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Overmono

The In-Between: Overmono create a layered and boundary pushing sound that exists between emotional states. 

Overmono are a UK electronic music duo made up of brothers Ed and Tom Russell. Raised in Wales, the siblings had individual success as producers before joining forces as Overmono. Wanting to reduce the influence of their individual pasts from the mix, they isolated themselves in a cottage and started to develop the foundation behind their music. Now, through a standing relationship with pioneering British label XL Recordings, they have released a series of layered and boundary-pushing work that define their distinctive sound today.

For this issue, NR had the opportunity to catch up with Ed and Tom to discuss their memories of growing up together, their experience of shaping Overmono to this point and their ambitions for the future.

Tom and Ed, thanks for joining us for this issue. I’ve been looking forward to having this conversation with you. I want to start by asking you about your memories growing up together, and what your individual influences and gravitations were because you’ve both done so much individually before Overmono.

T: I’m the elder of the two. Growing up in a house together, I was getting into rave music and Ed could hear the music through my bedroom door. I had turntables and some records and Ed got a pair of turntables when he was ridiculously young, like when he was around 10 years old. Then he was stealing records from my room, so there was some cross-pollination going on. As we got older, Ed developed his own taste and went on his own journey, and I developed mine and went on my own one, but it was all generally electronic music.

E: It feels like over the years our influences or what we were into individually were sometimes miles apart from each other, but then 6 months later we would come back and we’d be listening to the same thing.

“As we got older the distance between us got narrower and narrower, and nowadays it’s really rare that Tom plays me a record and I turn around and say “that’s shit, I don’t like it”..”

T: Haha when that does happens, I get really annoyed and I’m like you’re just not getting it!

E:Yeah haha, and these days we’re so similar in the sense of what we’re into, which from a writing point of view, makes everything pretty effortless because we both know what we like and what we want to try to achieve.

That connection is definitely felt in Overmono, but as a listener I can also hear and distinguish your individual influences feed into this project as well. Listening to your individual projects, it feels as Overmono is a cumulation of all those individual journeys. I’d love to hear more about you experience during those earlier projects – Tessela (Ed), and Truss, MPIA3 and Blacknecks (Tom). 

T: I’ve always been really into Techno. Various styles of it. It has been a constant for me since my teens. I remember hearing Tanith on Tresor, it completely blew my mind and sent me down this rabbit hole. So, I just carried on doing that, and through the 2000’s I was getting more and more heavily into production, which led me into the projects you mentioned. I think for me, and I guess Ed can come back to this too because I’m speaking a bit for him as well, I felt really pinned in at the end. Because I’d done so much producing into a similar lane, I felt like that was what was expected of me. As much as I loved listening to that stuff, I felt like there were broader horizons I wanted to explore, and that inevitably led us down this path to start this project together.

E: I feel like we both started feeling that similar feeling around the same time. I remember releasing this one record and someone said to me “I’m all for artistic development, but where are the break beats?”.  It got to a point that I felt like I had to put a break in every single tune otherwise people would be like this doesn’t sound right. Tom you were probably at a similar point with more distorted stuff..

T: Yeah, if I didn’t do something that was really tough and distorted it would just get no attention or traction. I could make something in 5 minutes that was distorted, and don’t get me wrong I love that sort of stuff, and people would go mad for it. But I could spend a couple of months crafting something and think it was one of the best things I’ve ever done, and nobody would care.

E: And That was a big thing both of us were going through around the same time. When you’re making music and figuring out your sound, cultivating it and honing it, it might feel really nice; to know exactly what you need to do to make something good because it becomes effortless. But after a while, when the expectation becomes “this is what you do” then, you start to think there’s so many other influences I have that I want to start to broaden what I do here. You end up feeling blocked from doing that. 

“We got to a point that we were like “let’s just start making music together and see what that’s like. No one needs to know we’re doing it together, or that this project even exists. Let’s just write some music and see what that sounds like”.”

The series of first ten tracks we wrote, in a really short period of time – like 3 or 4 days – sounded quite different from our previous work but we were surprised by how cohesive it all sounded. There was no plan for it, we just said let’s take this equipment, go to this place, lock ourselves away, write some music and see what it sounds like.

T: It was so nice to be in this headspace where we had no expectations at all, and no personal expectations either. We just said “let’s go to this place, make some music and whatever happens, happens.” We had no intention to start the project at that point, we just wanted to write some new music together. The whole idea for Overmono came quite a bit afterwards. It was really amazing to have that freedom and it’s something we still try to maintain because it was so liberating.

E: It gets harder and harder the further down the road you get because the expectations start growing again, and once you put out a few records that have done well, it’s harder to come out with something that is really weird or super headsy. But that being said, we still have that same mentality that we try to go somewhere that isn’t our own studio, somewhere that is a different environment, somewhere that we can’t be contacted and we can’t contact other people. We just go there to sit and try to make some music.

“It’s that thing of disconnecting completely and forgetting about all the noise and any expectations. Then you end up writing some of the best stuff because we’re just having fun.”

Yeah, the Arla I-III series! It’s interesting to hear the process you went through to write this collection of tracks. I realise that you did projects together before this too, projects like TR//ER. To me, the Arla series definitely sounds like a more cohesive beginning or foundation to Overmono. I’d love to hear more about your process of forming your sound as Overmono at this earlier stage.

T: There was a lot of sampling in the Arla I-III EP series, and it was nice because I didn’t do a huge amount of sampling before so it was a fresh perspective in production for me, and – I learned a lot from watching Ed because he’s great at it, and for me this was cool because it was an area of production that I wasn’t familiar with and got to explore. 

I was given, as a long term loan, a large record collection from my brother in law, which was a DJ in Leeds in the late 80’s and early 90’s. He had loads of old House and Techno records, and it was just in his basement collecting dust and getting a bit of mould on it,. So, I was like I can take care of it for you. But it turned out there were only a few good records in there, and most of it was utter crap – white labels that probably never made it to an official release, but it was still a pretty good archive of early British House and Techno. We decided to make something out of it, so we went through it all and started to make this huge sample bank. That was kind of the foundation of a lot of the Arla tracks. This is also maybe why they have a cohesiveness because they were recorded through the same turntable and through the same process. 

E: They were so dusty weren’t they…

T: So dusty! So much crackle and noise, and it’s also why those tracks don’t translate to sound systems very well haha. A lot of it again, was me watching Ed using the sampler and also Ableton, because to that point I was mostly a Cubase user for all my life. Ed kept asking me to switch over to Ableton and I was like “Nah, I’m used to Cubase, that’s what I know – blah…-blah blah…” After a few days in the cottage writing the Area stuff, and watching Ed use Ableton, I was like holy fuck I gotta start using this! It made other stuff look so archaic. The amount of times I would try to set up a side-chain in Cubase and I couldn’t be arsed because it was so long-winded, and then watching Ed do it in seconds. Also, seeing how you could manipulate samples with warps and time stretches was really inspiring. 

E: I think during this session we had a few synth lines that have been just sitting around, so we started to process them through the same process that we were using for the record collection, so that added a different dimension to them. If you listen to original Arla samples a lot of them have a late 80’s sound to them but we just mangled them over and over till it didn’t sound like that. 

Because we weren’t in our studio, we just rented a cottage in south wales, we had a limited amount of equipment with us. We had a small mixing desk, two speakers…

T: Didn’t we borrow an Allen & Heath?

E: Yeah! We borrowed an Allen & Heath mixer from David.

T: Shout out to him for lending that to us. Everything went through that and we also had a Lexicon PCM 80. I don’t know if we had any other effects?

E: We just had that one Reverb, and we took a Virus C synth, and probably a compressor. Think there was another synth as well…

T: We took the JD 800, didn’t we?

E: Yeah it was the JD 800! Haha.

T: Haha it’s pretty much the heaviest synth we could fit in the car.

E: It was this beast of a synth that we only ended up using for one day. The rest of the days we were super productive and for one day we just dicked around for 6 hours on the JD 800, and we thought the stuff we wrote was super deep. The next morning we listened to the track and we were like “Jesus christ that one’s getting axed” haha!. I think it made it to some of the tracks at the end though. It was a bit fucked up and it sometime would go weird and out of tune. You would be recording a synth line and move a fader or open up a filter a tiny bit, and it would go mad! So we chopped some of those bits up and put them into the tracks too.

You could feel that, considering the amount of tracks in the series, there were different approaches between them. Going from a track like O-Coast to Phase Magenta to something like Harp Open, although there was definitely a cohesiveness, you could tell that there were different influences and gravitations behind each of them as well. I want to ask you about your first studio in Bromley, and your experience of setting up that studio together shortly after the Arla series.

E: After that time writing in the cottage, we both had separate studios for a bit. Tom had a studio in Soho and I would go there quite a lot. The studio was right across from Black Market Records, and we would end up writing a lot of the stuff at his studio. I had a studio in my flat too, and we split our time between there and Tom’s studio. 

That was really good for a while, but after a bit we thought let’s combine all our gear to one big studio because we were writing so much together. It just so happened that this really big studio was becoming available in Bromley, which is a half an hour south of Peckham. It hadn’t been touched since the mid 90’s. It had this swirly paint job that was pealing off, and old school carpets with fag burns all over it. That said, it had a good feeling to it. It had this massive control room, a live room and a kitchen. It was big enough to play a five-a- side football game. So we decided to take it. 

We set it up into two rooms. All the stuff that we used less often or used for our live shows one live room. There would be a bunch of synths set up with loads of effect pedals – and some random kit that we collected over the years. You could spend a day in there and have the freedom to start recording loads of stuff with all the gear, which was really fun. Then you had the control room that was properly a sound-proofed studio, which had all our gear set up in it and sounded amazing. That’s where we’d work on the tracks together. We were in that studio for three and a half years, and we spent quite a lot freshening it up. We took all the carpets off and sanding the floors back, but unfortunately the whole building got sold to developers. It was such a unique place. It was in the middle of nowhere.

T: It was the most unassuming place for a studio, just in the ass-end of absolutely nowhere –

E: There were no other studios there. It was opposite a chip shop, above a church, beneath a magazine printer, so it was so random. I remember every now and then we had someone come over to produce something with us. We had VK, a drill producer, come over and when I went down to get him, he  was like “nah, don’t know about this”. You had to go through this bin store and get to these industrial stairs and I remember looking at him and he was like “this isn’t right”.

T: The previous occupant put up these weird hospital signs, like “blood unit this way” or “radio therapy that way”…- obviously trying to put people off it.

E: It looked like a really weird NHS unit and was sort of an outlier. But yeah we were there for three and a half years and it was amazing. We wrote a lot of the Overmono stuff there. Still, when we had that studio we would book times to go away. We went to a remote hut in the Isle of Sky in the Highlands of Scotland. We would get as much gear as we could and fit it into a few peli cases to fly with. We would always keep that mentality of taking some gear and go write for however many days; where all routine could go out the window, to see what we come up with. Sometimes in five days we’d end up doing what we did in three months in the studio. But yeah R.I.P Bromley studios, we really loved our time there and it was an amazing place.

T: Yeah it really was!

One of the things that really stuck out to me reading about you in the past was you saying that you always felt like “you were always looking in from the outside”, even from early on in your careers. That you grew up outside of a big city and it never concerned you what the trend was at that time. I feel that these moments where you disconnect yourselves have been so potent because it’s so close to what’s been true to you from the beginning.

A track that I listened to a lot early on when I was getting into your music was actually called Bromley, which you did together with Joy Orbison. Before we move on from your time at Bromley, I want to ask you about your experience of working with Joy O, and also discuss the tracks you mentioned you made towards the end of this period because they’re some of my favourite work you’ve produced together.

E: The stuff with Joy Orbison started when he came to the studio a couple of times. We started to hang out and record a few things, so we decided to work on something official together. I remember I sent him a rough idea before and he was into releasing it on his label Hinge Finger, but I never ended up finishing it. So we thought “why don’t the three of us try to work on this track together and maybe we can get it to something that’s more finished”. We started pulling some of the stems from the original idea and started working on it together at the studio in Bromley.

“Us and Pete (Joy Orbison) have totally different working methods. For us, we’re really instinctual and we don’t really think of rules and structures.”

T: I think we’re just too disorganised for that kind of stuff. Personally I just don’t have the patience to stick with something for too long if I’m struggling with an idea. Ed usually perseveres longer than me, and often there are times it’s the right thing to do because the track gets cracking on.

E: Pete can persevere the longest, I’d say.

T: He has an unbelievable ability to stay laser focused on something. He can make these decisions hours and hours after being at the studio, where I’m just like I don’t know what’s going on anymore. He has an amazing ability to do that.

Really interesting to hear the story of how that all came together. I want to talk to you about your more recent releases on XL Recordings like Cash Romantic. I’m interested to hear about your process of shaping the sound behind these more recent releases.

T: By the time we moved away from the Arla series, we started using samples less and less, and we actually started making our own sample bank. We spent some time making up loops, synth lines and chord progressions that make a large sample bank that we now share. So a lot of these more recent tracks, their start points are from these samples we made. Gunk, for instance, is from a synth line that we originally came up with for our I Have A Love Remix, which is actually the last ever track we made at Bromley studios. So it was a really nice way for us to start Gunk off like that because that track – I Have A Love (Overmono Remix) – was a really special track for us. I think over the years, developing this sample bank that’s made of all our own samples, is a big part of our sound and serves as an important jumping off point for us. We started programming our own drums and aren’t doing much break-beat’s anymore. For example, the drums for Cash Romantic, the title track, is made from all programmed drums from a contact multi-sample drum pack. There’s no actual old sample break-beat, but instead everything’s much more processed.

“We always want to bring out the most grit and character we can out of things. Most of the time we have to use stuff in a way that they’re not designed to be used.”

That might be, for example, using an EQ to boost stuff so harshly that it starts distorting, but once you take that in the computer you can bring it back a little bit and take away some of the harshness.

“It’s about building layers of character and a sense of physical space. I struggle sometimes when listening to music that is too clinical or clean because there is this lack of physical space. That’s something we think about a lot; how the music itself sounds in relation to its space. Even if you’re listening with headphones with no interaction with the space around you, does it feel like it’s in its own space? And I think a lot of that comes from getting it out and running it through the different cables.”

It sounds like you’ve simplified or programmed your set up so that it’s more responsive to your making process, and that creates space for you to be more instinctive and expressive when shaping your sound. 

I’m curious to hear more about the story behind the imagery and visual content of your recent releases as well, and about your partnership with Rollo Jackson in creating that content.

E: There’s a few things that came together with the imagery. Mean dogs have traditionally been used in UK rave music like in old Drum & Bass records, and there was always this thing of dogs on chains snarling at the camera. It was something that became quite pastiche and didn’t age that well. Dobermans are perceived as these” vicious dogs”, but they’re not at all. That’s just how they’re trained and how people portray them to be. They’re actually really lovely and friendly dogs. So we thought “why don’t we do these sleeves with Dobermans on them?”. As soon as you tell someone “I have two Dobermans sat in a BMW on the cover of my album” they’re like “oh, that’s a bit cliché.”

