Candela Capitán and Paul McCarthy

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

NR 19 Detour · 2025
Published · Print Page 063

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

Where Does a Body End

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

Candela Capitan Do you remember I called you once?

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

CC I’m in Barcelona!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CC What made you come back to performing?

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

CC And why did you stop?

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

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

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

CC What? I don’t remember this piece?

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

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

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

CC I do too. It’s a proper ritual.

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

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

PMC Do you usually work with the same dancers?

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

PMC Did you rehearse for this one?

CC No, no rehearsal. We just did it.

PMC So, when do you rehearse something?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you working on something new right now?

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

PMC Cows?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CC Yeah, exactly—they become the product.

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

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

PMC Let’s stay in touch.

In order of appearance

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

Daniel Arnold and Donna Ferrato

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

NR 19 Detour · 2025
Published · Print Page 144

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

Dealing with the World as a Collectible Surface

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DF You didn’t know how friendly I was?

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

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

DA Perfect coincidence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DF Without lust, there’s no human sexuality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DA Was she showing you the tattoo on her back?

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

DA How does that part happen?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In order of appearance

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

Courtesy and Toxe

Posted on 15 de April de 202527 de April de 2025 by nr

NR 19 Detour · 2025
Published · Print Page 012

Feature · Courtesy and Toxe
Words · Courtesy and Toxe In Conversation mediated by Andrea Bratta

Scandinavian Connection with Courtesy and Toxe

DJs, producers and multi-hyphenate Courtesy and Toxe dive into a warm, free-flowing conversation, spanning from the interplay between public architecture and sound to the Dutch Golden Age’s visual storytelling, weaving through the Danish art scene—and, of course, the pulse of music. A meeting of minds where genres blur, influences collide, and creative instincts take center stage.

Toxe I started making music when I was really young—around 15. My brother got me Ableton back then and really pushed me to start. He was the one who initially got me into it, but after a while, he stepped back, and I was able to explore and discover things on my own. My latest album leans heavily into lyrics and singing, which is something new for me. But I’m not looking to stop with music itself; I’m always finding ways to build on it. I also recently graduated with a degree in architecture, and I think that mindset—of constantly adding layers and depth—applies to everything I do.

Courtesy I read that both your parents are artists, which, honestly, made me a bit jealous.

Toxe They’re very local artists in Gothenburg, where I’m from—and actually, I’m in Gothenburg right now. My dad’s a sculptor, and my mom does a bit of everything, though lately, she’s been making costumes for theater. They both work a lot with scenography and public art projects.

Courtesy This feels like a very Scandinavian thing. In the Danish art scene, a lot of young artists I know are involved in public sculptures and similar projects. But in Germany, none of my artist friends or anyone from the scene here would ever do something like a town hall sculpture. In Scandinavia, contemporary artists take part in these traditions, due to the funding and cultural focus.

Toxe That’s probably true, I think for many public building projects here there is always part of the budget set aside for public art or something of a requirement. I like public art in the same way i like pop music, it’s for the people and more integrated into everyday life where it can really make big impact.

Courtesy There’s this Danish artist, Poul Gernes, who was a 1960s provocateur. He did a lot of school and hospital decorations, as well as some iconic public commissions. One of his most famous works is a building in Copenhagen called the Palads. It’s this pastel pink cinema right in the middle of the city—anyone who’s taken the train into Copenhagen would recognize it.The building itself is kind of controversial. It was originally an old station building, probably built around 1900 or earlier, and it had that classic architecture of the time. When it became a cinema, they decided to do this big PR stunt—they completely covered the building in construction materials so no one could see it and then commissioned Gernesto to transform it. He painted it this bold, almost garish pastel pink and many other off colors that looked absolutely wild. When they revealed it, it caused a huge stir. Something like that would never happen today in a Scandinavian city—they’d be much more cautious. But back then, it was a major statement. Now, they’re planning to tear it down, which is bittersweet. I’ve been involved in a project documenting the building for a book. I wasn’t doing traditional architectural photography, since that’s not my thing, but I was capturing portraits of the building.

Toxe You’re also a photographer, right?

Courtesy I do photography as part of my art practice, but not in the sense of being a photographer, if that makes sense. This project is an example of the kind of town hall or public art commissions that feel so distinctly Scandinavian.

Toxe I hadn’t really thought about it specifically as a Scandinavian thing, but it’s probably true. Even though I’m very different from my parents in what we make and how it looks, I think they’ve definitely influenced me—particularly in terms of working with space and spatial ideas. They’re very sculptural and focused on things like architecture or engaging with existing spaces and places in the city. I think that influence really shaped me, more than anything else.

Courtesy Why did you study architecture?

Toxe When the pandemic hit, I thought, This is the perfect time to study. I’d always wanted to study at some point, but, you know how it is—when you’re DJing and working on projects, it’s hard to find the time to stop and do something like that. The timing just worked out. So, in 2021, I moved to Amsterdam to study, and I spent the last three or four years there. I just finished this summer. Did you study?

Courtesy I studied a few different things but didn’t finish most of them. I did complete a bachelor’s at the conservatory, though. Otherwise, I spent some time studying psychology and cultural studies— art history and similar topics—at a master’s level, but I didn’t finish. But it’s fine..You’re not gonna get many jobs from reading Judith Butler or Foucault.

Toxe It’s a good addition to what you’re making, similarly to the way I studied architecture. It wasn’t like a classic, technical school. It was more of an art school, you know? We read a lot about architectural theory, and people were exploring all kinds of things. It felt less strict—more like something you could add to any art practice, or even use if you wanted to be a writer or do research. It was very open in that way.

Courtesy I think one of the first art history books I read was Gombrich’s The Story of Art. It kind of ends up being the story of architecture and art: Since the Renaissance, all the artists were architects too. You can’t really talk about one without the other—the influence is so intertwined, with the same people designing buildings and creating art. So unless you go to a really technical school, those two things are kind of unavoidable—they’re just linked together.

Toxe Of course, totally—I fully agree. It feels like such a valuable thing to have studied. There’s so much interesting reading that really adds to how you see the world.

Courtesy How was it to write lyrics for your album?

Toxe Um, I think writing lyrics is probably the newest part of my whole music-making process. Singing and using my voice is something I’ve always done, even before this album. Like, I’m always humming or singing when I make melodies or harmonize—it’s just a tool I use when I produce. But this is the first time I’ve actually put my voice directly into the production, so that part felt more natural. The lyrics, though—that’s what’s really new for me. I didn’t originally plan for them to be in Swedish; it just kind of happened. I think there are a lot of sounds in Swedish that fit my voice really well. Plus, I have this strange, awkward relationship with the language because I haven’t lived in Sweden since I was 18. My Swedish feels very simple, very teen-like, and I actually like that awkwardness. It works for this kind of poppy, teeny-sounding record. The lyrics are simple and repetitive, and I really like how that turned out. I feel like this is just my first attempt, though, and I want to do more of it. I’ve always loved paying attention to lyrics when I listen to music, and now it feels like this whole new world has opened up. But yeah, lyric writing is definitely the most awkward part for me. It’s also what I struggle with the most, but I like that. I like when something feels a little awkward, difficult, or uncomfortable. It’s a good challenge. Did you sing or write lyrics before?

Courtesy I have an awful singing voice, so that’s never gonna happen. But this is the first record I’ve done with lyrics—not my voice, but still. When I started working on the album, I wanted to include lyrics, so I started paying a lot more attention to poetry. I was reading a lot and kind of absorbed that. I’ve had this idea for a while, though—that I wanted to collaborate with writers I know. Not songwriters, but friends who are art critics, artists with writing practices, or authors. This album felt like the perfect opportunity to make that happen. For example, I commissioned a text from Sofia Defino Leiby—she’s an American artist, a painter, but she also writes and released a book last year. I gave her a theme to work with, which was breadcrumbing. You know, when you’re dating someone or in a situationship, and they’re just giving you the bare minimum—little breadcrumbs—to keep you hooked. I had this idea for the first song, gave Sofia the concept, and she wrote a longer text for it. Then I worked with a Singaporean singer Sophie Joe, she’s this really technically amazing singer—and we edited the text together into the song. I did something similar with the Danish author Lucia Odoom. I asked her to write a song as well, and then I edited it down to fit. It was a really interesting process.

Toxe So they all kind of just wrote a whole text, and then you edited it down?

Courtesy They wrote a whole text, and then I edited it. I worked closely with the vocalists, recording them in my studio and shaping the final piece. Of course, I also wrote all the music. I did this with four different writers for the album, so you end up with these longer texts that sit somewhere between songs and poetry

Toxe There are so many ways to work with words and music—it’s really exciting. Even doing something like that, or writing for others, feels like it would be so much fun. It’s like this whole new world that’s opened up, and I’m really excited about it.But for me, compared to what you’re describing, the way I made my new album was pretty different. I just hummed nonsense over the songs first, like placeholder sounds, and then I translated that into words. It wasn’t this thing where you start with a full text and then shape it into a song, or chop it up and structure it. It was more about fitting real words into the nonsense sounds I was already making.

Courtesy What was the name of that beautiful Scottish band that used nonsense lyrics a lot?

Toxe Cocteau Twins? Yeah, I mean, I guess that band just kept it that way—leaving it as nonsense sounds. But I think a lot of people’s process starts like that. You kind of just sing nonsense. For some people, it’s very much like, “I’m writing a poem, and then I’m putting it into a song,” or, “I’m freestyling words as I go.” For me, it was really hard to just freestyle words. I think it’s because I’m also thinking a lot like a producer. It makes more sense for me to hum things first, and then construct the words afterward. It’s kind of a mix: it’s intuitive because I’m just singing freely, but the word aspect feels very deliberate and organized—like a producer’s approach.

Courtesy Do you work very much in the grid as a producer? Like, in terms of 4/4 timing and the way you compose—how structured are your songs?

Toxe Yeah, I think so. My songs usually have a clear structure, but they evolve and change in different ways. I wouldn’t say I’m too rigid, but I’m definitely structured. I’ve never been the kind of person who had a lot of instruments around me when making music. I’ve always worked on my laptop, so I never really jammed with people or recorded live instruments. I guess that naturally makes my process more “griddy.” Adding a human voice does make things a bit more fluid, but in general, my approach is pretty structured. I did make a soundtrack for a movie once, though, and that was very different. It involved a lot of field recordings and creating ambiances, more about capturing moods than following a strict grid. It was for a small film my friend made and something I released on PAN Records a few years ago. That was the first time I really stepped outside of that grid-focused approach, but in general, my work is very laptop-based and structured. What about you? How do you approach it?

