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ACN Arquitectura

Posted on 5 de September de 20258 de September de 2025 by nr

Feature · ACN Arquitectura
Words · Melis Özek

Son Xotano: The Quiet Intelligence

Architecture is a register of perception; to inhabit a space is to move within its temporal
rhythm, where memory and imagination course through. A poetics of spatial experience.

Son Xotano embodies Mallorca through silence and measured proportion. Its roots extend from the 10th to the 13th centuries, when it was known as the Alqueria de Judí, a name derived from the Arabic yuhudi—“Jewish”—hinting at possible Hebrew ownership during Mallorca’s Muslim era. A nearby landmark, the Pou de Judí, remains a quiet trace of this history. Following the conquest of Mallorca by King James I in 1229, the land passed through several families: Gastón de Bearn; Ramona Adrover; and Ferrer Girbau. By 1685, one of these holdings became the Son Xotano estate under Joan Torres, known as “Xotano,” whose name endures. Prominent Mallorcan families—the Flors, Mulets, Torrents, and later the O’Ryans—cultivated cereals, vineyards, and wine on-site. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, ownership shifted to Granada, Crespí de Sóller, and Gestrudis Rossinyol with Lluís Zaforteza Fontes. In 1982, Pedro Ramonell Colom acquired the property, transforming it in 1993 into an agrotourism and equestrian farm while preserving its pastoral vocation.

Built with stone quarried from its own lands, its walls are simple, durable, and attuned to the rhythms of rural life. A seventeenth-century sandstone arch frames the entrance, a silent witness to generations. Additions expanded organically, responding to the needs of each era. The current restoration honors the legacy: original structures have been reinforced with traditional techniques, while contemporary comforts, including lighting, bathrooms, acoustics, and climate control, have been woven in with restraint, using noble local materials such as natural lime, solid pine, reclaimed tiles, and stone floors. Handmade counters of Mallorcan mud echo artisanal practices, binding the project to place and tradition.

Walking its halls today, one senses the centuries. The restoration revealed: walls kept their rough hewn texture, timber preserved its irregularities, and rooms remained deliberately minimal. Every intervention sought to articulate the estate’s original character. Renovations began in 2018 with an extension for the kitchen, restaurant, and pool, followed by the main house. Future plans include a discreet, single-story apartment building near the estate, designed to complement. “Intervention is translation,” Pizà observes. “It’s about bringing the house into contemporary legibility without diminishing its depth or spirit.”

“The first impression,” Pizà reflects, “was a profound sense of calm and quiet. The building’s thick walls, emblematic of Majorcan construction, immerse you in centuries, yet also convey the serenity of Mediterranean proportion.” Clapés adds, “It is an important house, but never ostentatious. Even if past residents were affluent, the atmosphere is modest. Preserving that humility guided every decision in the renovation.”

Clapés and Pizà worked with an ethic of care. Dry stone walls were repaired, original beams stabilized, and the marès sandstone arch cut centuries ago from the estate’s quarry—was reinstated as a defining threshold. The approach emphasized reinforcement rather than replacement: materials retain their irregularities, and the building communicates its age through texture, proportion, and light. Architecture here I understood as clarification of what was already present. “Even modern interventions are grounded in local materials and construction systems that have endured here for centuries,” Pizà notes. Clay, stone, and timber, shaped by local carpenters and stonemasons, serve as living archives. “Guests may not immediately notice every detail, he adds, “but each window, roof, and door reflects the singularity of Son Xotano compared to other towns. Preserving that subtle uniqueness is central to the project.”

Interiors, directed by Virginia Nieto, extend this principle with measured restraint. Material choice —Mallorcan clay, raw pine, brushed metal, woven linen—are deployed for their tactility as much as for visual coherence. Whites and muted earth tones establish a calm, minimal atmosphere. Custom furniture, developed in her studio and executed by local artisans, maintains continuity between structure and use. The result, anchored in the cultural and material context of Mallorca.

Sustainability shaped the decisions too. Crossventilation and natural insulation reduce energy demand, while historic cisterns and dry-stone systems have been reactivated to manage water and regulate temperature. The gardens, designed by Nieto, follow principles of permaculture and local ecology: olive, almond, and carob trees intermingle with lavender, rosemary, and thyme. Restored terraces and channels reinstate the estate’s agricultural intelligence, ensuring its continuity as an ecological organism rather than a static site.

Generations left traces here. The subtle irregularities reveal rhythms of those who lived here, embedding presence into the fabric of the house. Today, Son Xotano endures as a field of experience. An act of imagination, bridging centuries and the present.
Architecture’s quiet, enduring intelligence.

Find out more on annuahotels.com
Special thanks to Purple PR.

Mohamed Bourouissa

Posted on 17 de July de 202522 de July de 2025 by nr

NR · Magazine
Published · Online

Feature · Mohamed Bourouissa
Words · Melis Özek

Composing Otherwise

Mohamed Bourouissa’s practice challenges not only the politics of representation, but the mechanics of perception itself. Working across photography, film, installation, and sound, he constructs spaces where legibility is never passive — where power circulates through the act of sensing and attending. With roots in the banlieues of Paris and an enduring connection to Algeria, Bourouissa attends to the margins not as subjects to be revealed, but as structures of relation, opacity, and force. His art privileges embeddedness over spectacle, friction over clarity, and process over resolution.

From the charged immediacy of Why Did I Choose to Make Music, where sonic form becomes a site of memory, rupture, and emotional release, to the vegetal audibility of Brutal Family Roots, Bourouissa’s practice insists on listening not as inclusion, but as structural reconfiguration, where marginal forms recompose the frames. Temps Mort constructs a portrait of incarceration through text messages and mobile footage; Hara!! transforms street cries into spatial composition; and The Whispering of Ghosts listens to the unspeakable weight of landscape in postcolonial Algeria. Across these works, Bourouissa refuses closure. Instead, he makes space for the relational, the opaque, and the unfinished to resonate on their own terms.

Though frequently read through a political lens, Bourouissa resists the reductive framing of the “political artist.” For him, the political is not a message but a material condition—emergent, embedded, and embodied. His work holds open the space of listening, where marginal voices do not simply enter the frame, but reconfigure it.

In this conversation, he reflects on the ethics of proximity, the architectures of control, and the capacities of sound as a relational medium. The dialogue follows Why Did I Choose to Make Music, Bourouissa’s live performance at the Bourse de Commerce on June 25, part of the cultural program curated by Cyrus Goberville, structured around his forthcoming release on PAN and featuring Le Diouck’s Fatéouma in a shared act of sonic authorship.

Can you recall the moment or process through which you first felt drawn to art as a mode of expression? Was it instinctive, or did it emerge in response to something specific, political, personal, or otherwise? You’ve previously said, “I’m not a political artist. But it is political.” How do you reconcile that distance between intention and implication in your own work?

I think it’s a confluence of intuition and personal experience. I wouldn’t even describe it as entering a distinct “world” of art; it felt like something natural, an extension of my way of looking at things. Growing up with friends, we often had strong, critical perspectives on society, and those perspectives inevitably filter into the work. My family background, especially in relation to immigration, also shaped how I see and respond to the world.

Art became a way to speak about what was around me. My first short film, for example, was about a friend who had spent five years in prison. That experience opened a window onto issues of social impact and marginalization. Still, I hesitate to frame the work as having a direct political ambition. The political dimension arises from the subject matter, not from a manifesto.

Any artwork, even when abstract, contains a political charge. It reflects a set of decisions about what matters, what is made visible, what is given form. A landscape, too, is a political statement; it represents a choice, a position. That’s why I say I’m not a political artist, but the work is political, because my environment is political. I’m drawn to these themes because they’re part of the reality I inhabit.

In your work, sound often operates beyond language: as texture, rupture, or residue. What draws you to these non-verbal registers, and what do they allow you to express that image or text cannot?

Text has always posed a challenge for me; it doesn’t come easily. I gravitate more toward visual language because it feels like home. It originates in drawing, in how I learned to observe and translate the world. I’m not seeking to displace text or prove its inadequacy; rather, I’m operating within a modality that feels authentic to me.

Over time, I’ve begun to work across multiple forms: sound, theatre, sculpture. This multiplicity opens up new dimensions. Collaboration has become increasingly important. I value working alongside those who engage with language in other ways. It allows me to expand the limits of my own perspective. I don’t want to work in isolation. I want to inhabit a broader field of exchange.

You often work with frequencies that hover at the edge of perception: breath, distortion, cry. Do you consider your sound work a form of sensing rather than representing? In a previous conversation, you mentioned, “I’m interested in the poetry inside the streets.” How do you perceive poetry as a form of resistance or a method for revealing structures of visibility and invisibility in the urban and social landscape?

Poetry is everywhere. It’s embedded in gestures, in the mundane. The way someone walks down the street can be a kind of poem. It’s not about grand declarations but about subtle reframing. Poetry, for me, is not distant or lofty; it’s radically proximate.

It’s about attention, about the frame you impose on what might otherwise seem insignificant. A movement, a hesitation, a glance: these can carry poetic weight if you’re attuned to them. It’s a shift in the register of perception. Suddenly, the street becomes a site of layered meaning, where visibility and invisibility coexist.
This way of seeing transforms the ordinary. It resists the notion that only certain spaces or subjects are worthy of artistic or critical attention. In that sense, it becomes political. Not in a declarative way, but in its capacity to reorient how we value the everyday and how we read social space.

You often resist the notion of art as a detached, rarefied gesture. Instead, your work is grounded in embeddedness: in lived experience, in proximity to systems of surveillance, care, or control. How do you define the ethical responsibility of the artist today?

That’s a profound and complex question. Responsibility, for me, begins with personal experience. The way you live, the people you encounter, the situations you navigate: these all shape how and why you make work.

In one of my projects involving shop lifters, I faced an ethical dilemma. Initially, I hesitated to use their faces without permission. But the more I sat with the material, the more I realized that the images revealed something critical about power, surveillance, and the politics of representation.
People often conflate morality and ethics. Ethical responsibility is often more subtle, more situated. It can emerge in unexpected places, like in the ways people resist visibility, resist being fixed within systems of control.

For me, it’s about being honest with the work, with the process of inquiry. When I reflect on places like Palestine or Gaza, it’s not about adopting a position of authority or offering answers, but about staying with the questions. Trying to understand the complexity. That’s what responsibility means to me: not a grand moral gesture, but a practice of integrity and openness in how you approach the world.

In earlier works, you manipulated photographic codes to interrogate power dynamics and perception. In your sound-based practice, you seem to move toward frequencies that precede or elude language. What do you see as the limits of representation, and how do you move beyond them?

I don’t believe images have strict limits; rather, they offer possibilities. What interests me is how different languages—visual, sonic, spatial—relate to one another. When you think about rhythm, breath, and time, you begin to see how these elements move across media.

In photography, you build rhythm through composition, through the placement of bodies or structures. That rhythm resonates with music. The tension in an image might mirror the tension in a chord. There’s always this porosity, a kind of permeability, between forms.

We often try to silo practices. A painter might not see their work as musical, for instance. But to me, painting is also about music, about the unseen structures that guide attention and emotion. So, rather than seeking the limits of representation, I’m interested in the points of convergence: where languages touch, blur, and expand one another.

You’ve described art as a “means of listening.” How do you cultivate listening as both a formal method and a political stance? And how does this shift in receptivity over expression change what it means to create?

My relationship to sound began with a desire to render visible what is usually hidden. Take plants, for example. In working with mimosa plants, I sought to make their internal life—electrical activity, responsiveness—audible. Using electronic materials, I translated their signals into sound.

This process revealed something profound: we too are electrical beings. Our nervous systems function through signals and rhythms. We breathe in a pattern that is different from plants, yet connected. That realization opened up an understanding of interconnectedness across species.
European modernity often divided plants, animals, and humans into separate categories. But my work resists that. It is about exploring shared atmospheres, the invisible networks that link us.
Listening, then, is not passive. It’s an active, attentive mode of being. It creates space for other forms of presence to emerge. By privileging reception over declaration, creation becomes dialogic: less about imposing meaning, more about holding space for complexity, ambiguity, and relation.