T: And part gangster..

E: Yeah, haha! But they actually look quite playful and dopey, and in reality they are actually really playful.

“From a musical point of view that ambiguity of emotion is something we always gravitate towards. Something that feels like it’s between a few different emotional states. I think that’s what those dogs represent. Because of how we’re brought up to view Dobermans, when you portray them in a different way, you instantly feel like your are conflicted between different emotional states.”

You ask yourself “is this supposed to look aggressive and mean, or is it just lovely dogs being playful?”

Rollo (Jackson) has such an incredible eye and is able to see things in such a unique way. So many of the shoots we’ve done have been serendipitous. When we were shooting the cover for Everything You Need, it was in the carpark of the Bromley Football Club because we got kicked out of the other location. We showed up in a van with a couple Dobermans and a Boxer and they were like “what the fuck you guys doing?” haha

T: Haha, they were like, “get off our property!”

E: So we went to the football club and they were more accommodating. I just remember the sun coming out from behind the clouds and bouncing off the leather seats of the BMW, and we all looked at each other and were like that is it, that’s got to be the shot. And there’s still so much more to explore with that.

T: Also with Rollo, he’s so deeply involved in UK music culture. He has such a knowledge of UK dance music, specially London-centric forms of music, so he really gets where we’re coming from. Because of that we really feel like there’s a kinship there between us and we can really trust in his judgment of what we’re trying to achieve. Also, his judgment of what to avoid specially, like things that might be a bit pastiche, brings a fresh angle too while we explore things that we’re collectively into. 

I think this is a good point to ask you about your live shows and how this imagery ties into it. I’m curious to hear about how your live set up has evolved over the years and where you hope to take it next, as you are now embarking on on your UK, European and US headline tour. 

T: It’s a bit more professional these days that’s for sure, haha, It was a fucking mess back in day! We started with a booking request from Ireland in Limerick, and this was before Overmono even existed and before we did anything together. They were like “Would Ed and Tom like to play together?” and we were like “we’ve never done that or hinted that we wanted to do that together haha, but sure yeah why not!” So, suddenly we needed to figure out a techno live set-up. We had only released one track and suddenly we started getting a few gigs together. We were travelling around with the most insane amount of kit. We had this colour-coded pillow case system with different leads and cables in them. We had a blue pillow for our midi leads, a red one for our power cables, and a black one for our audio cables. They were all crammed into these giant peli cases with the rest of our gear. They would take two hours to set up and two hours to take down. We’d take some gear like a big drum machine and we’d only use it for 5 minutes.

E: I remember you used this synth that didn’t have any controls on it..

T: The EX, the Korg EX-800 desktop version!

E: Yeah haha, you’d be playing a pad off it and you’d want to open up the filter and you had to press this button to find the filter and keep pressing it to turn it up… it was a mess and quite lawless. We would just have to improvise and some of the shows were alright and some of them were terrible.. So by the time we started doing stuff together as Overmono we already had learned a lot. When you’re playing electronic music live, there are these pit-falls that are waiting for you to fall into and you have to spend some time navigating those from a technical point of view.

“Performing electronic music live is a big technical process that needs to be continuously worked on and refined.”

For the first few years after every Overmono live show, we would almost redo the entire live show after every gig. We would sit down in our hotel room after every show with a notepad and write down all the things we wanted to change or improve. We would write down what worked and what didn’t work, and record all the technical problems we had in the show. We would keep repeating this and over the years we started honing in on what it worked for us from a performance and technical point of view. 

Now we’re in such a different spot, the set up hasn’t changed for six months, which is a new personal record for us. We feel more confident and comfortable than ever because we spent a long time developing a set up that is all properly functioning and cabled so it feels more professional. That means we can focus and have fun with the performance side of it, instead of worrying about why that drum machine went out of time again. But now our headspace can be filled with the more exciting stuff like wondering what I can make with these drums do for the next five minutes, and do something interesting and weird.

The next logical step was figuring out the visual side of things, and for a long time we were figuring that out ourselves. But generally we had no idea what we were doing, so we just borrowed a bunch of modular video gear and recorded a lot of things out of it.

T: It looked good on a tiny screen and we were like that’s killer, but then got to a festival with a giant LED screen and it looked so bad and so pixelated.

E: Now, we thankfully got more people on board to do that with us. We’re still pretty heavily involved because we have a clear idea of what it should be. So we’re more directly involved in the creative direction of the visual content, but now we have people that actually know how to use that gear. The visuals are generally split between footage that Rollo captured, like thermal images of the Dobermans running through a field, and then a lot of processed content we created with a visualiser called Innerstrings, who uses a lot of the same gear we were using but knows how to use it and he’s great with it. That’s enabled us to grow the show to what it is now, and we have ambitions to take it even further.

T: Like Ed said, the live show is something we are so deeply passionate about and something we’re continuously trying to grow. To make it more of an immersive experience in every step and try to think of the evolution of it. So that’s a big priority for us, but the biggest priority is to always keep writing and making music every opportunity we have.

“Our aim is to keep progressing and moving forward in writing music that we think is an evolution from where we were before.”

E: Going back to the live show, thinking about the covers we made with Rollo Jackson and our ambitions for the future, the live show gives us the chance to expand that into something more cinematic and the sleeve images start to feel more real.

“You suddenly feel like that whole world has opened up, so the further along we go the bigger we want that feeling to be. You see a Doberman running through a 50 meter screen, it’s just glorious and there’s nothing better. That’s what we want to keep growing and pushing towards.”

Team

Talents Tom and Ed Russell (Overmono)
Photography · Oli Kearon
Fashion · Kamran Rajput
Grooming· Daniel Dyer
Photography Assistant · Nic Roques
Fashion Assistant · Elza Rauza
Special thanks to Abigail Jessup, William Aspden at XL Recordings and Jon Wilkinson at Technique PR

Designers

  1. Left to right, jacket NORSE PROJECTS and hat Talent’s own; jacket SAUL NASH
  2. Left to right, jacket and trousers ONTSIKA TIGER and boots ARMANI EXCHANGE; jacket CP COMPANY, trousers TEN C, shoes and cap Talent’s own
  3. Left to right, full look ARMANI EXCHANGE; jacket and trousers MONCLER and shoes Talent’s own

Okolo

Riding Around: From riding bmx bikes to shaping a multi-disciplinary design collective, OKOLO strives on collaboration and presenting the unexpected

OKOLO is a Prague based design collective founded by Adam Štěch, Matěj Činčera and Jan Kloss. They operate in a multitude of disciplines ranging in research, design, curation and architecture. Their key focus is delivering educative content and experiences through various mediums such as graphic design, illustration, publication and curatorial projects.

For this issue, NR is in conversation with Adam Štěch, to discuss OKOLO’s individual and collective journeys as a practice to this point, and to hear more about their ambitions for the future.

Adam, Thanks for joining me today. We’re lucky to have you for this issue and I’ve been looking forward to our conversation. I want to start by asking you about how you all met. I’d love to hear about your individual backgrounds and journeys, and how you came together as OKOLO.

Of course. We really appreciate it too. It started when I moved to Prague in 2005. I moved here to study Art History at the university, so my background is in Art History. I’ve always been a curious person. I’d always go around and try to meet people. At that time I was, of course, studying, but I was quite into BMX bikes, actually, bicycles in general. This is quite a strong connection between all of us. I went to my classes in university and after that, in the evening or afternoon, I always went to some skateparks or street spots to ride my BMX. One day I met this group of guys that were even younger than me. One of these guys was Matěj, Matěj Činčera, who was still in high school. He told me I’m interested in art and want to study graphic design. We realised we liked a lot of the same stuff. So we started to go out for beers and taking about doing some projects together.

“This lead to the idea of OKOLO coming around because OKOLO means “around” in Czech.”

We wanted to express that we were interested in the things that we find in everyday life, things that we like and admire . Whether it’s the design of bikes, furniture, artwork or architecture, anything. So we said, ok, let’s start some projects. We started to make t-shirts with some illustrations of real design objects on them. These t-shirts came with a text, with a story of what was on the t-shirt. So these t-shirt’s were a curated selection of some specific objects from design history. This was the beginning of our approach, and I think it’s still rooted in the same idea that we always want to present something from design history in a new way, through a new contemporary curatorial and graphic approach. Then we made our first issue of OKOLO Magazine in 2009. Basically that’s the year that OKOLO started, and at that point it was Matěj, My brother Jakub and I. My Brother was is crazy for bikes. He’s probably one of the most knowledgeable guys around bikes and bike design.

A few months after we met Jan Kloss. Jan wasn’t really from the BMX community but he was more into skateboarding and rap music. Both of these are also very close to me. I loved skating for its lifestyle, and we were all really into rap, groove, funk and soul. It was really great that we all met like this and had a similar vibe and sense of humour, and had the same values in our lives. What was important was that we each had different skills. I’m the curator. I’m the guy who writes the content and comes up with concepts for our projects. And Matěj and Jan are graphic designers, but slightly different from each other. Matěj’s much more into working with materials. He works with paper to create handmade installations, but also makes objects out of paper. He’s really skilful in this because his father was a packaging designer as well. And Jan’s more into the visual side of graphic design, not only creating logos but coming up with visual concepts for our books and visual features for our projects. So this is a perfect match, as each of us brought something different to the table. This allowed us to work independently as group and create everything in-house ourselves. This, I think, is our biggest advantage. But we’re really open as a collective, and do different projects on our own. I’m teaching and doing books with other publishing houses. Jan has a sneaker brand called PÁR, which means “pair” in Czech. Matěj is also teaching. So there’s projects that we do completely independently, but if there’s an opportunity for all our skills to connect and it would benefit a project, we always connect and do it together.

It’s interesting to hear how far back you all go and what interests your relationship is rooted in. I can visualise a trajectory of the different points and happenings that connected you all, it’s meaningful to hear how that relationship has built up to shape the dynamic you share.

Exactly! it’s really nice that we’re really good friends. We can really party together, we can see each other and hang out in any situation. It’s really like we’re kind of family. But In the last few years we don’t get to see each other as much. Jan has a family and Matěj lives a bit outside of Prague, so it’s nice that the bond between us is very strong.

It almost sounds like a mechanism that you’ve developed together, that you can rely on. It’s an established dynamic that you can activate when something comes around that you can all work together on. Even if you’re all doing different things and living in different places.

I’d say it’s basically a system, you know, If someone approached us with a brief, we already know how to process it, how to approach it and start developing concepts together. So it’s really an intuitive process for us.

We talked about your interest in BMX bikes, but I also wanted ask you about your lager brand and your exhibition about bottle openers. One of the things that I found interesting, which you touched on, is your approach to curating your shows. You seem to have a collective emphasis to re-introduce objects in a new context or alongside other objects, to give them a new meaning or narrative. Can you explain why you gravitate towards this approach when re-introducing these objects?

I think mostly the topics we are curating, we are choosing just because we love them. You know, for example, this bottle opener, this idea was born sitting having beer because we really love drinking beer, you know, and we laugh and have a good time during that. Also, this idea connected with the opening of our new gallery and studio space. So it was perfect idea to open our new space with the exhibition of bottle openers. Small things, you know, nicely designed, which have value and are everyday life objects. But they are really beautifully made and beautifully designed.

“For me as a curator, it is interesting to always choose a topic, do research and then show the broad spectrum of the topic. All the versions of all the incarnations of this topic as possible. It’s always based on this process of choosing something familiar, but to show it in a selection, which nobody would’ve put together.”

We like to really make this effort to choose different examples. Bottle openers or lamps or whatever, and to make a story, that somehow links in between them and then presents them in, let’s say, a fresh way. 

I’m coming from an academic background, but I’m not really academic. I don’t like it so much, this academic environment, which is very traditionalist and old school in many ways. We always wanted to educate, to bring this academic information, interesting information that is not well known, and to present it in completely not academic way. To present it in an almost new contemporary way to the public. Because our public or our people who follow our work and they are not academics, they are basically designers. But of course, designers, they do their own work and they don’t always have time to study books and read books as I do for example. So I always wanted to spread this information, which I have in my memory, in my design research, and to present this information in a catchy new way that is also understandable to people who are in the scene, but also people who are completely outside of our discipline. 

It’s almost like you’re creating a new vocabulary to re-introduce your research that feeds back into the system you talked about earlier.

It’s also very personal. We always have a lot of passion. It maybe can sound a bit cliche but the passion is the most important thing that you can have in what you are doing, whatever you are doing. It’s something that drives us. Even it’s a small exhibition in our gallery in Prague, where few people come to, or if it’s Triennale di Milano, like one of the most prestigious events in design. Basically, all our projects are on the same level, let’s say, because we love them all. We’re presenting this interesting information and stories of design through our personalities.

I think that reflects what you mentioned earlier that you love all your projects and that passion in a way is weaved through all your processes, whether it’s for bigger or smaller projects. 

I know one of your passions is modernist architecture. I’ve been following your instagram account for a while and you have a nice collection of modernist gems on there. Where did this interest start and how does modernist architecture as a global movement but also in the Czech republic influence the work you create. I’d love to hear your scope on why it was pivotal as a movement and how it has evolved through different happenings over time.

Mhm, I think the 20th century’s the golden age of design and architecture. It’s the time when all these amazing movements came from and they were really idealistic. They were utopian and were very optimistic. I think it’s seen and felt through the objects. I kind of miss a bit this idealism in contemporary design. This idea of a bigger goal, and to create really the new society, the better world. Modernism is basically about that. It’s the movement which originated as a tool, used to show us how our society could grow better. The tool that was accessible to more people and they could afford quality products which help them in their everyday life. So, this is what I think is really extraordinary about the modernist ideas. 

I’m kind of a retro person, so I’m not really as interested in contemporary architecture as much as the 20th century because there’s something in it, some special atmosphere, some charm, which really attracts me to it. You can tell these stories. You can read the stories. So for me, it felt natural that I focused on the 20th century design because you can feel the diversity of design. What was done in Scandinavia is different, and what was done in Brazil and in Japan is different, but everything is somehow connected under this big idea of of modernism. It’s like picking some chocolate from a bonbon. You don’t know which is better, and you want them all basically haha. For me, modernism is this period that I can really find so many beautiful forms, shapes and materials, and all its architects and designers across the world. And it’s basically an endless source of of stories for me. 

For 15 years, basically even more, like 17, 18 years it’s been a constant for me. A constant study of 20th century design and architecture. In my head I have a huge archive, and it’s something that you can always find something to explore, something new. I think in last ten years, and maybe because of our work a little bit, it’s got a popularity among the public, and suddenly you see that brutalism now’s quite trendy. People are travelling and taking photos. Now it’s become a thing our generation has started to re-discover, and it’s great that even the people who aren’t really geeks like me are discovering this, and they find some beauty in it. Social media and digital publications have had a big part in this as well. I think it’s a good time now to continue in this because it suddenly has much more of an audience than before.