Courtesy No, it’s all over the place for me. I work with a lot of musicians, and it’s kind of complicated for them to work with the material I make because it’s so disjointed. Even for the singers, it’s probably a bit of a nightmare, but we figure it out in the end. I don’t really stick to a set grid, and a lot of the basslines aren’t in 4/4—like, they end up being kind of poly-rhythmic without me intending for it to be that way. It’s just what sounded good at the moment. The basslines, for instance, won’t be in 4/4, which makes mixing tricky for some dj’s. Some songs on the album, I think, sound really great like that, but it doesn’t always translate well if you’re someone like a DJ using the loop function to mix in. It just won’t work because everything is kind of going over an awkward number of bars. The length of the vocals or different instrumental parts doesn’t line up the way you’d expect, which makes it hard to mix in a conventional way.

Toxe I get what you mean—it’s not like I’m producing or making songs with the club or mixing in mind either, or even how it’s going to sound on speakers. It’s more about what feels right in the moment.

Courtesy And what about your new album, Toxe2?

Toxe It just kind of happened, really. I initially wanted to do a self-titled album because it feels like my first, and more personal”. But the title actually came about because of the artwork I created. I was really into movie logos and entertainment media—those flat, logo-style texts that capture the emotion and story of a film or game. So I started creating a logo for the album, just for the sake of having one, and it turned into something that felt right, which then became the album name.

Courtesy It for sure streamlines questions of authorship! [laughs] I did an EP called The Violence of the Mood Board, which plays with the idea of authorship and critique. If you’ve ever seen mood boards—whether for fashion, a photoshoot, or some creative project—you’ve probably noticed how they often appropriate images from photographers, visual artists, and other sources without any credit. A friend of mine, an art critic, Jeppe Ugelvig, wrote an essay, which touches on how the fashion industry tends to appropriate images from artists and incorporate them into fashion mood boards or campaigns without giving credit. But the critique goes both ways: the imagery used in the EP artwork from that record came from Sofia Defino Leiby, a visual artist and painter who makes collages and sometimes appropriates imagery from fashion. It highlights this reciprocal relationship between art and fashion, where both sides borrow and recontextualize without clear ownership. In the context of music, particularly dance music, the conversation around authorship, sampling, and originality is always complicated. It’s an ongoing discussion that doesn’t really hold much weight, but it’s still something I find fascinating. Fashion, too, is full of contradictions—it’s a space where appropriation is widespread and accepted, yet often ignored. It’s all part of this broader critique I’m interested in exploring, not because I’m particularly invested in fashion, but because it’s a field that’s deeply messed up in its own way. I’ve worked with smaller brands that I’m friends with, where I made music specifically for them, and I consider those collaborations more artistic. Then there are the situations where I’ve been paid to have my music used in a fashion show or ad. But the worst part is when bigger fashion brands steal your music—they’ll use it in their shows, and when they post the video online, they’ll change the music just enough to make it hard to prove legally. It’s a really shady move, and unfortunately, it’s something that happens all the time. It’s just part of the gross side of the industry.

Toxe I’ve only had stuff where people buy my music for runway shows, not really commissions. So, I don’t think I have a deeper relationship with fashion in that way, not really.

Courtesy Yeah, I get that. It feels like fashion’s kind of stuck right now, especially with the big houses just doing the same thing—studio shoots with celebrities, no real creativity. A few years ago, there was more excitement around it, but now it’s like everything’s watered down, even from brands like Balenciaga, where it feels more like behind-the-scenes stuff than actual fashion. It’s only the small, up-and-coming brands that feel fresh and interesting, but the industry as a whole doesn’t seem to be pushing boundaries at the moment. I wanted to know—what did you end up writing the lyrics about? Just going back to that, what are the songs about? Anything in particular?

Toxe Well, I think the general themes are very much like love songs, and also just isolation and loneliness. A lot of it reflects that phase of my life where I was just alone a lot, especially in Amsterdam. I didn’t really have a private life there, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing because I like being alone a lot. But yeah, the topics really revolve around that—isolation and those feelings.

Courtesy Unrelated question, but do you like Dutch art? I recently fell in love again with the old Flemish masters, like Jan van Eyck, that’s why I am asking. I was at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin recently, I go there often actually, and they have some great Dutch painters, along with Renaissance pieces, like the Italians and others. I really enjoy painting a lot. As for architecture, is there a particular architect or movement you’re into? I’ve been reading a book recentlythat explores architecture and politics in Germany from 1918 to 1945. It focuses especially on the Bauhaus movement and the Nazi response to it, and how architecture became so politicized in Germany. It’s really intense, especially considering recent events in Germany. But I love architecture because it can tell you a lot about a city. You can even see when a city was bombed, just by looking at how much modern architecture there is. You can also learn a lot about a city’s political history by which buildings have managed to survive.

Toxe It’s hard to say if I have a specific favorite architect or movement, but over the past year, I’ve been reading a lot of Beatriz Colomina, if you’re familiar with her. She’s an architectural theorist, and her work focuses more on the relationship between mass media and architecture. It’s been really interesting, especially in terms of understanding how the two—media and architecture—interact and shape our perceptions of space. She talks about this a lot in her book Publicity and Privacy, where she compares the work of architects like Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos, analyzing their different practices. Later, she shifts focus to modernism and mass media, particularly the transformation of domestic space. She explores how buildings, once transparent and open, have become spaces that are now staged for representation, and how we’ve become experts in crafting our own public personas. Colomina dives deeply into privacy, examining how our intimate spaces—the home, personal life—have become increasingly public. We’re all constantly exposed to representations of other people’s private lives, especially in today’s digital age. For example, I can see your house in the background here, on Zoom, and we all now live in a world where our homes are often seen as a backdrop for our online selves. We’re more exposed to curated representations of spaces, like in movies or social media, than to the actual physical spaces themselves. What interests me most is how this affects how we perceive and interact with space. We live in an age where the domestic space is both staged for online consumption and yet made to appear intimate, personal. It’s like we’re living in a movie set, framing and presenting our surroundings for an audience, but at the same time, this display of intimacy can be flattened, reduced to signifiers—symbols of our lives rather than their true essence. It’s fascinating how the domestic becomes a kind of branding tool, where we curate and perform intimacy for an online audience.

Courtesy I just finished Understanding a Photograph by John Berger, and he explores this really interesting distinction between commercial photography and private photography. What’s fascinating is how these two have completely merged now, especially with social media. The purpose of both has shifted, and it’s so relevant today. His perspective really adds to how we think about the act of capturing moments and their meaning. It reminds me of Susan Sontag’s writings on photography as well. Both she and Berger, contemporaries in their time, were essentially in conversation about media theory and the staging of images. Like, photography has always been a performance in a way—there’s no such thing as an “authentic” photograph. Every image is an interpretation or edit of a moment. And that’s why I think it’s so uncomfortable to have my photo taken. It’s not just a snapshot of me; it’s someone else’s aesthetic or interpretation of me in that moment. It’s their perspective imposed on me, which is a strange and unsettling feeling. I think people often believe there’s some kind of inherent truth in a photograph that doesn’t actually exist. It’s more of a constructed narrative—every photo tells a story, but it’s never a completely accurate reflection of reality. It’s like every image has been filtered through the lens of someone else’s view.

Toxe Yeah, exactly. It’s fascinating how this has evolved. We’ve always been staging ourselves in some way, whether through portraits or still lifes in historical paintings, where possessions and settings were carefully chosen to present a certain image or status. But now, in the age of social media, it’s like that process is happening in real-time, constantly being updated and shared. The line between what’s real and staged is so blurred. It’s almost like authenticity is no longer a fixed concept—it’s become performative in itself. The act of presenting your life, your home, your possessions, and even your emotions online is a performance, but it’s also embraced as “authentic.” It’s not about hiding the fact that you’re performing; it’s about making the performance feel genuine, relatable, or aspirational. Everyone is curating their persona, but at the same time, that curation is seen as real, as part of who they are. It’s a strange paradox, right? The performance becomes its own form of truth. And in this digital age, we’ve all become experts at shaping and performing these narratives about ourselves.

Courtesy That shift in how authenticity is viewed is so interesting, especially in creative fields like music. Ten years ago, there was so much emphasis on being “authentic” or “original,” as if it was a standard to strive for. Musicians were expected to have their own voice, and if you weren’t presenting something unique or deeply personal, it felt like you weren’t really succeeding. But now, as you said, it’s almost like that concept has been diluted, to the point where it’s not even about striving for authenticity—it’s more about how you present yourself, the world you build around your art. Now, it’s about the whole package—creating a brand, a persona, a narrative that feels coherent, whether or not it’s “authentic” in the traditional sense. And I think that’s what’s made the music scene, and even creative industries in general, so much more about curation and perception than about the work itself. It’s like people are less interested in whether the music is original or authentic and more focused on how it fits into a larger narrative or how it can be consumed. The idea of “authenticity” in the traditional sense feels almost outdated in comparison. It’s less about what you’re doing and more about the image you project while doing it

Toxe It’s fun to surprise people. I totally get that thrill of proving people wrong, of having them think one thing about you, then completely flipping it.

Courtesy It’s really contemporary, though, because even when I started my record label, the last one, Kulør, we had this big record with what was considered fast dance music at the time. It resonated a lot with people who are now in their late 30s or so, and up until a year ago, I was still associated with that sound. But since then, I’ve explored a lot of different genres. My approach to music is very eclectic. Yet, I’d have people, particularly men, come up to me and tell me I wasn’t being true to myself, saying things like, “Be yourself.” It was like they had this one snapshot of me—this moment that captured a version of me and they wanted me to always be that person. But for me as an artist, that’s not interesting. If people are expecting me to stay in that one frame, they’ll always be disappointed, because I can’t be reduced to that singular snapshot or sound they want me to fit into.I think in the art world, especially in contemporary art, there’s more acceptance of evolution in an artist’s practice. But in the dance music community, there’s still a lot of resistance to change. Some people have very rigid ideas of what authentic music is and what’s “acceptable.” It’s definitely a generational thing. That’s why movements like the ones at parties, like the deconstructed club oneS Dan booked in Berlin, where there were DJs breaking norms and pushing boundaries, always upset people. That kind of music still pisses people off in the dance music community today. It’s like, once you challenge these long-held ideas of what’s “authentic,” it causes friction.

Toxe Yeah, exactly! It’s fun to pull people along, surprise them. When they start expecting too much from me, I just get this feeling like, ugh, I can’t breathe. It’s suffocating. But I totally get that thrill of proving people wrong, of having them think one thing about you, then completely flipping it. It’s a nice feeling, like breaking free from their expectations and showing them something unexpected.

Courtesy A lot of artists I like in visual art are really trolly as well. Do you think that this recent conversation about expectation, staging, and the distinction between the private, intimate, and public – and what is given to people for consumption – connects to the art of DJing or performing? I definitely think about the audience I want to play for. When I DJ, I mix different genres, blending experimental music with classic house tunes. I’m always considering the dance floor, but it’s not about playing what the crowd expects at that moment. I focus on what the future of the dance floor could be. It’s not about playing commercially functional music – I know that right now, hard techno is popular, but that doesn’t mean I’ll play it just because it works. I’m not interested in it. For me, it’s about being mindful of what works, but also not playing music I find boring, even if it’s effective. That’s really important to me.