You’ve spoken of repair, of “putting people back in movement” through your work. What does movement mean to you—spatial, psychological, historical? And how do you imagine it operating through your sound work?

Movement, for me, is intimate. It’s tied to how I’ve experienced sound: as a carrier of trauma, memory, and transformation. The cry, for instance, triggers something deeply emotional in me. It’s immediate and visceral.

As I delved into music and sound experiments, I began to understand how frequencies interact with the body. Sound doesn’t just pass through. It resonates. It imprints. It can unlock dormant memories or emotions stored in the body.

Initially, I wanted to create articulate, structured works. But music taught me to let go of that impulse, to prioritize immersion, feeling, and intuition. In that sense, movement becomes psychological, emotional, even cellular. It’s about the capacity to shift something within, to loosen what’s stuck.

Why Did I Choose to Make Music interrogates the very ontology of sound—what music can be, mean, or resist. In hindsight, what does this title mean to you now? Was it ever a question directed inward?

I don’t consider myself a musician in the traditional sense. I make music and sound, yes, but not from a place of formal training. The performance is an experiment, a way of illuminating how sound threads through my broader practice.

The title actually comes from a rapper, Bucha, whose album Timeout Tamo was significant to me. I grew up with hip-hop. Artists like Lunatic shaped how I listened, how I thought. That music offered a mode of reflection and resistance.

Now, music has become a way of mapping my journey—my personal life, my collaborations, my artistic evolution. My son’s mother is a musician, and that also shaped how I approached sound. The title is less a question than a space of reflection, a gesture of transparency about process, time, and becoming.

You’ve previously described sound as a space of repair and catharsis, particularly in relation to trauma and memory. How do you approach sound as a material of healing—not only for the self, but within a collective register?

I began working with plants, trying to amplify their presence. I wanted to make their activity visible through sound. Using tools like SuperCollider, and collaborating with Jordan Kikira, we translated their electrical signals into audible frequencies.

What emerged was a sense of mutuality—how sound mediates relationships between bodies, environments, and histories. I wasn’t thinking in terms of “music,” but of sound as material: something that engages directly with the nervous system, with the brain’s circuitry.
Sound became a conduit for transformation. It made the invisible visible. And in doing so, it created a space not only for personal catharsis but for collective resonance.

In Temps Morts, you wove a fragmented narrative out of lo-fi digital remnants: voice messages, images, mobile footage. Now, with Signal, sound becomes the structural core of the exhibition. How has your understanding of narrative architecture evolved across media?

Let me give an example through architecture. I wasn’t initially drawn to Le Corbusier, but one building changed that: La Tourette (Couvent Sainte-Marie de La Tourette), which he designed with Iannis Xenakis. Xenakis was both an architect and a musician, and you can feel that duality embedded in the space.

Walking through the building, your body begins to follow its rhythm. The windows are not uniform. They vary in size, creating an internal rhythm, a shifting visual tempo. That spatial variation constructs a kind of narrative, one that’s inseparable from bodily experience. You don’t just look at it. You move with it.

This had a profound impact on me. It showed how architecture and sound share a relationship rooted in movement, rhythm, and physical engagement. It’s similar to being part of a rave, where your body becomes part of the architecture. You’re not just in a space. You are participating in its unfolding.

With Signal, I approached the exhibition like an album: each component structured like a track, with intervals and intensities. I wanted to rethink time in a spatial sense, to explore how a narrative can emerge through sonic and architectural rhythms. It’s not about linear storytelling, but about composing an experience that moves through space like a score.

Your collaborations often stem from improvised encounters: from Beirut to Marseille, from street cries to noise frequencies. How do you navigate the space between intuitive listening and constructed composition?

My work is deeply rooted in intuition and in accidents. I don’t claim to have a fixed structure when I begin. The process often emerges from relationships, from encounters that are unplanned and relational rather than theoretical.

In Beirut, for example, I was on a residency and wandered into a flea market. I discovered people selling pirated CDs—music that immediately resonated with my family history, with certain memories and forms of intimacy. I started buying them, listening, and becoming immersed in their textures.

I wanted to dig deeper, so I began asking to meet people connected to this music. That’s how I encountered Sharif Sehnaoui, a major figure in experimental Arab music. Our collaboration wasn’t premeditated. It grew from a shared curiosity, from exchange.

Initially, I imagined turning this into a fiction film. But as time passed, the experience itself—the process of encountering, listening, being present—became more important than the film. I realized that what I’m often working on is not the artwork itself, but the conditions through which an experience takes shape.

My approach isn’t about mastering form or composing in a classical sense. It’s about allowing relationships and intuitions to generate meaning. The work is the constellation that forms around those points of contact.

In The Whispering of Ghosts (2018), shot in Algeria, you work through slowness, spatial tension, and memory. How did returning to Algeria shape your sense of place? What ghosts—personal, colonial, sonic—were you listening for in that landscape?

Returning to Algeria was layered with emotional and historical resonance. The land itself carries echoes: of colonial violence, of migration, of family stories that are rarely told in full. I wasn’t seeking clarity. I was trying to feel the opacity of the place.

There’s a specific weight in the air there, something you can’t articulate but that you feel in your body. The pace of the film, its slowness, reflects that. It’s a way of listening to the landscape, not just through sound but through atmosphere, through vibration.

I was listening for ghosts—not in the spectral sense, but in the material sense. Ghosts as remnants, as structures that continue to inform how we move, how we see, how we remember. In Algeria, those ghosts are everywhere: in the architecture, in the silence between conversations, in the landscapes that hold unspeakable histories.

Works like Brutal Family Roots and Hara!! wrestle with social textures and sonic atmospheres, often drawing from peripheral voices. What role does rupture or disruption play in your approach to sound?

Rupture is fundamental. It interrupts flow. It breaks habits of listening. In both Brutal Family Roots and Hara!!, I wanted to unsettle the sonic field, not for its own sake, but to expose something that lies underneath: a history, a violence, a dissonance that has been buried.

Disruption makes space. It cracks open the surface and allows something else to emerge—something raw, something unresolved. That’s the terrain I’m interested in exploring. It’s not about aestheticizing chaos but about revealing the fractures that already exist.

Peripheral voices, overlooked sounds—these are sites of power and resistance. By amplifying them, or by introducing sonic rupture, I try to reconfigure the listener’s position. To move from passive reception to active confrontation.

You once referenced Booba’s Temps Mort as a formative influence, a gesture that draws a through-line between subcultural archive and contemporary art. How do you view the political potential of referencing popular or underground culture within institutional contexts?

Referencing Temps Mort was a way of acknowledging lineage, of saying that my artistic formation didn’t emerge from the academy but from the streets, from pirated CDs, from lyrics that spoke to dislocation, struggle, and identity.

When this kind of reference enters institutional space, it creates tension—and that’s productive. It forces the institution to contend with forms of knowledge and expression that exist outside its canon. It shifts what is considered legitimate, what is considered worthy.

There is something political in that gesture. But that doesn’t mean I set out to make political art. People sometimes ask me, “Are you a political artist?” and I say no. I don’t make political art in the sense of having a declared agenda. What I make comes from my personal experience, from the subjects I care about—many of which are social, historical, and therefore political.

When you set out to make explicitly political art, you risk becoming institutionalized, absorbed into a system of ideological representation. That’s not my approach. I prefer to let the politics emerge from the work itself: through context, through form, through the people and stories it engages with.
Yes, my work is political, but not in a programmatic way. It’s political in how it navigates systems, how it pays attention to lives and places that are often overlooked. It’s about the conditions we live in, how we relate to one another, how we resist, how we care. That, to me, is the deeper politics of art.

At the same time, I work both inside and outside institutions. I don’t depend on institutional validation, but I also don’t reject it. For example, I’m currently involved in a project that gives children in my neighborhood access to video equipment. I’m also part of a collective working with Sahab Museum on a virtual space.

This movement between inside and outside feels necessary. Visibility within institutions can be useful, but it’s not the endpoint. The real work happens in the spaces where life and practice intersect: in the streets, in collectives, in communities. That’s where I want to stay grounded.

All works courtesy the artist, Kamel Mennour Paris/London

Mohamed Bourouissa, La Fenêtre, 2005. Série Périphérique 2005-2008. Color Photography © ADAGP Mohamed Bourouissa
Mohamed Bourouissa, Why Did I Choose to Make Music, 2025. Live Performance with the participation of: Lou-Adriana Bouziouane, Le Diouck, Mehdi Anede, Cynthia Léon, Diong-Keba Tacu, Rachid-Amir Moudir, Mushy, Christophe Jacques. Thanks to Simon-Élie Galibert, Yumi Fujitani, Matière Noire and T2G. Courtesy of Pinault Collection. Photography Raphaël Massart.
Mohamed Bourouissa, Why Did I Choose to Make Music, 2025. Live Performance with the participation of: Lou-Adriana Bouziouane, Le Diouck, Mehdi Anede, Cynthia Léon, Diong-Keba Tacu, Rachid-Amir Moudir, Mushy, Christophe Jacques. Thanks to Simon-Élie Galibert, Yumi Fujitani, Matière Noire and T2G. Courtesy of Pinault Collection. Photography Raphaël Massart.
Mohamed Bourouissa, La Butte, 2007. Série Périphérique 2005-2008. Color Photography © ADAGP Mohamed Bourouissa
Mohamed Bourouissa, Le Hall, 2007-2008. Série Périphérique 2005-2008. Color Photography © ADAGP Mohamed Bourouissa
Mohamed Bourouissa, La République, 2006. Série Périphérique 2005-2008. Color Photography © ADAGP Mohamed Bourouissa
Mohamed Bourouissa, La Main, 2006. Série Périphérique 2005-2008. Color Photography © ADAGP Mohamed Bourouissa
Mohamed Bourouissa Généalogie de la violence, Extrait de la vidéo, 2024
Mohamed Bourouissa Généalogie de la violence, Extrait de la vidéo, 2024
Mohamed Bourouissa Généalogie de la violence, Extrait de la vidéo, 2024
Mohamed Bourouissa, Le Téléphone, 2006. Série Périphérique 2005-2008. Color Photography © ADAGP Mohamed Bourouissa
Mohamed Bourouissa, Why Did I Choose to Make Music, 2025. Live Performance with the participation of: Lou-Adriana Bouziouane, Le Diouck, Mehdi Anede, Cynthia Léon, Diong-Keba Tacu, Rachid-Amir Moudir, Mushy, Christophe Jacques. Thanks to Simon-Élie Galibert, Yumi Fujitani, Matière Noire and T2G. Courtesy of Pinault Collection. Photography Raphaël Massart.
Mohamed Bourouissa, Why Did I Choose to Make Music, 2025. Live Performance with the participation of: Lou-Adriana Bouziouane, Le Diouck, Mehdi Anede, Cynthia Léon, Diong-Keba Tacu, Rachid-Amir Moudir, Mushy, Christophe Jacques. Thanks to Simon-Élie Galibert, Yumi Fujitani, Matière Noire and T2G. Courtesy of Pinault Collection. Photography Raphaël Massart.

Athens Epidaurus Festival 2025

Posted on 17 de June de 202517 de June de 2025 by nr

NR · Magazine
Published · Online

Report · Athens Epidaurus Festival
Words · Melis Özek

Athens is a city that resists metaphor. It does not stand in for history; it is history, unfolding in real time. To arrive here during Subset was not to attend a festival, but to step into an atmosphere dense with texture: conceptual, sonic, civic. What unfolded across the weekend was not simply a program of performances, but a series of durational states: of attunement, permeability, and ecstatic stillness.

Subset operates as a proposition, one that asks the listener to relinquish mastery, to dwell in uncertainty, to encounter sound as condition rather than content. Athens responded in kind. Its terrain, fractured, layered, and perpetually in flux, held the festival with an uncanny fluency. The city’s ambient frequencies folded into the works, becoming a porous substrate through which performance and place co-articulated. Everything felt permeable, just beneath language.

