English Spanish Korean
+-
English

[태그:] Identity

WHAT IS IDENTITY? – NR MAGAZINE ON THE STACK

Posted on by nr



Willem Dafoe



Bottega Veneta

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

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



Omar Apollo



Remi Wolf

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

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

Listen to the full interview here.

WORDS MATTHEW BURGOS

 

LATEST UPDATES

News


GIVENCHY UNVEILS SPRING SUMMER 2022 CAMPAIGN BY MATTHEW WILLIAMS



GIVENCHY UNVEILS SPRING SUMMER 2022 CAMPAIGN BY MATTHEW WILLIAMS

Since joining Givenchy as creative director back in June 2020, Matthew Williams has set about introducing a number of signature details and key pieces to the Parisian fashion house. One such example of this is the Mallow, the (in)famous streamlined molded rubber shoe that also features prominently in Givenchy’s SS22 campaign. For the collection, Williams brought the American artist Josh Smith on board, whose sculptures and vibrant paintings played a key inspiration for the overall vision of the season. The colours, pattern and prints of the SS22 collection are a nod to the dynamism Smith instils in his work – and a reflection of the energy with which Williams has approached his role at Givenchy.

Read More →



NAPAPIJRI X FIORUCCI COLLABORATION LAUNCH CELEBRATES A SHARED PASSION FOR EXPLORING THE WORLD



NAPAPIJRI X FIORUCCI COLLABORATION LAUNCH CELEBRATES A SHARED PASSION FOR EXPLORING THE WORLD

Launching today, Fiorucci and Napapijri unveil a collaboration that combines the practicalities of alpine outerwear with the dazzle of the disco. By joining forces, the two Italian brands celebrate a shared passion for exploring the world and their respective heritages. The technical know-how of Napapijri and the creative flare of Fiorucci become the foundations of a collection that celebrates the iconic reference points of both brands.

Read More →



AMBUSH FALL WINTER 2022, A FOCUS ON TECHNICAL INNOVATION



AMBUSH FALL WINTER 2022, A FOCUS ON TECHNICAL INNOVATION

For the AMBUSH Fall Winter 2022 collection, designer Yoon Ahn focuses on technical innovation. Specifically, the brand’s logo and monogram become a point of exploration for the technological possibilities of the collection. Knitwear featuring the AMBUSH logo changes colour in response to sunlight, while the monogram appears on a coat in response to rain. As much as these details capture Yoon’s desire to push the boundaries of innovation, this technological response to weather represents the designer’s interest in the natural world, too.

Read More →



LOEWE FALL WINTER 2022 COLLECTION, A CALL TO REFLECTION



LOEWE FALL WINTER 2022 COLLECTION, A CALL TO REFLECTION

The Loewe Fall Winter 2022 Men’s collection was presented in and amongst a site-specific installation by artists Joe McShea and Edgar Mosa. Titled Flags, Paris 2022, the work is composed of nearly 4000 ribbons hanging down onto the sandy runway and audience seating below. As models appear and the vision of creative director, Jonathan Anderson’s collection becomes clear, so does the meaning of McShea and Mosa’s artwork: “The flags are stripped of meaning, acting as a call to reflection.”

Read More →



JIL SANDER FALL WINTER 2022 MENS COLLECTION, A CRAFTED VERSATILE-YET-MINIMALIST TEMPLATE



JIL SANDER FALL WINTER 2022 MENS COLLECTION, A CRAFTED VERSATILE-YET-MINIMALIST TEMPLATE

For Lucie and Luke Meier, their role at the helm of Jil Sander is to provide the individual with “the tools and freedom to be what they want to be”. For their Fall Winter 2022 Men’s collection presented in the American Cathedral in Paris, that means crafting a versatile-yet-minimalist template for the wearer to adapt. Outerwear and tailoring work as the starting point for a uniform that can be adapted, suitable for day and night. The silhouettes of the collection follow a simple logic: sophisticated but casual, which feeds into the idea of establishing a blank canvas on which to build a sense of self.

Read More →



MAISON MIHARA YASUHIRO FALL WINTER 2022, AN EFFORTLESSLY ECLECTIC ODE TO VINTAGE



MAISON MIHARA YASUHIRO FALL WINTER 2022, AN EFFORTLESSLY ECLECTIC ODE TO VINTAGE

“In an era when information has become much easier to obtain globally,” explains designer Mihara Yasuhiro, “I’ve turned to localising myself with my surroundings.” The outcome is an F/W 2022 collection that delves into a moment since past, as Yasuhiro recalls Tokyo of the 1990s. The Maison Mihara Yasuhiro show was held in a shopping market in Asakusa, Tokyo – where the designer’s first offices were located 25 years ago.

Read More →



YOHJI YAMAMOTO POUR HOMME FALL WINTER 2022 COLLECTION IN AOYAMA, TOKYO



YOHJI YAMAMOTO POUR HOMME FALL WINTER 2022 COLLECTION IN AOYAMA, TOKYO

For the Fall Winter 2022 Pour Homme collection, Yohji Yamamoto staged the show at the flagship store in Aoyama, Tokyo rather than in Paris. The result was a show that felt distinctively low-key and personal for a designer of such global recognition. The collection takes its inspiration from the nineteenth century, modelled by a cast of dark yet dandy figures (including, as it happens five Japanese actors). Hair and, at time, faces are streaked and powdered grey with almost Fagin-meets-Scissorhands effect. Yet the collection is anything but raggedy.

Read More →



LOUIS VUITTON FALL WINTER 2022: 'AN OCTOLOGY ACCORDING TO VIRGIL ABLOH. COLLECTION 8: IN THE GRAND SCHEME OF THINGS.



LOUIS VUITTON FALL WINTER 2022: ‘AN OCTOLOGY ACCORDING TO VIRGIL ABLOH. COLLECTION 8: IN THE GRAND SCHEME OF THINGS.

At the 𝓛𝓸𝓾𝓲𝓼 Dreamhouseô, imagination runs wild – specifically, the Boyhood IdeologyÆ that the late Virgil Abloh left us with. The Louis Vuitton Men’s Collection F/W 2022 marks the final act of an eight season-long play and Abloh’s swansong as menswear creative director. The collection, most of it completed before Abloh’s death in November 2021, encapsulates the legacy of the designer’s vision and his contributions (sartorially as well as creatively and intellectually) shared over his short tenure at the French house.

Read More →



LEMAIRE FALL WINTER 2022 PRESENTATION



LEMAIRE FALL WINTER 2022 PRESENTATION

At Lemaire, models travel across what feels like a vast landscape, moving across time and space. The chronophotography of the nineteenth-century scientist and physiologist, Étienne-Jules Marey is a point of reference here for Sarah-Linh Tran and Christophe Leimare. Marey layered negatives atop of one another in order to study movement of the body; the show achieves a similar effect here as models meander in front and across of one another. All on separate journeys, perhaps, but bound by the similar silhouettes they cut.

Read More →



Y/PROJECT FALL WINTER 2022, A COLLABORATION WITH JEAN-PAUL GAULTIER AND EVERGREEN



Y/PROJECT FALL WINTER 2022, A COLLABORATION WITH JEAN-PAUL GAULTIER AND EVERGREEN

Next week, the designer Glenn Martens will take on the role of creative director for Jean Paul Gaultier for a single season. But what relevancy does that have for the Fall/Winter 2022 collection for Y/Project? It means everything. Martens has approached this collection as a merging of alliances, making reference to the iconic designs of Gaultier, as well as his role as creative director at Diesel.

Read More →


Willem Dafoe

Posted on by nr

NR Vol. 14 Identity · Autumn Winter 2021
Published · Print Page 306

Cover Feature · Willem Dafoe
Words · Ellie Brown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Credits

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

Justine Kurland

Posted on by nr

NR Vol. 14 Identity · Autumn Winter 2021
Published · Print Page 494

Feature · Justine Kurland
Words · Izzy Bilkus

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

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

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

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

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

Genesis Báez

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jennifer Calivas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AK Jenkins

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

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

What attracted you to working with portraiture?

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

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

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

Sydney Mieko King

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keli Safia Maksud

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jacky Marshall

What inspired you to start working with photograms?

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

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

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

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

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

Qiana Mestrich

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does motherhood influence your creative process at all?

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

Shala Miller

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

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

What inspired you to work across text and image?

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

How important is transformation to you and your practice?

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

Cheryl Mukherji

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

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

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

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

Diana Palermo

How does spirituality influence your identity as an artist?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Calafia Sanchez- Touzé

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

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

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

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

Gwen Smith

What inspires you to work between photography and painting?

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

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

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

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

The exhibition runs until October 16th, 2021. 

Discover more here huxleyparlour.com

Abiboo Studios

Posted on by nr

NR Vol. 14 Identity · Autumn Winter 2021
Published · Print Page 272

Feature · ABIBOO Studios
Words · Nicola Barrett

“sometimes the planning is just a roadmap to set the initial building blocks for the society to evolve”

Science fiction is in at the moment. In October we’ll be trooping to the cinema to watch the film adaptation of the Dune saga, which is to sci-fi what Lord Of The Rings is to fantasy. The viral Ice Planet Barbarians Kindle novels, an epic romance series about blue alien boyfriends, has been picked up by Penguin Random House. Even on Netflix the new Korean drama Squid Game, which blends together horror and near dystopian sci-fi in a nail-bitingly binge-worthy package, is currently number one in the whole of the UK and worldwide. And in 2054 they are going to start building a sustainable city on Mars.

Oh wait, that one isn’t fiction, it’s actually going to happen. Or at least that’s the aim of ABIBOO Studios who have teamed up with SONet to design Nüwa, one of five cities proposed to be built on the red planet, with the first colonists set to arrive in 2100. Built into the slope of the Martian cliffs near Tempe Mensa, “the steep terrain offers the opportunity to create a vertical city inserted into the rock, protected from radiation and meteorites while having access to indirect sunlight.” The city will be connected via high-speed elevator systems, and everything from schools to farming to indoor parks will be available to the citizens. To get there you will need to spend one to three months on a shuttle and tickets will cost a whopping estimate of $300,000. No need to worry about the return fare though, once you arrive on Mars you will probably be there for good, so it’s certainly not a journey for the faint-hearted. NR Magazine joined ABIBOO founder and chief architect Alfredo Munoz in conversation.

Nüwa is an incredibly exciting project and it has been stated that the things that can be learned during the conception and creation of this city could be applied to issues on Earth. However, is there not a risk that these solutions will never actually be implemented on Earth, especially as there are already solutions to issues here that still haven’t been fully implemented such as renewable energy etc, and the majority of resources will be focused on the space race and cities like Nüwa?

So there’s obviously always a risk of the innovation not being implemented, but there is definitely the opportunity to implement it. And that’s where the learning that we can do by thinking out of the box and implementing it back on Earth is very valuable. Let me give you one very simple example. When we were working on the solution for finding the most efficient way to generate food on Mars, we developed hydroponics technology, which in concept is a technology that allows farming indoors. It’s highly efficient. It has been going on on Earth for a while, but recently it’s become quite common in the US.

It’s not possible to have an animal-based diet on Mars. The reason for that is that they require a lot of space, which obviously on Mars, it’s tricky because we cannot have them all outside in the environment. We need to treat that spaces where animals would be in a similar way that we would treat the spaces for humans, with the right pressure, the right oxygen. This is very expensive to build and very expensive to maintain. So it was not realistic to consider a diet based on animals. The team of life support experts proposed a solution that was mainly based on algae and insects.