Toxe For me, I feel like I’m a pretty bad DJ in the sense that I just play whatever I want to play. Of course, I’m mindful of the situation I’m in, but when I DJ, I see it more as an extension of the music I make. I’m just trying to create a context for people to understand what I’m into by embedding my music into that wider musical world. If it’s a party, I want to make people dance and have fun, of course. Regarding performance, I’m very much a loner. I make music alone, and I really prefer to keep the process private until it’s finished. I don’t collaborate much, and I don’t share anything until I feel it’s ready. So, going from that private, intimate space to public performance is a big shift for me. It’s about translating something deeply personal into a public spectacle, and that transition is interesting, though difficult and weird at times. It makes me feel somewhat detached from myself, as you become a product, especially when you’re aware of using your own image and being very public. But there’s still a distance, especially online, since I haven’t performed live in front of large audiences yet. Now, with this album, I want to figure out how to perform live, especially with singing, and be on stage more.

Courtesy I’m curious—do you enjoy hanging out with groups of people? Growing up, did you have a friend group, or did you prefer individual friends? For me, it’s definitely individual friends. I’m not a group person at all; a dinner with four people max is ideal, and anything more than that starts to feel stressful. Unless I’m at a party or actual club.

Toxe The idea of a large group dinner doesn’t attract me at all.

Courtesy It’s interesting because, for someone who performs, people often expect me to be more social, but I just don’t thrive in big groups. I collaborate a lot, but my collaborations are usually limited to a max of three people in a room—me and two others. That’s when it feels like a really beautiful dynamic, but I don’t want anyone else around. I do enjoy performing, though, because it’s different. When I’m on stage, I’m controlling the room. I’m the one guiding the energy of the entire space, and I find that really interesting.

Toxe No, exactly. I’m curious about how this transition works, because DJing is one thing—you’re just controlling the room and the sound, and it feels more technical that way. But then when it comes to singing live, it’s a completely different experience. It’s much more personal, more exposed in a way. I wonder how you navigate that shift, from being in control of the energy through music to sharing something so intimate with an audience.

Courtesy How do you feel about microphones? Because they fucking scare me.

Toxe I don’t know yet. I definitely need to have some kind of rehearsal or something to get into it. I’m excited though because I like the challenge and the uncomfortable feeling, but yeah, it feels awkward for sure. Like, I haven’t really sung live much, maybe once or twice, so it’s all pretty new to me. I didn’t even consider it when I made the album—like, “Oh, I want to make a vocal album and perform.” It wasn’t part of the plan. Now, I’m trying to figure out how to do it in a way that makes sense for me.

Courtesy Any shows planned?

Toxe I’m heading to the US now and will be in New York for the rest of the year. I think I’ll start doing live shows in 2025.

Courtesy What are you doing in New York?

Toxe I’m planning to work there for a bit—I might have a job at an architecture studio. I’ll be doing that while working on music, preparing for my live, and traveling a bit. I might want to move there long-term, so it’s a bit of a trial phase for me. You’re in Berlin, right?

Courtesy Yes. Which is kind of like New York, like a kind of sad New York now. No jobs, but the same prices, almost like.

Toxe You’ve been there for a while, right?

Courtesy I’ve been here for about eight years, so I’m kind of stuck here now, a little bit. I think it’s going to be the one, though. Yeah, I’ve built a family here now.

Toxe Do you have kids?

Courtesy Yeppp!

Toxe Whaaaat? Wow!

Courtesy I have a daughter that’s three years old, so the moving around has stopped.

Toxe It’s beautiful. Do you think motherhood affected your music?

Courtesy It’s really just about time management. I am in a way much more productive than before. Now, I don’t have the same kind of time, and it’s frustrating because your whole perception of time changes when you become a parent. A lot of people use it as an excuse to not make art, or they just don’t have the resources. But the reality is, you have limitations unless you choose not to spend time with your kid, which isn’t an option if you’re trying to be an active part of their life. You really have to prioritize and be efficient with your time. And when I do have those days where I can just work, it’s honestly amazing.I think some people can have the structure without it, but for me, it gave me the structure and motivation I needed to become a proper artist, instead of just kind of floating around.

Toxe Yeah, that makes sense. Also because you’re not doing that just for yourself anymore.

Courtesy Exactly, I do it for her too.

Credits

Talent · Courtesy wears SIA ARNIKA
Photography · Pablo Manrique
Styling · Yannic Joel Hohaus
Makeup Artist · Naomi Gugler
Hair Stylist · Rebecca Schmitz from Nina Klein Agency
Styling Assistants · Diana Lukashuk and Stella Jennifer Roswitha Wiechers

Talent · Toxe
Photography · Michael Wolever
Styling · Michael Wolever and Toxe
Photography Assistant · Tucker Van Der Wyden

Nicolas Winding Refn

Posted on 15 de April de 202519 de April de 2025 by nr

NR 19 Detour · 2025
Published · Print Page 056

Cover Feature · Nicolas Winding Refn
Words · Maud Tenda

Absolute Cinema – Nicolas Winding Refn on the Record

A restless visionary, Nicolas Winding Refn has built a career on pushing cinematic boundaries. From his early days capturing raw reality to his later obsession with the surreal and imaginative, Refn’s work is a constant evolution of artistic expression. In this conversation, he reflects on his creative journey, the genesis of his media platform BYNWR, and his philosophy on filmmaking.

Maud Tenda Hi , nice to meet you ! So before talking about your career and work, I just wanted to start talking a bit about BYNWR, the media platform, and production company you created in 2018.

Nicolas Winding Refn Oh, cool !

MT I wanted to know, what was your intention in creating that platform ?

NWR My wife asked me that question every day (laughs) I think that I was interesting by what the digital revolution has brought, such as the new opportunistic way to share contents. Any artist needs an audience, just like an audience need an artist to create, it’s like a chain reaction. And it’s even more inspiring if you can communicate with the audience directly without being forced to deal with the system of obstructions that we’re so used to. The digital age has made this possible ! I wanted the platform to be a collective experience, it needed to embrace everything. I didn’t want the platform to be just cinema or television or, you know, installations of photography or music or news. So in way the platform is everything and none, it’s like a museum, an archival, a digital archival space, where things exist forever and can be represented and repurposed for everyone in the future.

MT Can you explain why The Nest of the Cuckoo Bird was the first movie on your platform?

NWR At the time I was workin on a movie posters book with one of my editors, Jamie McDonough, who’s a wonderful writer. And through various internet opportunities, I connected with a collector who was selling posters. One day, The cuckoo birds came up and I remember going to Jimmy asking him if he knew it and he sais : « Oh my god this is the holy grail of the fringes of cinema ! ». So I bought the poster for $20, and a year later it came up another copy for $8,000 on eBay. I thought that this must be a very valuable piece of art because the only thing that I could find about it was an old promotion newspaper. I also knew that The Cramps have done a song about it. And then, I was in Texas just by accident, and a post production facility came up and said : « We know that you’re interested in this film and we actually have a print that we’re scanning » I thought that if I could have the print, I l’pay for the scanning and restoration, and The Cuckoo Bird became the first diamond on the platform !

MT Are you a collector in your life? Do you collect things?

NWR Well yes, I have phases, one of the things that I still collect is Japanese toys for my youth, I place them all around me. Also I love being around with obsessive people that collect because it’s very interesting. It’s like you’re hanging out with Indiana Jones and finding the strangest things you can ever imagine. That’s always so exciting.

MT How do you finance this platform?

NWR Oh, self financed ! Working ! (laughs) But that’s how it had to be in the beginning, because I wanted to have the control. Over the years, it’s gotten more easier to get support. Obviously it’s now the intention. Everything has to become a business you know.

MT Some director as Werner Herzog thinks that is better to not watch too much movies to make ones, because it’s easier to create something new without a great cinematic culture. What do you think about that ?

NWR I don’t really know if I have an opinion on what one shouldn’t do or do, but I’ll say it like this, I think not knowing can be incredibly important and inspiring but at the same time, all the enormous amount of knowledge and information is also a big part of creativity. We all stand on each other, and that’s what evolution is. When you think of all the great artists in the history, they all had an extreme knowledge of the past.

MT Do you consider yourself as a cinephile?

NWR I don’t know if I’m a cinephile, but I think I very much like the moving images. Because of my dyslexia, I had this big fascination for television, because that was a means of expression that suited me. I don’t think that I discovered movies, I think movies discovered me, and that was through television first of all.

MT How did you starts your career ?

NWR I was very fortunate to begin my career with a phone call, and that led to getting my first film finance without having any knowledge of how to make a movie. My family comes from the film industry you know, so I grew up on sets. I was very lucky, and I’m forever grateful for that. But it’s a big difference between suddenly having to make decisions. I just seen a lot of movies, but I didn’t know anything about making ones.

MT As a director you always have to think about money issues during your creativity process, how do you manage with that ?

NWR Through your career, you obviously begin to understand that money and art have an equal importance. Making art is to be free to make exactly what you want to do, and If you really want to control your life, you have to understand money and financing. Every dollar you get, is a headache or an obstacle. So how many headaches and obstacles do you want in your life in order to be completely free? You know, the less your movie costs, the more freedom you have, not just in making the movie, but also afterwards. Art is always dependent on a financial reward in many ways in order to continue and putting yourself. I think that the financial pressure can be very healthy creatively, because the more desperate you are, the more you can exercise your muscle of instinct, it’s like to create a brain lies in your stomach and therefore not in your head. So you also have to use tricks to put yourself in situations where you have to navigate through all the obstacles.

MT How did you find your identity as a director, is it conscious?

NWR I started making films because of my interests in reality. At the beginning of my career I tried to turn reality into fiction, but then I became less interested in reality, because I didn’t want to be documentarian. I wanted to make fantasy, to make imagination. And so I decided to work more with the unreality but with the same authenticity and the same emotions. I’m now more interested in the unreal world than the real world. I find it more liberating. You know, it’s more freeing?

MT Are you influenced by your childhood, in your creative process?

NWR I think it’s important that you never allow your judgment. I always believe that you must never let the inner child disappear, because it’s like never forgetting who you were. At the end of the day, that’s who you’ll become.

MT I noticed a very interesting development in the writing and treatment of female characters during your career. On this point, there’s for example a big gap between movies such as Bleeder (1999) and production like Copenaghen cow boy (2023) ? Do you agree? And can you talk bout that ?

NWR Well, I’m sure you’re right, at least that’s what everyone tells me. But I don’t think so much about what I do. I’m surrounded by women, so I guess that has something to do with it. I guess I always set out to make films about women, and end up making it about violent men. Creativity is also to constantly move and never stay in one place. Creativity is like liquid, like water. It always has to flow, and it’s transparent because it’s not what you see, it’s what you feel of the water that really affects you. So for me, creativity is like a stream of conscience, and it evolves as you evolve, as you grow. It grows how you lived your life. It’s affected by those decisions. And as long as you keep yourself open to whatever comes to you and not think about it so much, but just create, then you are free, and that freedom can never be taken away from you.