Christina Vantzou opened the weekend at the Athens Conservatoire, and in many ways it was an initiation. The space itself, solemn and precise, seemed to recognize the gravity of the moment. But it was the crowd that moved me most: a quiet density of intellect and curiosity, gathered from all corners of the world. Vantzou’s performance unfolded not in front of us, but around us. Her compositions invited a kind of listening that is almost extinct, one that demands the body.

The work stressed the pure form of existence: listening stripped of spectacle, of signal, of distraction. A reintegration of the ear not as a passive receiver, but as a site of encounter. To listen, here, was to inhabit the moment with one’s full physicality. It was a radical slowing down, a surrender to the temporal grain of sound. A rare moment of reintegration. The ear, often reduced to a passive conduit, was here reclaimed as a site of encounter, a threshold through which time, breath, and matter could converge. Hers was a poetics of embodied listening and letting presence accumulate.

At the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, Renzo Piano’s architectural meditation on openness and light, MONOM’s spatial sound dome emerged not as a venue, but as a vessel. Walking through the surrounding park, where olive trees serve as temporal anchors and the sea glints at the periphery, one approached the dome less as a structure than as a frequency field.

Sound moved through the spine, the chest, the base of the skull. A full collapse occurred between interior and exterior. MONOM made porous the boundaries we so carefully uphold: between self and world, between rhythm and rest. It was meditative, yes, but also deeply physical. It compelled stillness and invited motion, as if the body had momentarily forgotten where it ended and the sound began.

Suzanne Ciani’s Improvisation on Four Sequences opened with analog synthesis rendered in fluid geometries, sketching a speculative grammar of resonance. Evita Manji’s Echo(location) chamber is a refracted emotional architecture, as if longing had been spatialized and given breath. Cinna Peyghamy summoned tactility from pressure and pulse, folding ritual into modulation with almost surgical clarity. Andrea Belfi’s Above My Door, There Is Knocking activated what lay dormant just beyond the threshold. A sonic ecology that expanded the architecture of listening just slightly beyond the edge of the body.

Where Vantzou dissolved the self and MONOM absorbed it, Ryoji Ikeda reconfigured it. His performance dealt in extremes: of data, of frequency, of form. His precision was almost surgical, excising time into units and spatializing mathematics into physical sensation.

There is a rigor to his practice that resists spectacle and yet produces awe. Frequencies carved through the space like scalpel lines. Data was not visualized; it was enacted, rendered as intensity. The room did not move. It held. The audience, silent and still, was algorithmically synchronized. There is something devotional in Ikeda’s refusal to soften, a kind of purity that exceeds expression. Pure intelligence.

Cafés became informal extensions of the program, where conversations unraveled like marginalia: speculative, embodied, unresolved. A city shaped by interruption and multiplicity, it offered not stability but resonance. In the rhythm of its streets, in the slow generosity of its pauses, Athens enacted what Subset proposed. To listen is not to extract meaning, but to remain in proximity to it.

Subset does not curate spectacle. It curates conditions. Its intelligence is not in its scale, but in its sensitivity, a careful orchestration of slowness, density, and attention. It does not speak over. It listens. And in Athens, a city fluent in dissonance and return, that listening became something more than practice. It became epistemological. It became political. Not resistance in the usual sense, but resonance as mode — as method, as ethics, as form.

Subset Festival Athens

Posted on 22 de May de 202527 de May de 2025 by nr

Now in its third edition, Subset Festival is rapidly establishing itself as one of the most forward-thinking and culturally significant platforms in Greece’s contemporary music scene. Curated by composer and sound artist Stavros Gasparatos, the Athens-based festival becomes a dynamic reflection of a broader cultural shift: where experimental sound, technology, and performance are not sidelined but brought to the forefront of Greece’s artistic discourse.

Launched in 2023 as part of the historic Athens Epidaurus Festival, Subset offers more than just a programme, it builds a much-needed space for contemporary and experimental music within a country still negotiating the balance between tradition and the avant-garde. “When I first proposed Subset, my goal was to create a space that can support and connect the vibrant Greek artistic community working in these fields,” says Gasparatos. “I want a platform that commissions new works, highlights the wealth of talent based in Athens, and opens up meaningful exchanges with leading figures from the international experimental scene.”

Rooted in the cultural heart of Athens and co-produced with the Athens Conservatoire, the 2025 edition of Subset expands this vision even further. It brings together global pioneers and local innovators across venues such as the Athens Conservatoire and the SNFCC, presenting a bold conversation between music, movement, spatial sound, and digital media. The lineup features international figures like Lyra Pramuk, Mouse on Mars, Suzanne Ciani, Carmen Villain, and Ryoji Ikeda, alongside a new generation of Greek artists actively redefining the local scene.

Notably, the Athens Epidaurus Festival itself does not shy away from forward-thinking music either, will present Arca’s debut in Greece on May 31st, marking a landmark addition to the festival’s evolving identity. Live in Athens from the iconic Lycabettus Theater in celebration of the Festival’s 70th anniversary, Arca will be supported by local Greek musician and fellow PAN-signee, Evita Manji, and with a DJ set from local Porschelane. The performances will be followed by Subset’s opening celebration, doubling as the afterparty for the Concert and developed in close collaboration with Plural Artist Management and NR Magazine. Taking place in a raw brutalist basement in the centre of Athens, it features boundary-pushing DJ sets from Apu Nanu, Bapari, Bobby Beethoven, Engalanan, Evita Manji, Oldyungmayn, Safety Trance and Wicboyx. The lineup resists easy categorisation: deconstructed club rhythms, ambient textures, reggaeton mutations, and rave atmospheres converge in a night that celebrates genre fluidity and radical expression.

As Plural Artist Management notes, “Subset Festival represents a well-intentioned shift from the traditional Theater, Dance and Performing Arts programme that Athens Epidaurus Festival is known for. As such, it positions itself as an expansive addition to summer in Greece, and has attained well-deserved praise for its openness to collaborate and invest in ‘one-of-one’ artists.”

A visual recap of the afterparty and select DJ sets are set to be published exclusively on NR in the coming days, capturing the charged energy that opens the festival.

At its core, Subset is not just an event but an evolving platform for cultural dialogue. “Another key aspect of Subset is fostering collaboration across disciplines and backgrounds,” Gasparatos explains. “The festival actively encourages hybrid projects that blur boundaries—between genres, between artists, and between audiences.” This spirit of experimentation defines Subset’s role in today’s Greece: a space where adventurous ideas can take root, and new artistic vocabularies can emerge.

Additionally, Athens Epidaurus Festival has also initiated a first-time collaboration between the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre and Berlin-based spatial sound studio MONOM, which will present both Live and Archive works presented across 6 days at the SNFCC Dome. “The partnership with MONOM is, for us, an especially fruitful result of Athens Epidaurus Festival’s ambition to experiment, and an effort to offer the public some insight into new technologies surrounding music/sound creation. With projects from two artists on the agency presented daily [Cinna Peyghamy and Evita Manji, who is Greek] as part of the Archive Works, we’re excited for audiences to experience this new format.” says Plural Artist Management.

In a country shaped by both rich heritage and a restless, forward-looking generation, Subset feels like a timely signal. Here experimental sound doesn’t just exist in the periphery, it belongs on the main stage of Greek cultural life.

Find full details on the Athens Epidaurus Festival website for all concerts, and secure a spot via Resident Advisor for the afterparty – tickets are limited.

Cinna Peyghamy

Posted on 30 de April de 202515 de June de 2025 by nr

NR · Magazine
Published · Online

Feature · Athens Epidaurus Festival
Words · Melis Özek

Auditory Matter as Ritual Form and the Space Between

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.

Cinna Peyghamy brings us into contact with the spatial texture and weight of sound. Moving between percussion and electronics, field energy and sculptural precision, his work challenges the idea of listening. Here, sound is force. It’s matter. It’s ritual. With a background in science and a commitment to improvisation, Cinna treats sound as a phenomenon to be shaped, inhabited, and released. In this conversation, he speaks of silence as suspension, of performance as a state beyond thought, and of listening as a sensual, even sacred act.

This conversation coincides with the presentation of Cinna Peyghamy’s spatial sound work within the AEF x SNFCC x MONOM program in Athens. Developed in collaboration with MONOM and originally conceived for the 4DSOUND system, the piece deepens Peyghamy’s exploration of vibration, resonance, and embodied sonics. Here, sound is not treated as discrete, rather as a sensorial continuum to be entered, absorbed, and metabolised. The work resists the notion of performance as delivery; instead, it unfolds as a durational ecology of attunement, shaped by presence, porosity, and mutual transformation.

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?

That’s such a deep and fascinating question. I always like to start by saying that sound doesn’t need images to be understood. Hearing is one of our most fundamental senses, but it’s also a way of perceiving the world across different timelines and intensities. Whether you’re in a concert hall or walking through a forest, sound is something you can feel. It surrounds you, it moves through you. It’s not abstract—it’s physical.

In French, we use the word matière to describe sound. It means material, something tactile. And I treat it like that—as something I can shape, mold, and work with like clay. Unlike vision, which we can close off easily, we can’t simply choose not to hear. You can close your eyes, but you can’t close your ears. That makes sound uniquely intimate, but also inescapable. It reaches you whether you invite it or not.

Orson Welles once said something about how we’re addicted to images, and I think that’s still true. We live in a visual culture. But sound is older. In nature, it’s how animals protect themselves. It’s how a child cries for its mother. It’s primal. And yet we tend to treat it as background. I’m interested in what happens when we bring it back to the foreground.

How do you see sound as a source of transformation?
Sound is transformation. It is energy in motion. A wave doesn’t move matter, but it transfers force. It literally reshapes the space around us. It changes how the air behaves. When a wave hits the ear, it gets translated into electric signals in the brain—and that translation becomes emotion, memory, sensation. So even before you attach meaning, sound is already doing something to you. That’s the level I’m working on. The invisible level that still leaves an imprint.

When you’re composing, how does that sense of energy and space influence your creative process?

I often describe myself as a two-faced musician. I play acoustic instruments, but I also compose electronic music. My work lives in the space between—electrifying the acoustic and bringing acoustic resonance into the electronic world. That duality is everything to me.

The way energy feels is completely different depending on the source. When I’m playing percussion, I’m the source. I create the sound. My hand hits the skin, I feel the feedback in my body. There’s a direct, muscular relationship to the sound. But when I’m composing electronically, I’m working with machines and software. The speaker becomes the voice—but it’s designed, manufactured, mediated. It’s a different intimacy.

At the computer, I’m focused on texture, weight, spatial balance. How do the frequencies sit? Where does the bass fall in the room? But when I’m performing live, it’s almost athletic. I think about posture, hand coordination, physical stamina. It’s about staying attuned to the space and what it’s asking for. One is psychological, the other is fully embodied. Both are necessary.

Silence and decay seem as present in your work as tone and rhythm. What is the function of absence in your compositions? Is there a kind of sacredness in withholding sound?

Absolutely. There’s a quote often attributed to Chopin—”Silence is music”—and I believe it. But silence is difficult. Most people are afraid of it. Even outside of music, silence in conversation can feel awkward, like something you need to fill. But I think silence is also peace. It’s immobility. It slows things down. It invites reflection.

Silence functions very differently depending on the space. If I’m performing in a church, silence has weight. It echoes. You can use it to stretch time, to create tension, to let something land. In a club, it’s trickier. Silence exposes the background—the bar noise, the chatter, the bodies. It’s more fragile. But even then, it can be powerful if you trust it.

When I’m composing, I often return to a track and realize I’ve said too much. Why is there so much happening? Did I really need that many layers? Maybe not. Subtraction is a tool. You remove until you’re almost at silence—but not quite. That in-between space is where I try to live. That equilibrium, where presence and absence are in dialogue. It’s a place of heightened listening.