Although at first, your instagram account focusing on modernist architecture seems separate from your work as OKOLO and from your separate studio account, once you look deeper you realise that some of your projects find their roots in this obsession. For me Mood-boards, and of course, your publication Modern Architecture Interiors are evidently bringing these two worlds together under one umbrella. I want to ask you about your process and experience of putting these projects together with Jan and Matěj.

You mean Mood-boards for Vitra?

Yeah exactly!

Yeah, that’s the perfect example of how we can connect our skills. Because the “Mood-boards” project came up because I was asked by a curator in Vitra Design Museum that they’re doing this exhibition called “Home Stories”. It was about interiors set in different periods and different countries showing the evolution of the domestic space. They asked us, so you’re a curator and a theoretician, but you work with your colleagues. Maybe you could do a project that will be on the edge of research and some form of artwork. So these mood-boards were really a great idea because I could connect my knowledge from visiting houses to them. We chose three houses, which were “Villa Tugendhat by Mies van der Rohe”, “Villa Müller by Adolf Loos” and “Villa Beer by Josef Frank” in Vienna. And I visited these houses properly once again to research all the materials which were used in them. Then we tried to get samples of these materials, as many as possible, and create some kind of collage out of them.

This part was more the work of Matěj, because he really was able to work as a sculptor, to put all these samples together in a nice collage structure, which you can put on your wall as an artwork. But if you read the caption that comes with it you find out that it’s an exact imprint of a real iconic interior. So this project is a really nice example of how we connect our skills. For example, this project took about ten months to complete, and for the first months I traveled all around visiting these houses. I took all the pictures and documented all the details. Then I also visited some experts who would really tell me, yes, this marble’s this kind of marble. It’s not Carrara marble, but it’s a marble from Switzerland or so on. I gathered all this information and produced this research and I passed it onto Matěj and he created these mood-boards as a visual and as our art piece. It’s nice that these projects have different timelines for each of us. Mostly, I always work in the beginning on the concept and on the research and then the work of guys is starting in the second part of the process, when they’re starting to do the graphics and how this research will be displayed or how it will be conceived. 

Regarding the book for Prestel – “Modern Architecture and Interiors”, this book’s kind of a Bible for me. It’s my little Bible. It’s 15 years of travelling and visiting architecture. It started with me travelling and visiting many, many houses. I always wrote some articles or made some small exhibitions about it. But I never put it all together. So in 2018, I started thinking, okay, I have so many buildings which I’ve visited, so maybe it would be nice to put everything together and do a really huge book. Then we met Lars who is really nice guy, Lars Harmsen. He is editor in chief of Slanted magazine. It’s a graphic design magazine. Very strong magazine.

Yeah I know it. It’s a great magazine.

Harmsen told me, Oh, if you have such a big archive you should do a book for Prestel. I have some friends there, I can connect you and maybe they’re interested. I reached out and they said they were interested. So we said, ok, let’s do a book and I started gathering everything, all my archive. I realised that I have maybe 1500 houses already documented and I selected 1000 of them. I decided to approach the book as a starter pack in the sense that you don’t have too much information there, but it can motivate you to find out more. So it’s kind of a crossroad for different readers, suitable for deeper research for every single reader. We decided to do a book layout that would be understandable, which would also be efficient. We discussed it together – as OKOLO, and we said, okay, let’s do one building per page from A to Z – in alphabetical order. Jan created this layout, which I found to be quite universal. Then everything was ready to print, and Prestel told us we can’t print a 1000 pages and we needed to reduce it. They said you have to reduce it by 200 pages. That was a really sad moment for me, so now it’s just under 900 pages. I also had some issues with copyrights. Of course, all the pictures are my own, but there are some architects like Le Corbusier or Frank Lloyd Wright, which charge you a lot of fees, so I quite often have to edit out a lot of these pictures I took because the fees would exceed thousands of euros. 

Yeah that’s always a bit frustrating. This book to me incapsulates such an extended period of time of research and a beautiful form of obsession, even if it’s a reduced amount. Hearing you talk about these two projects, you can understand how you individually initiate projects and later in the process come together to collaborate on the delivery of the project. They also highlight your relationship with the community of creators and collaborators around you. 

I guess this would be a great point to ask you about your ten year anniversary book. I found the layout of the book quite interesting and very much in tune with the story behind the process you just explained for these projects. Half of the book showcases your work as a collective. The other half your individual work and personalities, and also your relationship with your community and collaborators. Can you please speak about the story behind choosing this format and your experience of putting this project together.

For sure! The format was actually Jan’s idea. We had our anniversary party in 2019, and it was quite big. Many friends came and it was fun. After we said, okay, that’s it. We did a party. We won’t do a book. We were thinking about a book, but we said we have a lot of work and thought we didn’t have time to do a book. But then, like few months later, Jan came because he’s totally a workaholic, and said “hey, I was thinking we should do this book, let’s do this book! I have a really great concept. Let’s do two parts for the book. One part will be about our work, and the other part will just be about our life, our friends and the people we’ve met. I said, that’s great, I think we should do it! 

So we gathered all the projects we made, even some really small ones we almost forgot about. Also, we all went through our photo archives and found these crazy pictures from the parties, from the openings and from travelling. It was really great that each of us had different pictures from different memories and projects. I think this is what exactly characterises us. That we love our work and we can even sometimes show it off, you know, and that we did this nice book. But I think maybe even more important are these moments meeting amazing people that share the same values and the same interests as us, who have many stories to tell. So all these great people, it’s so joyful, and we’ve been very lucky to visit and work with such amazing artists and designers. It’s really something that will be in our memory forever. When we sometimes go out for a beer together, we always talk about them. these rare memories are very, very valuable to us. This book is perfect for when someone’s visiting our studio, and we’re like we did this book and you can see our projects. But the most funny thing is from the other side, where they can see our photos from the from the parties and from back in the days when we were much younger. You can see it’s not a really difficult concept to do this, it’s basically very basic. Maybe in general, We really don’t like very complicated curatorial concepts. I think we’re kind of straightforward in this way. 

It’s crucial this idea of going with what’s closest to you, because so often when designers try to showcase such an expanded period of their practice and careers, it becomes a very serious conversation. To me, this can result in over complicating the conversation and making it less digestible for a broader audience. 

Also, I think there’s a lot of value in the side of your book that exposes your personalities and interactions with your community over this period. As a reader, viewer, designer, or whatever, I find this humane side of your book much more tangible and relatable. I appreciate that you’ve opened up this side of your experience in such an honest and simple way, and dedicated such a big portion of this book to it.

It’s also visible when we go somewhere to do an exhibition or something, and we arrive and they see three smiling guys, and I think we have a bit of a charm. I think they can see the passion in us, that we are dedicated to what we love, and this somehow opens doors for us. That we’re authentic and we aren’t pretending something. We can be at some crazy posh design week party, and we’ll still act like us. Super chill guys from Prague that like to drink beers and hanging out with each other. We gravitate towards the same people who are authentic and true. I have to say I’ve been super lucky that the people I’ve collaborated with were all really good people, and I think this is something that truly imprints into your mind and into your heart. Sometimes, you know, there are so many pretentious things in our discipline. This is something I’m really not interested in, and as I get older and older I kind of get angry at these people, like what the fuck, be normal, you’re not the star, haha. 

I definitely get that haha! I think the reason you’ve connected with the people you have has a lot to do with where you stand individually and as a collective. Over time your position and work asks the questions that interest you and attracts like minded people and partnerships. As someone that is only at the beginning of that journey it’s inspiring that over 15 years you’ve managed to keep your values so close to you and how that’s surrounded you with a community of likeminded people.

Yeah, thank you very much, I really appreciate it! I really do.

Touching on your collaborators and relationship with your community, I want to ask you about your work with Maria Cristina Didero and the exhibition, Designers, and the publication, People, you created together. It’ll be great to hear about the research you and her did together, and how Matěj and Jan visualised this research.

It was funny. We were in touch with Maria, but very lightly. We knew each other somehow, and we were in touch via email. For our gallery in Prague, we always like to invite designers that we’ve met before to come and exhibit there. We’d say we don’t have any money, but we’ll cover your flight and accommodation, and we’ll give you this space to do some cool project together. We’ll have a nice opening and have fun during the party. Basically, all of these designers that were invited were like yeah why not, let’s do it! And when I see them again, sometimes years later, they always remember those memories, and say they had fun in Prague with us doing these projects. It was the same with Maria. We were like let’s invite a curator, instead of a designer. It would be interesting. So I wrote her an email saying that I wanted to invite her to prague for a lecture and an exhibition, and she said “yeah, I’d love to! But what is the exhibition that you want to do?”. I had a spontaneous idea and I said because you’re not a designer but you’re a curator and writer, you can showcase your writing. What if you choose your favourite designers that you’re writing about, and we’ll – OKOLO, choose a specific part of the text and we’ll make some graphic posters out of them. And she said I love it, let’s do it! So I kind of became a curator that curated a curator haha. I curated Maria’s writing and it was so nice. I shared this with Jan and Matěj and we decided to do some posters and visualisations of the designers work that Maria was writing about, and these came as a visual representation of Maria’s work. It was a really fun opening during Designblok – Prague-based design festival. 

A year after Maria asked us if we could do a version of this exhibition in Milano, and we did “People” as a catalogue publication for this exhibition. We added some more designers for this exhibition, and we created more illustrations. And also we completely changed the media. Instead of posters shown in Prague, we decided to to a special publication with these illustrations.  We did this for Mostro, which is the graphic design festival in Milano. We invited her first to Prague, and this resulted in her inviting us a year later to Milano, and it’s really cool that this lead to this project having some kind of evolution.

That’s really interesting to hear how this partnership lead to a friendship and an on-going collaboration. 

I want to finish by asking you about what you’re working on now, and also about what you’re looking forward to in the future.

The Triennale is the project we’ve been working on for the past year. It’s the official Czech presentation at the Triennale di Milano, which is a legendary event going since the 1930’s. The main topic is “Unknown, Unknowns; Introduction To Mysteries”.

We were asked by the Czech Museum of Decorative Arts, which is the organiser of the Czech Pavilion, If we’d like to curate something under this topic. So we created an exhibition that we’re opening next week, which is called “ Casa Immaginaria: Living In A Dream”. It’s about the phenomena of “Dreamscapes”. During the pandemic there was quite a rise of this new digital phenomena, of creating fictional interiors of fantasy-like living environment, as a form of visual perfection or even fetish. You can relate that we were sitting in our homes during the lockdown and we were dreaming and fantasising about these dream-like environments that we wanted to be in and escape to.

And I think that’s part of the reason why this Dreamscapes phenomena came about. So I got in touch with some of these designers that create these Dreamscapes, which mostly call themselves digital artists. I thought this was a great topic for the theme of this show, focusing on this idea of escaping to some unknown world through these images. We did this installation that we printed these large more than 2 meter format prints mounted on light boxes, presenting this new phenomena of Dream- scapes. We added real metal constructions in-front of the images which work as an extension of the fantasy world into our reality, which symbolise the border between reality and fiction. Also, we’re presenting some historical context of fictional houses and interiors, in a similar process to our previous curations. We made a catalogue as well, and next week is the opening of the show. It’s going to be a big event with the minister of culture attending, which we’re really excited about.

That’s super exciting, and it touches on a feeling that we all collectively experienced and a period we all went though. This imagination that came out of our isolation, and presenting this section of work in this format is introducing them to us in a new light.

Yes, exactly. So this was our last project and now we’re doing a museum exposition for the Czech furniture company TON, which was born out of Thonet. It is a company that is now based in the original factories founded by Michael Thonet in the 1860’s. They produce handcrafted bent wood furniture using steam. We are curating a retrospective of their portfolio. I actually did a book for them and that’s were this project started – the book was not an OKOLO project, it was done with their own graphic designers, but this exhibition is our collective project.

Credits

Images · Courtesy of Okolo

Andres Serrano

Andres Serrano, Pieta (Early Works 1984-1987)

The transgressive art of Andres Serrano, an introspective window into the past that continues to feed our present 

Andres Serrano (born 1950 in New York, United States) has been recognised for his thought-provoking photographs and installations. Although the public might mostly recognise his famed Piss Christ, 1987 installation, featuring a small figurine of crucified Christ immersed in the artist’s own urine,  the photographer has created an archive of series reflecting on societal themes ranging from death, religion to torture, racism and more. The scenes and subjects of Serrano’s painting-like photographs provoke the mind exactly like one would hope art does. Trained in sculpture and painting at the Brooklyn Museum Art school and inspired by Baroque and Italian Renaissance art, rituals and religious iconography infused by his Roman catholic upbringing, Serrano’s transgressive art is timeless. Representing the destitute and the marginalised (Residents of New York, 2014), sharing an  authentic and personal take on Cuba (Cuba, 2012), portraying one of the most infamous leader of our generation (The Game: All Things Trump, 2018-2019) are only a few of the many themes and subjects Serrano explore. No matter the matter, Serrano manages to bring its beauty and inherent peace to the surface as the subject takes precedence in his work. There is a confrontational aspect to Serrano’s body of work and that is the success of his challenging work. Serving as a tool for introspection and engaging the viewer to see what it is not easy to view, Serrano’s art is an invite to reflect and not perpetuate the horrors of the past that continue to feed our present. 

Andres, it is an honour to interview you. I have discovered your work  a few years ago and have been fascinated ever since. Thank you very much for taking the time to participate, I am delighted to have you as part of this issue. I would like to start from the beginning.  I was watching an interview with photographer Joel Meyerowitz (How I Make Photographs: Joel Meyerowitz in conversation with Amanda Hajjar) and he was reflecting on a life changing moment that made him see a realm of possibilities in front of his eyes: being on set with the great Robert Frank, in New York. Have you had an event like this, that changed the course of your life or initiated the beginning of your career? 

I’ve had a few life changing moments, some good, some not. The problem with those moments is that you don’t always realize how profoundly they can affect you when they’re occurring. I used to see my life as a fast train not making any stops.

“The journey was more important than the destination. When you look back, you can’t say, “I should have done things different.” If you could, you would have, but you didn’t. I’ve fucked up more than once but I’m still here.”

There was one pivotal moment: when the Beatles came to America. I was 13. They were followed by the Rolling Stones and everyone else. Soon after that I discovered Bob Dylan and I was set for life.

You were born in New York, grew up as an only child raised by your mother. Your mother was born in Key West, Florida, was raised in Cuba and thus only spoke Spanish that you then had to learn at a young age. How did these different cultural identities impact you? 

The good thing is that I had to learn Spanish at an early age. The bad thing was that I didn’t like my mother. We fought all the time. But that was also a good thing because she was tough so I had to be tougher. The only cultural identity problem I had was when Castro came into power and a kid in the fifth grade discovered my mother had been raised in Cuba. After that, the little prick would tease me by calling me “Castro” or “Cuban.” It would piss me off and also embarrass me. The Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 was a big deal and no one wanted to be called “Castro” or “Cuban.” 