MT What is your method of actor’s directing ?

NWR I went to acting school myself. When I was 19, my mother had given me a book about John Cassavetes. I’v got passionate about it and went to the Cinematheque in Copenhagen to see The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. I remember thinking : « God, that’s the kind of acting I would like to have if I made a movie. » And then I discovered that John Cassavetes had gone to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. So I wanted to follow in his footsteps, but I was kicked out after a year… I think directing styles are so enormous and can have so many variations. I don’t think there’s a correct method or a wrong one. But what I’m always trying to do as a director is simply to inspire others to give their best. Being a director is like being a shrink psychologist. It’s being a military operator and a kindergarten teacher at the same time.

MT You have also a very particular approach to sound, and a real sound identity, which is quite rare. How do you work with sounds ?

NWR Because of my dyslexia, I had to always rely on not necessarily having words, so everything had to be approached like a silent movie. And obviously sound and music are very becomes my best friends. Again it’s like liquid, it’s transparent, so you can’t see it, you can only feel it. And I think one of the powers of creativity, if it is to sustain longevity, is that it has to surpass the experience of understanding into the experience of feeling.

MT Is there a soundtrack that influenced you particularly?

NWR Funny you asked that ! I was 8 when I moved to New York with my mother and my stepfather, so I had my formative years in the greatest city that ever existed in its best years. My mother had the soundtrack of Once upon a time in the west, and I remember loving to listening to the music and looking at the cover without having seen the movie. I guess that was my introduction to the power of film music. I actually still have that exact vinyl in my collection.

MT What advice would you give to a young director?

NWR I would say a very simple advice, in three words : Do it your way ! … Is that three words? my wife just corrected me that it was four words, but see, that’s why I was not very good in school, I can’t even count to four ! (Laughs)

MT Do you ever watch your own movies?

NWR No, I don’t watch my own films when I’m done. They just become, you know, that space. I get high on it’s the creative process, but the result is essentially no longer really mine. The experience of making the movie is mine, and the experience of seeing it is to the audience, and both are equally important. It’s like having children you know, they’re yours until they’re 18, and then you gotta let them go.

MT What was the last movie you saw that really stood out for you ?

NWR Well, my eldest daughter, who’s 21 was going to travel around Asia. Before she left, I showed her The Deer Hunter of Michael Cimino. And I was just again amazed by this magnificent filmmaking. She also very much liked it by the way, and I was very happy about it.

MT My last question, can you talk a bit about your next project.

NWR Well, I would love to tell you about my next project, but it’s difficult because I haven’t made it yet. I am planning on shooting something, but I still have to make it first before I can tell you what it is. I just I don’t know what things are until I’ve made them. It’s a bit like being a child, you know ?

Credits

Talent · Nicolas Winding Refn wears PRADA
Photography · Yuji Watanabe
Prop Stylist · Shizuka Aoki

Merlin Carpenter

Posted on 15 de April de 202519 de April de 2025 by nr

NR 19 Detour · 2025
Published · Print Page 154

Feature · Merlin Carpenter
Words · Lila Torquéo

Can the Inside go beyond the Outside?

Merlin Carpenter wields negativity as a weapon, dismantling art’s illusions with irony and self-negation—his shows postponed, relocated, or delegated. Grounded in Marxist materialism, he exposes art’s inescapable entanglement with capitalism, stripping critique of its false autonomy. Rejecting comfort, he embraces failure and refusal as radical acts. Through writing, he probes spaces beyond market logic, seeking new critical frontiers.

“Not just our labor, not just our leisure—something else is being commodified here: our sociability, our common and ordinary life together, what you might even call our communism. Sure, it’s not a utopian version of communism. It is a very banal and everyday one, it’s our love of sharing our thoughts and feelings with each other and having connections to other people. But still, most people seem rather alarmed that their desire to share and be with each other, to reach out to friends, to pass on cat pictures, even their desire to have ferocious arguments with strangers, is making someone else very, very rich.” McKenzie Wark, Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse?, 2019.

Merlin Carpenter explores forms of negativity through an iconoclastic, disillusioned, and irony-tinged approach. His exhibitions stand as negations of themselves – they are postponed, relocated, multiplied, or even delegated. From his artistic practice to his theoretical writings, steeped in Marxist and materialist philosophy, he lays bare the links between the economy of artistic production and capitalist ideology. Art, especially painting, finds itself confronted by its own contradictions: despite its pretensions to critique, it remains tethered to its market essence and the dominant financial system. Operating within both commercial and alternative spaces, Carpenter scrutinizes the speculative commodification of art and the flows of information and economic value that govern its circulation. While contemporary anxiety is often soothed with antidepressants and comforting illusions, Carpenter deliberately chooses the path of solitary failure and refusal, a radical gesture aimed perhaps at fostering conditions of lucid discouragement, or even a shared revolt. It is in writing, however, that he has found a privileged space to explore areas free from value, beyond the reach of capitalist logics, and open to new critical possibilities.

The heat of capital

In 2021, Carpenter presents his exhibition Steam Engine, curated by Tobias Kaspar, at Longtang, a Zurich-based venue. Entering the space, one encounters a room thick with steam and metallic sound textures, paired with panoramic paintings of locomotive wheels. Bold, rough black strokes define the structure of these machines – icons of the industrial revolution and metaphors for Fordist capitalism. These crude lines overlay colorful checkered patterns of plastic tablecloths mounted on frames. The speed suggested by the steam engine wheels is slowed by the heaviness of these strokes, yet the symbol of progress is definitively undermined by the ironic contrast with the retrograde connotations of the “Wachstücher” patterned tablecloths. This vernacular motif, emblematic of Italian trattorias and traditional German breweries, was notably used by his fellow Cosima von Bonin, who also contributed to the hedonistic mythos of the Cologne art scene of the 1980s and ’90s. These tablecloth patterns evoke scenes of rural life and a nostalgic yearning for a still and conservative past. The track Stress II by London-based producer Acolytes intensifies the sense of disjointed time, with its stretched and jagged frequencies endlessly looping in distorted echoes, repeating in a relentless cycle.

In a separate room away from the fog, two posters hang. One advertises Carpenter’s 2020 Paris exhibition Circuits at Palette Terre, featuring the Art Deco-styled tagline: “La vision obscurcie est la vision dégagée” (“Obscured vision is clear vision”). The second is titled The Far Right in the Art World as of April 2019, a diagram originally published in the Art of Darkness issue of Arts of the Working Class. These words, which conclude the exhibition at Longtang and which the artist will expand upon in a text published afterward, provide insight into the tenuous links between the ideological drifts of public opinion and the art world, as well as the hierarchies of perception associated with it. The steam both obstructs our vision and creates an effect of revelation, forcing viewers to move closer to the paintings to see how they engage with modernist, technocratic, and conservative traditions, all at once obsolete and enduring. The brash sounds gradually fade and decay, dissolving into a spectrum of broken, ever-regenerating frequencies. No revolution seems possible in this claustrophobic loop.

The drawings and paintings in Carpenter’s Circuits series, shown in 2020 at dépendance in Brussels and Palette Terre in Paris, depict broken electrical circuits. Their black lines on white background schematize the abstract chains of the global financial system, as if flattening them were the only way to represent it. After generating these circuit images in large quantities, Carpenter transforms them into something else: the cogwheels of steam engines, which give a new, thermodynamic shape to the energy of value. Though corrupted from the beginning, the system emerges stronger from its own damage, its ideology thriving on sabotage: the more it destroys, the more it progresses. Carpenter’s chaotic fusion of locomotives, smoke, and sound becomes an allegory for a disintegrating system in full delirium, that, though on the brink of a breakdown, continues to insist it still has energy to burn. We are faced with a megalomaniacal spectacle seemingly beyond redemption, compelled to consume even its own means of survival – right down to the very wood of the old locomotive’s wagons – in order to keep moving forward. There is almost a metallic aftertaste that recalls the misogynistic rhetoric of futurism, with its glorification of progress and war, famously described by Marinetti as “the only hygiene of the world”. The movement of the locomotive wheels is nothing but an illusion, a mirage conjured by smoke. But it doesn’t matter – White, dominant-class fascism spreads like a virulent cancer.

The fog’s obscuring effects and the hypnotic reverberations could lead to a physical experience of desubjectivation. It could echo Georges Bataille’s headless man and his meditation practice, which for him was a painful trial seeking to dissolve its mind. His retreat from both the social world and his individuality became a way to resist the war machine of negativity that defined World War II. This mental withdrawal resonates in a way with the trance state Carpenter values for its revolutionary potential. In his book The Outside Can’t Go Outside, he positions trance outside the realm of value. He frames it as a metaphor for what exists beyond capitalist realism, yet in a state that can only subsist virtually. Brian Massumi explains that capitalism is a vast exterior that captures interiorities. Carpenter, for his part, describes it as “a line of control within”. Since capitalism is boundless, can our actions occur outside of it? Pushing the question further: can the inside go beyond the outside? To capitalist, monetized surplus-value, Massumi opposes a non-capitalist, purely qualitative form of “surplus-value of life”. This makes us want to believe that in Carpenter’s exhibitions, or perhaps even more so in his writings and his concern for trance, there lie remnants of bare activity stemming from this great exterior. One can imagine a micro-activity stirring on an imperceptible scale within the steam. By changing the air’s density, the steam alters sound perception, heightening reverberations or dampening high frequencies. The particles suspended in the air may be to the waves what Carpenter’s texts are to his readers: micro-movements carrying transformation, traces of emerging ferment, of passionate activity. However, Carpenter insists that if such movements exist, they do so solely in their virtuality, with no direct relation to assimilated forms of opposition to capital such as alternative value systems, forms of care, or non-capitalist enclaves.

There was no official statement at the exhibition, only the steam, which could be read as a press release, and the announcement of a forthcoming text, written by the artist months later. A deliberate choice, meant to leave the field open. This retroactivity is common for Carpenter, allowing him to incorporate political episodes but also to self-revise, in what he calls an “endless theoretical discussion”. According to McKenzie Wark, the hacker class is made up of those who define themselves in opposition to their detractors, much as Marx and Hegel by embracing communism. Wark urges us to invent new term combinations that break free from our capitalist paradigm, to forge fresh conceptual matrices that can reprogram our perceptions. Carpenter’s approach seems close to this, using language to better shape a self-generating and experimental theory.