How did your collaboration with MONOM influence the way you think about resonance, space, and performance?

I worked with MONOM in May 2024. Usually, artists do a residency and create a fixed piece using their 4DSOUND system. But from the beginning, I knew I didn’t want to compose a finished work. My practice is rooted in improvisation. I never go on stage knowing exactly what I’ll play. That’s what makes each performance alive.

The MONOM system is incredibly complex—more than 50 speakers in a multidimensional space. With the spatial sound engineer, we adapted my usual stereo live set into a format that could move through that environment. I didn’t write anything in the traditional sense. I treated the space as an instrument and trained myself to play it.

Every day during the residency, I practiced, improvised, tested gestures. How does a frequency move across the room? How can I shape it in real time without hiding behind a screen? We developed a system that let me perform the room. The final show was fully improvised, like always. But it felt different. I had to react instantly to what I was hearing. That concert was recorded and will be presented at Subset. It’s a piece made entirely of live responsiveness.

What does it feel like to perform in that way?
When I perform, I enter a very specific state. I’m not thinking. I’m not planning. It’s like a small inner sphere—me, my drum, my synth. My hands are doing the work. I let them think for me.

It doesn’t matter if there are ten people or a thousand. The focus is the same. It’s not about control. It’s about attainment. The performance reflects the space, the mood, the temperature, the breath in the room. Everything affects everything. I like to compare it to walking a tightrope. You can’t lose balance for even a second. That’s what keeps it alive.

Questions from Christina Vantzou:
Is there a sound you’ve always wanted to hear but haven’t been able to?

I’ve always wanted to hear the sound of an earthquake. Not buildings falling, not the aftermath. I mean the sound the earth itself makes when it moves. That ultra-low frequency that we can’t quite access. It’s probably more of a vibration than a sound. But I hope one day we’ll find a way to hear it.

Would you say sound exists more on a cosmic level or a sensual one?

Sensual, definitely. What we talked about at the beginning—sound goes through you. It wraps around you. It touches you. That’s the core of it. It’s bodily. It’s intimate. It’s a feeling.

Photography · Payram
Discover more on aefestival.gr

Carmen Villain

Posted on 30 de April de 202530 de June de 2025 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 30 de April de 202517 de June de 2025 by nr

NR · Magazine
Published · Online

Feature · Subset Festival
Words · Melis Özek

Embodied Listening as Navigation and the Architecture of Time

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
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Rainy Miller

Posted on 18 de April de 202522 de April de 2025 by nr

NR · Magazine
Published · Online

Feature · Rainy Miller
Words · Melis Özek

Between Noise and Narrative: Tracing the Raw Vein of Expression

Rainy Miller didn’t enter music through the front door. No training, no grand epiphany, no polished ambition. His story begins not in a studio, but on the streets of Preston, in the shadow of the UK grime wave that surged through the city in the mid-2000s. He was barely a teenager when music, almost by cultural necessity, became part of his language.

It was raw, instinctive, DIY in the truest sense. There were no lessons in harmony, only the urge to speak, to echo, to belong. And from this chaotic, makeshift entry point, Rainy found his voice — one shaped less by technicality, more by emotion.

This wasn’t about perfection. It was about emotion. Like life is about. And in many ways, that early, unstructured beginning still echoes through his work today: emotionally charged, intimate, deeply human. As he puts it, “We weren’t worried about being perfect, we were just expressing ourselves.”

In a world obsessed with polish, Rainy Miller reminds us of the beauty in imperfection and the power of simply expressing, wherever you are. In this conversation, Miller reflects on his beginnings, his pull toward Preston, and the way music becomes a vessel for the things that are hardest to name. His process is tender, instinctive, often elliptical—unconcerned with rules or industry books. Life has to be lived. That’s what Rainy is about.

This spring, Rainy’s taking it on the road, channeling his emotionally charged sound into a run of intimate European shows. From Berlin Atonal (April 25) and Peckham Audio in London (May 1) to The Flying Duck in Glasgow (May 2), Lisbon’s ZDB (May 8), and Disgraceland in Middlesbrough (May 11).

Melis Özek How did your journey into music begin? Was there a defining moment?

Rainy Miller My journey into music began gradually. I wasn’t trained in music at all, nor did I have any initial urge or outlet to pursue it. there was this huge wave that swept through Preston, the UK grime scene back in 2006, that took over the city massively. I was around 11 or 12 years old at the time, and everybody got into writing bars and rapping.It was city-wide, more of a culture. You would actually be the odd one out to not be doing it. That was my initial introduction to music, recording with a rudimentary approach. Because of how young we were and our limited access to equipment, it was DIY by nature. It was free of restrains.

What was interesting is that due to the nature of the music and our lack of technical musicianship, we immediately fell into a school of thought focused on emotion, instead of calculating musicality. That was probably a bit of a blessing, because we weren’t worried about being perfect, we were expressing ourselves. It was an experimental, organic way of stepping into music, just playing with what was out there and seeing what we could create.

MO Your work carries a distinct sense of place—Preston isn’t just a backdrop, it feels embedded. How does Preston shape the creative process?

RM Well, this is interesting because I’ve spent a lot of time moving between Preston, Manchester, and back to Preston again. For some reason, I always end up back in Preston – and I’m living here again now. Due to the nature of the music I make, which always revolves around personal thoughts, all of my music has been contextually bound to times when I’ve been in Preston.

I’ve never really written music about times when I’ve been in Manchester or anywhere else. Preston gives me the entire context for my music. There’s this weird magnetism that keeps pulling me back, whether it’s living here or writing about experiences from here.

I think I’m drawn to the underdog mentality of the place. Preston is a second city in the northwest, and unlike other prominent music cities that have already established their sonic identity, Preston feels more ambiguous. It doesn’t have a clear musical flag in the ground yet, and I find that really intriguing.

My music isn’t intentionally trying to sound like Preston, but the city is naturally embedded in my work because my experiences here shape the narratives. When I write, the location and its memories are fundamental to drive the sense of musicality. The city is in the music itself – not because I’m trying to make it sound like a specific place, but because my personal narrative is so deeply rooted here.

It’s almost like Preston isn’t just where I’m from – it’s a fundamental part of how I understand and express my experiences through music.

MO The North has its own rhythm, its own sense of space. How does that translate into your compositions, your pacing, your textures?

RM I’m not a trained musician, so I don’t sit down looking for specific chords or thinking about musical keys. Instead, I lean into the backdrops, stories, and contexts of places to drive the piece. For me, what comes before making the music is the narrative behind I’m making the music about.

Naturally, the musicality is driven by location and feeling – what I need to portray based on what happened at a specific time in a specific place. Because many of these stories come from when I was in Preston or at home, the city’s essence naturally flows into the music. It’s not a calculated process, but an organic one where the rhythm and pacing emerge from the emotional landscape of the experience.

MO Your music feels deeply immersive, almost like a constant soundtrack that weaves through various narratives.Can you share more about the sources of inspiration and influences that shape your music? How does your creative process unfold behind the scenes?

RM I’ve always had a civic pride in language and accent, inspired by artists like Ian Brown from the Stone Roses. While their music might be different, I’m drawn to their approach to lyricism – people like John Cooper Clarke, Richard Ashcroft, and Sean Ryder. These artists pushed forward a narrative for the North.

My creative process is almost like scoring films in my head. The music has to come from how this movie in my mind plays out to capture the right emotion. I do a lot of field recording, which I borrowed from artists like Space Africa. I use granular synthesis to create musicality from tones found in physical places – using sheets of ambience and resampling things.

For instance, I can’t play guitar, so I’d borrow a friend’s guitar and tune it to a song that carried the emotion I wanted. By tuning it that way, I’d naturally find things within the same key that had the right emotionality. It’s about using the nuances of a lack of technicality and turning them into a strength that feels unique.

The inspiration comes from personal context, from the stories and emotions embedded in specific moments and places. It’s about creating a sonic landscape that reflects those internal experiences, using whatever tools and techniques feel right in the moment.

MO Your music seamlessly blends pop, ambient, and drill, yet it feels deeply personal rather than defined by genre. Is this fusion intentional, or does it emerge organically through your creative process?

RM The blending of genres isn’t intentional in the way you might think. It’s really about using different genre characteristics to express specific emotions. When there’s noise music in my tracks, it’s because that moment needed to convey a sense of frenetic anger. When I use Midwest-style guitar parts, it’s to carry vulnerability or a specific emotional weight.

I was heavily influenced by artists like Space Africa, Blackhaine, Croww, and Iceboy Violet, who use ambient textures like shades of paint. For me, genres are just tools to express emotion. I’m not trying to create a genre-defying sound – I’m using whatever musical language best communicates the feeling I want to express at that moment. It’s less about the genre and more about the emotional character of the music.

MO Your debut album Limbs introduced listeners to your unique sound. Looking back, how did the creative process for this album shape your evolution as an artist? What were the key moments that defined its direction?

RM Limbs was a pivotal moment for me. It was the first time I really got back into lyricism after making more beat-driven music that wasn’t fulfilling me. I realized I couldn’t fully express myself without lyrics, but I didn’t want to rap and couldn’t sing traditionally. That’s where auto-tune became crucial.

I was massively inspired by Frank Ocean’s Blonde and Blood Orange at the time. They showed me how to use auto-tune to create a unique linguistic language. The album also taught me about song structures – I studied pop writers like Bon Iver and Frank Ocean to understand how to construct songs that serve a purpose.

It was essentially my first step into finding my voice – literally and figuratively. I was learning how to express myself through music in a way that felt authentic and emotionally true.

MO A Choreographed Interruption and Fire, And Then Ashes followed Limbs, each exploring different sonic territories. How did the process for these projects differ from Limbs, and how did your sound evolve between them?

RM These projects were transitional for me. With A Choreographed Interruption, I was leaning more into very personal, intense lyricism. It felt like I was clearing out the last of my pop sensibilities – getting those final pieces out of my system.

Both projects were about shedding a certain skin as an artist. I was moving away from trying to write “good” music and instead focusing on writing music with a genuine purpose. They were less about creating something polished and more about artistic intention and experimentation.

It was like I was gradually stripping away the layers of what I thought music should sound like, becoming more comfortable with more experimental approaches. These albums were about breaking down traditional song structures and finding my true artistic voice.

Each project was a step in my evolution – from the more structured approach of Limbs to the more experimental, purpose-driven work of these later albums. It was a process of discovering what I really wanted to say and how I wanted to say it.

MO 2023 was an incredibly productive year with 3 singles and 2 albums. What inspired the flurry of work during this time, and how did these projects come to life? Were there particular influences or moments that drove this creative output?

RM I think it was about being given a purpose to write. The scenes we’d been involved in at that point were really exciting, and it felt incredibly easy to make music. We were working super collaboratively, which was new for me – I’d never really written music so collaboratively before.It got me out of working in such a personal way and allowed me to abstract things into a wider context. A Grisaille Wedding record, for instance, was written with quite a lot of fictionality – something I’d never done before. It became easier to write when I wasn’t having to be so directly personal or worry about how the songs might affect my family.

The collaborative environment and the freedom to write more abstractly meant my productivity was through the roof. It was about finding a new way of creating that felt less emotionally constrained.

MO Your collaborations with Space Afrika have been key. How has working together shaped the sound and creative process, and what does this fusion of work mean personally?

RM Working with Space Afrika was massive for me. It wasn’t just about them specifically, but about the entire Northwest scene. When I met them, everyone had such rich and deep knowledge of music. They opened up entire worlds to me – introducing me to noise music, ambient music, forward-leaning electronics.

They essentially opened the door to something I’d been looking for musically for a long time. Being able to grind down our creative endeavors against one another gave us these really nuanced, unique edges to how we create. It felt like we were solving a puzzle together.

While the core context of my music didn’t change, the palettes they introduced me to were the greatest musical influence I’ve experienced. It completely transformed how I thought about creating music.