Andres Serrano, Bedroom with Jesus (Cuba 2012)

60 years later you would think that kind of stigma wouldn’t matter but apparently it does. America still acts like Castro and Cuba are its biggest enemies. It’s easier to pick on someone you don’t need or fear than to stand up to the real strongmen. 

When President Biden went to Saudi Arabia he went for oil, not to confront the Crown Prince about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. And when he tried to bring it up the Crown Prince responded by telling him America wasn’t so clean either. What’s Biden going to say to that? “You’re wrong, we don’t kill innocent people or put children in cages.”

Andres Serrano, Magdalena, 2011 Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels

I tell you what impacted me more than anything else. As a child growing up, my mother had several schizophrenic episodes. She would be fine for two or three years then she would have a nervous breakdown that would last a couple of weeks before she returned to normal. I was always trying to figure out what was going on in her head during those periods. It taught me to read people, to get a sense of what they were thinking and feeling.

Some people are obvious. They are what they appear to be. I would always shake my head when the political pundits on television would spend so much time trying to figure out what Donald Trump meant by the things he said. Trump is transparent. He means exactly what he says.

What was it like to travel there and discover it, later on, as an artist for Cuba, 2012 (exhibited in Brussels, 2014)?

I loved your documentation of the interiors of the houses and the portraits specially of the women. Did you feel attached to Cuba?

I loved Cuba when I finally went. I waited my whole life to go. I don’t like to travel except for work. I needed a reason to go to Cuba and the reason came when Jorge Fernandez invited me to the Havana Biennial. Actually, I think I asked him to ask me. I participated and at the same time I went to do some work. I felt very much at home there. I feel at home whenever I go somewhere to work. 

Andres Serrano, Cuba, 2012

The Cubans were very welcoming and I had a blast working day and night. Work, especially when it’s your work, gives you tremendous energy. I had my wife, Irina, my assistant from New York, some friends and comrades and a driver that drove us in a large SUV from one end of Cuba to the other. Talk about a great road trip! What I like best is driving in the middle of the night not knowing what you’re going to find. I don’t drive but I like being on the road, especially at night. 

Andres Serrano, Cuba, 2012

The people are amazing! Cubans speak Spanish in a very precise way. They enunciate their words clearly. Once, in Havana, I saw a large stack of bread in a bakery that I wanted to photograph. I use lights and need time to set up for a shoot so I decided to go back the next day to photograph the bread. But the next day the bread was gone. They explained that the bread arrives early and would start selling immediately. So I bought all the bread in advance that was coming the following day. The next day, after I got to the bakery and took my picture, I told them, “Ok, now you can sell the bread again.”

I never talk much about myself in terms of ethnicity because it’s not important. All you need to know is that I was born and raised in New York City. But there are always people who like to get into your background, like it’s meaningful or the most important thing they can say about you. If you’re Black or White in America they don’t question you, but if you’re in a category that’s not easy for them to define, they try to define you anyway. My mother was born in America. I was born in America but they still want to place you somewhere else. I remember when we got back from Cuba I was telling someone about the trip. A couple of minutes into the conversation they say to me, “So what was it like going back to Cuba?” and I’m thinking, “Motherfucker, didn’t I just tell you I had never been to Cuba!”

“I don’t like to be called a photographer, but I have been called worst things.” At 17 years old, you studied painting and sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum art school. That background in painting can really be seen through your photography with the descriptiveness of the titles, the colours and the texture of the photographs. Why did you engage with photography as your preferred medium?

After two years at the Brooklyn Museum my scholarship ended and I didn’t have a studio to paint or sculpt. But I lived with a girl named Millie and she had a camera so I started taking pictures with Millie’s camera. I always knew I wasn’t a photographer but an artist who chose to take pictures as his art practice. I never went into a darkroom or printed my photographs (I still use film.) Photography has been a means to an end and that end has been to create art. I’ve always said I learned everything I know about art from Marcel Duchamp who taught me that anything, including a photograph, could be a work of art.

When I was in my twenties during the Seventies I wound up in the East Village taking and selling drugs. It was a period when I stopped taking pictures because I was not an artist at that point but a drug addict. 

Andres Serrano, Blood Cross, 1985 Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels.

I can’t say it was a bad time because I was having a good time. But it stopped being a good time when the people around me started dying and I knew it was time for me to leave. If I had gone from the Brooklyn Museum Art School to being an artist I probably would have been a different artist although I can’t imagine how. Everything is going to have an impact on you one way or another but you might stay the same. 

Andres Serrano, Caged Meat, 1987
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels.

The 1980s in New York, what did this mean as an artist in terms of starting out, getting recognised by galleries, having shows etc? How is it now?

The 1980s in New York was an exciting time for me. I met and married my first wife, Julie Ault, in 1980 and got back into art shortly after that. Julie had just formed an artist collective called Group Material along with Tim Rollins, her friend from Maine. Group Material was a group of several artists who mounted group exhibitions of other artists’ work that addressed social and cultural issues such as AIDS, consumerism and democracy. I was never a member of Group Member. Julie was doing her thing and I was doing mine, but it was through Julie that I became aware of what some artists were doing. I met some great artists like Leon Golub and Nancy Spero who were always super nice. They were very encouraging to other artists. 

It was Julie, who, upon meeting Felix Gonzales-Torres invited Felix to join the group. Felix didn’t need Group Material to make it but Julie recognized his talent early. Back then I wasn’t thinking about the art world, I was just doing my work. Julie and I lived on East 10 St. and when the art scene moved to the East Village several galleries, including Jay Gorney Gallery and P.P.O.W., came to our block. Interestingly, art, punk, graffiti, new wave music and street culture all came together in the East Village. Even the Post-Modernists were there. The first time I saw Jeff Koons work was at International With Monument on East 7 St. where Jeff showed his basketballs in water.

Andres Serrano, St. Clotilde II, Paris 1991
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels

The Eighties were also important for me for another reason. It was when rap and hip-hop appeared. The first time I heard Rapper’s Delight I knew it was something. I spent the whole decade listening to and collecting rap records. Music has always moved me more than art. Art does not touch me in the same way music does and rap was riveting.

Julie and I separated after ten years. I spent the Nineties going to clubs and listening to dance and house music at night and creating pieces during the day. 

Things are different now. People come out of art school knowing what galleries they want to get into. There’s Instagram and social media. I’m not on social media. I still use a flip phone. If it wasn’t for Irina, 

I wouldn’t have any idea of what’s happening in the art world. I still don’t. I think art and culture is now defined by algorithms.

Controversy and provocation play a huge part in your work. Was that something intentional?

With Piss Christ,1987 for instance although some viewers may see it as a blasphemy, it is important to note the attention brought to the act of crucifixion and thus dying. As Sister Wendy says in an interview :’An abuse shouldn’t take away its use’ (‘Sister Wendy in Conversation With Bill Moyers’ 1997). As a religious person, how does your faith interact with your art?

I’ve always thought that being an artist was the least controversial thing I’ve done. My life has been much more intense than my work. I remember when I first heard Dylan sing “And if my thought-dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine, but it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only,” and I thought, “That’s ridiculous. How could anyone get mad at you over what you’re thinking?”

Andres Serrano, Piss Christ, 1987
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris

I was born and raised a Catholic and have been a Christian all my life but who cares? Certainly not the people who label you “anti- Christian and blasphemous.” There are people who think only they know what it means to be a Christian. You can’t talk to these people because they’re convinced that only they know the answer. It must feel good to tell other people how to live their lives. Personally, I don’t have that luxury or want the responsibility. 

I like what Sister Wendy once said about me in an interview. “Serrano is not a terribly gifted young man but he tries.” I was in my late forties at the time so I was flattered that Sister Wendy called me a “young man.” I also liked when Senator Jesse Helms got up on the Senate floor and said, “Andres Serrano is not an artist. He’s a jerk who’s taunting the American people.”

Piss Christ made me think about the installation of Italian artist Maurizio Catalan, The three hanging kids (Untitled, 2004) that had been taken down almost immediately by the Italian authorities. When asked about the work, Catalan wondered if the real tensions and horrors of contemporary life should not shock us more. The Klan, 1990, Torture, 2015 and Infamous, 2019 are very confronting for instance, to the tainted history of the world. In your eyes which role art should play in society? 

Art should play the role it wants to. It’s not for me to tell the art world what to do or not do. They wouldn’t listen to me anyway. I’ve never been a political or activist artist although there could be some element of that in my work.

“I’d rather let the work speak for itself. My work is a mirror that’s open to interpretation. People see what they want to see.”

Half the people voted for Biden and almost half the people voted for Trump. It’s up to you to decide which side is more fucked up. I never voted in my life until I voted for Obama. Twice. In the last election I didn’t vote for Biden. I voted against Trump. If a tomato had been running for president I would have voted for that tomato.

Theoretically, Democrats talk a good game but often can’t deliver. On a practical level, the Republicans won’t raise your taxes. People try to shame you into voting. As an American you have the right to vote and you have the right not to vote. Even the Supreme Court sometimes says, “Let’s sit this one out.”

Since the theme of this issue is IN OUR WORLD, which themes would you wish to see more tackled in the art world?

The art world is not the real world so it’s hard for me to see how it could tackle anything other than itself. There’s a feeling of sameness in the air, same people, same faces, same chatter, same agenda. It pretends to care and promote inclusivity but that inclusivity only includes the people who fit the demographics they’re looking for. You can’t deviate from the status quo otherwise you’re left out in the cold. 

I left Paula Cooper Gallery in New York in 2008 and since then I’ve been a stranger in my own country. 

Andres Serrano, Denizens of Brussel. Cristo, 2015
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels

I’ve had a great many museum exhibitions in Europe and around the world thanks to Nathalie Obadia and Yvon Lambert. I was even appointed a Chevalier in The Order of Arts and Letters in 2017. 

But I’ve only had one museum exhibition in America and that was in the 90’s. I recently saw Adam Weinberg, Director of The Whitney Museum of American Art, at the Whitney Biennial and told him, “You know I’m an American artist and I’ve never been in the Whitney Biennial. I guess you’re waiting for me to die before you show me.” Adam laughed and said, “We’ll do something long before that.” 

Andres Serrano, Chris Sharma, Rock Climber, 2006
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Brussels

When I was a junkie in the East Village I felt somewhat distant from the people around me. “I am with you but I am not like you.” I still have that feeling. 

Could you talk about your breathtaking series The Morgue, 1992 and those portraits. What was the reason behind the series and how was that experience considering that you were photographing people who had passed away. How was the interaction between them, yourself and the camera?  

The inspiration behind The Morgue series was simple. I wanted to look at death. My interaction or involvement with the dead was as an artist who wants to find that inner peace that comes from an art that gives you spiritual and aesthetic comfort; the thing that brings stillness and tranquility. You could hear a pin drop in my work. It’s a moment frozen in time. When a song is right, when a picture pleases, it makes you feel like everything is right with the world. There’s beauty and grace everywhere, even in death.

With The Morgue, 1992, I think the titles indicating the causes of death in a way engage the viewer to wonder about the personal lives of these people. By this interrogation, it adds texture and life again to the stillness of death. That’s why I dont feel a sense of voyeurism but dignity and beauty. You have mentioned before that you are passing through. Could you delve into that? 

The truth is we’re all passing through going from one thing to another, one place to another. I always title my work in such a way as to describe what you’re looking at. In the case of The Morgue, the cause of death tells you what brought these people to this place and everything I know about them.

“People change and in death they change even more. But the sense of humanity lingers on even after one’s demise.”

It was this essence that I wanted to capture. The soul and spirit of a person cannot be seen but it can be felt.

Could you talk about your collaboration with Supreme and how did that unfold? Which other brands would you be interested in collaborating with?

Supreme came to me and said they wanted to do something with my work. They had ideas and designs for sneakers, sweatpants, sweatshirts, hoodies and a skateboard with my work. It was an easy collaboration. All I had to do was say yes. In 1996, Kirk Hammett and Lars Ulrich from Metallica came to me and asked to use one of my images for a new album they were coming out with called, Load.

They following year they came out with Reload, the follow up to Load and again asked for one of my images. They also made t-shirts and other merchandise with my work. I’m always flattered and open to collaborations of my work with good artists and brands. I’m very proud of Load and Reload and the Supreme collection. 

I’d like to collaborate with Gucci, Dior or Balenciaga. Sometimes the design houses are more cutting edge than the galleries. They know it pays to think outside the box. When people like you, they like what you do and these brands are well liked by their clients. The reason they’re liked is because their goods are well made and of good design. People always look forward to the new collections.

Do you have a favorite piece/body of work that you’ve realised?

I always have my favorites. I used to call them, “masterpieces,” the images from a particular series that stood out for me. There are many such images from The Morgue, The Klan, Immersions…etc.

Andres Serrano, Black Jesus (Immersions 1987-1990)

Piss Christ did not stand out for me until it was controversial and then it became one of my favorites! The favorites usually get a lot of attention. 

Your new series, The Robots, 2022 will be shown this November in Paris at Nathalie Obadia gallery. Could you talk about the series?

The Robots was inspired by NFTs and the Metaverse because before the Metaverse, there were robots. I like working with real things, not reproductions. And when I decided to create portraits of robots I went looking for vintage robots. I bought them on Ebay and other auctions. They’re mostly from the 60’s, and 70’s with a few from the 80’s. Some of them are rare and desirable.

The Robots is about race, childhood, science, science fiction and human nature. The word robot was coined by Karel Capek, and appears in his 1920 play, RUR or Rossum’s Universal Robots. It derives from the Old Church Slavonic word, “rabota,” which means “servitude or forced labor.” There are references to the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons, Kaws and Andy Warhol in The Robots, intentionally and unintentionally. 

I did enough work for several exhibitions because as I started making them I realized they could be a book of robots. There are all kinds of robots: Japanese robots, European robots, black robots, white robots, …. Some of my favorite pictures are those of the very simple children’s robots. I love Mickey The Robot, Mr. Rembrandt Robot and Chuckling Charlie The Laughing Robot. All of these will be included in the exhibition at Nathalie Obadia Gallery. 

I once told Leon Golub about a bad review I got in The New York Times. I said to Leon I didn’t want to take it personally but it hurt my feelings. He said to me, “You should take it personal because when they criticize your work, they criticize you.”  Leon was right. I am The Robots!

Credits

Artworks · Courtesy of Andres Serrano

Chantal Elisabeth Ariëns

“It is in the nature of the mind to make something out of nothing, so an empty state allows the mind to rest and opens doors at the same time.”

It might have taken Chantal Elisabeth Ariëns ages to pull herself out of the state of chaos and into the utopia of emptiness, but such a transition defines what she produces today, from photographs to prints. Relieving certain emotions to provoke certain memories ushers the multidisciplinary artist into conjuring her most reflective essence, giving a home to the works of art she treasures the most.