When we analyse the area that we needed per person to farm the food that humans would need on Mars, we were talking about a little bit more than 100 meters per person. That means that in 100 meters per person, we were able to generate all the food that future Martians could need. Okay. Now, let’s look at Earth, on average, every person requires 6000 m² for farming. So if you compare a 6000 m² per person versus 100 m² per person, there’s a huge gap. That means that we could use more efficient technology for crops and for farming and we could reevaluate the type of diet that we have on Earth. It can liberate a lot of space on Earth where we can actually plant trees or nature. That could help a lot with climate change.

So, yes, there is always a chance that the technology that’s developed for space will not be implemented on Earth, but sooner or later, if it actually brings value, it will be implemented.

How do you think culture would potentially evolve within these cities on Mars and what might those new culture’s look like and involve? 

So culture is very connected to how we live in the cities. One of the key aspects for us was to create a sense of identity, a sense of belonging. When we designed the city, we were very clear we were not designing a temporal settlement. We were aiming to create a city where people will go and live and die, and have families. So a sense of belonging and identity is critical, and that is part of what we think will drive local culture.

Another thing that I think is very important is the sense of community. So Mars is a very harsh environment. It’s not like Earth, where we change our environment as per our needs. On Mars, we will need to adapt to the environment. So that means that in such a harsh environment, we actually need to rely on each other much more than we do on Earth. On Earth, we used to rely on each other much more. Then as centuries passed and culture changed especially Western culture, we became much more individualistic. But we think that given the harsh environments on Mars, society will have to rely much more on their neighbours.

“We will need to look after our neighbours and our neighbours will need to look after us. If that trust is broken due to the harsh environment and challenging conditions on Mars, everyone might be at risk.”

That has a critical impact on how culture would be, because again, we ambition that culture must be more gregarious, where people will be not so focused on their own self, but also where the sense of community will be even higher than on Earth.

I imagine that there would have to be some kind of like a law enforcement system or some kind of punishment system. How would that work in such a small community to rely on each other?

Definitely, and that’s something very interesting that we still need to explore. We are currently at the state where we conceptualise the main ideas of the city. We are currently developing it from the architectural and engineering point of view, and the schedules that we are talking about are quite large. We might be able to start construction of the city on Mars by 2054, which is almost 35 years from now. So there is a lot of other analysis that needs to be done in conjunction with a multidisciplinary team of experts that might add some of those questions that you are asking.

There is always the risk of somebody not behaving properly and that has to be included in the way that the city functions in the same way that we are thinking about hospitals, the same way we are envisioning a location. It has to be considered what type of law will run on Mars. Maybe this is an organic process. Maybe the first settlers will have to find a way to organise things with some inspiration from some things that work on Earth. But then at some point, the society will have to be self-autonomous over there, and they will make their own decisions.

For this project there were included proposals for economic models, forms of government and dedication systems and the question was asked “Since we have the chance to start over, would life on mars be better than on earth?” However Nüwa will still retain many capitalist elements, “We envision a system that will combine the private sector – we’ll have our own economy and currency that will incentivise entrepreneurship”. Why not implement forms of true socialism or communism, as capitalism is already failing us here?

Sure, innovation will be critical. Settling on Mars will require levels of innovation that we are not even used here on from people on Earth. So we are not aiming for the city to have huge differences of wealth. Indeed, we do ambition that people might have more wealth than others, but not the extreme situation that we have here on Earth.

And when we look into the past at communism, humans find a way to look into their own personal interests without looking for the good of people. Right. I live in the US. I appreciate capitalism as a way to encourage innovation, and I think controlled capitalism is something that facilitates innovation. What is not good is that when you have monopolies that take over the market and new entrepreneurs cannot provide the innovation, that is not true capitalism. However, on Mars, we believe that intellectual property and an opportunity to generate value to society should be rewarded through recognition in society and through wealth among others.

But have you not considered creating a society that wouldn’t use money? Because then you would do away with the issues of some people having more and some people having less. Instead, you could come up with other ways to incentivise people to be innovative?

There are a lot of opportunities to continue exploring in this space. So again, we are architects and scientists, but it’s important for us to have people from different fields to add value to the project. We worked with a multidisciplinary group of experts that went from astrobiology, economy, life support systems, planetary design. So we have a very large amount of people, but that was only the first step, right. There will be a lot of opportunities to continue evolving so, going back to what we were talking about, it could be possible.

And definitely, there is something to investigate with that. But we don’t see, at least as of now, the harm of rewarding it through a certain level of wealth, because ambition is part of who we are as a species. We are the human species, wants to strive for a better life and wants to strive for a better thing for themselves and for their community. We ambition that Mars could be a great gateway for the scientific community to be recognised as they deserve. And that is connected again with innovation, connected to culture.

We’ve seen designs for Nüwa but there are also four other sister cities such as Abalos City which would be located at Mars’ north pole and Marineris City in one of the biggest canyons in the solar system. How might the designs of these cities differ from Nüwa?

Yeah, so we did not expand too much yet about the alternative cities but I’m going to explain first why there are many different cities. One is access to resources. In our case, we ambition self-sufficient, sustainable cities on Mars. That means that we are not relying on resources from Earth to operate or build a city, only in the very early phases. The rest will all be constructed from local resources on Mars. There are a lot of resources on Mars but they are in different locations. Therefore, we need to have a small set of settlements to be able to access those resources. Secondly, we must consider safety or resiliency. What happens if there is a problem, an emergency or something that is not expected in one city and everyone is in danger? We need to secure everyone and move them. Somewhere far enough away so they can be safe. And if you combine those two situations, we thought that to create a safe, long-lasting culture and colony on Mars, we needed to split it. And in this particular case, we split into five different cities.

We think that providing an open platform for creating identity is important as well, so different cities will have different cultures Some of them might be very different from each other, and that again connects to the sense of identity. Why do some people like London and others like New York because they are different, right? It’s not only about the culture of the people living there, but also the physical environment that makes room for that culture. It’s all interconnected. So we think that a successful permanent colony on Mars will be divided into different settlements, and all those settlements should have some type of unique identity

As life on Mars would require 10x more energy to support than on earth it has been stated that, even with the aid of technology, life there would involve an intense lifestyle and settlers could be contracted to spend 60-80% of their working lives contributing to the city. One cannot help be reminded of the song The Fine Print by Stupendium, which went viral during the pandemic, that talks about indentured servitude to corporations in space. As the price of a one-way ticket is estimated at $300k and would no doubt require a loan for the majority of people, what would prevent similar such issues from occurring in Nüwa?

So I’m not aware of the reference that you were mentioning. That $300,000 was a very quick estimate to premature to know what will it actually cost? That number was more of an academic level calculation based on today’s numbers. Is moving to Mars going to be easy or cheap? No, but you don’t need to go to Mars. If you don’t want to go to Mars, feel free not to go to Mars. Some people decide to move to very remote areas, and some people prefer to live in a nice, comfortable place in the Mediterranean, it’s is a personal choice, right? We can all choose what we want to do with our lives.  So some people might be more inclined in going to Mars despite the harsh environments.

But it’s going to be an extremely tough life, probably not appropriate for most of the people that live on Earth. Those that want the sense of adventure, the sense of exploring a new frontier in what being human is, and to be pioneers in what is next for the human species. Those are the ones that might be willing to go to Mars and have a very tough life. Again, it’s not easy not only because of the amount of work that will be required.

So again, if somebody wants to go to Mars for a holiday, probably that person is not going to be welcomed by the community because that’s not a person who is going to contribute.

We do ambition again, that the city is owned by the people, not by corporations. Again, there is a lot of room for development on this, but we think it’s important for the citizens to own the city and to own the proceeds associated with potential trade that might happen in the city. Obviously, there would be a lot of trade going back and forth between Earth and Mars.

But yeah, it’s not going to be easy, or cheap, or safe. And it’s not going to be pleasant because the diet is going to change, and the environments that we are building, which we think is amazing and so spectacularly beautiful, but they’re different to what we are used to. We’re not going to see the ocean, or nature, or have the opportunity to walk around without the suit.

“It’s only for certain people in the same way that in the fifteenth century some people were willing to risk their lives to travel west. In America we had the opportunity to explore new frontiers, and that will be only for some people that want to do it.”

I’m curious because you said that if you don’t want to go to Mars you don’t have to. But historically speaking, a lot of settlers and pioneers were people who were forced to go. If you look at Australia, a lot of people who were settled there were often criminals. It was the same with America. So I wonder what kind of people you would imagine would settle on Mars?

In this particular case, we ambition more people with vision, people that have a strong sense of community, a high appreciation for science. Which, again, if you actually look into the background of astronauts, they usually have a very high appreciation for science and for exploration, for adding some contribution to the history of humankind.

But in that particular case of settlers in the past, it was always connected to commerce. If you look at the reason, maybe not in Australia, but in the America the main reason why people were willing to go was commerce. And that’s where we see there is some room for the private sector to add value not only to the scientific community, but also tourism and mining. So there are opportunities that will come, associated with commerce between Earth and Mars, that could support some people to go.

Could a city like Nüwa be built on earth and would it be a viable economically and environmentally sustainable alternative to cities we have at the moment? 

Yeah, so some aspects could be implemented on Earth. One of the critical characteristics of Nüwa is that is in a vertical cliff. One of the reasons for it is to compensate for the pressure, because the pressure outside on Mars is very low but we wouldn’t need to do that on Earth. Radiation protection is also very important, but here on Earth, we don’t have that problem.

The magnetism on Earth protects us from that radiation. But we see problems with climate change, with temperature rising. In some areas, the temperature is becoming so high and that’s going to continue to increase, so living on the surface might become very complicated in the future. So we do see some room to implement some of the solutions that we will implement on Mars. In that case, as of now, we are working on building a small version of the solutions on Mars in extreme environments on Earth.

So you build a small building in order to learn from it, to adapt, and change things as needed in order to be able to modify whatever is required. So you can continue improving the solution. So that is something we are currently working on. So we ambition building some parts of the Nüwa city here as a way to achieve an additional level of research and development. Also with the possibility of adding tourism, the scientific community could come and start experiencing on a very small scale how society could operate on Mars.

The interior living spaces are obviously quite uniform and modern in design. However, it has also been mentioned that maintaining the good mental health of the people within these cities is imperative. As humans find expressing individuality important would there be scope to customise their living spaces or would that require too many resources? The same goes for fashion and other things like that?

Definitely, that’s a very important point. And we are currently working on that aspect. We do ambition customisation. That is very important again, to the sense of identity. We want to feel a sense of belonging, but we also want to feel that we are not one among many.  We have our own personal taste that has to be respected.

Similar to how we do co-living here on Earth or when you go to a dorm. You have private areas that are small, but you can customise a lot in your own space. Then all the common areas are public where you incentivise the social aspect of the community and where you have much more space to enjoy than in your private space.

Also with fashion, we are now working on the next round of designs where we are thinking about how fashion could be. If you wait a few months, you will have more opportunities to see how things are coming together.

What other ways do you think people will be able to express their identities within the cities?

Arts. We are giving a lot of importance to that. We think that self-expression will be an essential aspect of society on Mars. Again, the advantage here is that Mars is not going to be in isolation. It takes 20 minutes to communicate between Earth and Mars, so there will be a lot of communication and interaction between the Martians and the people living on Earth. Right. So there will be a lot of room for again transfer of ideas because life on Mars will be so different, people on Earth can learn a lot from the experiences that Martians will have.