MO You’ve collaborated with artists like Blood Orange, Blackhaine, Actress, and Mica Levi—each with their own distinct vision. How have these collaborations shaped your approach to music? Are there specific lessons or creative shifts that have emerged from working with such diverse voices?

RM These collaborations meant I had to wear different hats – becoming more focused on production and engineering. Working with artists like Blackhaine and Croww was about lending myself to something bigger than just my own work.

With Blackhaine, I wanted to contribute to something that felt larger than my individual perspective. It became another tool in my creative arsenal, allowing me to engineer for other artists like Ice Body Violet and work more broadly in production.

These collaborations expanded my skills, letting me work as an engineer and producer. It wasn’t always easy – collaboration has to feel right – but it opened up new ways of thinking about music creation.

MO The visual world around your music is deeply immersive. How do you see the relationship between sound and image in your work?

RM For me, music is always derived from image or memory first. There’s always a visual aspect before the music is made. Because my music has been so personal, it’s always tied to specific physical times and places.

I’m obsessed with binding context to things. If you’re making a song about something, you should be able to take a picture that embodies the same feeling, or make a film that captures the same emotion. It’s all driven from the same context.

The visual and musical elements are interconnected – they’re different expressions of the same emotional landscape. The musicality is derived from emotion and visual experiences from the very beginning. It’s about creating a complete artistic experience that tells a complete story.

MO Your song titles feel like glimpses of a larger story—elliptical, almost cinematic. How do you approach naming a track?

RM I like finding context for the song titles, but I also enjoy shrouding things in a bit of mystery. Because my songs are often personal, I want to cloak them slightly so they don’t feel too raw.

Take ToddBrook as an example. ToddBrook is a place near Derby where a dam burst in 2019. The song is actually about a day when I had an emotional reaction that felt like my mind was breaking open- like a dam bursting. So the title ties back to the experience, but in a loose, contextual way.

I always try to add layers of context, like adding muscles to a skeleton. The more context you wrap around something, the more it can move and breathe as its own entity. It’s about creating intrigue while maintaining a connection to the original experience.

MO Self-directing your videos gives you full control over how your music is visually interpreted. How does your approach to filmmaking differ from your approach to music? What inspires the visual language of your work, and how does your creative process unfold from concept to execution?

RM The approach to videos are simple – just me, a camera, and a camera stand. I’ll figure the rest out later. Take the Vengeance video, for instance – it was the first time I used movement on camera, and that movement was literally emulating how I physically moved on the night the song was written.

I don’t know how to edit videos or understand frame rates, and that doesn’t matter to me. It’s about serving the purpose in the most accessible way possible, in the most honest way I can. Artists like Klein inspire me – where technicality is irrelevant, and everything is driven by emotion.

It’s about creating a visual representation that captures the emotion, without technical perfection. Just pure, honest expression.

MO Fixed Abode is more than just a label—it’s a statement of intent. What sparked the idea to create it, and was there a specific moment or frustration with traditional structures that pushed the creation?

RM I created the label around COVID. When I had Choreographed Interruption ready to release, we sent it out and found that labels either weren’t interested or were keeping artists on hold for an unpredictable period of time.

I realized this way of working didn’t align with my creative ethos. So I thought, why not create a label where we can release music entirely on our own terms? The logo is an adaptation of an asterisk, playing with the idea of terms and conditions in contracts.The name Fixed Abode is a play on the UK phrase about not having a home. For me, it was about creating a forever home for art from the Northwest – a place to release music without having to play by traditional industry rules.

MO Joseph, What Have You Done? took five years to take shape. Can you walk us through how the album evolved? How did time change its meaning? Who is Joseph?

RM The album’s journey was long and evolved significantly. It started around 2020, initially sparked by a documentary called Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus. At first, it was going to be a highly conceptual, biblically referenced album with a specific approach.

The biblical references remained a consistent visual and thematic language throughout the album’s development. The title Joseph, What Have You Done? itself suggests a biblical narrative, though the meaning is deeply personal rather than strictly religious.

But life happened. As I went through personal changes over these years – moving from a fragile mental state to a more stable one – the album’s purpose shifted. It became more about personal catharsis. Now it’s structured in three acts: the first deals with darker, more vulnerable material; the second explores falling in love and out of love. At last, the third appreciates the people to surround me.

The five-year process wasn’t just about musical composition, but about living through experiences that would provide the album its depth. You have to live a bit of life to write a meaningful record.

MO This album feels like it exists between past and present, personal and universal. What was the emotional core of this record for you?

RM The album is essentially a journey through different emotional states.It’s about traversing from a fragile mental state to a more stable place. The record is chronological, showing my emotional evolution over five years. It’s deeply personal, but the biblical and contextual references allow me to abstract it slightly, making it feel more universal.

MO Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus was a key inspiration for this project. What about that film resonated with you? Did it shape the way you thought about narrative in music?

RM The documentary opened up fascinating connections for me. It explored folk music, folklore, and Christian evangelism in the American Midwest. I was drawn to finding parallels between that region and the North of England – how similar the towns feel, how their folk tales resonate.

Medulasa described my work as Northern Gothic after hearing an earlier record, which perfectly captured what I was trying to do. I became obsessed with the Southern Gothic elements and wanted to create a mirror to that in the North of England.

I pulled some lyrics directly from folk tales in the documentary, tying them to my own memories. It was about creating a collage of experiences, splicing references into something that stands alone as its own narrative.

MO The Fable / The Release explores the idea that memories—real or imagined—shape our sense of self. Can you elaborate on this?

RM The song drives from a memory I’ve had since being very young – a potentially traumatic experience. The fascinating thing is, I’m not even sure if it’s a real memory or something I imagined.

There’s a voice note about delirium that runs through the record, and the song explores this complex relationship with memory. It stems from an experience from my childhood that’s so distant and unclear that I can’t distinguish whether it actually happened or if it’s something I’ve constructed in my mind.

What’s crucial is that regardless of whether this memory is real or fictional, it has physically affected me and changed how I’ve grown mentally. The song isn’t about definitively proving what happened, but about understanding how these undefined memories shape us.

I’m interested in the idea that memories – whether factual or imagined – can be equally powerful in forming our sense of self. The song is essentially about not needing to dig up the past, understanding that revisiting certain memories can be harmful. It’s about letting go.

The song is strategically placed in the record at a point of transition, representing a moment of understanding that some memories, real or imagined, shape us but don’t need to define us forever. It’s part of a broader journey of emotional release and personal growth that runs through the entire album.

This exploration speaks to a larger theme in my work – how we construct our identity through fragments of memory, perception, and imagination. It’s about the blurry lines between what’s real and what’s remembered, and how those lines ultimately shape who we become.

The approach is very much in line with my overall artistic philosophy – using context, references, and personal experiences to create something that feels both deeply personal and universally resonant.

MO With live premieres across the UK and Europe, how does the work translate into live settings?

RM Live performances are actually more aggressive than the record. They’re a way for me to physically exercise the emotional baggage of writing. It becomes less about performing for an audience and more about expelling emotions.

I tend to black out a bit during performances – it’s like an hour of purely exhausting myself emotionally. The only time I get nervous is when performing in front of my family, because the music is so brutally honest and touches on potentially emotional subjects for them.

MO Beyond Joseph, What Have You Done?, what’s next for you and Fixed Abode?

RM For Fixed Abode, we’ve got some exciting things coming. There are a few artists I’ve loved for years who are returning to make music. We might potentially work on an album with Richie Culver.
I’m also looking to collaborate more. I’ve been discussing potential collaborations with Puce Mary. After such a personal record, I’m excited to collaborate and perhaps create fictional pieces.

The aim is to expand. Not just musically, but as a creative platform that can support various artistic endeavors.

In order of appearance

Rainy Miller
Rainy Miller
Rainy Miller
Joseph, What Have You Done? Artwork

Listen to Joseph, What Have You Done?.

Candela Capitán and Paul McCarthy

Posted on 16 de April de 202519 de April de 2025 by nr

NR 19 Detour · 2025
Published · Print Page 063

Feature · Candela Capitán and Paul McCarthy
Words · Candela Capitán and Paul McCarthy In Conversation mediated by Andrea Bratta

Where Does a Body End

What happens when a person becomes a product? Legendary performer Paul McCarthy and new-media heroine Candela Capitán come together to dissect their work—through a series of detours on Instagram addiction, endless spinning, streaming, TikTok aesthetics., abjection, and the shifting role of irony in art and life.

Candela Capitan Do you remember I called you once?

Paul McCarthy Sure, I remember, you wanted to come here –and I said: “Yeah, sure, if you want to come, come!” Where are you now?

CC I’m in Barcelona!

PMC I think my favorite city is Barcelona—though maybe Berlin is up there too. I really love Barcelona. I was actually supposed to work on a theater piece there. It was planned to take place in both Barcelona and Madrid, but it ended up falling through. We were working on a project called A&E, Adolf & Eva, Adam & Eve and were so sure it was going to happen. It felt like everything was in motion, but then, last year, it all just collapsed. Nothing came of it. There are still some conversations happening—phone calls back and forth—but these things take so long. Once something falls apart and stays dormant for six months or more, you start to wonder if it’ll ever come back.

CC It’s so difficult to get projects approved in Spain..

PMC And it’s always a little bit painful when something doesn’t go through, who knows, maybe we’ll manage to do it.

CC Regardless, It’s such a pleasure for me to be speaking with you! I’m a huge fan. I come from the world of choreography, but I’m deeply connected to performance art. My work draws from movement, blending elements of choreography with aspects of performance. I think that’s part of why I’m so drawn to your work – I feel like we share some common ground.

PMC I actually know of your work through Instagram. It’s interesting – with Instagram, you end up following so many people. I’ll admit, I’m a bit addicted to it, but I find myself connecting with certain types of imagery or ideas that stand out. I think I probably started following you because something in your work felt familiar or resonated with me. I was reflecting on that recently. I have some close friends who are dancers and choreographers – some are part of troupes, while others collaborate with different groups. In performance, there’s often this natural overlap with musicians, actors, or other dancers. The lines between disciplines start to blur. A good friend of mine is Simone Forti, and with her, those lines are completely blurred. As a dancer and artist, her connections with musicians and visual artists have always been significant. Simone is often considered a dancer, but she’s had a major influence on artists across different fields. Dan Graham once told me she was a key influence on many minimalists like Robert Morris – maybe not Donald Judd, that might be a stretch – but definitely Morris, and artists like Charlemagne Palestine in the 70s. I remember seeing your piece where you keep rolling, and it made me think about repetition – the endurance of it, and how repeating something over and over carries its own weight. There’s a sense of irony in that too. I think repeating an action or a word or a sentence over and over for an extended period of time, for the viewer or the performer, it can become ironic or absurd. When I think about your work, I find myself wondering – how do you think about irony? Maybe that’s the first question. How do you approach irony in your work? In mine, I often turn a situation upside down. That gesture, I think, is a layer over a deeper subject or issue. I think repetition can also bring something up, something deeper.

CC I think my work might have less irony, or at least it feels that way. I see my performances as more serious – maybe because I tend to confront myself in ways that feel heavier. I’m not sure. It’s not necessarily political in a direct sense, but more about how I construct my pieces. That said, irony plays a big role in how I build movement. Without it, I feel like something is missing. For me, it’s a bit like that – if my work doesn’t have a sense of the uncanny, it doesn’t feel as interesting or engaging, at least for myself. I don’t know. I work a lot with the internet and how our generation’s imagination is shaped by it – how everything now revolves around social media and the way we absorb so much from being online. For me, that imaginary world isn’t entirely serious, and I feel like irony naturally becomes part of it. My work reflects that – there’s irony in the way I engage with this digital space. I was actually thinking about something else before this. How do you see our generation now? You’ve always worked with devices, screens, and technology, and I feel like I’m exploring similar ideas, but in the context of a generation that’s hyper-connected through platforms and social media. I’m curious – how do you feel about that now? How do you connect with this shift?

