is a lens with which to see the world from a different perspective – which is so needed, now more than ever.

It’s interesting to think of spaces where people gather as places that weren’t always envisioned as serving those very purposes. How did growing up around Johannesburg shape your understanding of this?

Our city, of course, has a history of clandestine meeting and organising – from pirate radio setups on kitchen tables to underground jazz during Apartheid. The city has such a divisive understanding of what public is and looks like. In many regards, we never had public spaces that are truly designed for everyone and that have truly drawn on our ways of being and our understandings and cultures of what ‘public’ is and looks like. But, in many other ways, the resilience of practices and gathering that exist outside of, and despite formal limitations, has been a revelation. Being able to see and read these, and learning from the atmospheres and spaces that are created by people and their practices of gathering and constructions of belonging – whether at a carwash, at a petrol station, for a lunchtime gathering, or church on a patch of leftover veld grass in the centre of the inner-city – has been deeply fundamental to my practice.

 

David Vail

Posted on by nr

NR Vol. 11 Space & Composition · Spring Summer 2020
Published · Print Page Unnumbered

when I was a kid, I was being dragged around a garden-centre type 

shop by my mum, from what I can remember, I was doing her head

in something horrible, so to distract me she told me she was going 

to buy me some seeds to grow my own plant when we got home 

the patch I chose to plant was right beside the garage at the back

of the garden, perfectly viewable from the kitchen window

my well renouned patience did not set me up in good stead 

for the coming weeks 

slowly but surely the seeds gave life to a sunflower, luckily it was 

the start of summer so – even though Ireland isn’t synonymous 

with beaming sunlight, I figured it would have a chance in this patch

by midsummer my sunflower had become somewhat of an 

attraction to the neighbours in the street, as it now stood at least 6 feet 

high, boasted a thick, strong stalk supported by a piece of bamboo

the summer inevitably came to an end, and the plant withered

but the memory of this flower has lived so strongly in my subconscious, 

veritably popping into the forefront of my mind from time to time 

i often ponder why the image of the sunflower has left such a lasting memory 

why I have chosen to preserve this over others 

i have always found myself distracted by the passing world, which would 

get me in trouble in school for daydreaming – but I couldn’t help but wonder 

where my daydreams would take me, what else would I see that would have the 

lasting effect of the sunflower 

Credits

Photography and words DAVID VAIL
Inspiration and collaboration BENEDIKTE KLUVER
Models ABI FOX, TONG
www.davidvail.co.uk
www.benediktekluver.com

Clemente Vergara

Posted on by nr

NR Vol. 11 Space & Composition · Spring Summer 2020
Published · Print Page Unnumbered

Arcosanti

An aperture into architect Paolo Soleri’s City of Future, an urban laboratory

ARIZONA, UNITED STATES—I arrived to Arcosanti late on an afternoon, after driving many hours from Monument Valley through Sedona. I was really looking forward to visit Arcosanti, but having seen the wonders of those natural reserves, canyons and spectacular landscapes, I believed Arcosanti would not impress me… and I was wrong… I didn’t know much about Paolo Soleri’s project. I just knew it was an unfinished experimental city created during the 70s designed to be self-sufficient, and that we were going to sleep in The Sky Suite, the room with the best views you could rent in Arcosanti.

Once there, I was amazed by the project, the buildings, the people living, working and studying there. Also I got interested about the Architect (Paolo Soleri’s) work. I was lucky that in the room there was a huge book that gathered his drawings and ideas about futuristic cities. I also learned that the name of Arcosanti came from two italian words “Cosa” and “Anti”, that literally means, “before things”. I learnt also about the concept of Arcology, which comes from putting together Architecture and Ecology, and the importance of that concept in the current society of “take make dispose” that is ruining our planet. 

I will always remember the days I spent in such a special city, that keeps alive Paolo Soleri’s ideas.

Credits

Photography and words CLEMENTE VERGARA
www.clementevb.com
www.instagram.com/clementevb
www.arcosanti.org

Chu Viêt—Hà

Posted on by nr

NR Vol. 10 Reinvention · Autumn Winter 2019
Published · Print Page Unnumbered

Sapa in Fog

Credits

Photography · Chu Viêt—Hà

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