The use of AI and robotic technology will be integral to life on Mars, however, have you considered how people’s relationships with AI and robots might have changed in the future and how that might affect cities like Nüwa? 

Definitely. We are working a lot on the next wave. I was telling you that in a few months you will be able to see the next round of exciting solutions for colonies on Mars that we are working on. And this question that you are raising is very connected to that.

“We see that AI and robotics will be essential for the survival of Mars, and therefore the relationship with humans will evolve. To consider robots not so much as tools, but as an emotional beings that we relate to.”

In Japan is very common that they don’t see robots as objects as we do in the West but instead see a type of soul associated with the robots. And we envision that not only on Mars, but in the near future. The relationship between artificial intelligence and humans is going to evolve or transcend from a pure tool to an emotional connection. I mean, the movie Her is a fun example. As we will not be able to have many animals on Mars robots could become the next type of pet where we have a very close emotional attachment.

I imagine because it’s like such a harsh environment, having that companionship would be essential for the good mental health of the people there.

Definitely. We think that the tools that robots will provide will not only be rational, they can also be emotional. And the communication with Earth as well. Again, remember that we are talking about the hyper-connectivity among the citizens on Mars and with the citizens on Earth as well.

Do you envision people being able to control the robot from different cities as a sort of way of online dating?

That’s again is something we might need to see what happens organically. Sometimes we can’t plan. As architects, we are good at planning, but sometimes the planning is just a roadmap to set the initial building blocks for the society to evolve. The local architects, the local politicians, the local engineers and the local artist will have to find their own way to live. That’s the beautiful part, right? To leave it so open. That allows for innovation locally. And that rounds up our conversation about how important innovation is going to be for the future Martians.

Credits

Images · ABIBOO STUDIO
https://abiboo.com/

Ani Liu

Posted on by nr

NR Vol. 14 Identity · Autumn Winter 2021
Published · Print Page 402

Feature · Ani Liu
Words · Izzy Bilkus

“I think that the process of creation and the process of critical evaluation must occur separately”

Research-based artist Ani Liu works at the intersection of art and science to explore the reciprocal relationships between science, technology and their influence on human subjectivity, culture, and identity. Graduating with a Masters of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a Master of Science from MIT Media Lab, Liu’s work has been exhibited internationally and featured by the likes of National Geographic, VICE, Mashable, TED, WIRED and more.

Liu’s approach to art making is multidisciplinary and centred around themes of gender politics, biopolitics, labour, simulation and sexuality. Liu’s work interrogates how our plastic subjectivity goes through modifications and expansions with technological and scientific development. It is in this realm of plasticity that Liu operates as an artist to further explore the impact of technology on culture and identity, and ultimately, what it means to be human.

NR Magazine peaks with Liu to learn more about speculative design and storytelling in her work and her hopes for the future.

What inspired you to start working at the intersection of art and science?

As a first-generation immigrant, certain values were deeply ingrained in me from a young age – to work hard, to study math and science, to try to make a better life for myself than the one my parents had. For reasons I still don’t understand, I loved art from the beginning, but given the working-class context that I grew up in, I couldn’t imagine how to make a life of it. As a result, I studied architecture, which combines engineering, material science, physics and software, with design and culture. I think this was the beginning of my merging of art, science, and many other disciplines. My roots in architecture opened my eyes to thinking beyond rigid boundaries to create experiences that transcend each individual discipline.

Your work involves what you call ‘speculative storytelling’. Could you talk a bit more about that? And what does speculative design mean to you?

I am always fascinated by the pulse of technology, and all the breakthroughs rapidly happening in synthetic biology, machine learning, etc. For me, speculative design is a means of making work to reflect on where we are going societally, in the midst of this rapid trajectory. I think this is the value of good speculative design; it can draw the viewer into the world and ask questions that conventional design does not. Some of my heroes in this domain are Fiona Raby and Anthony Dunne, who have written extensively on the topic.

You’ve mentioned that you love speculative design that reveals something in the fabric of your reality that you weren’t previously aware of. Could you talk a bit more about that?

There is a quote by science fiction writer Frederic Pohl, where he says ‘a good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile, but the traffic jam.’ I think when you get into the heat of creating within the speculative domain, you essentially build an entire world out of a few artifacts, or a few moves in materiality. An artist and speculative fiction writer that I deeply admire is Margaret Atwood, for the ways she is able to build alternate worlds that scrupulously pierce into pressing issues of today.

In our cultural landscape, how important is interrogating the concept of identity to you and your practice?

It is constant! Identity is unstable and constantly shifting. It’s a construct that we each craft and perform differently in various contexts. I am interested in how technology interacts and co-creates the sense of self. Growing up in the time of internet chat rooms, as a teenager I spent time experimenting with different usernames and avatars, interested in ways I could escape my physical body in cyberspace.

“There is an awareness that the person on the other side of the screen is not who they appear to be, and yet we still consume it at face value sometimes.”

Watching people painstakingly craft their Tinder or LinkedIn profiles is fascinating to me. There is also a darker side to it – for instance the proliferation of beauty filters on social media can be linked to body image and self-esteem issues. Somehow, knowing that they are filters does not prevent us from holding ourselves up to literally simulated standards.

Reoccurring themes in your work include gender politics, biopolitics, labour, simulation and sexuality. What do you enjoy most about exploring these ideas in particular?

In my research, I enjoy the process of discovery and revelation, and the potential for cultural change. It is 2021 and we still live in a world with violent sexism. The right to education, healthcare and bodily autonomy are still things female identified persons struggle with. Through some of my works, such as Mind Controlled Sperm, A.I. Toys or Pregnancy Menswear, the hope is that it can contribute to a cultural conversation that can shift mindsets about how we perceive sex and gender.

Do you rely a lot on your intuition?

I do. I think that the process of creation and the process of critical evaluation must occur separately. I don’t always succeed, but I try to separate those days out in my studio. There are days when I attempt to make in a purely intuitive, non-judgemental way. There are other days when I return to edit the works more critically. The processes exist in a never-ending cycle.

How has living in New York affected your practice?

New York is expensive! I have had to be creative about my practice – I have had large studios and extremely tiny ones depending on the ebbs and flows of my life. I have become good at continuing to create work no matter the physical circumstances of my studio. During COVID I was locked out of my studio completely, and learned how to work from home, like many other people. I adapted my material palette to things that were more domestic friendly and less toxic.

Living in New York, I also spend a lot of time commuting, and have learned ways to fold it into my practice, either by drawing, writing, reading, or simply observing. I do feel incredibly lucky to be surrounded by so many museums and galleries. There is never a shortage of art to see. There are certain museums that are almost like temples to me – I have been visiting them since I was a child. I feel spiritually nourished every time I return.

How important is exploring an emotional narrative in your work?

Extremely! I am an artist that practices at the intersection of art and science, and while the research component is very important to me, I think it is the emotional narrative that draws you in. It’s also that magical element of art making and art experiencing that drew me in from the beginning – the elements of mystery, contradiction and the transference of knowledge that is not necessarily verbal but deeply felt and understood.

In your 2016 TED talk you mentioned being ‘obsessed with olfaction as a design space’. How do you feel this compares to other kinds of sensory perception with regard to constructing an identity?  

The art historian Caroline Jones has a wonderful quote about olfaction. She says (and I am paraphrasing), ‘smell is preverbal, and has no capacity to pretend.’

“As a human who can tend to be hyper cerebral and analytic, I love smell for the ways it continues to remind me that I am also an animal, with instincts, intuition, and involuntary bodily relations to the world.”

Olfaction as a design space tends to be underdeveloped in an increasingly hygienic and sterile world. I love the stories that can be told through the nose, and I am interested in how your own experiences, histories, and geographical memories remap experiences that different people have towards identical smells. What makes something smell disgusting, pleasurable, familiar, or erotic? How many of these reactions are cultivated, and are any of these reactions universal?

What’s your usual process when coming up with new ideas and research projects?

Sometimes it begins with a feeling – a feeling of sadness or longing for a particular memory, for instance. Other times, it begins with research – a paper that I read and bookmark and sparks a new idea. I try to keep a meticulous sketchbook and record of moments I find interesting to revisit in later projects.

Your work is obviously very forward thinking and future-gazing. Do you ever feel drawn to working in the realm of nostalgia?

I actually love looking at retro depictions of the future, such as images of the future that were created in the 50s or 70s. They are simultaneously future gazing and nostalgic. I think I am attracted to these images because they often tell a better story of the time they were created. In some of these images,

“even though there are flying cars and robots everywhere, women are still depicted doing domestic chores and performing the traditional gender roles of the time.”

There is a strange emotional power to simultaneously holding both; I am also thinking of TV shows like Westworld for example, which is both set in the future while containing an amusement park for visiting the past.

What has been your favourite project to work on?

Each project has its own joys and challenges. I laughed out loud quite frequently while creating A.I. Toys, a project where I trained a machine learning algorithm on real world toys made for ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ to get at the zeitgeist of how we teach gender from a young age through things we give them. The machine learning model was then asked to generate new ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ toys based on what it learned. Because the project was essentially a collaboration with A.I., I often sifted through unexpected inventions that the algorithm made up. Something that I didn’t anticipate was that the model would pick on the verbal sass of marketing language.

What are the main things you want people to take away from your work?

My hope is that they come away questioning their relationship with technology. I hope that the world opens up new ways of thinking about gender, biology, biotechnology, algorithms, equality and identity – so many of the things we talked about in this interview. I also hope it leaves them with a feeling, perhaps, the same way I feel after reading a good poem. I know that kind of magic is not going to happen every time, but that’s the dream.

What can we expect from you in the future? Are there any other creative industries you can see yourself dabbling in?

I recently became a mother and have been re-learning my body and crafting new relationships with new bodies. I feel that I am engaging in physical processes that millennia of women and other birthing bodies have experienced before me. In my work, I have recently been trying to capture this messy experience of becoming. As a researcher, I have been delving into the history of birth, the history of medicine and technoscience as it relates to reproduction, gender, and sex. As an artist, I have been making vignettes of these first-hand experiences – of lactating, the waves of hormones through my body, the enormous emotions, the stretch marks, the contradictions of love, pain, exhaustion and branching of identities. It is all work in progress, and like life, I find that some things are better understood in retrospect.

Credits

Discover more here www.ani-liu.com
Images ANI LIU

Deadhungry

Posted on by nr

NR Vol. 14 Identity · Autumn Winter 2021
Published · Print Page 176

Feature · Alex Paganelli
Words · Izzy Bilkus

“I think you can get so stuck in trying to sell something, that you forget you can have fun and play around with it”

Chef and photographer Alex Paganelli has carved himself a unique position in the industry, operating with ease across the realms of food styling, film direction, menu designing and product development. Uniting the culinary, art and fashion worlds, Paganelli injects a vibrant energy into his creations, and has established himself as one to watch, having already worked on campaigns for brands like Skims and Bottega Veneta – but this is only one level of his flourishing food empire.

Growing up in the French Alps, Paganelli picked up his interest in French cuisine and cultural diversity, which came natural with Italian-British parents. Moving to London at 18, Paganelli took the techniques he learned from home with him to the kitchen and discovered a yearning for a creative process detached from tradition, and began shaping his own signature style, creating things that were stunning to behold, but also wonderful to eat.