PMC I think, in some ways, it goes back a long time for me – to the 60s and 70s – when mediums/genres were starting to blur. There was this merging of dance, theater, music, film, art, painting, and drawing. I was lucky to be in a radical school at that time, but I was also actively seeking out the edges of things. Even from an early age, I felt like I was trying to leave something behind or break away from it. I wanted to make work using tape recorders, cameras, the motion picture, film. By the late 60s, I was already drawn to video because it offered something new. You could record for long periods, integrate sound, and immediately see what you were recording, see yourself on a monitor. At that time for me, all genres felt radical – painting, sculpture, drawing, dance, film, poetry. I was interested in minimalism, experimental film, performance, and happenings. It all converged. I did paintings flat on the ground as an action in the studio, without an audience, performance actions. I remember once, in 1967, I was assigned to make a kinetic sculpture in school, and I jumped out of a window – inspired by Yves Klein. That relationship between the body, sculpture, and action has stayed with me. Over the last 15 years, I’ve become deeply involved in video – recording, editing, collaborating. I write scripts that allow for improvisation, with key blocking moments but room to explore between. Sometimes we record for days, accumulating material that then traps me in the editing process. To answer your question about social media – I was interested but slow to engage with it directly. I never made a website or actively posted, though I followed what others were doing. Streaming fascinated me, but I felt too immersed in my ongoing projects to shift focus. The same happened with virtual reality – I was curious but hesitant, until someone asked me to create something, and I ended up making 30 VR pieces. Now, I’m obsessed with AI and work with it daily. Sometimes interests simmer until the right moment arises. Today, I’m performing, doing an action live and altering the recorded image through AI and then streaming the action through social media. I recognize the importance of social media and digital platforms – it’s not a lack of interest in what it is, but more about time and priorities. I don’t know where this dabbling in AI will end up.

CC What about galleries? Would you say their role, or importance, changed over time?

PMC I think possibly galleries are becoming obsolete. I think also in some cases, galleries are being run by people who are out of touch or placating collectors who don’t realize what is done, expressed, or formed by artists. I feel like there’s something happening that the art world isn’t fully recognizing. They’re not really interested in engaging with it creatively. During COVID, for example, galleries suddenly realized they needed to do online exhibitions. So they just hired people with technical skills – people who didn’t really get what artists are about. It became, “Give us the material, and we’ll handle it.” But artists struggle with mediums – we fuck with them, break them, and rebuild. That’s part of the process. So yes, I’m interested in how social media intersects with art.

CC I’m not really interested in AI. I’m not sure why – maybe I’ll understand it one day, but for now, it feels too digital to me. I love talking about streaming, how we connect with others through Instagram, and what’s happening on the internet. But I don’t feel very connected to digital imagery. I don’t know why.

PMC AI to me feels like a massive iceberg that we haven’t even hit yet. When I first interacted with AI images, it felt almost like a revelation – the fascination was immediate. I don’t think of it as a tool I need to train or control. I view AI more as a collaborator, and I’m not interested in the process of training it. Maybe I am training it, but that’s not my focus. What interests me is the layers, the speed, and the unpredictability of the images, the hallucination, or dreaming it produces. I’m not interested in the slick AI images, I’m more interested in distortion, blurred images. As an image maker, this speed and layering are compelling to me. A lot of my performance work is centered around creating an image, whether that’s a visual or a conceptual one – the making of an image and the effect on me being in it. Primarily it’s about the persona, entering another world. I think how I interact with AI is similar to painting and drawing. There’s a connection between drawing, painting, and how I engage with AI. Both are about creating something that evolves. The process is similar – I give it something, a prompt, an idea or a live or recorded input, and then I watch how it takes shape. There’s something in that, like watching a painting come to life, seeing the layers unfold.

CC And what about streaming, where does your interest lay in that?

PMC I’ve been really interested in that for a while now – not just in the traditional art world sense, but in how individuals, who aren’t necessarily part of the art scene, are using streaming platforms. These streamers can engage with thousands of people, creating a phenomenon that’s beyond anything we’ve seen in the art world. It’s a different kind of interaction, a new way of reaching a huge audience that doesn’t follow the traditional art world or tv and film world structures.

CC I work a lot with social media and streaming, but I’m always more focused on how these contexts are affecting my generation. I think that’s part of why I don’t connect with AI – I don’t think of my work as an image. I’ve never seen it that way, and I’m only realizing it now. Maybe it’s because I don’t create traditional paintings. I do work with visuals, but not in that final, static sense. I’ve always thought in terms of movement or action. I’m more connected with the action itself, the process, rather than just the image. I think a lot about how streaming is changing the way my generation lives. I even did a performance about this, looking at a sexual streaming platform called Chaturbate. Now I’m working on a project that focuses on the massive buildings in Asia where influencers and digital creators live and work. These huge complexes house rooms for influencers to do production, often at a very young age, and under intense pressure to produce constant content for platforms like TikTok. It’s like a hyper-production machine. They’re doing it all day long, creating content, doing advertising, and living under this very high-stakes, commercial environment.

PMC I think, you know, when it comes to mediums like streaming or AI, they’re just forms, extensions of something bigger. I’ve always been interested in video, film, and cameras, and in a way, streaming and AI are just natural extensions of that. I was drawn to media, especially film in the early 60s.

For me, performance is the core of it. The small drawings I make aren’t just images—they’re scripts. They’re a series, not singular. There could be 20 or 30 drawings in a series. They’re about what I imagine I’m doing or doing with others. The action, the performance, is the critical element, the core is always the performance. That’s what I care about the most.

I’m interested in streaming, I’m interested in video. I stopped performing in front of people in the early 80s and only did it in front of a camera. But now I’ve started performing in front of people again.

CC What made you come back to performing?

PMC I began performing and creating work with an actress and artist, Lilith Stangenberg, who’s deeply involved in theater and film. That led me into theater performance, which was something I had never done before. I wasn’t initially interested in it. Part of it was a rejection of what I thought of as traditional theater, the stage, the position of the audience. I was more drawn to the idea of performances, actions, happenings, taking place anywhere—whether in someone’s bedroom or on the street. A lot of the time, projects, work, happen because of an opportunity or coincidence, and then you dive in. That’s what happened with theatre for me. It wasn’t something I planned.

CC And why did you stop?

PMC I did it performances from 1967 to 1983. It was all within the context of the art world or the alternative art world. I did a performance in a gallery sometime in the 70s, but mostly it was in alternative spaces or my studio, or someone else’s studio. In the 80s, the art world started to change, and so did the alternative spaces. They became more like cabaret environments, where stages were built, rooms were painted black, and lights were set up. It changed performance art. It became more about entertainment performance. Many artists involved in performance in the 70s at that point checked out for different reasons. Some went off to explore other parts of life or moved to places like South America. The world was changing, and my interest started to shift too. I wasn’t as interested in performing for an audience anymore. Early on, I made work in a studio without an audience, just using a camera. I found myself going back to that original way of working—performing in front of a camera rather than an audience. I didn’t feel like I needed an audience. But now, over the past few years, and especially since 2019, I’ve been more interested in performing in front of an audience. Lilith and I did about 100 performances, ranging from two to four hours long, but only 15 of them were in front of an audience. The camera still played a central role, but I’m now more interested in engaging with an audience. Most of what I’ve done with Lilith has been done in constructed set-architectures that we’ve built, in nature, or existing buildings/houses, and always in front of cameras.

CC Now you can do it in front of a camera, but without an audience.

PMC I was thinking about your work in relation to these actions that are repetitive. There’s something about the process of standing up, rolling, then standing up and rolling again, and doing it repeatedly. What is happening within yourself, How long do you do it? I’ve made similar pieces where I’d spin for an hour. With these repetitive actions, there’s a connection or empathy that builds between the audience and the performer. It becomes a physical or emotional experience for them both.

CC What? I don’t remember this piece?

PMC Well, it’s similar to your continuous rolling piece. I spin standing up for an extended period of time, sometimes holding the camera. I did it a number of times. But when you’re rolling over and over again, do you get dizzy? Do you do it because of that sensation, dizziness, or is it about something else?

CC If you roll like i do, not spin, you don’t get dizzy. You just get super tired.

PMC It’s related to being exhausted. I know a number of actors, that before they start to perform, they spin. I do and Lilith does.

CC I do too. It’s a proper ritual.

PMC I think it’s a transition. It’s like you’re preparing for something. That spinning creates this kind of delirium, a shift—like when you stop, you’re not in the same place you were when you began. It’s a way to enter another world, a world of action, a world of performance. It’s a process of starting something new. In these A&E pieces we’ve done, Adolph Hitler and Eva Braun drank champagne in the bunker, and it seemed fitting to us that as part of the work, the performance, we should drink champagne. For me, in this case, drinking became a connection to spinning. Alcohol, in a way, loosens the brain, helps to enter a different headspace. I would drink throughout the performance, and there were times when I was quite drunk. It became a ritual, entering the next phase, the next world – a transformative one. It’s about leaving this world behind, shaking it off, and entering another space entirely. That’s what the spinning and drinking do—they prepare you to transition. I do think at times though, the drinking made me stupid, a true lush, a drunk.

CC My practice has a lot of that too, but maybe not exactly rolling like this. I think what I do is put my dancers—or myself—into this in-between world, this bridge world. It’s about preparing to enter another space, another reality. It’s that same kind of transition, that same ritual of moving from one world to another, whether it’s through action, movement, or setting up the right conditions for a shift. It’s about creating that moment of transformation, where you’re not quite in one place anymore, but not yet fully in the next. It’s that preparation, that threshold, where the work really begins.

PMC Do you usually work with the same dancers?

CC I work with six dancers, generally, but It depends on the specific action required or the type of performance. Some dancers are more comfortable with certain movements, while others aren’t. For the performance you mentioned earlier, The Death at The Club, some dancers were willing to stay on the floor for 40 minutes, and others were not. There’s that balance between what they want to do and what the performance requires. The rules I set are flexible—dancers always want to perform perfectly, they want to push themselves, but they also know their limits. For me, the idea of working with different types of dancers or bodies is intriguing. It’s less about perfect technique and more about the expression of movement and action, and how bodies respond to these rituals and transitions. It’s about pushing boundaries and seeing how different kinds of bodies engage with that process.

PMC Did you rehearse for this one?

CC No, no rehearsal. We just did it.

PMC So, when do you rehearse something?

CC For example, have you seen my piece with five dancers in pink? Yeah, for that one, the choreography is like a score. It has 17 figures, and the choreography is also written out. For that, I need to rehearse because they all perform the same movements, and I rehearse for months.

PMC Do you rehearse for months as a group or individually, or both, perhaps?

CC First, I always follow the same structure where I spend about one and a half to two years working on a project, but the project has different timings. Initially, I do a small piece with myself, a performance with just me, and then I do a second performance with the same concept but for a larger scenario. So in each project, there are two performances: one that I do alone, where I’m in the studio by myself, and then I invite more people to join.

PMC Once a performance is completed, does it become a piece that you can perform at different locations?

CC Yeah, I finalize the project, and then I move it. I think I’m always doing the same—I don’t like to change my projects. I move them like a dance company would.

PMC That is something that exists more in dance, in music, and in theater. But you don’t see it as often in performance art. The idea of creating a piece and repeating it in different locations isn’t as common. In performance art, you usually do it once—maybe twice or three times—and that’s it. In my case, the subject or character carries through. For example, I had a piece where I played a sea captain. I performed it four times, but it changed each time. It was never the same, but each time I was still that sea captain. It’s similar to shooting a film. If you film over 30 days, you’re that character for 30 days, but the actions shift as the narrative progresses. In A&E, Adolf and Eva’s performances would change based on the scenario. One time, they’re on a picnic; another time, they’re coming home after dinner. But certain actions were repeated in every performance. Those repetitions were rituals, their way of being. The surroundings and context would shift, repetition became critical, and I realized how much that reflects daily life. Every morning, I have coffee. The day changes, but the coffee is constant. These repetitions are part of life. I see that in my work too—there’s a similarity, a thread that carries through. I repeat it because it feels like I’ve found something I need to continue exploring. I’ve noticed that some elements in my work never seem to end. They’re internal, personal things that I keep coming back to.