The “value” of refusal

One should expect Carpenter to take a disconcerting approach with commercial galleries, urging them to make efforts that acknowledge the political stakes in which they are entangled. His 2018 exhibition De Streepschilderijen at Overduin & Co. in Los Angeles, offers a case in point. Carpenter required the gallery to rent an exhibition space far from the US, in Amsterdam, while keeping the Los Angeles gallery open as a salon for discussions and self-promotion. Between two screens, a television displayed footage of the Amsterdam exhibition, which Carpenter filled with paintings. Large canvases repeating a single motif – black and white lines stripes crowded the outdated rose-pink walls, making the entrance almost impassable. This is how he staged a blatant parody of the uniformity of classic – institutional formalism. By deterritorializing his works, Carpenter positions himself not only against the rise of the far-right but also against the incestuous ties between white imperialism and the art world. However, in promoting himself, he paradoxically cancels his own boycott while simultaneously reaffirming it. This act of sabotage transforms into an absurd performance. A strategy of failure, as seen in his boycott against the rise of the far-right with Not Doing a Show in FPÖ Austria at Nousmoules in Vienna (2018) – once again nullifying his refusal by allowing the exhibition to proceed after all.

For his 2020 exhibition Paint-It-Yourself at the gallery Reena Spaulings Fine Art in New York, Carpenter seemingly delegated the creation of the work to the audience, not preventing them from paint the white canvases displayed in the gallery. Ironically, the audience finds itself both exploited and complicit, working without remuneration, while Carpenter and the gallery reap the financial benefits, even though no money has been made yet. The work, which outwardly appears to offer free participation, is ultimately commodified. In doing so, Carpenter brings the dynamics of appropriation and free labor into the physical space, echoing their global normalization on social media. As he stated in his letter to the gallery, “Instead of using right-wing material as a left-wing joke, I would make the simplistic left gesture as a formal joke in relation to a more rigorous hypothesis.”Carpenter’s absolute rejection of any compromise lends him a heroic air, which simultaneously flips into cynical anti-heroism, as a risky way of life that embraces failure to avoid any form of reification. He seeks to expose the mechanisms of an ideological machine that, far from being subverted, is reinforced in the very negation of its own discourse. His attitude can in some ways align with that of Bonny Poon when she staged what she called the ‘nightmare of the gallerist’ in her exhibition Off The Wall at City Galerie Wien in 2022. There, Bonny Poon parodied the hierarchies that structure the transactional relationships of the art market, reducing the exhibition to a raw confrontation of messy obstacles, walls where she tag titles – Artist/Dealer/User/Lover/Pet – and a painting titled Anatomy of a Deal. Over the past few years, a growing interest in the conditions of production has been shaping the young art scene. We think of Eva Barto’s exhibitions, in which she created ‘communication vessels’ between public and private institutions, highlighting economic negotiations. This awareness and positioning is further marked by the rise of militant collectives such as Wages For Wages Against (founded in Switzerland), Art en grève and La Buse (in France) founded by Eva Barto, all with the urgent goal of regulating artistic labor. A massive work in progress.

Designers

Merlin Carpenter, Steam Engine, 2021
Merlin Carpenter, Paint-It-Yourself, 2020
Merlin Carpenter, Circuits, 2020
Merlin Carpenter, De Streepschilderijen, 2018
Merlin Carpenter, Steam Engine, 2021

Suzanne Ciani

Posted on 14 de April de 202521 de April de 2025 by nr

NR 19 Detour · 2025
Published · Print Page 074

Bottega Veneta Cover Special · Suzanne Ciani
Words · Gaia Grisanti

LFO Spirituality

A true pioneer of electronic music, Suzanne Ciani has spent over five decades shaping the sonic landscape with her groundbreaking approach to synthesizers. From composing in the late ’60s to redefining live performance with her immersive quadraphonic shows, her artistry transcends time. In this conversation, she reflects on her journey—from breaking barriers in a male-dominated field to finding her voice in modular synthesis, the impact of the ocean on her compositions, and the evolving relationship between technology and human expression. Ciani shares insights into the fluidity of sound, the importance of creative freedom, and the enduring resonance of her music in a rapidly changing world.

Gaia Grisanti Hello Suzanne. How are you?

Suzanne Ciani Good morning. Just about to wake up, but everything is good! What about you?

GG Excited for this interview to begin, I am a big fan of your artistic production. It all started when you curated the live music performance at the Acne Studios’ Fall Winter 2023 Show in Paris. It really seemed like the sound was threading through the flow of the fabrics, almost establishing the textures, the weight, music became almost a physical presence. How did this collaboration start?

SC I got a call from Acne Studios, asking me to produce a soundtrack for their new collection. They gave me complete freedom. I was excited because I find freedom to be a fundamental ingredient for my performance, plus the fact that I love playing live because I really like to stay in the moment. One of my missions has always been to demonstrate the performability of electronic instruments without using a keyboard and to impact the design of these instruments. I can easily adapt to sudden things, following and pacing the flow. I played with the Moog where I have a module that allows me to move the sound in quadraphonic space.

GG After being a piano student and a composer for some years, you approached the world of electronic music in a period where women were not really allowed to experiment with that.

SC In the Sixties, women composers were not really seen as credible and composing music was quite an intimidating prospect. In those years, composing meant mainly working with an orchestra. And that involved conducting: standing and getting the result you want. My teacher was an Italian man who firmly told me that women basically had no right to be on the podium and conduct. Hearing that wasn’t easy, but that moment was what channeled me towards a new door.

GG What happened after?

SC Every time you meet a closed door you have to pivot and look for a different path, until you find your unique one. You have to invent new possibilities. So I instinctively adopted electronic instruments as my own voice. Then my goal was to get enough money to buy a new Buchla 200 for myself in a period when institutions and not individuals were owning these instruments and in a field where women were not commonly involved.

GG As human beings, we tend to focus too much on the past and get stuck with regrets or nostalgia. Likewise, when we focus too much on the future, we can feel overwhelmed by feelings of anxiety or anticipation. In the meantime we forget the now. How did you find your own voice and learn to stay in the present moment?

SC Back in the Sixties in California, I started working with Don Buchla (pioneer in the field of sound synthesis. Ed.). I called him the Leonardo Da Vinci of electronic music instrument design. He didn’t use the word “synthesizer” because it had a connotation of being related to a keyboard instrument, but Don Buchla was more interested in the more elaborate voltage control of all parameters of the sound. I fell in love with a new possibility that gave me the freedom to be on my own and experiment independently..

GG You have always considered the synthesizers almost as living beings, defining them as “machines with a brain”. Tell us more about your relationship with these mechanical humans you have always been surrounded by.

SC Well, I grew up with them. Actually I grew up with the piano, when I was a composer of classical music. That is until I met Don Buchla. When Don Buchla and I started working together, he made a distinction about the machines: those instruments have an inside and an outside. I was in charge of the outside, moving the Knobs and dials, while an engineer was in charge of the inside. Technology was collaborative: it involved the artist that worked on the sound/performance and the technician who took care of the circuit board inside of the machine. In the end, every analog modular instrument is unique and you have the option of curating your own configuration of modules.

GG How crucial was it to find the right mentor at the right time?

SC You know, Don Buchla wasn’t very friendly at the beginning. He fired me the first day.

But I just came back the day after saying that it wasn’t fair. And I stayed. Don Buchla was also very shy, he wasn’t really sharing his thoughts with me, but he found his way of expression through the instruments. We found our common ground in the machines.

GG I guess spending time alone and really getting to know your personal self has been important for your personal development. And it is especially nowadays with all this pressure of sharing and showing, of having to attend everywhere to prove oneself relevant.

SC When you are making music it really comes from a private place and then it goes out into the world. If you respond to what people like, you are lost. Don Buchla, the designer of my instruments, never ever bent his ideas to the market.

GG Was there a moment or a place that represented a turning point in your career?

SC Japan played a big role in my career. Back in the Sixties , a musician couldn’t publish any music independently and you had to have a record company to release your music. I went to all the record companies in the US and in Europe but they didn’t understand what my music was. They thought I should sing because I am a woman. Then I went to Japan and they listened to the music. There I got my first record deal; that was a launching moment. When I went back to the US there was still no place for my music in the music store, because they couldn’t really find a category for this electronic instrumental sound.

GG After some time though, your music was ultimately labeled as New-Age.

SC In my second album I had a song called “The Velocity of Love” and when it was played on the radio it got a huge response even if nobody knew what it was. Some radio people started to sponsor my concerts and did a lot of airplay. Finally that genre took off and was labeled as “New Age”.

GG What made this genre special at that time?

SC New Age was a very controversial name, it could be massage music, meditation music, relaxation music or simply instrumental music. It seemed to be part of a cultural shift towards healthiness and “spirituality.”

GG Has the process of producing music been working as a therapeutic form for you?

SC The stepping stone for my music was the ocean and that immense space that is unpolluted by human inventions and noise. The ocean was my canvas. My first album was called “Seven Waves.” Now, at last, I’m living on the ocean and so there is some kind of happiness going on here.

GG In recent times AI is taking over our lives, leading to new explorations and forms of relationships. Looking at fashion and art, a Neo Space Age is approaching and space travel is expected to be booming again. You have explored this symbiosis of the organic and the artificial several years ago. Where do you think this fascination for futuristic, escaping scenarios comes from?

SC I think there is no replacement for human relationships, I believe AI is going to cause a lot of misery and desperation if you unlearn how to communicate.

In the Sixties and Seventies live performance and technology were not in a good place, the audience didn’t know that the instruments were producing the sound, they were asking where the sound was coming from, where the tape recorder was. To them there was no reference point.

Now the audience sees and understands what is going on when I play because I have a video camera focused on the instruments and also my young fans own and play these analog modular instruments. I believe technology has to be a support but not a replacement.

GG In your latest album “Golden Apples of the Sun” you used synthesizers like Buchla 200e and Moog One, but the addition of your voice and whispers makes it a truly immersive experience. You really get to meet with your inner senses, feeling some sort of deep fulfillment. Does all this come from a deeper connection with your inner nature?

SC In my previous album “Seven Waves” I also used an instrument called the Vocoder to loop in my breath because I found the vocal presence very personal and I wanted to put part of myself into it. My voice has been used a lot in sound design, I even had a tool called the Voice Box that is used for processing voices and other sounds. But I am glad that you appreciated it.

GG Are there any composers that you like at the moment?

SC Yes there are quite few and there are a lot of women dedicated to this instrument. I met Caterina Barbieri several years ago who is performing live on analog modulars and I like her a lot. Also Lisa Belladonna and Floating Points.

GG I believe you are one of the most contemporary artists playing nowadays, although your first album “Seven waves” was released in 1982. You said that most of the instruments on Seven Waves no longer exist and that that recording is an historic footprint in the evolution of music, unique to its time yet still valid today.

SC When I was growing up in the music industry the main idea was that if you turned 40 it was all over. But, you know, I believe that there is no clock.