Since establishing DeadHungry in 2015 – a studio, kitchen and creative hub for his food ideas, Paganelli has catered for specially-curated events and has built a strong reputation for daring menu design and serving eclectic, modern and experimental dishes.

Paganelli continues to subvert the conventions of food photography and conjures up scenes and dishes that are optical feasts, including life-size jelly shoes and handbags, cartoonish pies and mind-bendingly visceral table settings.

NR Magazine touches base with Paganelli in London to learn more about his visual language and creative evolution.

Growing up in France – a culinary capital of the world, how did this influence you when you first started as a chef?

France influenced me a lot. I grew up there and I lived there until I was 18. My mum is from London, so I used to come and spend my summers here with my family. My dad is from Italy, but the whole family moved to France when I was a child and we used to live close to them. They were a typical southern Italian family, so I think I’ve been influenced by all three if that makes sense- my dad’s Italian family, my mum’s British family, and then of course me growing up in France. I think all three really had an impact on my work, what I cook with and what I like to eat.

I grew up more or less with a Mediterranean diet, but then moving to London I discovered so many different types of cuisine. I met and worked with people and chefs from all over the world, so later in life I realised that even if I’m drawn to more traditional food, London has added an element of modern cooking, in a way that I don’t think I experienced growing up in France.

When did you start to shape your own signature style?

It was something that happened over time. I think my style grew after I became a photographer, but that happened a little bit later. At the beginning of my career, I was just focussing on food, but then I started documenting my work and eventually started getting hired as a photographer. Eventually it all melded together and formed what is today my style. It took a little while though. At the start, when I was only working with food and wasn’t really photographing as much, I hadn’t really figured out what my style was, and I didn’t really understand fully what it was that I was trying to do.

Eventually I started using different techniques, like I stopped using animal products and started to create more vegan dishes. That defined it a lot more, and I think that’s what made me grow in a way that was quite unexpected. Up until then I was cooking in a more traditional way, using very traditional ingredients, and when I decided I was going to use more plant-based ingredients, I realised there weren’t really any rules for that because it’s such a new way of cooking. I think that’s what really influenced the way that I cook. I realised that it was this exciting, new territory, where I didn’t have to stick to such a specific and traditional way of doing things. I think that’s when I realised my career was starting to grow in a different direction.

Are you vegan yourself then, or is that just what you happen to cook?

I cook and eat more or less the same stuff. There are a lot of chefs that will cook very differently to how they eat at home, but for me it’s more about blending it together. I don’t really believe in cooking something that I wouldn’t want to eat myself. In London I would consider myself mostly vegan, but if I’m in a place somewhere in the world where it makes sense to eat a certain food, then I can easily be influenced by those local ingredients – I have no problem doing that. I was in Nice for quite a while, and I did eat quite a bit of fish there.

For me, it’s more about blending into the environment you’re in and eating what makes sense in that location.

Yeah, that makes sense. I’ve got a lot of family in Greece, and obviously their cuisine is based a lot around things like cheese and fish, so when you travel there, it’s hard not to eat those things.

Exactly, and I also think the quality is and important part of it. I think eating a packaged piece of cheese from the supermarket is different to eating some that has been made on a really amazing farm. It’s part of the culture there which makes a big difference.

What inspired you to create DeadHungry in 2015? 

I’d been working in restaurants for quite a few years, and I realised that the restaurant pace was quite draining. I couldn’t see myself doing that full time for the rest of my life. There was an aspect of photography that I’ve always loved, which started off as a hobby rather than a career. But from the beginning I decided I was going to pursue a career in food and with that and I knew there was an element of creating visuals that I was really drawn to.

I really love creating imagery with cooking, so I found a way of blending the two together. But I never thought I was going to become a photographer – it was never a goal, it just happened.

Your work explores the different textural potential of food and objects, and your film direction, particularly with Bottega Veneta employs similar aesthetics and sensory techniques to ASMR videos. Do you draw inspiration from things like that? It seems like exploring different colours and forms is a key part of your work.

I’m not specifically influenced by things like ASMR. I would say it’s more a case of me liking anything detail oriented. I like anything that focusses on a great depth of colours and textures in general, and I think that’s something that we don’t really see much in food photography, apart from real close-ups of food that I think feel quite commercial.

I was always interested in things that were odd and almost a little bit repulsive. That part of food photography is something that I don’t think a lot of food photographers touch on. That’s become my point of view over time. It’s more about photographing things that we’re not used to seeing, for example I love to photograph things that are rotting, but as a food photographer, that’s not really something that you’re going to focus on, but it’s something that I personally find really visually appealing.

Your work has a very playful feel to it and at times, a darker sense of humour that shows off a different side to food photography. What inspires you to combine the worlds of gastronomy with art and fashion in this way? 

Again, that wasn’t something that I specifically thought I wanted to do. Those were just the type of clients that started coming my way, and I realised I had to adapt my work to fit the fashion world and its products in that way.

I think I’m inspired more by fashion photographers than food photographers – like more art photographers and still life photographers. That’s where my references come from. It wasn’t a conscious effort of combining the worlds of food and fashion, but over time, working with a lot of fashion brands and clients, it evolved into that.

I also noticed that some of your photographs are reminiscent of classic still lifes, but with a modern twist. Some of your tables are set in the style of the 60s and 70s, and have a nostalgic feel to them, particularly with the colourful jellies. Do you draw much inspiration from these eras?

I think I’m inspired by those eras for sure. It’s embedded into my work somehow. It’s not necessarily something I’m specifically drawn to, but there’s definitely a nostalgic feel to what I do.

I’m just attracted to anything beautiful, and perhaps a little romantic at times. I think that’s just a product of my taste.

What’s your usual working process – how do you approach developing new ideas?

I approach new ideas in lots of different ways, it just depends on what I’m doing. If I’m thinking of a photoshoot, then it’s more about understanding the product. If I’m working with a brand, I try to understand what their idea is and how I can then integrate that into what I do.

If I’m testing and developing a new dish or certain flavours, then it starts with a couple of ingredients that I want to work with – usually something seasonal that’s just become available. In that case, it’s more a matter of just testing it in my kitchen until I have something that I like.

I follow quite simple guidelines with the way that I shoot – I’m either shooting a beautiful dish as it is, or I photograph the process of it, as sometimes that looks even better than the final product. There are certain things I’ll make that are delicious to eat but that might not necessarily look very good on camera.

In terms of pure photography when it doesn’t have anything to do with a really tasty dish, then it’s more about getting the right elements in the studio on that day and getting my team to do the things they are good at, and honestly just having fun and not overthinking too much.

I think the best ideas come when you have a solid idea in your head, you don’t overthink every shot and you just have an overall idea of what the mood is going to be. The rest just falls into place.

What artists and chefs inspire you at the moment?

There are some pastry chefs that I love like Cédric Grolet in Paris. He’s very famous now but I’ve been following him for quite a while. There’s also this amazing artist called Craig Boagey that I discovered who does these incredible paintings of mushrooms but I’m also a huge fan of Sam Youkilis who does lots of moving images of mountains and stunning landscapes (amongst other things including lots of food) which remind me of home. Things come and go. I get really obsessed with people over a few weeks or a few months at a time and then I’ll move on to something else.

Do you feel like your identity as a chef and as a creative is rooted more in France or London? 

I’ve lived in London my whole adult life, so I think everything that I’ve ever created with DeadHungry has been created here, so I’d say that my work is deeply rooted here. In terms of my inspiration, that definitely comes from other places. I grew up in the Alps and spent most of my childhood there, so that’s a very special place for me. Every time I go back, I feel really inspired.

It’s funny though, because I eat very differently when I’m there compared to how I eat here, and I think of food in a completely different way. I think London has this immense pressure – there’s this stress to deliver things that are exciting and different all the time, whereas in other places you don’t think of it like that. Instead, you think of food more as a necessity rather than an artform. I think they’re both very important and they’re both part of how I work. They’re two very different approaches but I don’t think I could do what I do without them both.

What do you find most interesting about the intersections of the culinary and fashion worlds?

When you work for a food client that wants to sell a product and wants to focus on what that food is for a restaurant or a hotel etc, I think you can get so stuck in trying to sell something, that you forget you can have fun and play around with it. What I really love about shooting food for a fashion brand is that it doesn’t really matter what the food is, as long as the overall image looks good or has an energy or an emotion attached to it that is interesting and visually appealing.

If you were just focussing on food clients, all you really want to do is make something look delicious, and that’s not always the best way of taking an amazing image. Sometimes trying to be too realistic takes away from the magic of creating an image. That’s what I really like doing with brands that aren’t necessarily always about food – you can have more fun with them without having to worry about what every element looks like. As soon as you start to do that you lose the sense of a really interesting image, and it just becomes more about the product.

With the theme of this issue being Identity, I thought it would be interesting to hear about your signature dishes or any favourite recipes from your childhood. 

Honestly, the thing I love to cook the most is pizza. I know it sounds really basic, but it’s what I love to make the most. It’s so simple and it’s something that everyone loves, but its also something that is a lot more difficult than people think – it took me years to perfect a really good dough.

I also love pastries, and I love to cook with seaweed. I don’t really have a specific recipe that I go back to, but there are certain kinds of food that I seem to always go back to, and then maybe new flavour combinations will come out of that.

I’m really into cooking vegetable skewers at the moment, but things come and go depending on the season. Since I’ve been vegan, I find the versatility of an ingredient like seaweed to be really interesting.

What stands out to you most about the London food scene?

The level of the food industry is really high in London. When I go back to places like France, people always ask me ‘don’t you miss French food and French ingredients?’ and in Italy it’s the same. People say the food is disgusting in London, but I’ve had some of the best food in the world here. There are so many people from all over the world, and so many different communities – you can go east and see the Vietnamese community, you can go a little bit more north and see the Caribbean community, and every community has some stand out places that are incredible.

Something I miss when I go away is that idea that I can have food from all over the world. If you know where you’re going, you can find things that are incredibly special, and I love that.

The downsides are that it’s a very fast-paced city, and a lot of restaurants open and close really quickly, because its very expensive and its not necessarily financially viable to run a restaurant. I think in general, it’s a very hard city to break into. The food industry is one of the most difficult industries to get into. It’s very challenging to own a restaurant and I admire people who can actually run a restaurant 24/7, because it’s so demanding and such hard work. But I think it’s also a very special place for food.

I love it. It’s so diverse, and we have some of the best chefs in the world here. So many chefs come through London just to open a restaurant because they know the clientele is here.

Do you think you would ever live anywhere else?

That’s the question I’m asking myself! I’ve been here for 14 years, and I love it, it’s an exciting city, but I think the older I get, the more I realise I’m ready to live a life that’s a little bit more relaxed.

I think as long as I have a foot in London then that’s fine. I’d still want to be in the city, because it’s an exciting place to be, and I think you learn so much from other people here and get so easily inspired. I don’t think the level of creativity would be the same in a smaller city, and I think I would miss that if I left. But I’m definitely drawn to a more relaxed lifestyle with a bit of sun.

Is sustainability important to you and your work?

Yes, its really important! It wasn’t something I thought was that important when I started working, but now I think every chef in the world has some level of responsibility and should understand that we can’t really be cooking in the same way that we were 50 years ago. I think if we want to move to a more sustainable food chain in general, and we want to really improve our systems, whether that’s the way we farm and fish or the way that we eat – I think it’s a collective effort.