CC I love when someone repeats the same thing over and over, but each time with a different perspective. It’s like they’re driven by these obsessions, you know? They keep exploring the same idea forever, but actually not quite.

PMC I can see things I’m doing now that trace back to 40 years ago. Even though a lot has changed and evolved, certain themes persist. I remember reading a while back about the death drive. This idea that certain traumas stay with you forever, certain issues you just keep repeating and repeating. The nature of the death drive is that you never escape it. It’s an addiction, and I don’t think I want to escape it.

Are you working on something new right now?

CC I’m working on a new piece, something to do with the subject of cows.

PMC Cows?

CC Not real ones. What I mean is, I’m analyzing these companies in Asia that collaborate with young influencers, and I’m connecting this with hyper-production and cows. Hyper-production of videos, streamings, content for social media. These companies contact young people to create a massive amount of content for social media platforms. And I’m drawing a connection between this hyper-production of digital content and the hyper-production of milk from cows.

PMC Are you engaging one of those companies directly? Using them?

CC No, not directly, it’s more of a territory of inquiry, a theme, in relation to younger generations, especially gen alpha.

PMC Will you use social media as part of it? Will the performance exist on social media?

CC I always create two scenarios: one for social media and one for the stage or the physical space, simultaneously. When I do it, it’s live —streamed through a platform or website. I’m kind of building two spaces simultaneously. It depends on the context. For example, in my last performance, Solas, we streamed it on a sexual streaming platform. This created two types of audiences: the real audience present in the performance space and the audience accessing the platform to see porn. On the screen, there’s a chat interface, so what’s fascinating is that the audience in the physical space and the audience on the platform chat about the performance simultaneously. For those not in the room, they receive the feed through the platform. The number of people varies depending on where I stream. For instance, on Instagram, I could have around 1k viewers. But on Chaturbate, the audience tends to be smaller because they quickly realize it’s a performance, not what they expected, so they might only stay for a short time. The platform choice really influences the type of engagement.

PMC What does the use of social media in your work represent? What is it about?

CC It’s about different things, depending on the platform. For instance, with the sexual streaming platform, the focus was on connecting two kinds of audiences. One audience came to watch dance, while the other came to consume porn—though some might not even realize they were engaging with porn. It depends on the project. For example, my next performance will involve TikTok because the imagery of my new piece aligns more with TikTok’s aesthetic. On TikTok, there’s a lot of streaming with bizarre content, like 1,000 dogs in a pool or Asian girls doing nails for 20 hours straight.

PMC I mean, there’s something about the subject you’re choosing to work with—these influencers in Asia, right? Are you trying to understand what they’re like? Or were you saying that, as humans, they essentially become the product?

CC Yeah, exactly—they become the product.

PMC I guess that’s what I’m exploring. The work I’m making seems to grapple with this proposition, though it’s not always straightforward. There’s an interest in these influencers, but I might be looking at it differently. Maybe it ties back to our earlier discussion about irony—or something close to that. But I think my focus is less on social media itself and more on something visceral. It’s about the body, the physical, and its abject existence. These mediums—social media, influencers—are interesting to me in terms of their effect on the body and consciousness. What’s happening when someone becomes a product? What happens to their body and their sense of self? That said, my work tends to circle back to the visceral, the physicality of existence itself. So while the phenomena of influencers and streamers intrigue me, it’s not just about them—it’s about the deeper, more primal aspects of existence. The subject might seem futuristic, but for me, it’s tied to something deeply physical and human.

CC I love your answer, and it was extremely interesting speaking to you. You’re so focused—almost obsessed—with the importance of the body itself, and that’s always been so fascinating to me. Your work is so important to me! Should you ever manage to do a project in Barcelona, or even Europe, and need a performer, I’d be happy to do it!

PMC Let’s stay in touch.

In order of appearance

Paul McCarthy with Lilith Stangenberg. A&E, Santa Anita Drawing Session, 2022. © Paul McCarthy. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photography by Alex Stevens.
Paul McCarthy with Lilith Stangenberg. A&E, Adolf and Eva, Dead End Hole (Picnic), 2021. KODE Lysverket Art Museum, Bergen, Norway. © Paul McCarthy. Courtesy the artist, Kode Art Museum, Peder Lund, and Hauser & Wirth. Photography by Alex Stevens
Paul McCarthy with Lilith Stangenberg. A&E VR experiment Adolf and Eva, 2019-2021. © Paul McCarthy. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Khora Contemporary.
Paul McCarthy with Lilith Stangenberg. A&E, Adolf and Eva, Adam & Eve, Picnic in the Garden of Eden, 2021. © Paul McCarthy. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Alex Stevens.
Candela Capitán, SOLAS. Courtesy the artist. Photography by Daniel Cao
Candela Capitán, MOLOKO VELLOCET, 2024. Courtesy the artist.
Paul McCarthy with Lilith Stangenberg, A&E, Adolf and Eva, Adam & Eve, Santa Anita Drawing Session, 2022 © Paul McCarthy. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.. Photography by Alex Stevens.
Candela Capitán, The Death at The Club (in 45min). Courtesy the artist.
Candela Capitán, GRANJAS HUMANAS. Courtesy the artist.

Daniel Arnold and Donna Ferrato

Posted on 16 de April de 202519 de April de 2025 by nr

NR 19 Detour · 2025
Published · Print Page 144

Feature · Daniel Arnold and Donna Ferrato
Words · Daniel Arnold and Donna Ferrato In Conversation mediated by Andrea Bratta

Dealing with the World as a Collectible Surface

Chance and love—two words that perfectly capture the encounter between photographers Donna Ferrato and Daniel Arnold. In the warmth of Donna’s NYC apartment, the two friends-photographers sit down for a candid conversation. Through the literal lens that unites them—a camera one—they reflect on their lives, the serendipity of their meeting on a summer morning walk, weaving through the intersections of love and lust, the compulsion to document, and the nature of seeing—and being seen.

Donna Ferrato Do you remember how we met? I saw the wildest couple walking down the street—the man seemed completely entranced by the woman, who had this almost ethereal glow, like a firefly in daylight, surrounded by a rainbow aura. I sat with my dear friend, Alex Paterson Jones, a brilliant designer. We were a little high, a little giddy, basking in the warm air. We spotted the man’s camera and I called out to them, Hey, photographer! Hey! I wanted to pull them in, drawn by the feeling that something was stirring, something electric. We needed them inside with us. So what did we say?

Daniel Arnold I looked up, slightly confused, and you told me to get up there! Kay and I had just been at the diner around the corner, and I was walking her to her studio a few blocks away in this totally ridiculous way, like a big cartoon strut, twisting together as I held her at the waist.

DF I can spot someone strange miles away. And, as expected..

DA We were deep in our own rhythm when we suddenly heard a woman call down to us—”Hey photographer!” We looked up, and she said, Get up here. We were feeling impulsive with nowhere particular to be, we just looked at each other and went, Okay, okay. And so, we headed upstairs.

DF You get into the building, you know it’s a little odd, you’re going up the stairs, it’s kind of dark, there’s the woman from the fire escape calling you in the hallway. Keep coming, Come on, come on in there, one more flight. And then they get into the house, the two of them. It’s like we started dancing around each other trying to figure out where we were.

DA The “what is this, who is that dance.”

DF You had a Leica, right? So I knew he was a photographer. I wanted you to know straight away that as soon as you stepped foot into my house, you could take pictures of anything you wanted, because I would have been taking your picture whenever I wanted. I guess that gave us a direction to follow in starting to understand each other, and that’s how it all sort of started, but still, you were very shy about it in the beginning.

DA I wouldn’t say shy, necessarily. Just.. It was all super impulsive—we walked in totally blind. I was just feeling it out, taking the temperature of the room. Not in a hesitant way, I was definitely up for it, but more like, Okay… what’s going on here? Where am I? Who is this person? Can I trust her?

At some point, I noticed more than one copy of a Donna Ferrato book lying around, and it clicked. Oh… wait. This is Donna Ferrato’s place. I knew your work—I was familiar with it—but I had no idea what you actually looked like. I mean, I live in New York, but that doesn’t mean I know everything. I just knew you were a big deal.

DF You didn’t know how friendly I was?

DA I just had to walk up the fire escape to find out! It’s not that I found you unfriendly, I just didn’t know anything about you, the human. And now we’re old friends.

DF We had a ton of pastries, plenty of good stuff to eat, and we just settled in. Then he told me his name, and weirdly enough, I remembered an assistant I had a couple of years back mentioning him—said they were friends. That caught my attention. At the time, I didn’t really know Daniel Arnold’s work. I had looked him up once and thought, hmm… interesting, but it was totally outside what I was following back then. Over the years, though, I kept seeing more of his stuff, and we ended up following each other on Instagram, sort of orbiting each other from a distance. But in that moment, when he said his name—when I realized who he was—it suddenly hit me. Oh. This is something special.

DA Perfect coincidence.

DF And your girlfriend, Kay, she is so whimsical. She doesn’t even realize she has so much strength, she’s like shards of glass, yet there’s something so powerful in her being. She has experienced so much in life: She’s young, but she’s also ancient, and suddenly she was there, showing me who she was. I was on my knees, I tell you. I was so humbled by her.

DA Oh, she knows. And yeah, you were clearly kind of intoxicated by the whole thing. It was great—just the energy of it, the time we spent together. I actually have pictures of you taking pictures of her. And the pictures of us—I don’t know if I ever showed you—but we had them up in the apartment for a while. I had to take them down because of some work we did, but for a time, they were hanging like a mobile from the light fixture. There was just something about them—the way you put it all together, the text on the back, the tape—it turned into this beautiful object. So we let it spin.

DF You gotta show that to me. This is what I like about you, Daniel—you’ve got this very cozy, straightforward vibe. Just a simple man, you know? No pretentious talk about photography, no blah, blah, blah—just the real thing. And I like your life, at least from what I’ve seen. Never been to your place, though. Maybe one day, who knows?

DA We met this spring, it was April, right?

DF Yes. Makes you think of how chance works. Speaking of working, I think we never speak about work, per se.

DA It’s interesting—leading up to this conversation for what, two months? I’ve been quietly, maybe a little neurotically, thinking about it—thinking about my work in relation to yours. I knew the magazine was interested in your Love & Lust series, and over the past month or two, we’ve talked a bit about intimacy—how it plays into both your work and mine. It’s been an interesting new angle, one I wouldn’t have necessarily applied to my own work if not for overthinking this conversation. It made me reflect on how love and lust show up in what I do—not just in the experience of intimacy but in the pursuit of it. And honestly, you could probably take that lens—Love, Lust, Intimacy—and use it to break down any two people, because really, what deeper common ground is there?

DF Than love? Let me tell you something: The majority of people don’t really carry the lust with whoever they love. It’s very rare.

DA Yeah, I had a long thought about this today on my way here. In my model of the world, which I am learning isn’t exactly like yours, lust is really just seeking love—whether it’s intentional or not. Lust is an avenue to love. And I think that, in a healthy, long-term way, love has to go looking for lust too. It’s like this snake consuming itself—lust leads to love, and then love needs to seek lust again. Because, you know, lust is of the body, and love, I think, ends up being more of the mind. It’s a choice, a sacrifice, an agreement. And I think part of maintaining that agreement, part of keeping it going, is that you have to go in pursuit of lust. That makes me think not only of my relationship but also of my work. It connects in a way I hadn’t fully considered before.

DF Without lust, there’s no human sexuality.

DA But I also think that lust is not just about sexuality.

DF To me, lust equates sexual life force. That’s why women’s empowerment and liberation is extremely important. Our lust and pleasure drives are ours to balance. There was a time when men could control women’s drive. No more... Women’s desires can’t be confined and of service to men anymore.