Credits

Talent · Suzanne Ciani wears BOTTEGA VENETA.
Photography · Yudo Kurita
Styling · Shaojun Chen

Banks Violette

Posted on 14 de April de 202519 de April de 2025 by nr

NR 19 Detour · 2025
Published · Print Page 130

Feature · Banks Violette
Words · Daria Miricola

A Kind Of Martyrdom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credits

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

Full Look CELINE
Shirt ZEGNA, Trousers ACNE STUDIOS
Full Look CELINE

Joel Meyerowitz

Posted on 14 de April de 202519 de April de 2025 by nr

NR 19 Detour · 2025
Published · Print Page 118

Feature · Joel Meyerowitz
Words · Sara van Bussel

Memory, 35mm

Considered to be the pioneer of color photography, Joel Meyerowitz (1938) discusses his artistic path, his transition from painting to photography, the will of capturing every single aspect of reality through art and the picture he wishes he had taken but didn’t. This interview offers profound insights into Joel Meyerowitz’s artistic journey and the history of photography as a medium, delving into the impact of the practice on his personal life and on art in general.

Sara van Bussel You have a long lasting career, and your practice is very rich, with works that span from portraits, to street photography, to landscape, even reportage (911 memorial series). If you had to describe the single thing that they all have in common, what would it be? How would you describe your gaze, in toto?

Joel Meyerowitz I would say that my overall and general way of looking at the world is curiosity.

I am interested in things that have photographic problems at their heart, such as, how does one find invisibility on the street, so that one could be free enough to make interesting pictures out of the fragmentary conditions that form contemporary urban life. But I also ask the questions: what is a portrait? Who is it of? How does one go about making it, or a landscape, or a still life? How does one take on a tragedy the scale of ground zero, the 9/11 destruction of the towers? How does a single person do a reportage on something as big as that?

So I think all along questions about the essential nature of the medium of photography have been what has motivated me to continue searching and responding. If I hadn’t had that kind of open heartedness about the medium itself and I made the same kind of street pictures over and over again for 60 years I probably would have run out of energy after 10 years. Because when you look at the history of photography many great photographers had merely 10 years more or less of active dynamic connection to the medium and then moved along. So for some reason this dynamic medium gave me an opportunity to reframe the question for myself so that I could stay interested.

SVB In the documentary La peau des Rues directed by Philippe Jamet, you talk about how the world of advertisement changes the perception of reality: shaping a fictitious one, tailor made to the consumer. I am fascinated by this idea of reality in general: is a captured reality more ‘true’ than a constructed one? Is picking a fragment out of a scene from daily life less staged? What is in fact, ‘’truth’’ in photography?

JM There are photographers who use a kind of mise en scène to make their work. They create an environment, whether they build it or they use a found environment and they bring actors in and they have some kind of idea about a subject that they’d like to talk about or visualize. I’ve seen quite a few of those kinds of pictures, and what always astonishes me about them is how boring they are, how flat footed, how lacking in real human connection those tableaux vivants really are. They feel staged, as hard as they try to look like the real thing in a real place they always feel like overdramatized but under imagined in some way, whereas working on the street in the tradition of Cartier Bresson, Robert Frank or even Eugene Atget in his way and my own work, these are moments of pure perception, we could say, fleeting consciousness. When I am out in the street I am watching the panoramic movement of everything on the street in front of me, and I am trying to stay loose and open in such a way that when my senses tell me that there is something emerging from the flow of life around me. Relationships that are spread across the street and have nothing to do with each other but to me, from my perspective, where I could put a frame around the piece of the street and join a couple or a trio on one side and a single person somewhere else, if I can see that there is some fleeting meaning, something that is almost indecipherable but when you see it as a finished frame it seems to hold a kind of electrical energy, because it’s reality in the moment of transcendence. This may sound a bit Buddhist and spiritual in some ways but if you do it as I have for 60 years you begin to recognize that there are truths, and they’re really your truths, they are not about truth in general. The fact that I can see certain things because they are my response mechanism, they are in a sense the flavor of my life, they are almost like poetry.

What we love about poems is that if we read the work of one writer from poem to poem there are consistencies, points of view, reverence of life, understanding of nature, a connection to the human endeavors. There is a philosophy at work, and I feel that street photography, or ‘outside in the world photography’ that relates to your own sense of what’s important, and tests that day after day with a slow building up of images, manages to bring up all of this. Over a lifetime there may be 30 or 50 images in all that carry something of who you are and how you see the world. And so it’s this kind of essential distillation of the fragmentary quality of life in the 20^th and the 21^st century that is put on film or in pixels and held there for people to look at in the future, to understand something about who that person was, who existed in that time frame, and what was it that they saw that gives us some sense of meaning about that time.

I understood that from looking at Robert Franks book ‘The Americans’, which was made up of all these fragments – 70 pictures – all of them adding up to 1 or 2 seconds of life, and yet they carry with them an incredible meaning.

SVB You talk about the idea that photography to you is capturing a time, freezing History as it unfolds in front of our eyes. As a medium, photography has immediacy as a fundamental power. A picture manages to capture something in a split second, Instead of a painting, which for example takes months if not years. How do you take this into consideration when you work? Since I know you originally started as an abstract painter, I am curious about this switch you made.

JM Re reading this question I realize that my answer to the previous one also relates to this. The only thing I would add here is that I had been a painter, an abstract expressionist painter of the second generation. I started painting in the 50’s and abstract expressionism was already a flourishing concept in painting back then, I was trying to find my way out of that when I returned to New York to take up a life as an artist. But it became clear to me once I discovered photography in 1962 that I really much preferred the reality of the everyday world, and that pushing around blue into a magenta wasn’t really enough for me to stay interested in. It was an argument that no longer had meaning for me. On the other hand photography had a major argument in it. It was not accepted as an art form, it was considered commercial or amateurish, particularly in color, so my big argument was how do I break through the wall of resistance that only black and white was art in photography and try to convince the photography world that color was equal, if not more important, than black and white.

SVB When talking about your work, it is impossible not to come across the so called ‘question of color’, since you are recognized as one of the first to use it in photography. If I understood it clearly, however, the use of color in your practice is a very logical choice, since you see photography as something that, quoting you: ‘’has to document reality to its fullest’’. Following this statement, I was wondering if you had ever considered film, since it includes all of the element that reality is able to offer: its people, their movement, color nuances. I then discovered you did indeed experiment with film, by producing the movie ‘pop’. How was this experience? What was the fundamental difference with your photographic work?

JM Working with still color film requires a commitment to making thousands of photographs, to really understand the way color works. Black and white is an abstraction and a reduction, and at the time the kind of understanding of photography was that if you pick up a camera and you press the botton what you see in front of you is just the description of what’s there. Description was and is a very important asset to photography. I felt, as a very young photographer, that if description is what photography is really all about but it’s in black and white then is losing the full emotional range and content that color brings to it.

So my first argument was to try to revise this understanding, and you know, youth is the real avant garde because you don’t really care about what came before, you may love it and learn from it but you have to push away the past in order to make way for the present. So I was looking to not only educate myself but to educate the viewers that I was able to show this work to ( limited, believe me, back then in the 60s) by advancing the sense of what color can do, in the way it describes atmosphere, and skin tones, and the local radiance of the way light bounces around off of surfaces or reflects off of corners and the floor. How variant all of these tonalities are and how artistic this really is, in ways that we don’t actually describe when we look at pictures, we search for the meaning of the picture but yet the color is embedded in the meaning, it lifts the picture up because it renders everything. It’s like the full tonal range of an orchestra, that’s what color I think adds.

As far as making film, when I made the film about my father it was done for an emotional and social purpose first of all. My father was living with Alzheimer and memory loss, and that felt to me, as it did for many in the 90’s, like it was the scourge that was happening to all of our parents. People who had lived through the Great depression and suddenly as they were aging this disease was showing up. We do not know what it is that brought this huge wave into the population of the world, and I thought as a conscious and loving son that if it escaped me as it was actually happening to my father how many millions of people are facing this. So I thought I am going to take my father out of this assisted living environment he was in, take him off his medication and see if I could shake him back into a normal existence and render that on film. It was really a road movie of my son, my father and myself, three generations of the same family, and the idea was to see how does this guy who is so infantile deal with world at its large? Is there something we can learn from seeing this so that we could be better caregivers to our parents or grandparents or whoever was suffering from this illness?

That trip with the three of us from Florida up to New York City back to the Bronx was almost a month long adventure, it was thrilling to see what happened to my father and the way he managed his own illness, the way he could cover it up and how he could still relate to people. The beauty of it was, it is shot on video, broadcast quality cameras of the 90’s, it showed a kind of everyday all through the day kind of life, of how it was like to live with somebody with this affliction and I truly learned a lot from it.

I am now my father’s age from when I made that movie and fortunately for me I don’t have the same disease, but I hope that what I did for him – I actually know that the film was seen by over forty million people worldwide – that it was helpful to understand the predicament he, and other people, found themselves in.

SVB Connected to this question is also the idea of post production and the re-working of images. You worked analogically, was there ever manipulation of the image during the printing process? If not, how do you see this aspect in relation to contemporary photography?

JM I’m a very early user of the digital world. I had one of the very first photoshops in 1991, it was almost a beta, I had a digital print exhibition, the first of its kind in any museum at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1993 and even before that in 1968- 69 I had the color enlarger in my own darkroom in NYC, printing 35 mm color and later on shooting 8 by 10 large format. I was making contact prints, I made probably 30.000 color prints myself. So I was an early advocate, because after all technology is what’s moved photography along, it’s a science as well as an artform so when the science aspect of it keeps on adding new devices to it it’s important to pay attention to those things. And I don’t mean just getting new cameras all the time, but in its larger form, how does this medium keep getting better and more interesting. So my 40 years of being in the darkroom gave me the tools to work in digital, I use photoshop exclusively now, I have given up the darkroom, 40 years of chemistry, chance and dark was enough, I prefer to sit at a big monitor and make my adjustments, just as I did in the darkroom, because there you interrupt the stream of light with your hands or filters, in photoshop you do the same thing. I am so deeply connected to a kind of critical sense of the reality of things that I don’t exaggerate, I shoot in a very flat way with a full rendering of what’s in front of me because I want it to be believable, I want the viewer to trust that what I am showing them is the beauty of the everyday world, not some kind of fantasy realm where I pushed things to make them overdramatized. That’s the kind of thing that, when I see it in other people’s work, I think why are you subjecting us to this kind of falsity.

So I am very disciplined in my use of digital materials and tools.

SVB Relating to our current time, I remember reading in one of you interviews about the naivety that belonged to the sixties, in which fame was not something everyone could get, and thus the role of the photographer was different from today. I would like to explore with you the idea of control: with the rise of selfies, of an aesthetic narrative that we can construct ourselves though social media, where is the role of the photographer? How does he-she navigate this new possibility given to literally anyone?

JM There is a big difference. Carrying a camera on your phone and using it is not the same discipline as someone who carries a camera around, using it by looking through the lens, setting exposure. It’s a very serious endevor and it takes a kind of discipline to work with it and to believe that what you are seeing and what you subsequently say will allow you to make a print as big as you want, 6 or 8 feet, to be in that moment of time creates each time a specific picture.