From her reverence for water as a distilling element of life to the reminiscence of her sister’s youthful time, Ariens personifies the glory of existence: the stillness in dancing, the melancholy in capturing the relics of a passing, the times when realizations ask her to carry on.

I would love to learn more about your career transition. You first worked as a dancer, having studied at a ballet academy in Tilburg. You also modeled and assisted photographers. Why did you switch to photography? When did you realize it was time for you to hold the camera yourself?

I grew up with classical ballet and studied at the ballet academy, so my whole life was surrounded by ballet. But

“my dream to dance in a company like the NYC ballet fell apart.”

I started to look for something that could replace my passion for ballet. This was the quest. For a period, I started working as a model, where I got inspired by photographers I worked with and started to assist some photographers.

I am also a print-maker. I felt the need to create with my own hands, to give my prints more depth. I went in search of a craft technique that would allow me to do so, and this led me to the photopolymer etching technique. I love the tactility, the structure, the scent, and countless shades of black. The work itself is very intense and slow; it brings me to a more quiet part of myself and makes me more aware of how gratifying craftsmanship can be.

Delving deeper into your photographic philosophy, how did your ballet, photo modeling, and assisting experiences help shape your photography? What nuances from these backgrounds do you use in your practice today?

Dancing had been a way to express myself since a very young age. This was replaced by my love for photography. My father was a gifted photographer and a photo teacher in addition to his day job. He taught my sister and me how to print our own photos.

“Working as a model became the second part of my photographic education.”

It was wonderful to be able to learn from so many photographers, through their own ways of creating images, especially in the fashion world. Then, my process became different after working for magazines.

I felt the need to create from within after my younger sister passed away. I had to let go of concepts or themes to find out where my journey would take me. Gradually, I realized how everything turned out to be personal, including my relationship with the models I work with. I like to create an intimate atmosphere for the models to make them feel comfortable and be themselves.

I prefer to work with models with a background in dancing as they often move freely. It is important for me to make real contact in order to create images that move. They become personal from the moment I started to create my own world from the inside.

The inspiration of your works stems from the subconscious, a state of emptiness. How do you perceive an empty state? Is it meant to be filled, or just be left their void? 

In the past, it was not easy to enter an empty state of mind overnight. It took me years to be able to let go, meditate, and practice. It is in the nature of the mind to make something out of nothing, so an empty state allows the mind to rest and opens doors at the same time. This is where it became possible for me to dig deep and create my personal work, by letting it be void with all that will come up in a natural way.

As you have written: these images arise by giving space to emotion and exploring where the connection lies between emotion and memory. Emotions and memories are stored in the subconscious. For you, what is the connection between emotion and memory? What kinds of emotions and memories do you want to evoke?

For me, memories come with certain emotions, so bringing up certain memories can evoke certain emotions. I try not to evoke these emotions as I prefer them to arise in a natural way. It is by giving space that they will find their way. For me, photography is about connecting to the landscape, the people, and myself. It is about creating my own world.

Let us go through a few of your works. Where Are You reminisces about your younger sister, a time when you saw her everywhere. Would it be all right if you guide us through your state in this series?

Where Are You #1: The image is taken by the moonlight, imagery of Taoism, and the yin energy that brings the viewer within. The feeling brought me to remember the memory of my sister drifting away.

Where Are You #4: In my dreams, I was running fast to see glimpses of my sister. When I saw a figure running, I thought it was her.

Where Are You #11: I know it is not her, but it is the vague figure that is moving towards me that makes me think it is her.

Where Are You #20: Ever-changing clouds, floating on air.

Where Are You #18: The sea, the waves, the clouds, the sun behind the clouds, the rays of light coming in. Here, there is a play between the dark and the light, the light and the dark. I was fascinated by it: it moved me in ways, it made me feel emotional, it lulled me into it, and it connected me to the ones I lost.

Unfinished #2: Here a teststrip of Marijn, I started photographing with her and still do, she became my muse.
In this image she reminds me of my sister, Nathalie.

Monologue Intérieur seems to be a photographic conversation between who you are and what you feel, an inner monologue associated with thoughts, fears, and emotions that come and go. Have you ever latched on a single emotion and found it difficult to let go? 

The inner monologue is often associative. Thoughts, moods, feelings come and go. I try to catch these in order to be moved by the image. It is not only about my feelings, but my models’ as well.

Nude photography can be a complex subject to me. It is about finding the purest and most liberating expression of strong femininity. It is combined with the inner monologue, transforming the images into layers of stories.

Water as a purifying, transformative, and healing gift of life. In Healing or drowning, water becomes the symbol of existence, the power of connection, softness, surrender, and forgiveness. When do you seek healing? Is it hard to surrender yourself to the flow of the universe? How do you forgive – by forgetting?

I seek healing especially in times of grief and turbulence like the last one and a half years, where we have all gone through certain waves.

“Surrendering to the flow of the universe is a never-ending challenge.”

For me, forgiving is not about forgetting. I think it is a process that experiences ups and downs, highs and lows like waves that come and go, trying to find the angle of compassion for others. I think these bring in the softness, the healing part, for others and myself.

You quote T.S. Elliott as part of your artist’s statement. “So the darkness shall be the light. And the stillness the dancing.” How do you relate to these words?

The words refer to my own process that started with the death of my younger sister. I went through deep grief, a depressing period, trying to find the light. This is why I started my series  ‘Where Are You’ with specks of black and bright white. 

If I had to go to a deeper layer of myself, I think I would uncover stillness while finding my way out, accepting that nothing will ever stay the same and that love never dies.

What’s next for Chantal?

I’m looking forward to some wonderful collaborations in Japan, Italy and Sweden and a period as Artist In Residence to be able to do research, experiment and deepen my work.

Credits

www.chantalelisabethariens.com/

WHAT IS IDENTITY? – NR MAGAZINE ON THE STACK

From meeting at a law school to branching out the magazine into a myriad of niches, Jade Removille and Nima Habibzadeh, co-founders and creative directors of NR Magazine, sit down with Fernando Augusto Pacheco of Monocle’s The Stack to discuss NR Magazine and its recent print issue on Identity

“NR is a print, bi-annual publication that we co-founded in 2016 in London. It is a way for us to narrate a story through different artists, photographers, cultures, and creatives that we are inspired by and that we want to give a platform to and for our readers to discover because, for us, NR is a window to what is around us and what is going on in our society,” says Jade as she introduces the magazine.

The conversation moves along until it touches upon issue no. fourteen. The Identity issue covers interviews with Willem Dafoe, Omar Apollo, Remi Wolf, and a Bottega Veneta fashion editorial special. It enshrines the readers an escape towards the creatives’ utopia: a journey through the varying creative processes, an overview of their private lives, an in-depth understanding of their philosophy, and their personal perceptions of identity. The issue opens up dialogues concerning the fluidity and fertility of identity: all masks lifted, all truths bared.

“We work with so many different people globally. We try to work with people that are not necessarily heard of from Ed Templeton who is a professional skateboarder and photographer to Eddie Plein the creator of grills. We like to touch upon so many different people within the art and culture world while also bringing together people in the music world in the fashion world. It is a combination of different people coming together,” says Nima.

Listen to the full interview here.

WORDS MATTHEW BURGOS

 

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Joselito Verschaeve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is next for Joselito?

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

Stefanie Schneider

On the West, Nostalgia and Instant Dreams

Stefanie Schneider captures the Western mentality and landscapes, archetypical histories of love, flawed beauty, and how women coddle chickens through her lens. She projects the life she yearns to live, the love she hopes to embody and receive, and the lust for both from within her onto her images. The results display burned spots in print or hazy and overlapping gradients of light, the signature she created for herself and her audience. These flaws, as she dubs them, manifest a mythlike dream Stefanie imagines for herself and those around her, ushering them into a discrepancy between light and darkness in photographic styles and the human psyche.

The German photographer works on self-portraiture as she poses for most of her projects, always infusing every shot with her views on life, love, and nostalgia. As she taps into her realm, Stefanie’s flair for memories and bygone eras – plus an old ranch and a farm of chickens – unravels into instinctive and distinctive photographs that ask viewers to journey through their definition of psychedelia and existence.

I wanted to ask how you got the moniker Instant Dreams then I came across your photo book of the same title. In this compendium, you take the American West as your inspiration to tell stories that evoke ideas of masquerade and play, and of love, pain, loneliness, alienation, rediscovery, and a social commentary on America. Why were you fascinated with these themes? 

Instantdreams is simply a combination of my two primary interests: the American dream and instant film. It just came to me in 1998 when I was building my first website. The American West has wide, open spaces that give us perspective on the meaning of life. Its void is a reflection of your interpretation. Expired Polaroid film produces ‘imperfections’ that mirror the flaws of the American Dream. These imperfections also illustrate that the dream is a myth that misleads, offering unachievable goals; the dream turning into a nightmare. The disintegration of Western society. The last hurrah.

That is the canvas of my creations. In fact, it’s the rudder of my uncharted journey. The allure of America is my pursuit of self-identity through love and pain, alienation and loneliness.

In your first book, Stranger than Paradise, the description mentions: There is no script, and none is necessary – a primal tale with ordinary looking people with archetypical histories – they drink, make love in nameless hotels, stalk the desert under the blinding sun, dance and carouse, and endlessly move on. A sense of liberation surrounds these scenes. Have you lived through these situations? When do you feel the most liberated?

All of my projects originate from my personal story. I created a place for my imagination to flourish, so there are no limits to where I can go. This particular project you’re referring to is called ‘Sidewinder’ and is one of my most personal stories.  It projects the intensity of love, the pain of losing love, futile attempts to hold on to it, and the destructive acts we engage in to avoid abandonment. For me,

“there is a catharsis in creation. Art liberated me. It allowed me to create a parallel universe.”

Going through your selected projects, three bodies of work caught my attention. I want to start with Oilfields (2004). It connotes both the notion of the frontier and the adventurous mentality of the West, and a kind of horizontal understanding of the landscape that is so quintessential about the West. Would you still describe the Western mentality as such today considering that you did this project in 2004? What changes have you noticed?

The project was published in 2004. The actual shoot took place in 1999. Considering that, basically everything has changed. There was still a kind of innocence present. The internet just started. Hardly anybody used cell phones. The information traveled slower. Actual letters were still sent and received. There was more time. Pre 9/11.

The landscapes were emptier and less populated. The feeling of being alone was much greater. Climate change wasn’t omnipresent. Back then the open landscapes felt like the last frontier. The last place to disappear into; to be swallowed into your own imagination. But it felt as if we were witnessing, with our own eyes, that times were changing, that everything would break apart.

Fast forward to 2014,  you introduce Wabi-Sabi (2014) as desolation and solitude are two adjectives that I would use to describe my Polaroid photographs, another two would be the Japanese term ‘Wabi-Sabi”. The simplicity of ‘flawed beauty’ comes from the expired film I use to create a reflection of love and loneliness. Why did you use desolation and solitude as descriptions? Was that how you felt? Then, why did you combine the feeling of love with loneliness?

Love, lost love, and unrequited love are the prominent themes in my 29 Palms, CA project. The consequences of emptiness, loneliness, and absence are related to existential themes, just like expired films. Constantly changing and crumbling, the film mirrors the changes of time, almost like a premonition. The summers seared through heat waves to the cracks of the Wabi-Sabi void.

Onto the third one: Chicks and Chicks and sometimes Cocks (2016 – present). One sees women dearly hold chickens in their arms. Can you share the concept and beginnings of this project? What do you aim to convey?

I rescued an old ranch in the High Desert just over ten years ago. Since then, I have been focusing on self-sustainability, growing organic food, and raising chickens, which has been so rewarding to me. I absolutely love chickens and wanted to share their beauty. I call it my Desert Living project. It is about reconnecting our human needs back to the sources of living, back to basics; my own personal reset.

You have used expired Polaroid films to capture and emphasize the sun-drenched, nostalgic, and photographic appeal of memories. Is there a forgotten memory that you want to relive? How do memories influence your creative artistry?

Memories are the essence of life itself. They are stories, they are history, they are our identity. The ones you keep and show define what transpires. The Polaroid itself is a tangible reminder of a moment we want to remember and hold onto.

“We only have what we remember or imagine.”

Thinking about your filmic and trance-like style, how would you direct your self-portrait and want the backdrop, the approach, and the essence to be?

A picture of myself looking at myself in the mirror of some old car far out in the desert, alone and searching with desire for a love that I know exists.

My work is full of self-portraits. I am using myself as the subject a lot either because nobody else is around or because the project is so personal such as in the case of ‘Sidewinder’ or ‘Wastelands’. I can create my vision far easier and more precisely if I play the role myself. Nobody else could have felt what I felt at that moment, so I appear again and again and again.

Credits

Images STEFANIE SCHNEIDER
http://www.instantdreams.net/

Willem Dafoe

“when you aren’t trying to accomplish something that serves your goals and you start to consider some else’s point of view, that becomes creative and that becomes fun”

Willem Dafoe connects to Zoom from Rome, where he lives with his wife, Giada Colagrande. The actor has just returned from filming in Budapest – where last week, the shoot for NR took place. For the shoot, Dafoe wore exclusively Prada, a brand he says he likes very much. “There were some crazy colours, but I like to stick out my neck a little bit. Sometimes I put on clothes I wouldn’t normally wear in life, but I enjoy doing it to shoot with.” As one of the most prolific actors in cinema for some forty years, the actor must have some familiarity with stepping into clothes he might not otherwise. “That’s the idea, and that’s the pleasure,” he says. Whether he steps into Prada attire for a magazine or spends countless hours in make-up to embody the legendary Nosferatu in 2000’s The Shadow of the Vampire, Willem Dafoe is a master of using costume and his surroundings to capture the emotional profile of a character. 

And his characters are vast and varied. The actor has played a red cap-wearing ship engineer in Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), a weather-beaten lighthouse keeper in The Lighthouse (2019), and as Sergeant Elias in the career-launching 1986 film, Platoon. From voicing the world-weary Gill in Finding Nemo (2003), to courting controversy through association with Lars von Trier’s provocative arthouse films Antichrist (2009) and Nymphomaniac (2014), Dafoe’s career is difficult to pin down. It’s not surprising, given the kinds of roles the actor has undertaken, that he is often asked if he has difficultly in leaving his characters behind. The answer is no, he can shut them out and return to his life, being Willem Dafoe, without problem. But are there elements of characters, perhaps some more than others, that stick with him regardless? 

“When I do a project, I have an experience. It’s part-social, part-artistic, part-life experience, and you learn things,” he explains. “When I learn things, I don’t unlearn them – unless I really make a concerted effort to. So certain things do stay with me, or certain things surprise me.” That, for Dafoe, is part of the adventure and the pleasure of stepping into the shoes of a character he hasn’t previously met. “Other possibilities occur that didn’t occur before in your life,” he adds, “like new skills or different sensibilities. “Those are the things that stay because I return to that feeling.” Besides the lasting impact that playing a role can have on Dafoe as a person, I wonder if he ever looks back to a previous character in order to shape a new role? “I hope not! You know, the idea is really to start from zero every time.”