I think chefs have a responsibility to show people options and to make good examples. I take it quite seriously, that’s why I don’t cook with meat and fish anymore. Especially in a big city, you hear lots of people say, ‘what if we all bought meat and fish from sustainable farms?’ and that’s great if you have the money to do that. I don’t disagree with the idea that we should still be eating meat every once in a while, I just don’t think it should be part of our diets in the way that it is now – I think it should be something we do extremely rarely.

The problem is that it’s cheaper to buy a kilo of chicken wings in a supermarket than it is to buy really good quality vegetables. I think that’s where the responsibility for chefs lies, in breaking away from that broken system.

How would you define your visual language?

It’s quite dynamic and has a touch of camp to it. There’s something very raw and vibrant to it as well. The idea of photographing things that are very realistic doesn’t appeal to me. I like things that are a bit surreal. That’s what’s fun with photography – being able to replicate something that you don’t always see with your own eyes. I don’t understand the point of photographing things the way that you see them in real life. Why not have fun with it?

There are amazing photographers that do documentary and journalistic work. Some people are very good at that, but for me, it’s more about being able to capture something that is a little bit surreal.

What’s been the most daring or challenging thing you’ve done in your career so far?

I think generally, opening the studio a couple of years ago – that was very challenging. So far, it’s been trying to establish myself as a chef and a photographer on the same level. That was something that before I had the studio, I was really struggling to do, and my career was moving more towards creating imagery and less towards cooking, so being able to establish that has been very important. It has been challenging but also very rewarding, because I realised how important they both are, and how I couldn’t really be doing one without the other.

I think the most challenging things are yet to come. I’m looking at opening a new studio – something a bit more stable and solid, that could be running a more regularly than what I’m doing now. At the moment my studio is here, but I only open it every once in a while for dinners, so I’m looking to open something that could be a bit more permanent.

Agnes Questionmark

Posted on by nr

NR Vol. 14 Identity · Autumn Winter 2021
Published · Print Page (044)

Feature · Agnes Questionmark (Agnes?)
Words · Nicola Barrett

“This is my dream, of being a new creature, half-human, half fish, to be a hybrid, something that can’t be recognised or put in a box.”

During May of this year, while we were just emerging out of a third lockdown and entering a world that was both forever changed and somewhat the same, something else, or rather someone, was also in the midst of transformation. In an abandoned health centre in Belsize Park the art installation/performance Transgenesis curated by The Orange Garden and Charlie Mills, was taking place. Over the course of twenty-three days, Italian artist Agnes Questionmark (Agnes?) climbed into the body of a giant octopus sculpture, which took up the entirety of a drained swimming pool, and stayed there for eight hours every day until the exhibition was over. 

For Agnes Questionmark (Agnes?) the start of the exhibition was also the start of her transition from the gender she was assigned at birth. However, she also considers herself trans-species, stating that her “dysphoria is not only gender-related but of species too. I wish I could find a hormone that allows me to become an octopus.” The sea plays a big part in Agnes Questionmark (Agnes?)’ work, she grew up on her father’s boat and being underwater is a comforting experience for her, which she has likened to returning to the womb. NR Magazine joins the artist in conversation. 

Your father was a sailor and you grew up on a boat. What was that like and how do you think those experiences have influenced your artwork specifically?

I grew up in my father’s boat. At the age of three, I discovered the underwater world holding his hand and at the age of eight, I dived for the first time by myself. The experience of being underwater was always a comfort zone, a familiar place where I would feel at home. I would fish and hunt, explore the fluid element with my body, feeling part of that habitat.
Being completely submerged was what I liked the most. In that precise moment, which only lasted a few seconds, I would feel at peace. Under the water, where sound is muffled, where sight is blurred, where touch is slimy, my body becomes light, my skin soft, I feel a sense of belonging, it’s like going back to the origin and falling into the arms of mother sea.

When my mother told me that, before she gave birth, I would hide in the womb, I realised that I had an unresolved relationship with my mother’s womb. I realised that my whole life I was trying to go back into my mother’s womb. I am trying to recreate that sensorial experience, being into the amniotic liquid, in the placenta. And the place where I felt closer to my mother’s womb is under the water.
Through my art and my performances, I am creating the feeling of being inside my mother’s womb, to perhaps solve my relationship with it.

I also grew up by the sea and one of my favourite games was to grab a big rock and sink to the seafloor to see how long I could hold my breath for. You stated that “Underwater was always a safe place, a place of comfort.” Did you ever play similar games and do you consider your artwork an extension of the play and exploration the ocean encourages in our childhood?

Holding myself with a rock underwater is still my favourite game. I can now hold my breath for about two minutes, so I have lots of fun holding myself with whatever I find under the water. As I said before, while I am underwater I remind myself that I am still in the womb. I like to watch around me and feel part of the habitat, I would look at the fish and pretend to talk to them, I would look at the rocks and pretend they are part of my house.

Your performance in Transgenesis lasted eight hours a day for twenty-three days. How did you cope with such long performances and did the experience affect you after the exhibition was finished?

Transgenesis was a ritual of self-destruction that announced the beginning of a new transformation. The day I started the performance was the day I started my hormone replacement therapy (HRT). While my body was standing at the top of a giant octopus, inside my body a real transformation was taking place. I was changing in real-time in front of the spectator. Even though the changes were not visible I would feel them. Since the first day I felt my body differently, touching myself felt different, my mood was different and my body began little changes that only I could perceive. Alas! I could not enjoy them because I was trapped and chained in the octopus. Every day I had to stand for 8 hours and perform.
It was devastating, an extreme action that consumed all my forces and all my energies. I felt exhausted, the more I would keep going the more I would feel the pain. I needed this process of destruction, I needed to die, to let a part of myself decay in order to flourish a new being. 

After the performance, I felt like a new person. Agnes? Was finally born and my new life began. It was the most dramatic ritual I could ever stage and I decided to share it with everyone. The show went viral, more than four thousand people booked themselves in and walked along my installation. There was a sort of peregrination towards the octopus. Everyone wanted to come see the great mother.

Over the course of the twenty-three-day performance that you did for Transgenesis you must have seen a lot of visitors. How did they normally react to your work and what was the most interesting reaction you witnessed?

Most visitors couldn’t believe their eyes. I immediately felt that I created something out of normal by looking at their faces, they were all scared but somehow enchanted by me. The experience was sublime, in a romantic view of a tragedy happening in front of their eyes, like a shipwreck. The viewer was contemplating a suffering being from a safe position, but they were still scared of falling, they wouldn’t get too close, they wouldn’t talk too loud, they would carefully choose their movements, they were all attracted by me but also very frightened. The energy in the room was very dense, all day there was a constant flux of people entering in the dark and loud space. Sometimes I would rest, sometimes I would be very angry, sometimes I would be calm and quiet. Often the spectator determined the energy of the room, I would perform with them at an unconscious level.
One day, a lady came right in front of me, she looked directly into my eyes and we looked at each other for a long time, I was repeatedly moving my arms back and forth following my breath, slowly she started synchronising my movements, it felt like an instinctive reaction to the connection we established. We performed for some minutes, together, moving our arms, looking directly in our eyes without touching but still connecting.

 A man used to come every other day, he used to sit down in front of me with dark sunglasses and watch me for hours. No movements, he would just sit down, listen and watch me perform. One day towards the end of the performance he stood up and started dancing like crazy. At that point I was exhausted, it was almost 8 hours of performance, but suddenly I felt all the energies recharged, he gave me strength and I started to perform with him, I felt like laughing and screaming but I could just express myself through my arms and my breath. Later on I discovered he was the singer of R.E.M.
Since the show was completely free we had the most disparate range of audience, from kids to adults, young students, to curators and gallerists, bougie of the neighbourhood or those who lived or were just lost on the street. An old woman came twice, I recognised her because she was holding the same plastic bag, she was messy and dressed as if she just came out from a Tim Burton movie. She wasn’t scared at all, she immediately came close to me, she came very close until she touched one tentacle. She was the one who came closer and stood up next to me and watched me from a very close distance. At first, I was scared because I felt vulnerable, I felt I had no vantage point towards her, she made me feel tiny and shy even though I was a giant octopus 5 metres tall and 9 metres long…

Your work is very personal and explores your transition. Do you think that the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns have allowed people more time and freedom to explore their own gender identity?

Yes, of course, statistics say that gender transition triplicated after Covid. I don’t think it was a matter of having more time to reflect and think but rather we were forced to face our own body because we were left alone with it. There was no opportunity to escape or avoid ourselves, no places to hide. Alone with our bodies, so we all had to find new relationships with ourselves and new compromises.

You have spoken of how your work explores the scientific, particularly in relation to the body. Do you think as technology advances the use of cybernetic body enhancements will become commonplace? Is that something you would potentially explore in the future? 

I was always interested in re-shaping and re-exploring my body. I feel our body is a potential machine in constant transformation. Watching my body changing radically through medicines is inspiring me to transform it at an even deeper level. Gender transition is the first step towards my cybernetic future. My next step would be exploring the possibility to expand my senses towards other beings in the sea, and therefore use extensions of my body to connect with them. 

You have stated that your dysphoria is not only related to your assigned gender but mainly caused by your assigned species. Recently there has been a rise in popularity in non-human x human relationships in media. Do you think there is a collective desire for marginalized groups to move away from ‘humanity’ and escape post-capitalist patriarchal trauma by becoming and embracing the otherworldly? 

Fascination with the non-human is becoming more popular and of a trend. Human prostheses, body extensions, claws, tentacles, tails, we dream of becoming a post-human creature to transcend our humanity and become something new. This is my dream, of being a new creature, half-human, half fish, to be a hybrid, something that can’t be recognised or put in a box. I am tired of being a human, my body is not representing what I feel. I feel more connected to the sea, I wish to talk with its creatures and connect with them and perhaps create new bonds. For this reason, we should rethink our way of communicating and relating to the world and start creating new ways of communication, starting with ourselves and our bodies. If we want to be post-human we ought to destroy our notion of being human and see ourselves as a potential being in constant transformation.

You have spoken often about wishing to return to your mother’s womb and your connection with female octopi who die when they become mothers. Do you consider yourself to have a fascination with the concept of motherhood and do you consider the creation of your artwork as a kind of birth?

The concept of the womb is the one of gestating life. I feel like my art is a womb, my studio is a placenta where things and beings are born. It’s a place that destroys to reshape itself, that kills and gives birth, like the mother. The mother has always been the figure of life and death at the same time. This is why we are all scared of our mother because we know she can kill us.

What advice do you have for young creatives looking to explore their identity and what does identity mean to you?

Identity doesn’t exist, gender is a construction of society. So forget about everything you learned and do whatever you like. You make your own rules. Be a rock star, be a rebel, don’t give a fuck about anything; don’t listen to anyone, follow your instinct and make lots of mistakes.
I always remember that I have the agency of being whatever I want to be, and If you want to be an octopus I am proof that you can do it!

Are you working on any projects at the moment and what plans do you have for the future?

I am transforming at a fast speed, everyday I am a new person. So my work is changing very fast too. I see and feel things differently, so I am enjoying my transformation and letting my new ideas come out. There are lots of projects I am working on at the moment, one of them is in collaboration with a great Greek artist who is also a trans-pieces queen so we are making something very special together.