It’s really about being there and being conscious in the moment whereas there is a sort of generalizing product that the phone makes. The phone in itself is imperfect, people move it while holding it, the edges aren’t precise etc. While with the camera, that frame is an articulate space that you are filling with your identity, and after all photography is a search for your persona, your character, and your poetry, is not a generic device like a smartphone which you wave around and click. A real photo takes a real intelligence, one that you do know, and you deepen, and select a picture and then print it. There is an ongoing discipline that allows for the photographer and the photograph to become one, so that when people see a thousand of your pictures they can say ‘that’s a Cartier Bresson’, they recognize the way of looking at the world. And that is truly, where the artform is positioned.

The clarification of your own sense of meaning, the understanding of the reality of the time you are living, these are all a combined integrated effort on the part of the photographer.

SVB What do you consider a precious advice to offer to emerging photographers today?

JM I would say that we human beings have as part of our species intelligence and instinct.

If your instinct is to respond when you are out in the world, when something makes you turn your head, that is your instinct speaking directly to you, the person next to you will not have the same response, you have to learn to recognize and respect your instinct as a measure to your own identity.

Learn how to listen to it and turn your camera there at that moment, that is the path towards understanding who you are and how photography can be yours precisely.

SVB Last question. Is there a picture you wish you would have taken but never did?

JM Yes there was.

In 1996 I spent a year in Europe. I was driving through Ireland and I was on some country road with hedgerows as tall as 12 -14 feet, driving in a car that had American steering in it. I was going around a blind curve and above me, on top of the hedgerows, a man leaned on the wooden fence and vaulted over the fence flying the 10 feet down to the road with his arms extended and his coat flapping.

I was coming around the corner and had the camera on my lap, because I photographed from the moving car, but I couldn’t manage the turn, the traffic and the camera on time.

He was Christ like, in the way he descended to the ground and he landed absolutely beautifully, arms out.

He is forever mid flying in my mind, I hold him there dear, as the one picture that I did not manage to take.That’s my sense of a lost moment.

In order of appearance

Dominique, Provincetown, 1981
Chuckie, Provincetown, 1979
Paris, 1967
New York City, 1963
Barcelona, 2015
Along the Banks of the Yanngtse, 1978
Achill Island, Ireland, 1966

Daidō Moriyama

Posted on 14 de April de 202519 de April de 2025 by nr

NR 19 Detour · 2025
Published · Print Page 005

Essay · Daidō Moriyama
Words · Daisuke Yokota

Daisuke Yokota on Daidō Moriyama

In 2006, after graduating from a vocational school, I wandered aimlessly without a job, but I continued taking photographs.

At that time, there was a lot of debate about digital vs. analog, a typical binary opposition that arises during transitional periods. Being a darkroom enthusiast, I was completely on the analog side, thinking I would never use a digital camera in my life. But to be honest, there was no clear reason behind this; it was merely an attachment to what I had been doing and a kind of small faith in the photographers I admired.

I had plenty of time, but I had no idea what to do or how to move forward. The only thing I could do was submit my work to competitions.

During my time at school, Kōtarō Iizawa visited as a special lecturer and advised us to apply to as many competitions as possible. If we got no recognition at all, we should reconsider our path. Being a relatively serious student, I followed his advice and applied to as many competitions as I could. I thought at least one of them would accept my work, but in the end, I was rejected from all of them.

For about two years, I remained unemployed, living at home, and calling myself a photographer without any achievements or connections—plenty of time to feel anxious about the future.

I realized that something had to change. So, I decided to educate myself by visiting museums and bookstores in Tokyo. But I had no money, so I couldn’t buy books. Instead, I collected flyers from bookstores, taking multiple copies—one for myself and one to give to friends. This was a nostalgic habit from that era, something I rarely do now.

I can’t remember where I found it, but I still clearly remember the flyer. It was unusually long and horizontal, with a symmetrical mirrored photograph printed on both sides. The deep black image was vague and abstract, carrying an eerie atmosphere. It read: “Goodbye Photography, reissued early 2006!”

“Goodbye Photography” (Shashin yo Sayonara) was a legendary photobook that had always been displayed in the glass cases of secondhand bookstores. I don’t remember the exact price, but it was definitely not something I could afford. I was too timid to ask the shop clerk about it, so I have never actually seen a first edition copy in person.

When I learned that this phantom-like photobook was being reissued, I got excited and came up with a personal plan:

I would go to the book signing event at NADiff in Omotesando, get Daido Moriyama’s autograph, and use that as a turning point. I would completely abandon my analog film style and start anew with a digital camera.

Like many photography students, I had unconsciously developed an absolute standard of what “Moriyama-esque” photography should be. Attending the event was my way of breaking free from that influence—my own symbolic farewell to Daido Moriyama.

Although the idea may seem foolish or even rude, to a young man struggling with his future, it was not a joke. It was a small ritual for independence, something I took seriously at the time.

I don’t remember whether there was a talk show at the signing event; I was too nervous. As I waited in line, I watched Moriyama greet each guest with a few words and a handshake.

What should I say to him?

I must have been desperately thinking about that. When my turn came, I stood there speechless.

In my panic, I stretched out my trembling hand and, without meaning to, gripped his hand too tightly. He must have noticed my tension because he firmly squeezed my hand in return. I was deeply moved.

I decided not to open the book I had just bought. Since I had gone there to sever my ties with Moriyama’s influence, allowing myself to be further affected would have defeated the purpose. In the end, I didn’t look at the book for more than ten years.

Now, I realize something surprising—I don’t own any other Moriyama photobooks besides “Goodbye Photography.”

Back when I was most obsessed with his work, I had no money, so I only read his autobiographies and essays. For photobooks, I relied on browsing at bookstores, borrowing from friends, or visiting libraries.

By the time I started buying more photobooks, I had already performed my farewell ritual, and naturally, I distanced myself from Moriyama’s work.

Why didn’t I buy them?

To young photographers who are debating whether to buy a photobook: if you can, I strongly recommend making the effort to get it.

One more memory just came back to me—there was a photobook called Hokkaido that I used to contemplate buying at the secondhand bookstore Hyakunen in Kichijoji.

It was a large book, expensive, and a bit heavy to carry home. Every time I went to the store, I told myself, “Maybe next time.” I kept putting it off until, eventually, I missed my chance.

Moriyama was around 40 when he shot Hokkaido. Now that I’m almost the same age, I can’t think of a more fascinating book for me at this moment.

I was worried that I might not find a copy anywhere, but after checking, I discovered that a few bookstores still have it. I’ll order it immediately.

And with this, I’ll take another deep look at Moriyama’s work once again.

Koreless

Posted on 14 de April de 202519 de April de 2025 by nr

NR 19 Detour · 2025
Published · Print Page 162

Feature · Koreless
Words · Melis Özek

The Art Of Reduction

Known for his otherworldly soundscapes and meticulous approach to production, Koreless explores the delicate balance between precision and sentiment. The Welsh artist reflects on the power of silence, the art of reduction, and the fluid dialogue between sound, visuals, and intuition: shaping a world where technical mastery and instinctive emotions intertwine.

Melis Özek Various cultural influences can be traced in your work. How are abstract concepts translated into something tangible and audible within the music? The titles of your tracks, for example, seem to carry significant weight.

Koreless Rather than stemming from a deep symbolic or thematic intent, many of my track titles are chosen for their visual symmetry and aesthetic appeal when written. The process of naming feels less about attaching meaning and more about how the words resonate visually and intuitively. It’s typically the final step in my creative workflow, and it can be surprisingly difficult. I often start with placeholders, only to spend a long, deliberative process finding the right fit. In the end, I gravitate toward words that simply feel “right” and possess an innate visual harmony, rather than searching for deeper significance.

As for cultural influences, they inevitably find their way into the music, though I try not to overanalyze them. I believe creativity thrives when it’s rooted in exploration rather than over-intellectualisation. While I’m inspired by my surroundings and experiences — and, of course, the music I consume — I consciously avoid letting those influences dominate my process. Any cultural or personal nuances that emerge do so organically, without deliberate intention. For me, the creative process is at its most exciting when it’s driven by curiosity and discovery, rather than a predetermined concept or heavy analysis.

MO Speaking of titles, let’s go way back! Yūgen—meaning “dark” or “obscure”—captures beauty only partially perceived, with its exact translation depending on the context. Earlier works drew inspiration from this philosophy. What led to its discovery, and how has it shaped the artistic approach to capturing its elusive essence in music?

K When I was younger, my work was heavily influenced by philosophical ideas, and the music I created during that time reflected a stark simplicity and disciplined minimalism. It was around this period that I encountered the word. Though I can’t recall exactly how I discovered it—likely during one of my internet deep dives—it immediately resonated with the ethos I was exploring. It felt like a serendipitous connection as if the term had been waiting for me to find it.

The word’s ambiguity and roundedness perfectly mirrored the essence of the music I was creating—abstract, open to interpretation, and resistant to fixed meanings. It encapsulated the sense of searching for beauty within the undefined and the unspoken. In many ways, it became a conceptual anchor for that creative period, embodying the elusive, intuitive qualities I sought to express through sound. The philosophy of yūgen, with its emphasis on the partially perceived and the subtly profound, naturally aligned with this approach, shaping the way I thought about music as something to evoke rather than explicitly define.

MO Your music often feels like a dialogue between sound and silence. How is space approached in your compositions, and is silence viewed as a sonic instrument as powerful as any other?

K I’m fascinated by what I call the “fridge off” effect—that moment when ambient noise, like the hum of a refrigerator, suddenly stops, leaving behind a serene and almost tangible silence. That void, that absence of sound, is one of the most powerful sonic experiences I’ve encountered. In many ways, I find that silence can have a more profound impact than the addition of sound itself.

There’s a beauty and tranquility in that stillness that I’m constantly striving to capture and preserve in my compositions. However, I don’t consciously overthink this process. I’m naturally drawn to a sense of order and tidiness in my music, which can sometimes come across as “inhuman.” But I’ve come to appreciate that even chaos when presented in an intelligible and structured way, can be a beautiful form of order. Ultimately, the emotional element of my work comes through instinctively—I suppose it’s inevitable, as I tend to be a bit of a softie at heart. Those feelings seep into the spaces I create, blending with the silence to form a dialogue between sound and stillness.

MO What drives the fascination with creating “inhuman” music, and how is this concept balanced with the profound emotions evoked as the foundation of the work? Is there a guiding philosophy behind this juxtaposition, and how is that delicate balance maintained?

K I’m deeply drawn to the idea of order, which can often translate as “inhuman” because humans, by nature, can be messy. I find myself striving for tidiness—a reduction of complexity to something simple and pristine. Early in my work, this simplicity was incredibly stark, but I’ve since realized that even chaos when presented in an intelligible way, can embody a kind of beautiful order. This realization has allowed me to embrace a more nuanced approach to the interplay between structure and emotion.

As for the emotional element, it’s something that happens naturally. I’m a big softie at heart, and that emotionality tends to color everything I create. I don’t consciously aim to infuse emotion—it simply emerges, balancing out the inhuman cleanliness of the music.