The reverberations of previous performances can linger, but Dafoe is careful to avoid revisiting the past. His process involves “trying to steer away from that, not to repeat yourself – not that that’s a sin, but it might suggest that you aren’t going deep enough, or you’re leaning on something.” Delving into the unknown is where Dafoe finds his energy. The actor has also made a career-long effort to avoid being typecast. Despite his distinctive face and a persisting misconception amongst some that he almost exclusively plays ‘bad guys’, it’s difficult to see the same person twice across his oeuvre. 

The surface characteristics of a role are something that Dafoe specifically tries to mix up, in order to avoid repetition. “Sometimes I’ll approach a character and look for a trigger for your imagination – so I’ll change my external appearance in some way.” That might be a prosthetic or a hairstyle. It might, for example, be a moustache. “The style of that moustache, in my head, is owned by a certain character, so if I have a moustache that looks a certain way, I think ‘Oh – that’s too Bobby Peru!’” 

Dafoe has spoken previously about playing the lecherous gangster Bobby Peru in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990), recalling that the director handed him the character’s costume without discussion. How much of the process of bulking out a character is a collaboration? That depends on various factors: the character, the project and the personalities involved. Part of what Dafoe calls the “beauty of working in film” – and to a degree, in theatre too – is that “one must figure out what they think their area to explore is, their area to perform in, or what their responsibilities are.” Those boundaries aren’t fixed, but perennially shifting. “Sometimes one has to support other aspects of the story to get it on its way; sometimes you are the story.” 

“And in a similar way, some directors want talent to collaborate, [while others] want their actors to inhabit what they’ve created.” In At Eternity’s Gate, the 2018 biopic of Vincent van Gogh, director and painter Julian Schnabel taught the actor how to paint in preparation for the role. Writing in The New York Times in 2020, Schnabel recalled how early scenes from filming didn’t make the final cut: “He was wearing the same clothes, had the same hairdo, but he wasn’t the guy yet. Then there was a certain moment when all of a sudden he was. He was transformed, transfigured. He was somebody else.” Dafoe says that he likes a flexibility of approach in order to not take himself too seriously or get stuck in the belief that there’s only one way to go about the acting process. “It makes me feel more fluid and energetic somehow.” Figuring out how to navigate a role or a collaboration is also where the pleasure lies. “Once I feel comfortable in that mode and I’m working with people that I trust, then the sky’s the limit.”

Dafoe’s response intrigues me, in part, because of an interview he did with fellow actor and Mississippi Burning (1988) co-star, Frances McDormand for BOMB in 1996. “That’s another age!” he exclaims. It is, but there is something he says that is particularly interesting. In the interview, Dafoe refers to actors as “serving someone else’s construct,” before asking McDormand the extent to which she finds that position frustrating or liberating. In 2021, how would Dafoe respond? In order to answer, he asks what McDormand replied. I can’t remember, I confess. But going back to her answer – that “actors are in the service industry” – it is undoubtedly similar to Dafoe’s. “Part of an actor’s process is serving [the] idea and being able to articulate and inhabit what [the director] is trying to do.”

“I think I say this a lot,” Dafoe continues, “so maybe I’m getting stuck in a certain kind of idea, but I still think it’s true – it probably was true in 1996 – when you aren’t trying to accomplish something that serves your goals and you start to consider some else’s point of view, that becomes creative and that becomes fun.” In doing so, one is “let of the hook” in a way because the actor is not responsible for the film’s meaning, or its framing. “But the quality of being there, of what someone is doing, and the pretending is an actor’s responsibility – and I can do that if I’m doing that for someone else. If I’m doing it for myself, I sometimes have a little voice in the back of my head that’s always asking how I’m doing; ‘Is this what we want?’ ‘What’s this going to get me?’ And you want to get away from that.” To let the experience wash over Dafoe in this way allows him to “feel looser and more open,” and to forget himself in that moment. “You’re not there anymore, you’re someone else. And that taps you into a whole other world that’s not based just on your experiences and the things you want.” It’s in that state that allows for “something pure and intuitive – beyond your understanding,” shutting out a self-consciousness that can (dis)colour the action. “That’s usually where the most interesting things happen.”

Dafoe may be deemed one of Hollywood’s leading actors, but he rarely appears there – preferring films shot on location. In the case of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Dafoe headed to Morocco to film, only to return to the US to encounter a backlash. The actor’s all-too-human portrayal of Jesus was deemed blasphemous by some religious groups, but it demonstrates the extent to which Dafoe seeks out real emotion during the filming process. “Shooting on location is a lot of fun because my life experience working in that place informs [and roots] what I am doing.” In a more extreme way that some of Dafoe’s other films, The Last Temptation encapsulates how the environment and emotion interact in order to shape the character that appears on screen. 

In Sean Baker’s critically acclaimed 2017 film, The Florida Project, Dafoe plays Bobby, the overstretched but unflappable manager of the Magic Kingdom motel on the periphery of Disney World, Florida. Filmed at a functioning motel, many of the film’s stars were, unlike Dafoe, non-actors. In order to master his role, Dafoe learned the ropes of management from the Magic Kingdom’s real-life manager. It catapulted Dafoe into another world, shaped by the surrounding characteristics and quirks of the location and its weather system, the lifestyles of its inhabitants, and so on. “I spent my time working with people that are actually living there, so it’s super rooted. Hollywood does not exist for these people,” he explains; “after a couple of days, they’re over the fun of the circus coming to town [and] it becomes life for them. And also, for myself.” If that made the film’s situation “easier to enter” for Dafoe, it also contributes to the uncomfortable truth portrayed in the reality of the characters and their experiences. 

Then there’s the overwhelmingly morbid The Lighthouse by Robert Eggers, in which Dafoe and Robert Pattinson feature as two nineteenth-century lighthouse keepers on a remote island in New England. Shot in black-and-white in square format (recalling the silent films of the previous century), the film is uncomfortably claustrophobic. The lack of theatrics gives The Lighthouse a terrifyingly real atmosphere – except for very brief uses of special effects that blur the realm of ‘real’ versus ‘surreal’. “The isolation was so complete,” Dafoe recalls; the film was shot in Nova Scotia under terrible conditions. “The weather was so extreme that that put us there right away. There’re certain things that are very difficult to act, you know, extreme cold, runny noses, flush skin from brutal wind. These kinds of things put us in a state that allowed us to be there in a very full way.”

The strife and struggle that burdens Dafoe and Pattinson is rendered visible by the circumstances under which they filmed. Not least, as Dafoe adds, in the moment of filming something like The Lighthouse “I’m not thinking about how the movie is going to do. I’m not thinking about my career. I’m not thinking about any of these things because I’m in it.” Shooting on set, meanwhile, is fundamentally different. “I go into make-up [and] there may be movie magazines around, which I don’t like very much because I don’t want to be reminded about those kinds of things when I’m making a movie.” Inasmuch as Dafoe seems to resist the ‘cult of the movie star’ when it comes to being an actor, though, it’s inevitable that he cannot always control how he is perceived.

Given the nature of some of the characters the actor has played, I wonder whether other’s perceptions of him, as Willem Dafoe – the person, are shaped by a particular film role. And if so, which characters tend to be referenced the most? “You know, I can tell. I can tell what films people have seen when they approach me.” Because Dafoe has undertaken so diverse a range of roles and films, it’s easy to demarcate one type of movie watcher from another. He says that he often feels that people who watch the higher-pace films have “no awareness of the European movies or the auteur movies, and vice versa. Someone will come up to me and say, ‘I’ve seen all your movies,’ and they’ve probably seen 10%.” That’s normal; it’s a reflection of different tastes. “Spider-Man, The Lighthouse or The Florida Project – those are three distinctly different movies.”

The actor has identified, for example, a middle-aged audience who watched his earlier films before getting caught up in life as they got older; “they stopped watching movies and if they did, they tend to go to the more available, the more commercial. They were less cinephile.” So, there are different camps of the Dafoe-phile (‘fandom’ does not seem to be an appropriate way to describe it). “Sometimes you see people that are stuck in another time of your career because it reflects their viewing habits. People do see you depending on the films they watch and the characters they see.” It’s curious how this then feeds into preconceptions about the kind of person Dafoe might be. “Some people think I’m, you know, some crazy nut. Some people think I’m eccentric. Some think I’m a normal guy. Some people think I’m athletic. Some people think I’m an old guy.”

Dafoe talks compassionately about the encounters people have with him. He recognises that the interaction is not always specifically to do with the actor himself, but rather the characters he plays, in order for people to make sense of themselves. “I am touched by people’s need to make some sort of connection, and when they see actors and films, it connects to some prior feeling or experience they’ve had.” In that moment, “that world in their head came together with that world that was up on the screen.” Talking to Dafoe, however, he seems to embody neither the Green Goblin who lurked in the corner of my bedroom for some time after the release of Spider-Man in 2002 (“yes he is – so behave yourself”), nor does he have the pained visage of van Gogh, battling demons in his latter days, as in At Eternity’s Gate. Instead, wearing black-rimmed glasses and Bose headphones, Dafoe appears to be, well, himself. The actor’s portrayal of van Gogh is one that, nonetheless, leaves a lasting impression.

In Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 biopic of the French painter, Lust for Life, Kirk Douglas takes on the role of the ‘tortured genius’; the artist misunderstood by his peers, only to be discovered in death. The enduring legacy that exists around van Gogh created the appetite for a depiction of the life and suffering of an artist in a film like Lust for Life. But in Dafoe’s portrayal, what is so compelling is not its ‘authentic’ depiction of ‘true’ events, but his haunting portrayal of human feeling. In one scene in which Dafoe’s van Gogh explains how he cut off his ear, it isn’t the uncanny recreation of the artist’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear that makes it such an affecting scene. Rather, it’s Dafoe’s arresting ability to convey a person caught between certainty and confusion with pained restraint.

But by playing a real artist, with whom the world ‘identifies’, some criticism is inevitable. Over the course of a career defined by such a range of characters – real (a motel manager), ‘Real’ (van Gogh and Jesus Christ) and fantastical, where does Dafoe locate and connect with the essence of a character? And how does he decide whether or not to take up a role? “I read a script and I say, “What does the person do? Do I want to do those things? Am I interested in them? Will it be fun? Will I learn something?” 

The pandemic allowed Dafoe the chance to stop temporarily and spend time with his wife, Colagrande, who as a filmmaker and musician has a schedule to rival his own. Dafoe scrambled back to Rome from New York and recalls how volatile and scary those early days of the pandemic were. There was the aggressive jockeying in the run-up to the US election, misinformation surrounding COVID and the point of view that Italy was, besides China, the “worst place in the world to go”. By July, however, Dafoe was able to get back to work, something that he says he is grateful for. The circumstances, though, were different. “The idea before Nightmare Alley [director Guillermo del Toro’s forthcoming carnival-based thriller] of spending two weeks on entering Canada in an apartment unable to leave, having your food delivered to you, was basically like prison – actors’ prison.” 

If the pandemic slowed down Dafoe’s usually busy schedule, the actor is now regathering pace. And Poor Things, based on the 1992 novel of the same name by Alasdair Gray, is one project that is worth keeping an eye out for. “Listen, it was a great experience and Yorgos Lanthimos is a real talent. It’s got a beautiful cast, and you get self-conscious. I don’t want to blow my own horn by association saying how great things are, but it’s very special.” Given the nature of the story, it will be fascinating to see how it is realised on the big screen. Dafoe is, equally, intrigued – but shuts himself up before sharing any potentially revealing details. “Since I just finished, I’m still high off the experience. I’m excited about many things, but this one is high up on the list.” I don’t ask Dafoe whether the rumours are true that he will be resurrecting the Green Goblin for this year’s highly anticipated Spider-Man: No Way Home; he certainly wouldn’t tell, and, for the sake of my younger self, I don’t really want to know. 

 

Credits

Creative Directors · NIMA HABIBZADEH AND JADE REMOVILLE          
Photographer · LUC COIFFAIT          
Fashion Stylist · SAM CARDER          
Grooming · VIRAG MOGYORO
Assistant · ALEXANDER CSOMOR
Interview · ELLIE BROWN
WILLEM DAFOE WEARS PRADA AUTUMN WINTER 2021

Justine Kurland

London’s Huxley Parlour Gallery Presents ‘I Belong To This’ Curated By Photographer Justine Kurland

Curated by contemporary American photographer Justine Kurland, ‘I belong to this’ gathers a group of 17 artists to explore notions of the self, family, death, and private and communal rituals, as part of a declaration of identification, a promise of solidarity, or a blurring of self into multitudes, as inspired by Ariana Reines’s poem ‘Save the World’, after which the exhibition is titled. 

The work presented by the artists constantly refuse an emblematic or fixed identity, and instead, have repurposed their DNA into a limitless family album, resurrected ancestors, and activated psychic space to give shape to their experience. The photographs in the exhibition work collaboratively in resistance to destructive power dynamics by creating new pathways to knowledge in a pact between artist, subject, and viewer. It is through these acts of resistance that we are able to recognise ourselves both through and among others.

The artists include Genesis Báez, Jennifer Calivas, Naima Green, AK Jenkins, Sydney Mieko King, Keli Safia Maksud, Jacky Marshall, Qiana Mestrich, Shala Miller, Cheryl Mukherji, Diana Palermo, Calafia Sanchez- Touzé, Keisha Scarville, Wendy Small, Gwen Smith, Anne Vetter, Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang.

NR Magazine speaks with the featured artists about the inspirations behind their exhibition pieces.

Genesis Báez

How did growing up in both Puerto Rico and Massachusetts shape you as an artist?

It shaped who I am therefore it inherently, even if indirectly, shapes my work. Having roots in two drastically different places opened my mind up at an early age. I developed a curiosity and need to see things from different perspectives. 

You and your mother feature in your piece for the exhibition. Could you talk a bit about your relationship with her?

My mother and I feature in the piece Lifting Water. We lift a heavy glass vessel that is about to overflow with water. When I made this picture, I was thinking about transference, inheritance, and the weights that we collectively carry. My friend once said that she read the image as us removing the water between Massachusetts and Puerto Rico. I like this interpretation! My mother and I like making pictures together. I inherited a relationship to Puerto Rico from her, as she took me back there for the first time when I was three, and then throughout my life. But my work is not about her or our relationship. I also make photographs with many people, both family and extended community.

What do the concepts of motherhood and motherland mean to you and your work?