DA Wouldn’t you say that lust can also be expressed elsewhere? When I think about it in terms of work, I kind of see myself in it. Remember when we were talking about your dad and how he wanted—he wanted to take pictures so badly. At the end of the day, he’d stick his camera in the windows of strangers’ houses just to keep taking pictures. I totally get that, that first intense lust for taking pictures. It’s like, you need more, to have more, to capture more. And then, at some point, you move past that. Even though there’s still a muscle memory of it, you go from that intense lust—where you can’t go to bed because you need more pictures—to a place of long-term commitment, where you’ve got to search for that lust again, something that keeps you wanting to work, to keep putting your camera through the window. It’s interesting to think about how that evolution works. And funny, thinking about how the two—lust and love, work and life—fit together.

DF We dovetail together very well. And that all, I think, comes from our fathers. Both of our fathers were brilliant men who both suffered a lot. And we, the children, have suffered too.

DA Well, I’ve got to say, having been exposed to that in my life—in a sort of defanged, up-close, practical way—I also grew up in a world where experiencing the very high and the very low together just feels so natural to me.I think it’s kind of a more honest, more permissive relationship with the world. Yeah, of course I’m depressed sometimes; Of course, I’m having a month where I can barely drag myself out of bed. It’s part of it. And the highs can be just as extreme. You can go too far in either direction.

DF There’s a lot of conversation these days about how, especially the newer generation, seems to have less of a sex drive and a more complicated relationship with pleasure in all its forms. It’s not just about sex and desire, but also about how people relate to their extremes, whether that’s lust or pleasure. The suffering, you know, the human suffering, the cruelty, the barbarism, and the lack of empathy—it’s all killing our sex drive. Where’s the love? We don’t see it in front of us anywhere. It also ties into the relationship with one’s work and the enjoyment of it.

DA What does making work look like for you, nowadays, Donna? What do you shoot?

DF I channel, or rather shoot, my rage through other women’s bodies, women I meet and photograph. Even with Kay’s body that day, when she just took her skirt down in the middle of the house—it’s a place where women come to express what they’re going through, their fears, their rage, and they feel comfortable doing so. It’s been like that for 30 years. But when she did that, capturing that moment—that’s what my work is all about. Being with her in that moment and witnessing it. It was incredible.

DA Was she showing you the tattoo on her back?

DF Yes. It was the tattoo. Then she showed me what the hospitals had done during her surgeries. That was really powerful. But this is what I do all the time. I’m also working on stories about domestic violence. I mean, if I put the word out there, inviting women who’ve been through hell to come and stay with me, they come.

DA How does that part happen?

DF It’s a very private and delicate process. Sometimes they come stay with me for a week or two. I want women to come here and live with me. I feel a deep kinship and trust with these women, like we’re all part of the same story. If they bring their child, that’s fine. If they bring a kitten, that’s fine. It all just flows from one thing to another. I always tell them, “From now on, you photograph me too, because I’m going through hell, and I want the world to see it—just like I’ll be photographing you.” I know I can be intense. Did I scare you a little when we met the first time?

DA No, I wasn’t scared. Maybe cautious, but that’s just how I am, despite running up the stairs. I’m observant. But not scared.

DF Good, good. So you feel safe with me. You know, we’re alike—that’s what we realized today. That’s why we were also so late for the interview. Sorry guys.

DA We caught a spark of friendship from the jump, but we never managed to take the time to sit and swap lore. So we had to take a little extra time rolling out the good stories.

DF Family, craziness, and being honest about it is what brought us closer.

DA Gotta be honest! My idyllic Midwestern beginnings worked like a force field, something I carried with me that eventually had to be broken. I’ve never wanted blinders, but it takes a while to figure out which parts of your life are fantasy. I’ve always pursued reality, always been curious about chaos. And strangely, I think that raw, unfiltered living–though it might feel crazy–it ends up giving you a more grounded existence.

DF Does that have something to do with finding love in your life?

DA Yeah, definitely. That young, idealistic love-seeker in me had to be dismantled—not by me, though. I can’t take credit for that. I just threw myself hard against a lot of brick walls and learned the hard way that Disney life wasn’t available to me. At first, I had that naïve phase where I wanted to turn everyone into the love of my life, for the rest of my life—which, let’s be real, is a tough dream to bring to New York. Then, for seven, eight, maybe nine years, I swung completely in the other direction. I told myself, “No one can have me.” I poured everything into work, compulsively, obsessively. And it delivered. At some point, I realized I was experiencing the feeling of being in love—but alone. Not in love with myself, just in love. Chemically. I was consumed by work, by what I was putting in and getting back. It felt just like love.

DF Amazing. You know, in that way, we’re total opposites. When I came to New York, everything felt possible. I could find love easily and work like a beast at the same time—doing my own projects while hustling like a little street rat, picking up assignments with local downtown newspapers. It was all within reach. I was constantly throwing myself into relationships, wild love affairs, sneaking into the craziest clubs—Paddles, Chateau 19—dressing up, playing with men, making everything part of the experience. That’s how Love&Lust came together, all tangled together in the thrill of it. Photographing swingers, going to orgies, meeting Elizabeth and Bengt.

DA You’re the cautionary tale! I’m kidding, but there’s such a low hanging metaphor-microcosm here, with you swinging off the fire escape inviting me, a stranger, into your home, and me coming up and being cautious, and you wondering if maybe I’m afraid!

DF Here you were, with your girlfriend, and me begging you to take pictures.

DA Think about the way we work. It’s very telling. I have a much more cautious, guarded relationship with the world. You dive in deep, right up to someone’s belly button while they’re in the middle of having sex. Meanwhile, I’m slipping by unnoticed, catching a shot on the street without anyone even realizing I’m there. I’m gone before they can say hello. And I think both approaches have their own truth. They seem, to me, opposite expressions of the same itch—just different personalities finding their own way of coping, dealing with the world as a collectible surface. What I do on the street—while it’s what I’m publicly known for—has also been my education. I had this insatiable desire to document, to collect. Coming to this city with my little Milwaukee mentality, I felt like I needed to take everything home with me. That desire propelled me through an education I didn’t even realize was happening. At first, I didn’t know how to use the camera—I just pointed it at things I wanted. But as dissatisfaction with that grew, I learned. The camera became an extension of my body; I know it inside and out now. And along with that technical evolution, there’s always been the internal work—the work around my family, my home, my relationships. Even though that’s more private, I approach it with the same intensity. Just as you shot your domestic violence work, I document my own home in that same deep, personal way.

DF You see, that’s beautiful—truly beautiful.

DA It’s been a way to make sense of the early hiccups in a relationship, when you don’t fully know where the other person stands. My absent-minded, work-obsessed way of being could have easily felt like neglect, like not caring enough. But I had to point it out—look at how I live my life, look at the time, energy, and attention I pour into this. The three cameras on my desk next to the bed, the way I treat our existence as something worth keeping, collecting, studying. It’s not detachment—it’s devotion, just in my own language.

DF To be able to share a life with someone who understands and connects with this, it’s a beautiful thing.

DA When I think about it in relation to your work—the sex, the domestic violence, the big headline stories like Donna Ferrato—it’s obviously a different subject matter. I’m not documenting violence or abuse, but still, thinking about it alongside what you do gives me a new perspective on my own work. I’ve cultivated this relationship with my home where I can be completely in it, fully present and lovingly invested, yet still maintain an outsider’s perspective—feels meaningful. It allows me to step back and say, this matters, we need to keep this. I had such a juicy thought about this. When we were talking before the interview—yeah, the story of your dad. She told me about her father, this compulsive, insatiable photographer, always reaching for the camera, always capturing. Sticking the lens through a window at night, photographing everything, every moment.

DF You know, sharing these things with people—especially family—creates a bond like no other. I have a relationship with my ex-husband, Johnny. He’s been through everything with my parents, my brothers, and me. The street is just the surface. Home is where everything truly unfolds, where you see the raw, unfiltered truth. That’s where the real shit happens.

DA I don’t want to over-tell your story, but your dad experienced something profound—sitting in his home as an old man, watching his betrayed wife destroy all the work he had ever made. We call that a tragedy. A triumph for your mother, a tragedy for your father. But in that moment, I also thought—maybe it’s perfect. Because it clarifies the real core value of it all. You take away the work, and at first, it feels like erasure, like his life has been undone. But because he made that work. Because he cultivated that part of his mind and arranged his life around it. He lived in a way that can’t be erased. Those pictures existed because he saw, thought, and engaged with the world in a certain way. And that—his relationship with the world—means so much more than any legacy ever could, more than any proof ever could. It was his life. It was the world. Having all your work disappear, it’d be heartbreaking—but only for a moment. The life that created it, the experiences and state of mind behind it, can never be taken away.

DF Think of the Palisades—through the fires, through the loss. Everything is dust to dust. We’re not in control. Photographers, filmmakers, musicians—losing everything they’ve ever created. But they still have themselves.

DA It might be an insensitive time to think this, but there is a version of losing everything that might actually be a gift.

DF It’s about resistance. So many are just waiting to see what happens—but if you’ve been paying attention, you already know. We’re breathless, always bracing for the worst. Without collective action, we’ll all end up like Metropolis—faceless drones, marching back and forth, stripped of individuality. In fact, we may already be there. Resistance is all we have left. And somehow, we have to build it together.

DA Well yeah, you said something a little while ago—what can you do to be good? You be of service. You bother to see who’s around you and you do what you can to help. When we’re at risk of becoming drones, that’s a powerful guiding light, even without revolutionary upheaval. That’s one of the great things about New York, especially for photographers. You can’t help but tune into the idea that being of service is everything—it’s the way out of any darkness. Maybe that’s naive, maybe it’s not enough for what’s coming. But it feels like the right place to start, community. It connects you to your humanity in a sort of smelling salts way. Wakes you up.

DF Build relationships. In the subways, they say, Don’t be someone else’s subway story. But the truth is, I am the story. I’ve been creating and telling these stories for a long time—through my own lens, my own voice. My father used to say, If it wasn’t for you, Donna, men would still be getting away with beating their wives. You showed the world how ugly it is. You made men feel guilty—at least for a while. Who knows? Do you think New York still has its own creative language?

DA New York is a place where, no matter when you show up, you always feel like you just missed it. There’s so much I missed, that I’ve come to fetishize. But the creative language of the city—it transcends generations. I think New York does something to people. Whether it’s meaningful—-or getting better or worse, I’m not sure—but it taps into something deep.There’s an undeniable thread through hundreds of years—people who come here and fall into the same obsessive relationship with the city, trying to articulate their own special connection. When I found out Leaves of Grass was about walking around Manhattan, looking at the people, I went nuts. It’s so far back, it’s not even photography. It just feels like such profound time travel to find it all alive in myself. New York still has that essence. Being in this place, in the mess of people making their mythology—it’s like a constant. It hits people in a way that’s traceable through time, and it doesn’t change that much. You really feel impermanence pressed on your throat here. Every store, every restaurant is built on the ghost of 500 others, and you look away for a month and there’s an entirely new city. Everything is so fleeting. It makes you want to catch every face, every train, to hold onto the moment. It intensifies the instinct to value the passing moment because everything moves so fast, and you’re confronted constantly with your impermanence and your insignificance. My story is as good as anybody else’s, because I can see we’re all going to end up erased. So whatever, might as well enjoy the ride.

DF I think that’s what it is about New York—it’s always had this sense embedded in it, even before this feeling became so widespread.

DA Yeah. It’s a very New York thing that has infected the world. We shouldn’t be surprised –we’ve been trying to infect them forever.

In order of appearance

Donna Ferrato, Daniel Arnold & Kay Kasparhauser, 2024
Donna Ferrato, Swingers So, CA 1999
Donna Ferrato, Studio 54, 1980
Donna Ferrato, Studio 54 Poppers, 1980
Daniel Arnold
Daniel Arnold
Donna Ferrato, Kay Kasparhauser, 2024
Donna Ferrato, Kay Kasparhauser 2024
Donna Ferrato, Dad Open Heart Surgery. 2008

Author: nr

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