I think it’s also worth noting that we’ve long moved past the notion that electronic music can’t be emotional; that debate was left behind decades ago. In fact, I find electronic music to be inherently beautiful, with its capacity for clarity and structure. Interestingly, I see this pursuit of inhuman cleanliness in all music now—even in genres that present as organic or acoustic, like guitar-based music. There’s a shared tendency to approach an almost surgical refinement, which creates a fascinating interplay between the mechanical and the emotional across the spectrum of music.

MO Visuals seem to have always been a key part in your world-building process. Joy Squad and White Picket Fence: They are as precise and evocative as the music they visually embody. How involved is the process of shaping these visual narratives, and how is the relationship between sound and imagery expanded upon?

K I really enjoy the collaborative process of working on visuals—it shares the same hands-on, experimental spirit as music-making itself. While I can’t create the visuals personally, I maintain a collection of inspiring images that serve as starting points or reference material. From there, I work closely with talented visual artists like Daniel Swan, whose refined eye allows them to translate the music into a cohesive visual language far better than I could.

I see visuals as an incredibly powerful way to complete and enhance music that intentionally leaves space for interpretation. Even a simple choice, like pairing a random image with a track, can profoundly shape how the music is perceived and felt. It’s a fascinating, symbiotic relationship between sound and imagery. My approach is largely intuitive and collaborative—I don’t follow a rigid, pre-determined formula. Instead, I focus on curating evocative images that resonate with me, and then I trust the visual artist to translate that into something complementary to the music.

MO Collaborating with artists like Sampha brings unique opportunities to merge creative visions. How have these experiences influenced approaches to music production and performance?

K Collaborating is always an eye-opening experience, especially as someone who finds music-making to be a largely solitary process. Every artist has their own unique, often idiosyncratic, way of working. When I first collaborated with Sampha, for example, I was struck by how completely different his approach was from mine, even though we were using the same tools and software. He would do things that had never even occurred to me, and it was fascinating to see how someone could approach the same medium in such a distinct way.

This dynamic is especially interesting when working with other producers. It forces you to rethink the processes you take for granted and can offer a fresh perspective on your own workflow. Each collaboration is an opportunity to step outside your own bubble, and it has definitely shaped how I think about both production and performance.

MO The reinterpretation of Benjamin Britten’s piece Moonlight brought a classical composition into a contemporary electronic framework. What inspired this reimagination, and how was its original essence preserved while infusing it with a distinct sound?

K I’ve always been a huge admirer of Benjamin Britten’s music, particularly the way his harmonies unfold in Moonlight. The piece struck a chord with me when I first heard it—probably on the radio—and I felt compelled to dive into its harmonic structure. Initially, it was just an exercise in understanding the chords, but as I worked on it, I found myself recursively remaking the piece, shifting elements around, and experimenting. Over time, it evolved into something that felt like a faded memory of the original, still retaining its DNA but with a distinct identity of its own.

Britten’s work fascinates me because it’s often more subversive than it’s given credit for. While many gravitate toward the avant-garde composers of his era, like John Cage, Britten was crafting music that remained staunchly traditional yet deeply beautiful and harmonious. At the same time, he was a complex figure—being openly gay at a time when it was incredibly difficult to live as such—adding layers of depth and quiet rebellion to his legacy. That duality of his music—its surface simplicity and underlying complexity—was something I wanted to explore through my reinterpretation.

The process itself was painstaking but rewarding. I worked primarily with sample libraries, attempting to replicate the orchestration and structure, often failing along the way. Those “failures” eventually led to something unique—an interpretation that began as a distant, mutated version of the original and gradually became more faithful, especially in the final third of the piece.

It was about chipping away at it, letting the reinterpretation grow organically, and embracing the cumulative imperfections. By the end, I felt like I had captured not only a piece of Britten’s original essence but also a reflection of my own approach to creating music. It was less about achieving perfection and more about letting the process shape the outcome.

MO Many tracks seem to begin with a core idea or motif that is extended into hypnotic and immersive experiences. How are these foundational elements identified and built upon, and what is the approach to creating both progression and timelessness within a track?

K My process often starts with identifying a core idea—a motif or sound—and then removing anything unnecessary that might clutter it. It’s about letting that central element exist on its own terms, without overwhelming it. However, it’s a delicate balance: if you leave it entirely on its own, it risks losing its vitality but overloading it with additions can suffocate it. You have to feed it just enough to keep it alive but not so much that it overwhelms.

This delicate dance shapes the progression of a track. I like to keep one main idea gently moving, allowing it to grow organically. The aim is to create something timeless and immersive by focusing on simplicity, maintaining a sense of clarity, and letting the motif take the lead.

MO Your music defies traditional genre boundaries, weaving classical influences, experimental electronics, and ambient textures into something entirely unique. What draws you to this cross-genre approach, and how is the authenticity of each element ensured while contributing to a cohesive sonic narrative?

K I try not to think about genres too much. Some artists commit wholeheartedly to a single genre or the blend of genres, which is incredible, but my approach is less about fitting into a specific category and more about allowing different influences to blend naturally. One reason I’ve avoided using drums extensively is that they often tie music firmly to a particular genre. Removing them creates a kind of fluidity where genres can more easily dissolve into one another.

The result is a cross-genre sound that emerges organically. I don’t intentionally set out to blend classical, electronic, or ambient influences—it’s more about responding intuitively to what feels right. Each element is authentic because it stems from genuine exploration rather than a deliberate attempt to check boxes.

MO Music thrives on intricacy and detail. How are studio productions adapted into live settings without losing their emotional depth?

K Great question. In the studio, you have endless time and the best equipment to refine every subtle detail, but live settings are completely different. The acoustics of a large, untreated space and the sheer volume obliterate much of that subtlety.

What I’ve found is that going back to the very first version of a track—the initial demo, before all the intricate carving and layering—often works best for live performances. Those early iterations are simpler, more direct, and more raw, making them better suited for a live environment. For example, the original demo of Joy Squad was much harder and more straightforward than the final version, and it’s that directness that translates so well on stage. Instead of stripping back a finished track, I base live versions on the “seed” of the song—the essence I captured in its earliest form.

MO Your music is often described as being crafted with architectural precision, with each layer meticulously placed. How do you approach structuring?

K Honestly, there’s no intellectual rigor involved—it’s more about time and a bit of obsession. I spend hours and hours working on tracks, going through countless versions, carving, refining, and sometimes returning to earlier iterations. For example, I might move from version 20 to version 40, only to go back to version 17 because it felt truer to the song’s essence.

For me, the process is less about finishing a track and more about the joy of working on it. It’s almost like playing a game—when I was younger, I was hooked on Farming Simulator, where you meticulously build and manage a farm. Music-making has a similar feel: it’s about endlessly chipping away, tweaking, and experimenting. That iterative process naturally leads to intricate details, but they’re really just the result of my enjoyment of the craft. I’m fortunate to spend my days immersed in this process, and the emotional depth comes naturally from that ongoing engagement with the music.

MO Released in August 2024, Deceltica showcases intricate electronic elements. What was the inspiration behind this track?

K Deceltica was created shortly after I moved to a remote mountain area in Wales, surrounded by sheep farms and a kind of vast, quiet isolation. My studio was set up in the attic, and while experimenting with my synths, I stumbled upon the core of the track by accident. It all happened in a rare creative burst—I worked on it non-stop for about 48 hours, playing it on loop while lying on the floor, almost hallucinating from the lack of sleep.

The entire process felt immersive and intense, which is unusual for me, as most tracks take much longer to shape. The environment undoubtedly influenced the track—it was a rare moment of being entirely engrossed in a piece, letting it evolve organically until it felt complete.

MO “Drums of Death” has such a unique energy, combining club music with raw emotional intensity. Could you walk us through the production process for this track, especially how it came together from your initial idea on the flight to Berlin, to the live debut at Berghain, and now its place on EUSEXUA?

“Drums of Death” has an interesting backstory. I originally made it years ago while flying to Berlin for a show with Sophie. At the time, I felt my live set lacked something harder and more dynamic, so I created the core of the track during the flight in about an hour. At soundcheck, I gave it a rough mix, debuted it during the show, and then shelved it for years.

When FKA Twigs and I were finalizing her EUSEXUA album, we felt the project needed something harder and more playful. I remembered this track and played it for her—it immediately clicked. We recorded vocals, added chorus melodies, and brought in Tintin to contribute parts. The whole thing came together quickly, in just a day, which is rare compared to some tracks that take months.

This ties back to my process in general. Sometimes, tracks feel like a game of chess, with ideas evolving and developing over weeks or months in the back of my mind. Other times, as with “Drums of Death,” everything just flows effortlessly, and the track practically builds itself.

MO The UK’s musical landscape in the early 2000s to 2010s was marked by the rise of labels like Young and XL, which helped push forward the boundaries of electronic music, indie, and experimental genres. As someone who was right in the middle of it, how did you navigate through this evolution?

K While I was releasing music through labels like Young and XL, I felt more connected to the Glasgow scene during that time. It was a smaller, tight-knit community of friends, which made it more manageable and personal compared to the larger scale of the London scene.

London and the big UK labels always felt a bit overwhelming to me, like looking in from the outside. Glasgow, by contrast, was where I felt grounded—a creative microcosm producing amazing music and offering a space that felt intimate and inspiring. Even now, I tend to keep my distance from big cities, preferring a more hermit-like existence.

MO To expand on this concept of evolution, from earlier EPs to the present, the evolution of sound presents a striking transformation. How have creative philosophies evolved?

K Early on, my music was stark and minimalist, partly because of technical limitations and partly because I liked it that way. My first releases were strictly focused on essentials—nothing more. Over time, I gained more technical skill and began exploring more elaborate compositions, which was a deliberate attempt to break out of my self-imposed simplicity.

However, creativity often works in cycles. After proving to myself that I could make something more complex, I’ve recently felt drawn back to the discipline of simplicity, focusing again on reduction and restraint. Change is essential to keep things exciting—whether it’s stripping back or building up, as long as I feel like I’m exploring something new, I stay engaged.

MO Reflecting on the latest work, where might the music head next, and what concepts or sonic territories remain unexplored?

K I’m feeling drawn toward reduction—trying to make the simplest, purest pieces possible. It’s about embracing limitations and finding beauty in the essentials once more.

Credits

Talent · Koreless
Photography · Gavin Watson
Styling · Calvin How

Category: NR 19

Candela Capitán and Paul McCarthy

Where Does a Body End

Daniel Arnold and Donna Ferrato

Dealing with the World as a Collectible Surface

Courtesy and Toxe

Scandinavian Connection with Courtesy and Toxe

Nicolas Winding Refn

Absolute Cinema – Nicolas Winding Refn on the Record

Merlin Carpenter

Can the Inside go beyond the Outside?

Suzanne Ciani

LFO Spirituality

Banks Violette

A Kind Of Martyrdom

Joel Meyerowitz

Memory, 35mm

Daidō Moriyama

Daisuke Yokota on Daidō Moriyama

Koreless

The Art Of Reduction

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