I don’t think about my work in relation to motherhood, but rather the idea of an origin or belonging, and how these are quite precarious and slippery. What if you don’t have a motherland – can’t go to it, can’t stay in it, or don’t want one? I don’t have a motherland. At times it’s been painful, and other times I don’t want one and it’s a relief! Sometimes, overidentifying with a ‘motherland’ can quickly slip into complicated nationalistic tendencies. I’m more interested in describing the watery, temporal experiences of existing between worlds. I used to yearn to have a clear, grounded origin that I could go to and say, ‘I belong to this.’ Now I lean into the watery places of my belonging. Belonging can be nuanced and certainly extends beyond geography.

Jennifer Calivas

How would you describe the relationship between body, earth and identity within your practice?

It may sound corny, but sometimes I need to be close to the earth to get grounded. In graduate school I was exposed to so much in the way of art and ideas which was wonderful in many ways, but afterwards I wanted to get back to earth so much that I literally went into it. When I am underground for one of these pictures, I can’t see what things look like, so finding out how my body looks when I develop the film is really exciting. I love to see how the earth cracks and forms around me and finding out what new forms have appeared. Seeing these new sand or mud blobs take shape helps me to mess up my own sense of self and for its boundaries to feel less rigid.

What impact did performing this self-burial have on you?

It gave me a rash! All of these pictures were made by the ocean, in the sand or on mud flats. Did you know that the rotting smell of the ocean is caused by tiny microbes doing their part to digest and ferment decaying matter? When I am buried in these pictures, I can feel my body being eaten. In my effort to be still for the photograph, I end up getting consumed. The last time I made one of these images this bacteria made my skin burn and gave my assistant’s silver jewellery a patina. I think I’ve performed my last burial where I’m stuck in the sand and now. I want to move my body around which is what I’m doing in my new work.

What sculptural influences do you take from ecology and your environment?

I grew up on the coast of Maine, spending my time climbing around the shoreline, always poking and prodding at the ground to discover things. I seem to have a limitless love and fascination for this space and by burying myself in it, I get to experience it with all my senses and feel what it’s like below the surface. When I started these pictures, I had death on my mind but realised quickly that below ground is teaming with life, which has made me think about stillness differently.

Also, I am at the mercy of the weather, tides, and light when making these images. I like having to coordinate with nature in this way. There’s not much negotiation involved; I have to follow its lead. This reminds me that I am a part of environmental processes, not separate from them.

AK Jenkins

What was it like for you creating the series ‘Grandma’s Fans’? 

It is very much an ancestral conversation that is happening, along with my own memories of what growing up in the church has instilled in me – how it has shaped, and at times shamed me. My grandparents’ home is still in our family and much of it remains intact. It’s really hard to create new memories in a space like that which has so many markers of presence, both physically and spiritually. It often leads me to enter into a conversation with things that may never be fully answered. It’s like how I still listen to older music and records – there is so much more I understand from them now that we both have more life in the world. The act of revisiting, be it an album or my grandmother’s house, is a practice that allows me to understand changes in meaning overtime. 

What attracted you to working with portraiture?

I would say that specifically, self-portraiture is at the centre of my work right now. This shift happened after I found myself conflicted with the power dynamics and even weight of ‘shooting’ people with the camera. At the same time, we all look at the plethora of images to understand our narrative in the world. I wasn’t witnessing the nuances of my own life; it was like people like me didn’t really exist in image culture. So, imaging the complexity, strength and the love of my existence became obvious and urgent. The work is not speculative, though I’m interested in exploring that moving forward, but I’d say these thoughts, moments, and places I find myself playing with are within the context of my daily life. I appreciate that portraiture gets to the core of humanness, even though people often come to the work through identity, I think really good portraiture penetrates deeper than that. I never have to say queer and Black; you see that when I image myself. But I still do have to make images that speak to conditions of love, desire, belonging and beauty.

In writing about the series, you mention that it is ‘rapt in moments of contemplation and refusal’. How do you feel this relates to your identity as an artist? 

I think it is what we try to do as artists – in making our work we are constantly wrestling with what we give, what we take or leave on the table, as we draw from our realities and imaginations.

Sydney Mieko King

Your work in the exhibition includes archival photographs of your grandmother. Could you talk a bit about your relationship with her?

My grandma lives on San Juan Island in Washington State. My parents, brother and I visited my grandparents there every summer until around 2016. My mother always said that my interest in art came from her. We used to make chalk drawings together on the cement floor of the garage while I ate Push-Ups from the freezer. One summer I was really invested in growing plants, so we tried to plant tulip bulbs near the mailbox and cared for a tomato plant together. My grandmother lived day-to-day and told us very few stories about her past. Most of the time we would watch movies and TV together or take naps on the couch. Every summer we would get into a fight, and I would spend the rest of my visit trying to make it up to her. She was tough in a way that I couldn’t handle; she had the capacity to ignore and not forgive.  

If she were my age, we would be the same size and shape. Her clothes that didn’t fit my mother I now wear. The two-piece outfits, the tie-dyed gown, the house dress that she’d put on when we drove away each summer, waving from the front steps. When I saw her this summer she faded in and out of consciousness. She still made snappy comments to me and my brother, told us we were ‘being mean to grandma’ when we joked with her at the dinner table. That was her old self, the one that loved us and pushed us away. My mother says that she is silent most days now, too tired to move.

You studied Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. Was this where you first became interested in the potential of the body to create new realities and histories?

The old photo labs at Princeton were right next to the ceramics studio, where a lot of sculpture students would make and leave behind their two-part plaster moulds. There were dozens of moulds of vases, mustard containers, wine glasses and other objects. I started photographing the objects I found there, angling the light so that the objects would appear as three-dimensional casts in my resulting images. I was fascinated by the idea that I could change my perception of objects through photography – to create an almost-tangible form when there was only the absence of one. After a while, I started making my own plaster moulds with a variety of materials, mostly to experiment with form. I would mould apples and oranges from the dining hall, blobs of foam insulation and snow procured from just outside the art building. I was fascinated by the way these objects could switch between two states, a shifting in form that I had begun to relate to my own understanding of identity and how it could be portrayed through photography.

How do you navigate the concept of identity through photography and its relationship to the body?

I view the difficulty of portraying the body through photography as a topographical one. It will always be impossible to fully translate and understand a three-dimensional body by transposing it onto a two-dimensional surface. To re-imagine the medium’s relationship to the body, I started bending my prints, later manipulating the surface of the negative to somehow empathise with or mimic the surface of what I was photographing. Thinking of the plaster mould as a form of proto-photography, I later returned to recording the surface of the body, itself.

Making moulds with plaster requires so much stillness – it is a material used for replicating sculptures for educational purposes, for creating ‘death masks’ of the recently-deceased. When I mould myself in plaster, I try to occupy positions that evoke movement and breath. A bend in the stomach, legs wrapped around each other, or the overlapping parts of the body. It becomes an exercise in trying to hold still, and the inevitability of the object falling off my body with each breath I take. The moulds become an archive of my body over time – a way to understand its shifts. Some moulds that I made a year ago no longer fit; sometimes I cannot remember how I created a particular mould and go through an exercise of ‘trying on’ old positions that my body once occupied.

Keli Safia Maksud

What aspects of your work stand out to you as declarations of identification?

The overarching theme in my practice is the politics of identity. I interrogate state narratives and how they are used to manufacture national identities. It is crucial that I give a sense of my background, as it runs hand in hand with my practice. I was born in Kenya to Tanzanian parents of Muslim and Christian faith, making me a Kenyan-Tanzanian-Muslim-Christian. In addition, having only ever attended British, Canadian and American schools, I cannot deny what Frantz Fanon calls, ‘Presence Europeenne’ as a constitutive element of my identity. How does one postulate a Black and/or African self within a language or discourse in which Blackness is absent? It is a result of this fragmentation in my identity that I find an interdisciplinary approach to art making to be the most accurate and naturalist way of making sense of the world.

With the theme of this issue being Identity, I thought it would be interesting to know your thoughts on the relationship between sound and identity.

Identity is tricky, because it is often thought of as being fixed. In my work I am much less interested in fixed notions of identity and more on in-between, hyphenated, and contradictory spaces between identities. I am interested in how things bleed into each other or are in excess of boundaries that we have built around them. As such, sound allows me to explore these interests because it is omnidirectional and cannot be contained. Working from the space of leakage is generative as it is where I can begin to think about questions of connectivity and cross pollination.

Could you talk a bit about the inspirations behind your work in the exhibition?

For the past two years, I have been researching and deconstructing national anthems from various African countries. When African nations gained independence from European colonial rule, they too were motivated by the ethics of self-determination by adopting new national anthems that would speak to the new ideologies of the independent states. These anthems, however, were composed using European musical conventions (notation, language, and instruments) and many were modelled after former colonial powers, thus exposing the contradictory and hybridised nature of postcolonial subject formation where self-determination both mirrors the former colonial powers while also speaking against the former colonial power. Put differently, these new states continued to use European tools of imagining while also rejecting European ideology.

The outcome of this research has ranged from works on paper to deconstructed sound works of various national anthems. The sound piece for this exhibition is a deconstruction of the Algerian national anthem. Here, I was interested in taking an anthem that is quite revolutionary and militaristic and turning it into something that connects and allows for reflection. I am interested in how sound moves through space and how it feels in the body, so this piece begins in a very high sublime range and gradually drops to a very low piano sound which plays back from a subwoofer, which is really felt in the body and ends with this coming together of voices in some form of a chorus.

Jacky Marshall

What inspired you to start working with photograms?

I have always admired Christian Schad’s Schadographs and was inspired to see what compositions I could make myself. My work is an iterative process combining all the elements of my drawing and photography, and taking my drawings into the darkroom and experimenting with new ways to make pictures was a natural process. At first it was just the poppies and ginkgo leaves, then the drawings I had been working on from Zoom life classes were added. I was drawn to the test strips which I could put together and make new collages. 

What parts of your creative process help you navigate your identity?

The act of making pictures and being creative helps me express myself in ways I could not verbally articulate as a child, and probably still now as an adult. I am creating a new world for myself in my work. 

What is it about blurring the boundary between painting and photography that appeals to you?

I am both a painter and a photographer. I like that I can be working on my paintings and drawings that are quick and gestural, and then take them into the darkroom and make another picture using the two processes and even adding more elements to the photograms at the same time, playing with colour through the darkroom process. Painting and drawing with light instead of paint and ink. Everything for me is available to be used and recycled.  

Qiana Mestrich

Born to parents from Panama and Croatia, how do these cultures influence you and your work?

As an artist of mixed heritage, I consider my work to be transcultural in nature, meaning that it combines elements of more than one culture. I never knew my (Croatian) father, so that is a country and culture that is still very foreign to me. Eventually, I would like to use my art as a framework for discovering and connecting more to this Eastern European identity that is in my DNA.

My mother’s homeland of Panama is a very unique place geographically, it being an isthmus in Central America and the site of the canal that most people know it for. Culturally it is a mix of indigenous, European (Spanish colonial) and African influences as the country was an important centre of the trading of enslaved peoples in that region starting in the 1500s. Given this unique history, upwards of 80% of Panamanians are considered to be Black or ‘mixed race’.

Beginning in the 1830s, another wave of Black migrants came to Panama from Caribbean islands like Jamaica and Barbados – this is when my mother’s family settled in Panama. Somehow my mother’s maiden name is Scottish in origin, which we still haven’t traced back, so this cultural multiplicity is everywhere within my family tree. Genealogy is one aspect of my practice.

I’d love to know your thoughts about how you feel identity impacts knowledge sharing and community building – I know these aspects are a key part of your practice.

I first encountered photography as a teenager in the mid-1990s and I never thought twice about the fact that we studied the work of (mostly white male) artists in class. It wasn’t until I got to college where I took 3 years of colour photo and began to question, ‘where are all the Black photographers and why aren’t we studying them in class?’ 

My confidence as a photographer and connection to the medium was formed when I was able to discover (on my own) the works of artists like Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, Andres Serrano and Renee Cox, among other emerging photo-based artists of that time. From there I devoured work by Latin American photographers like Garduno, Bravo, Cravo Neto, Iturbide; obsessed over Japanese photographers like Hosoe, Sugimoto, Moriyama, Miyako; marveled over Black British photographers picturing the diaspora in Europe like Shonibare, Pollard, Fani Kayode, Barnor….the list goes on.

Essentially, I was determined to educate myself about ‘photography’s other histories’ and that is how my blog, Dodge & Burn, was founded. The blog was initially a place for me to digitally hold my knowledge, but then it became a platform for the many photographer interviews I published. It connected me to a global photo community and judging by the feedback I got from my peers and email correspondence from curators, students, and educators, it was something we all needed.

Your piece in the exhibition includes your son – could you talk a bit about your relationship and the inspiration behind the work?

Winston is the oldest of my two children. He’s the son I wished for, and he was so excited to come into this world that he was born a month early. I literally went into labour during my baby shower! Parents can be biased towards their offspring of course but not a day goes by when I don’t marvel at his presence, and I am validated by the many compliments I get from other adults who know him.

The sequence of images I’m showing in the Huxley Parlour group show were taken during an impromptu dance session (which Winston often breaks into) while I was shooting some still life photos in my makeshift outdoor studio on the deck of our home. One of his favourite songs came on and he started doing this dance called the Orange Justice – his limbs were just cutting the summer air and I found it curious how his head just hung down the whole time – a position not typical when performing that dance. 

The sun was blazing above us, and our home’s vinyl siding was the perfect reflector. I fired off multiple frames as I often do when photographing my children because I have to make every millisecond count before they tire of my requests to pose. I was trying to record Winston’s energy, this ecstasy he was in.

In interpreting the spirit of this work, I’m curious about the various (art) historical references that a viewer might apply to these photographs – from the religious (crucifixion) to the profane (lynching) to the technical capture of motion (Muybridge) but ultimately it reminds me of the transcendent experiences of African rituals throughout the diaspora that defy time and space.

Does motherhood influence your creative process at all?

Mothering has influenced my creative process in the sense that it made being an artist more urgent. Caring for two children fuelled my desires to care for and nurture the artist within me.

Shala Miller

How do you feel like your pieces in the exhibition explore the concept of identity?

I believe there is much to be seen and heard within the quotidian, and there are both simple and dynamic poetics of everyday living. Poetics that continue to help me understand the beauty and pain of Black femme adulthood, which in turn helps me understand the world around me. My entire artistic practice is bred from this belief. ‘Play’ is not just an image of myself, a Black female bodied person, beneath a tree and hanging from a tree. It is an image in conversation with my history as a Black female bodied person. It is an image about resistance and finding grounding.

What inspired you to work across text and image?

Working with text and image has been a sort of touchstone of my practice over the years. It’s what led me to video installation and writing for moving image in general. I try to use text as an extension of image making, not separate from it. In ‘Play’ specifically, I was also thinking about ethnographic field work as this image is a part of an ethnographic study I’ve been doing about the epigenetics of trauma and my relationship with my mother. The text beneath the images is a kind of poetry but then also field notes.

How important is transformation to you and your practice?