The Ranch Mine

Posted on by nr

NR Vol. 14 Identity · Autumn Winter 2021
Published · Print Page 358

Feature · The Ranch Mine
Words · Nicola Barrett

“Our identity is the fuel behind the best design and architecture”

Architectural studio The Ranch Mine draw inspiration from the rich history of the pioneers who settled in their local state of Arizona in search of a better life. “We chose our name to honour those that have come before us, the humble ranchers and miners, who have paved the way for our opportunities for prosperity today, and to serve as inspiration to design spaces that afford us the opportunity to imagine what’s beyond what we see in the present so we can strive for new experiences.”

In 2018 The Ranch Mine was approached by a family who owned a large plot of land in Phoenix, Arizona to create a home “in which their family could grow and create.” One member of the family is a ceramic artist and The Ranch Mine drew inspiration from the ancient art of pottery when designing the property. The name Foo House is derived from the Chinese character ‘Fu’, which means good fortune and luck, as a nod to the client’s Chinese heritage.

Phoenix is located in the northeastern reaches of the Sonoran desert and is known as The Valley of the Sun. With dusty-grey board marked concrete, orange weathering steel, and shades of olive and cream Foo House embodies the spirit of the desert with a sprawling and airy design. NR Magazine joins The Ranch Mine in conversation.

How do you think identity informs design and architecture?

We believe that identity is both the reason for design and architecture and the result of design and architecture. Our identity is the fuel behind the best design and architecture. Architecture is a reflection of who we are, our time, our place, and our culture. Who we are and how we live shapes the form and function of the spaces we create. What is really fascinating to us is that who we are is inextricable from where we have been and where we are. We shape the built environment, and it, in turn, shapes us. This is why it is critical to continue to infuse the identity of people into spaces, and design for opportunities to grow beyond who we are and what we see today.

Foo House is influenced by the ancient art of pottery. How did this factor into the design specifically?

We are fascinated with history and love how pottery has played a critical role in most societies in human history as well as our modern-day understanding of those societies. So we broke down what makes pottery interesting to us, and how could we take those principles to inform a new piece of architecture. The design emerged as a home that is rigid in structure while malleable in use, precise in form while imperfect in texture, and varied in volume while limited in materials.

Are there any new technologies in architecture that you are particularly excited about?

One of the most exciting things about architecture is the development of building science, and how we can use new materials to improve tried and true ancient ways of living. The newest technology that we are excited about is a company based here in Phoenix called Source that has created a hydropanel that is the first renewable drinking water system. It creates drinking water from the air through the use of solar energy. Living in a desert where water is a precious resource, this is very exciting to us.

Given the issues of rising temperatures around the globe and the location of Foo House was this something you had to consider when conceptualising the architectural design of the property?

Phoenix is definitely at the forefront of dealing with extremely high temperatures and has been for a while. Studying the sun, the most powerful element here is where all our designs begin. Foo was designed as a large courtyard house that follows the sun’s day arc, shielding the interior from times of extreme heat. Courtyard houses have been effective ways of living in the desert dating back 5000 years to Kahun in Egypt and possibly earlier. They are self-shading, providing a space to either embrace or escape the sun at all times of day throughout the year.

Other than the ancient art of pottery were there was there any other influences or inspirations that you drew on when working on this project?

We always draw inspiration from our clients, who in this case were a very “hands-on” family, starting with their professions but leading to their kids playing musical instruments, gardening and raising chickens, and making robots. We wanted to go beyond just making a pottery studio and maker space to satisfy the “what” of the scope. We wanted to build on the essence of these items and make an entire home that reflected their family values. So the design uses a combination of the hand made and materials meant to patina and change over time, in an aesthetic some might consider wabi-sabi, that embraces the journey, the imperfections of hand made, and the transitory nature of our world. The other major inspiration in every project is the site, and its location in this world. We are fortunate to have incredible weather for the majority of the year in Phoenix. While the headlines talk about the high heat which can be intense, about 7-8 months a year you can basically live outside.

We wanted to create a home that everywhere you are in the house has a direct relationship with the exterior, and we wanted to create a lot of different types of connections, not just one big opening. The main living space has double-height glazing that faces north towards the courtyard. It has sliding glass doors that open it out onto the covered patio towards the outdoor kitchen, fire pit, and pool beyond. It also has a lofted area that provides skyline views to the south and views of the Phoenix mountain preserve to the north. It provides a different perspective of the landscape. We also created glass connectors between the volumes of the house, so the landscape sort of tucks in around the house, and you are constantly aware of it as you walk from one area of the house to the next. The bedroom wing has smaller openings that frame the olive grove or high windows that look towards the sky. Using exposed aggregate concrete blurred the transition as you step outside and areas where the glass is fixed, the new desert landscape comes right up to it.

What were some of the challenges you faced when working on Foo House and how did you overcome them?

The first challenge is that the house is located in a pretty busy urban area, less than a half-mile from 10+ story towers. To create an oasis-like refuge, we shaped the building to create a large central courtyard, using the building to shield the areas that faced the busy part of the city. The second challenge was overcoming the fact that buildings are generally by their nature static. We wanted to find a way to activate the house to meet the dynamism of the family and their passions. Our approach to doing this was two-pronged. The first was to design the building to be noticeably affected by time. We did this by using materials that would patina like the rusting siding or soften the board-formed concrete joints as well as using vertical floor to ceiling windows that face due south that act like sundials throughout the day. This is most noticeable where we shifted the hallway around the stairwell and added a steel brise soleil to highlight the solar pattern in the hallway. The second way we did this was by creating a campus-like plan, where you walk through communal spaces, outside and inside to get to more specific places. This creates casual exchanges.

When creating a family home like Foo House what are some important aspects to bear in mind?

When creating a family home, the first thing people often think of designing for is durability. While this is of course important, it is not the main driving factor for us. When designing family homes we focus on flexibility over time, spaces that inspire creativity, and a variety of spaces in which you can connect with each other, with extended family and with friends, as well as opportunities to disconnect.

The site contains a chicken coop, a citrus grove, a stone fruit grove, and raised planting beds for growing herbs and vegetables. Are there any other methods of sustainability used on the property?

The house is designed to primarily use stack ventilation in the bedrooms and main living area to use the diurnal temperature swings to help passively cool the house. The house opens up primarily to the north for indirect natural light and uses the height of the volumes to shade exterior spaces for outdoor living. The U-shaped form of the house creates a large courtyard, creating a bit of a microclimate. The roofing is a combination of white-coloured foam or corrugated metal to reflect the radiant heat from the sun. The property used to be almost entirely grass and we changed it to primarily desert and native vegetation on drip irrigation, heavily reducing the water consumption on the property in combination with low flow water fixtures throughout.

What advice do you have for young creatives looking to work in architecture?

Find out who you are first. Then put that out into the world. Once you do it will attract people you want to work with. You are uniquely you. Your identity is your gift to the world, it is the one thing you do better than everyone else. Share it.

Are you working on any projects at the moment and what are your plans for the future?

We have about 30 residential projects in the works currently. We are excited that about 1/3 of those projects have taken us into new climates, new states, and outside of the country. Each new location continues to hone our research practices and understanding of place.

Our plans for the future are focused on continuing to grow our residential practice, designing homes that expand people’s creative potential and liberate them from the confines of convention. We look forward to more projects locally as well as projects that take us to new places, new people, and introduce new challenges.

Sophie Hicks

Posted on by nr

NR Vol. 14 Identity · Autumn Winter 2021
Published · Print Page 234

Feature · Sophie Hicks
Words · Izzy Bilkus

“Architecture appears to be moving towards helping human beings live, work and experience their lives better. And if that means the building looks like shit, then so be it!”

While still a student at the Architectural Association, Sophie Hicks founded her London-based architecture firm in 1990. The practice started out designing private housing, and by leveraging her insider insight, it is safe to say that Sophie Hicks has become one of fashion’s favourite architects, with her firm designing stores for the likes of Acne Studios, Chloé, Yohji Yamamoto and more.

Hicks became a chartered architect in 1994, prior to which she worked as a fashion editor for Vogue and for the iconic designer, Azzedine Alaïa. Hicks’s relentless efficiency has allowed her to lead her practice with extensive experience in the fashion world. Particularly strong on design, her approach is both conceptual and practical, and is highly attuned to the zeitgeist.

Outside of her fashion clients, Hicks’s residential projects embody the spirit of their surroundings, and champion honesty and boldness of materials. Subtle yet meticulously considered details are typical of Hicks’s architecture, which is best characterised by her discreet, restrained and durable ways of working.

NR Magazine speaks with Hicks about the ins and outs of her career, and to learn more about what distinguishes her identity as an architect.

What inspired you to change career path from fashion to architecture? 

I think it two things, really. I was very excited about being in the fashion world. From the age of about 17, when I entered it, it was very exciting. I enjoyed being a stylist and identifying new trends and fashions, creating pictures, and putting teams together, but I got to a point where I saw the fashion cycle coming full circle with the types of images and models coming out, and I was only about 26. I felt that it was too soon for me to be getting stuck into a cycle. I didn’t want to be part of a world that was going around in circles.

What I really wanted to do was to be creative and to create something myself. With photography and styling photographs, you are in effect, being creative but you’re putting together teams like a director. You’re grabbing clothes, putting together teams of photographers, models, hair, makeup and inventing a story, but you’re not actually taking the photograph or designing the clothes. I’d always been interested in architecture ever since I was a teenager, and I just decided to completely change paths and see if I could be an architect and create things myself that would affect how people experience the world.

Was that scary? The fashion world is such a dynamic and intimidating place to work in. Was it a shock moving into the world of architecture? 

Yes. I quite like having new and different experiences, and I quite like taking risks. Towards the end of my fashion career, I was working for Azzedine Alaïa doing a set of photographs with him of his previous collections from the start until that point in the mid-80s. We were recording all his collections for a book that he eventually bought out. So I was dressed top to toe in Alaïa – the tailored pieces, not the slinky ones, but I was pretty sharply dressed. I’ve never been so smart since.  I swanned up to the Architectural Association for an interview looking like something they’d never really seen before.

They asked to see my portfolio, and I told them I didn’t have one, only my fashion sketches. In those days at fashion shows, you weren’t allowed to photograph the clothes because they were kept embargoed until they actually got into the shops, so if you were an editor, you sat there sketching in your notebooks. You had to sketch extremely quickly because the models would come by quite fast. I showed them these books, and I was sitting there in a black tailored double-breasted suit – I think they just thought I was mad. I heard afterwards that they really didn’t think I would stick it, but they didn’t realise that if I decide to do something, I do it.

But they offered me a place, and on day one, I knew I shouldn’t walk in there all dressed up, so I decided to go completely under the radar and became unnoticeable. You had to absorb yourself and become a chameleon. It was about the second term, when someone turned to me and asked, ‘You’re not that Sophie Hicks who used to be the fashion editor at Vogue, are you?’ and I said, ‘well, yes, I am actually.’ and she said, ‘why do you look like that then?’ it was all quite amusing. I just really enjoyed drawing and making things. We did a lot of work in the workshops – we would weld, cut, saw, and make models. I loved all of that. We did a lot of expressive drawings, which were pre-computer, and I’m not a good drawer by hand, so I’d make a lot with clay, plaster, carving, printing, and etching etc.

We would talk a lot about our ideas. And the Architectural Association is brilliant at teaching design, and brilliant at teaching you how to think. I’m an external examiner there now, which I’ve been doing for the last four years, and it’s amazing how they get their students to think – to a level that I don’t think you get in other schools.

It’s a bit like if you were thinking about conceptual art, I suppose. Thinking about what the concept is, what the meaning behind it is and why you’re doing it. Absolutely everything needs an explanation when you design, and it’s got nothing to do with aesthetics until you know why you’re doing it, then the aesthetics happen naturally. Of course, some people do their aesthetics better than others – some people have an elegance, and some people don’t. But if there isn’t a reason behind why you’re doing something, then I don’t think it’s very meaningful.

I’ve always thought that film directors have a very interesting job, with the way they approach a project and how they set up a team and choosing all the people who are going to gel as unit. It was Grace Coddington who taught me how to set up a team when you’re doing a fashion shoot. The psychology of a group is incredibly important. I took that kind of thinking with me to the world of architecture: thinking broadly, out of the box and about how to set up an architectural project in a way that is more likely to be successful.

What inspiration do you draw from other engineers and architects – particularly with Félix Candela and Paulo Mendes da Rocha? 

They worked brilliantly with concrete. Recently, I’ve used quite a bit of concrete in buildings I’ve made. I think Félix Candela was probably the most brilliant user of concrete who has ever lived. He mathematically worked out how to create very thin, reinforced concrete shells that were very elegant and incredibly clever. And if you can do something very clever, why wouldn’t you? He also did this because he was designing quite simple structures like bus shelters and churches for communities in Mexico. The budgets were very tight, and I believe he even designed some churches without windows. Because of this low budget, he used less concrete, so the building was less expensive. Because of that, he designed these extraordinary floating canopies and canopy rooves, where the geometry is really his invention. His brilliance as an engineer allowed him to do that. There are some wonderful photographs of this, one in particular which has workman standing on top of this mushroom-like roof. It’s about 10 or 15 metres high and incredibly thin. It’s just a brilliant demonstration of history.

Paulo Mendes da Rocha’s buildings in and around Sao Paolo have an incredible force to them. They’re raw and feel very dynamic, as they have so much embodied energy, in that they are incredibly still. The thing about him which I find very interesting, and which I feel reassured by, is when when I hear about architects of his stature that did what I do, which is having an office of one. An architect of his stature, you would expect to have an office of quite a lot of people, but he maintained a very small office. I’ve never had a big office – I’ve had an office of about 10 people perhaps, and I found that I wasn’t properly designing myself. I was spending too much time looking after other people and checking their work.

Everything froze with the crash in 2008, and I felt like I really needed to get back to basics. What I really wanted to do was design buildings, and what I really wanted to do was actually be the one doing the designing, not passing it down. I’ve got the most brilliant kind of situation now, where I work very closely with my colleague Tom Hopes, and we work very well together. He’s very strong on construction, and I’m very strong on design. He’s teaching me construction and I’m teaching him design – we do both and understand both sides. My aspiration would be to continue to work in this way, and to continue to work in the way that Mendes da Rocha worked. That involved only bringing in other team members for a project when you need to, so you don’t have everyone in the office all the time.

The most recent building I did was a house in Northamptonshire, and it was a reasonably big team. We did all the drawings here, with about 10 or so people, but it worked very well because the quality of the design and the detail was that bit higher. We work very closely as a team and get much better results, I feel. But it’s an unusual way to work, so I’m always encouraged when I read that someone like him created really interesting buildings with that same process.

What do you value most about a living space?

That it’s really comfortable, and not just literally. It’s important that you feel relaxed, calm, and able to be yourself in and around it. The word ‘comfortable’ might have the wrong connotations because it makes you think about sitting on squishy chairs, but it’s not that. It’s a kind of feeling – feeling yourself.

When I design for other people, I want to find out what makes them feel right. If I’m designing a house for somebody, I want to know everything about how they live, how they behave, what makes them feel comfortable, and what kind of impression they want that building to embody. With the house that I designed for my daughter recently, which is called House Between Two Lakes, it was really important to her that it wasn’t a show-off-y house. She didn’t want a flashy house. She didn’t want a house that was obtrusive. She wanted something that was the opposite of a designed house, which is why we made something that sat very gently in the landscape, and that is very streamlined.

As the theme of this issue is identity, I thought it would be interesting to know if you’ve ever had kind of ‘identity crisis’ with a project?   

That’s a difficult one, because architectural projects are very long and very complicated, and they involve an awful lot of solving problems. These problems might be thrown up by the environment or by the building problems that crop up during construction. If you’re working on a project where you’re solving problems, an identity crisis is less common.

There’s initial design that you tend not to go forward with until you’ve got the concept sorted out. Projects don’t go ahead if you can’t get that right. It’s a difficult question for me to answer. I know it sounds as if I’m not admitting to self-doubt, but that’s not it. As an architect, you’re a servant of the client, so you need to understand what they’re all about. If you don’t understand what they’re all about, the project tends not to go forward. If you are trying to understand what they’re all about, you carry on until you reach a point of agreement, and during that process, there are often moments where you doubt if you’re ever going to get there. There are multiple points in time where I would be searching for the solution that would embody the character or the ethos of a brand, or the character of the person or thing that they want to embody in the building. It might be some sort of feelings or atmosphere, and I might be struggling to understand what they really mean. And even when I do understand, I have to then find a way of translating that into a built form.

There is a kind of lightbulb moment when you get it right. It happened with the Chloé shop early on for Phoebe Philo. I was struggling with what to do for this luxurious brand, and for its new, young, dynamic designer. She’s got great ideas and a contemporary way of looking at things. At the end of the day, it’s a Paris luxury house, and had stores on fancy shopping streets. I thought about what we could do to bring the spirit of that young designer into the shop environment in a way that would feel how I think she feels about her designs. I really thought we weren’t going to get there. I really didn’t know what I was going to be able to suggest, and then suddenly, we had riots in Bond Street. There were some demonstrations, and the shop fronts were boarded up, and that was my lightbulb moment. We used railing and raw plywood like you would use to protect your front window. We put that inside the shop and used it as the finish for the walls. There’s a real beauty to basic plywood. Not fancy plywood and beautiful veneer, just the bog-standard shuttering with lots of faults in it. I wanted to bring that into this luxury space and offset it with the pink marble and gold-plated metal fittings that Phoebe was working on. We gave it a kind of spin that would tell the kinds of rich women who are going to come into shop, that there’s something else going on here. The spirit of the place is just a bit more rooted in reality.

Your Acne Studios flagship store has a very forceful and distinct presence, reflecting the studio’s designs and aversion to conventional Swedish design. What were the other influences behind this project?

When working with a fashion client or a brand, they have very distinct characteristics and their brand identity is important to them, so it’s about finding an architecture that will embody that character and ethos. When I have a new client, I go and study that person, or that group of designers.

I’d never been to Sweden before Acne Studios contacted me, so I spent a long time shadowing Jonny Johansson during design meetings, hearing how he spoke to other people and absorbing how he works and how he makes his choices. I also spent quite a lot of time travelling around Sweden and going to the islands to gather information in my mind about Swedish light.

One of the most important things for that Seoul flagship store was the kind of light you get in Sweden. In the summer, you get a very strong and completely engulfing flat light. Light is very important in Sweden, because for many months of the year they don’t have a lot of it, and then they have a lot of it all at once in the summer. Something I noticed from studying Jonny and the other Swedes in the office, is that they were very private and keep their cards quite close to their chest. Seoul is a very dynamic, outgoing place in comparison. I thought if I were going to make a building in this very dynamic city for a brand whose culture is much more reticent, then I would like to make the building sit as a quiet, almost brooding monster. Monster isn’t quite the right word, I know, but there’s something very still about the concrete frame within that building. It’s very grounded and permanent, but then it’s held inside this misty white box. With this misty white box, you get no hint of what’s going on inside until you enter. I also had no idea that the light was going to be as good as it was until we built it. I thought it would be nice, but it really is extraordinary. All the daylight comes through this white polycarbonate material, and it makes you feel as if you’re in a white cloud. It’s quite odd and does strange things to your perception. I think that aspect of it is the Swedish part – this sense of unreality and dreaminess that is present in Sweden, particularly in the islands, that are so silent. It embodies that quietness of the Swedish character.

So it’s kind of in opposition to Seoul, but then all the air conditioning and all the services, we had piled up on the roof. All the rooftops in Seoul are a mess of air conditioning units, so we did that as a nod to Korea, but in a very neat and tidy way. This also allowed us to keep the space inside the building free, without any dropped ceilings or internal surfaces hiding anything. I don’t like finishes and I don’t like hiding things, so I don’t like having to build internal walls to hide services. I like the internal finish to express the structure of the building.

How did you go about combining both Japanese and Parisian aesthetics and design principles with your Yohji Yamamoto store?

I knew Yohji anyway, as I’d seen his first shows in Paris when I was working at Vogue, so I knew how he was when he landed in Paris. He landed with this extraordinary new vision that was completely different from anything that had come before. I knew how he’d been incredibly shocking to the Parisians and the world of fashion entirely. I also knew how he’d become comfortable over the years in Paris and opened one of his design studios. He had a big office in Paris and worked quite a few months of the year there, so I knew he’d become much more embedded in Paris than say Rei had – she was much more Japan-based.

When I was working on his project, I basically shadowed him. But with him, he didn’t like anyone close, so I’d be observing and studying from a distance. He’s a very private person, and Japanese shopping culture is very sophisticated. They don’t like to show off. It feels very wrong to put a mannequin in a window for a Japanese client.

I decided to include glimpses, and he was open enough to be able to show glimpses into the store from the windows, so we used a kind of Shoji screen. We played with the idea of things on axes, like in formal French gardens. You get glimpses through the screen, and as you get closer, you can see into the shop. We included without heads, so basically had all the dresses floating in the space. And when you entered, you’d have a series of glimpses that would start from a kind of corridor of wooden folded screens. As you move down this corridor, the view suddenly opens up, and that’s when you can tell a story about menswear and womenswear. It was all to do with opening up really, which I think is a very French thing, and then through showing his clothes in a progression – that’s how I tried to make the link between him and Paris.

What qualities of materials do you think lend the most atmosphere to a space? And what do you enjoy working with the most?

For an interior space, I like the structure of the building to be expressed internally. I want to be able to see what the structure is, and it’s the expression of those structural materials that I think gives character and atmosphere to the space. That’s one reason why I don’t like decoration. With House Between Two Lakes, we had one or two internal walls, as we had to divide the space somewhat, and it needed a surface finish. I hate decoration so I didn’t know what to do.

Because the roof is made from precast concrete planks and the floor is cast in situ concrete, decided to do something related to those two materials. We used render with some pigments to give it a more interesting colour, and it was very important to me that the sand and cement render was done by the plasterer. I would have hated it if someone else came to do a clever finish. We wanted to keep any expressive movements. We chose the colour to relate to the earth. That piece of land was a brick quarry at one point, so we chose this brick red colour. This was the only way I could find to do a finish that would be as far away from decoration as possible.

I’m also slightly allergic to tiling in bathrooms, so we put a waterproofing agent into the mixture, and put it in all the bathrooms. I’ve done tiling in other projects, I’ve done lovely marble bathrooms and stone-clad bathrooms, but for the House Between Two Lakes, it is a house in the mud. It’s unbelievably wet there. The house is supported on pairs of steel piles, that go something like 16 or 18 metres down into the ground to anchor it into the mud. You basically want to smear the mud on the walls. Fancy things wouldn’t make sense – it just doesn’t read visually.