What gives steam to the engine of my practice and my personhood is being devoted to discovery and being a student of life. And I think with discovery comes transformation, or a kind of repositioning. And that is the sort of thing that I strive for in both my practice and my life.

Cheryl Mukherji

Your work for the exhibition explores transgenerational trauma through interventions in the family album. Does healing play an important part in your practice?

Healing plays as much part in my practice and life as it does with anyone. If the question leans more towards knowing if I have healed (in any way) as part of my practice, I would not have an answer to that mainly because, right now, I am interested in naming things, articulating feelings, and ideas (which is its own way of healing, I believe) more than rushing to fix them.

Are family and psychic inheritance important aspects of your identity as an artist?

Family, transgenerational trauma, and inheritance are recurring themes in my current work which makes them an important aspect of my identity too, because my work is semi-autobiographical. I don’t identify as an artist who is only concerned with and restricted to exploring these themes, but they do shape both me and my work in huge ways.

Diana Palermo

How does spirituality influence your identity as an artist?

Trust and faith are required for both. Being a heavily experimental process-based artist, I find that my fluidly intuitive relationship with materials and the unknown are a bridge. Personally, I will have moments where I feel like I’m conjuring a ghost while working in the darkroom, and moments when the by-products of spiritual rituals feel like sculptures. They influence and inform each other.

What was the inspiration behind the pieces chosen for the exhibition?

In the last year, I’ve thought a lot about the element of fire as an archetype in my life. I’ve been interrogating different symbolic meanings in direct and cryptic ways. I’ve been particularly curious about fire as both creator and destroyer. The poems in the two photographic prints are informed by these inquiries. 

The long exposure lumen print (Incantation 11) is a diaristic document centred around the unknowns of Covid. I was quarantined out of my studio at Columbia University from March 17th until 26th August 2020. The exposure of that print measures that amount of time. I set up the conditions by writing a poem on a sheet of acetate and using it as a transparency by placing it on photo paper and leaving it on the floor for almost 6 months. I don’t think I knew how long it was going to sit alone in that room. In many ways it records my absence and created itself. 

The other piece (Incantation 9) is a poem drawn with a flashlight while kneeling on the darkroom floor. The prints were then developed, and the image was revealed. For me, it speaks to the slow emergence of something new when fire and light are wielded in a balanced and intentioned manner. 

Do you have any rituals as part of your creative process?

I am a pretty methodical person, but when it comes to actually creating the work, it can be somewhat chaotic. I find that my studio set-up and clean-up are extremely ritualistic. I place certain objects and materials in a way that would make me want to use them when I enter or leave. Though the parameters of the pieces are planned, the actions are frenetic and leave a lot of room for fortuity. I find this is much like the relationship one has with spiritual rituals.

How do you see your work as a declaration of identification?

Claiming space as a queer person in otherwise confined spiritual traditions is a declaration. I’ve done a great deal of work both internally and academically unearthing the spirits and stories of queer mystics, gods, and saints. My work is a visceral reclamation of religious archetypes and stories through intuitive actions. Though many of them are created in the dark or in an absence, they are presented in the light with all their history and power like a relic in a museum or chapel.

 

Calafia Sanchez- Touzé

Could you talk a bit about the inspirations behind your series of images in the exhibition? 

The photographs in the show are about the feeling of premature grief. A feeling I’ve long associated with my father and brother. In Mexico, I was surrounded with images of suffering, violence, and martyrdom, mostly in a religious context. I started thinking about how those images might have affected my father as a child and his understanding of his own mortality and sickness. I used crime photographs taken from the local newspaper in Michoacán as references for my portraits, as well as iconic religious postures to position my subjects. 

Has exploring aspects of the body and your family always been an interest of yours? 

I think my study of the body has a lot to do with my fascination with the ways skin can make us think about death. I make images where skin is plump and smooth, folding on itself, and juxtapose it with moments where skin is older and fragile, where it becomes a thin layer that could tear at any moment. Skin shows the body’s proximity to death in its capacity (or lack thereof) to seal the inside from the outside, but it can also show nothing at all.

Gwen Smith

What inspires you to work between photography and painting?

I’m a vessel filled with pictures—sometimes the photographs that I generate are transformed into paintings or collages, and other times they maintain their shape as photographs. This fluidity of media bears traces of my own fugitive existence, the way that I connect my lived experience to a greater genealogy which crosses lines of colour, nationality, and family. I create proof of my own existence through my relation to others- the artwork is my evidence.

How important is archival imagery to you and your practice? Does it help ground your sense of identity at all?

Essentially, I am an archivist: I accumulate images, photographs of family and those who have made me who I am, shots of artworks that have struck me, and use them to chronicle meaning in my life. These images connect to one another, forming threads of belonging and selfhood through a labyrinth winding around the complications of dissociation and Blackness.

‘These artists mark an intractable this. The lens points, more like an ear than an index finger, in the direction of what is felt rather than seen.’ – Justine Kurland

The exhibition runs until October 16th, 2021. 

Discover more here huxleyparlour.com

Remi Wolf

“At times it did feel like a bit of an overshare, but in the end I’m happy that I ended up telling my story.”

Following the release of her debut album, Juno, on 15 th October, I caught up with Californian singer, Remi Wolf, over Zoom. It’s early in the morning when we speak, but Wolf is excited to tell me about the photoshoot for NR. “There were loads of crows that were pinned to my body, did you hear about this?” she asks me. And sure, I click through some behind-the-scenes shots and there’s Wolf, side-eyeing a crow to humorous effect. Remi Wolf seems to be turning conventional pop on its head – introducing an eccentric bag of songwriting and sounds into what has long felt like a sanitised, sterile space. It’s like the Gen Z kid who grew up listening to Natasha Bedingfield before discovering MGMT as a teen went on to become a singer – which is, of course, the case. Wolf grew up in Palo Alto, where her early life was largely spent training as a competitive skier (she represented the US twice at the Junior Olympics). She quit skiing in her mid-to-late teens and turned her hand to music; Wolf became one half of a duo whose name was styled off Hall & Oates and appeared briefly, age 17, on American Idol. But it was after meeting multi-instrumentalist, Jared Solomon, at an after-school music class that Wolf’s musical vision truly began to take shape. Almost a decade on, Wolf and Solomon, aka solomonophonic, are regular collaborators, with the latter co-producing the singer’s debut album.

Like Wolf’s signature kaleidoscopic wardrobe, Juno is maximalist blend of bubblegum bops and funky beats. The record is infectiously catchy from the outset. Album opener, Liquor Store, demands to be sung along to, despite the fact the subject matter is a raw reflection of getting sober in the midst of the pandemic. It’s the kind of introduction that sets the tone for what’s to come, even if the rest of Juno dips in and out of different styles. Wolf’s debut album is a bit like a bag of pick and mix – some songs are sweeter than others and there are some juicy gems (in the form of hilarious pop culture references to, say, Billy Bob and Angelina) to be found. The album’s title takes its name and cover inspiration from the singer’s French bulldog, who Wolf adopted during the pandemic. Her debut follows on from two dog-titled EPs: 2019’s You’re a Dog! and I’m Allergic to Dogs! from last June. The song Photo ID from her sophomore EP is dazzling pop that, perhaps to no surprise, became a viral hit on TikTok. Earlier this year, Wolf collaborated with fellow Gen-Z sensation, Dominic Fike, to re-record Photo ID as part of We Love Dogs!, a remix compilation of her two previous EPs. With appearances and remixes from the likes of Beck, Hot Chip, Little Dragon, Nile Rodgers and many more, it’s safe to say Remi Wolf has already found her footing as a connoisseur of eclectic, experimental sounds.

Congratulations on the release of Juno. How are you feeling?

I feel tired, so tired, but really happy that it’s out. I feel this freedom that now I can kind of go off and do whatever I want because I’ve been doing work for this album for the past year and a half almost. So yeah – it feels good. It feels good to be done with it. I feel like I can move on to a new of phase of creativity and writing.

Am I right in thinking you started working on the album just as things with the pandemic really kicked off?

Kind of, I guess. The writing process really started more in November [2020]. That’s when I started writing the bulk of the songs; I wrote Liquor Store, wyd, Grumpy Old Man and Anthony Kiedis all within three days in November. And I think that really, those four songs decided the direction of the rest of the album. But then, I ended up going back [to] songs I wrote previously before those that ended up fitting in with the album. Songs like Sally – I wrote that three years ago almost. There’s little bits and pieces from different times, but mainly the middle of the pandemic was where the bulk of the album was made.

Did you have any expectations of what your debut album would be like?

I didn’t expect anything from the debut album. I kind of went into it and was just like, whatever comes out, comes out. I didn’t have a vision for it in that sense. I was just trying to be as honest as I [could] with the writing and trust my intuition on what sounds good and what sounds I like. And I tend to write songs that are kind of funky and pretty driven by drums. We used a lot of electric guitar. I think the instrumentation is a reflection of what we were feeling at the time. But yeah – no – I didn’t put any expectations on what the album was going to be. It is a bunch of different things all in one.

Listening to Juno, it does feel like a journey through so many different vibes. And it’s difficult to choose my favourite aspect of the album. So maybe this is an impossible question for you, but what’s your favourite song on Juno?

I really – I do love all of them. I like them all equally. Recently, I’ve been appreciating wyd because I haven’t heard that in four or five months ‘cause it was finished a while ago. But now that [the album] is streaming, it’s very accessible, so I can go and listen without having to dig through Dropbox or whatever! I love Liquor Store; I feel like Liquor Store was the first song on the album that I was like, “Okay, this is the start of the album.” I think it’s the thesis of the album, and I loved writing it. 

The subject matter of Liquor Store is quite personal. How does it feel to write and share that song with the world?

It is quite personal. I think I felt like I really had to share the story, or else the meaning of that song would have been completely lost. And you know, that is what I went through during the pandemic and felt like I had to be honest. If I left that out, it would have felt like I was lying to people about what was actually going on in my life. And this album exists because of the pandemic and my sobriety – it would have been a completely different album [otherwise]. At times it did feel like a bit of an overshare, but in the end I’m happy that I ended up telling my story.

There are so many pop culture references in Juno as well as elements that recall Natasha Bedingfield and the fun, bright sounds of the early 2000s. Did you always want to incorporate these kinds of references, or is that something you’ve picked up over time as the 2000s have gotten further away?

I mean I used to love Natasha Bedingfield, I really did. I think a lot of those references made their way in subconsciously, or as a result of me having listened to that music as a kid. Like truthfully, I didn’t go into making this record [thinking] “Okay, I’m going to reference this and this and this. It’s going to sound like the early 2000s.” It was a very organic thing that happened that I didn’t really think about. I don’t know, I think when you make music and you’ve been listening to music your whole life, things you like – melody ideas or whatever – end up coming out. 

I think during the pandemic, we all had this yearning to listen to music that made us feel comforted. I found myself listening to a lot of music from when I was younger during the pandemic. Maybe my subconscious was trying to make music that made me feel comforted, and because of that, we referenced a lot of early 2000s, late ‘90s sounds. But I don’t know; the pop culture references, they just slid their way in there as part of my songwriting. It just kind of happened, you know? 

What do you want your fanbase and listeners to get from hearing your songs? Beyond good, fun songs…

I want them to get whatever they want out of it. I honestly don’t want to put what I want them to feel or think about it on them, because I don’t think my music should exist in that way. Like, I didn’t make it thinking, “Oh my God, everybody needs to listen to this and feel freedom!” I want people to get what they get what they get from the music, and hopefully what they get is positivity and it helps them, I don’t know, get through their day. That’s why I listen to music; I listen to get through the day and feel happy – or feel sad. Just to feel something; so I hope they just feel something from it. 

Your European tour starts in a few weeks. That must be really exciting?

I think I fly over on November 5th and I start in Spain and then go all around. I’m very excited for it, it’s gonna be very fun. I just finished a month-long tour about a week and a half ago now. And it’s so amazing being able to actually see my fans in real life and see who they are, what they like, what lyrics they like and what lyrics they really scream out. It’s been a learning process, but it’s amazing. 

I think people are just so excited to go back to shows that there’s this energy for live music that I have never really seen. People, including myself, aren’t taking the live show for granted as much – and people want to go really hard. I’ve noticed there’s less phones; people want to be in the moment and I think that’s so cool. It’s such a community-building opportunity. And after some of my shows, I see fans get to know each other and become friends because of my music and that’s so cool. So yeah, I’m excited. I’m a little nervous, but definitely excited. 

What are you most excited to perform?

I keep talking about Liquor Store, but it’s really fun! What else do I have? Sexy Villain seems to be a crowd-pleaser. And I’m excited to perform Street You Live On – I think that one is going to be really fun to do. I want people to cry during that song. Now I’m putting this on the audience. They can do whatever they want, but I think it’d be fun if we all cried together…

It must be weird when you’re performing and seeing which lines people collectively sing, or shout. Are you ever surprised by which songs people really know?

It surprised me a little bit with my song, Disco Man, that people really love the chorus, but they also love the lines “And he’s wasted all his money, but he’s never been a waste of time”. I was just shocked at how many people knew that song to be honest, I had no idea. And then people really love the “ain’t no Chuck-E-Cheese in Los Feliz” line from Quiet on Set, which part of me expected ‘cause it’s really fun to say. But they really love it, they really scream that shit. I’m excited to see which lines they pull from the new songs I just dropped and the ones I dropped just before the album, like Anthony Kiedis. I haven’t performed that live yet, so I’m excited to see how that goes. 

Juno is out there now and you’re about to go on tour. What’re the next steps for you beyond that?

I mean, I think a lot of next year is going to be just touring, writing new stuff and trying to push the boundaries with writing again. I think that I’ve come out of making this album a very different writer, and I want to just keep developing [that]. I want to find a hobby that I can really put my time into because I need something else besides music.

Maybe I’ll start playing baseball or something. Maybe I’ll come out with a line of baseballs or baseball bats? I also want to start making clothes that I can wear and that my friends can wear as well. I think that would be a really fun adventure because I used to sew when I was younger and I kind of want to get back into it. 

I feel like that would be an obvious thing for you to do, given how much attention is paid to your style. You could have a little clothing range for your future tours.

Yeah, exactly. 

Credits

PHOTOGRAPHER · MIKAYLA JEAN MILLER
CREATIVE DIRECTORS · NIMA HABIBZADEH AND JADE REMOVILLE
FASHION STYLIST · SHAOJUN CHEN
SET DESIGNER · YAO LIANG
MAKEUP ARTIST · FRANCIE TOMALONIS HAIR STYLIST · RACHEL LITA
PHOTOGRAPHER ASSISTANTS · CHRIS LLERINS AND BROOKE CARLSON
CREATIVE ASSISTANT · ETHAN PENN
INTERVIEW · ELLIE BROWN
SPECIAL · THANK YOU TO KATERINA MARKA AT UNIVERSAL MUSIC
THIS FEATURE IS PART OF VOLUME FOURTEEN THE IDENTITY ISSUE

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