Is there anything you consider to be an architectural faux pas?   

I don’t know about faux pas, but over the past decade I’ve noticed a tendency for architecture to be sculptural, or a tendency for a piece of architecture to be a bold statement about form and glamour. That is something I don’t feel comfortable with, so I’ve been biding my time hoping this moment will pass, and I think it has.

This year’s architecture biennale in Venice was very much on a different track. Architecture appears to be moving towards helping human beings live, work and experience their lives better. And if that means the building looks like shit, then so be it! I much prefer that. Of course, they never do, because if you make a building that really functions beautifully for human beings, then by definition, it’s going to work and be a wonderful piece of architecture. I think it’s a great moment for architecture to get re-grounded and not be concerned with making a flash statement.

Some of the South American projects are fantastic. They’re more left wing and democratic. They have a history, that is not so far buried, of making buildings to serve the people. I’ve been sucked into this world of clients who aren’t really serving the people. I know that most of the projects I’ve been commissioned to do are projects that may be wonderful, and I may be pleased with them, but they are projects that aren’t necessarily needed. You don’t need a fancy store. I happen to enjoy designing a store, because there’s an intellectual exercise of trying to identify what the ethos of that brand is.

I think brands are moving more towards the social and cultural changes that we’ve experienced in the last two or three years. They are recognising them, reacting to them, and bringing something of them into their shopping experiences. I watch with interest to see if any of the big luxury brands react to this, but at the moment, I haven’t really seen anything that makes me think that they’re willing to break the mould and allow people to shop in a different way. I have various theories about it, and I’ve had a couple of potential clients in the last year who might have gone for it but didn’t in the end.

How important is sustainability to you? 

It’s very important. I’m very ‘waste not want not’, so it is in my nature not to throw things away – I like to reuse, and I like things that are very durable. What I’ve realised is that I’ve been creating buildings in the last 4,5,6 years, that are going to be incredibly hard to demolish. They have these big concrete frames that express a kind of solidity which I love to use in contrast to a lightness. I like the solidity and I like the delicacy as well.

The Earls Court House that I built for myself, has a basement which must be, by definition, constructed out of concrete. So, I decided to bring the concrete up to grow out of the ground and combine it with the delicacy of the glass. Mass concrete is incredibly comfortable to live in. It very slowly and gently absorbs heat or the cold, which means that you have a very constant temperature, so you can avoid using lots of electricity for heating. It’s very sustainable for electricity usage, because what you don’t do is use a lot of electricity for heating.

When you manufacture concrete, you use a lot of energy and you disturb the land because of the quarrying, so it is disruptive, but if you if you use concrete, and you don’t intend to demolish your building, it quite quickly becomes sustainable. I think there’s a balance. I think until a building has lasted a certain number of years, it’s not sustainable, but once it’s been in for a certain time, and you factor in the reduced energy usage, then I think it’s reasonably sustainable.

With the House Between Two Lakes, I reused joinery and doors from previous buildings that had been demolished and stored. The bronze front door for example – I think it’s quite rare for architects to reuse old parts in new buildings like that.

I think in the future, what I would really like to do is make a building where we use materials that are available very close to the site, whatever that might be.

What do you anticipate for the future of your work? 

I’d love to do housing development, rather than one-off housing. I would love to be approached by a developer who wants to design some sort of group of houses that is particularly suited to life now – perhaps family life.

Discover more here sophiehicks.com

Practice Architecture

Posted on by nr

NR Vol. 14 Identity · Autumn Winter 2021
Published · Print Page 468

Feature · Practice Architecture
Words · Izzy Bilkus

“It’s this kind of interdisciplinary weaving together that is going to make change happen”

Founded in 2009, Practice Architecture is a London based firm adept at delivering various acclaimed cultural, community and residential projects. The firm has established itself as one that creates exceptional structures with a strong sense of place, and has a hands-on approach, getting involved from a design’s inception through to a structure’s completion, and help to curate both space and the activity it houses.

For their innovative Flat House project, the firm worked alongside hemp farmers and with sustainable methods of construction to construct a zero-carbon home in Cambridgeshire from prefabricated panels, all in just two days.

Their smaller scale Polyvalent Studio project was created within the parameters of the caravan act, meaning in most contexts it does not require planning permission. It was designed by students from London Metropolitan University and constructed within just 12 days, exemplifying the possibilities of low embodied energy design and the benefits of a collaborative working process in the industry.

Practice Architecture is currently working with food growing workers cooperative OrganicLea in developing a 10-year plan for the expansion of the infrastructure at their main site Hawkwood. The project will deliver substantial new educational buildings and volunteer spaces alongside a large community hall and kitchen, and the project will be built from natural materials as a self-build, working with the volunteers on site.

NR Magazine speaks with Practice Architecture to learn more about these projects, how they incorporate sustainable methods into their practice, and their ethos as a firm.

What inspired you to start working with cultural and community projects?

We started making things in London in a very informal way. We worked a lot with our peers and what we were doing was really part of a broader DIY culture within our community. In the absence of institutions that spoke to us, we made our own spaces in which to explore our own culture. This kind of work was only possible under the provision of it being temporary, but serendipitously, almost all the places we built in this era are still here.

We made our buildings in a very hands-on way, going on site ourselves, with friends and volunteers to build a project and used very basic tools and equipment to do so. This experience continues to feed into the work we do now, our understanding of materials and the way we design with others.

More designers are using hempcrete at the moment, and I’m familiar with artists using it on a small scale with pottery and sculpture, but nothing like on your Flat House project. What was the process like when building with this material on a larger scale?

The process began with the drilling of the seeds in the 30 acres of field that surround the house.  This was overseen by Joe Meghan, a hemp farmer who had supported Steve Baron the client and founder of Margent Farm in getting a licence and specifying the appropriate subspecies of plant.

Hemp is a very resilient crop, with long tap roots that help to rehabilitate and condition soils that have been degraded through industrial farming practices. It has a short growing season of 3-4 months, after which we were able to harvest the seed and stem and process it into usable oil, fibre and shiv (the woody core of the stem).

The project makes use of each element of the plant, with the oil being used by Margent Farm in health and body treatments, the fibre being made into a cladding and the shiv into the hempcrete insulation. Each element of the plant went through a different process, with the fibre being felted and blended with a sugar resin and the shiv being chopped and mixed with a lime binder.

We designed a cassette-based construction system using structural timber with hempcrete to form an insulated panel, refining the construction details with Oscar Cooper from Lignin Builds. The panels were constructed in a factory and dried before being brought to site and lifted into place over two days. The cladding was made a few miles down the road with the impregnated hemp fibre matt pressed to form corrugations. The cladding is very easy to work with as it’s light and can be cut using a simple hand saw. We were lucky that with so many elements of experimentation, everything went very smoothly, and the building came together as anticipated.

Aside from sustainability, what were the other aims and inspirations behind your Flat House project?

We wanted to demonstrate how, what are often thought of as traditional materials, can be applied in a very contemporary way using the latest construction technology. The project celebrates the simplicity of its construction and how few materials went into making it. The key thing with Flat House was not just to develop a building, but to develop a whole system that could be replicated at scale across the country.

The project has led to the establishment of Material Cultures, a research organisation that explores natural materials in the context of offsite construction. Could you talk a bit more about that?

Yes, Material Cultures is now doing the work of scaling up these ideas and applying them to large scale housing and commercial projects. We are working with a variety of clients and housing developers – people who are interested in doing things differently. Alongside this, we carry out research projects with a number of universities, developing full scale mock-ups and looking at the broader cultural context of the work we do.

Material Cultures is exploring how regional specificity and a relationship to regenerative agriculture might shape the evolution of new housing typologies. The low carbon construction industry is still relatively embryonic, which means working across many fields and disciplines simultaneously to make things happen. That’s why we are really excited to be working with Yorkshire and the North East and ARUP to develop a regional strategy for a transition to a bio-based construction economy.

It’s this kind of interdisciplinary weaving together that is going to make change happen.

What does collaboration mean to you as an architecture firm?

For us architecture has always been as much about process as it is about built form. The design is material and construction led, which means really understanding how something is put together. 

“Each project is an opportunity to connect with different disciplines and expertise, to learn and test something.”

We have been really lucky to have amazing long-term collaborators such as Henry Stringer – one of the most inventive makers of things – and Will Stanwix who has over 20 years’ experience of working intuitively with natural materials.

We generally make places directly with the people that use them, whether that be through getting everyone on site during the build or developing genuinely engaged co-design processes.

How do you go about balancing space and intimacy with a project?

We are really interested in spatial qualities and the different ways in which we are acted upon or made to feel by a building. We look to create balance, often pairing close and intimate spaces with more open ones. Material plays a large role in this. Arriving at the Straw Auditorium project in Bold Tendencies you move from the harsh open floor plates of the concrete carpark into an intimate womb like space, enveloped by the tactile warmth and smell of an organic material.

What inspired you to work with cellulose-based materials for the Polyvalent Studio project?

The Polyvalent Studio project was developed with David Grandorge and students at the London Metropolitan School of Architecture. The project was a continuation of Practice Architecture’s work exploring natural construction at Margent Farm and shares a lot of the material technology developed with Flat House.

The building is designed within the caravan act meaning it can be moved in two independent modules and that it could be built without planning permission. It touches very lightly on the ground with timber footings that penetrate the soil line. These are made from Accoya, an acetylated timber product that can far outperform other timbers and represents exciting opportunities for the substitution of traditionally high carbon materials in exposed areas.

The studio was designed and built by students at London Metropolitan School of Architecture. What was it like working with students and completing the project in such a short space of time?

Building the studio together with the students was a really amazing experience. They brought so much energy, passion, and commitment. It is mournfully rare for architecture students to get an opportunity to use their hands and build things at scale.

“Building things is one of the most direct ways to learn how to design things, and the lack of genuine understanding of construction by architects is what leads to many tensions between professions.”

This project was established within the context of your research into natural materials and low carbon construction techniques like with Flat House. What other kinds of innovative solutions to sustainable construction are you hoping to work with?

We are always looking to learn about new materials. Currently this means exploring innovative straw and mycelium construction and looking at the role of chalk within structural and civil engineering projects.

With the theme of this issue being Identity, I’d love to know how you feel the firm incorporates sustainability and education into its identity.

For a long time, sustainability was something we did by default, but we didn’t really talk about it or have a way of articulating what we were doing. We saw our work as predominantly socially driven and about process – and the architecture and materiality as a means to an end.

It’s been interesting over the last few years to begin redressing and articulating an underlying intentionality behind our approach to how things are made. Underlying the design is a deep concern for how the things we make fit within a broader cycle and ecology of things. Where do the components come from and where do they end up? How can we be resourceful and responsible? It’s been great to begin to articulate these things and situate what we have been doing within other conversations around things like regenerative agriculture and the logic of global supply chains.

How important is adaptability to you?

We want to make buildings that can respond to their users. This means they need to be able to adapt and evolve. You can design in a way that either makes this very difficult or enables it. By keeping structure exposed and close to the surface and making the construction legible, it empowers residents and users to add, change and adapt.

Working with a food growing cooperative, your Hawkwood Plant Nursery project also champions natural materials and community collaboration. Could you talk a bit more about the aims for this ten-year plan?

It’s really exciting to be working on a number of large-scale food growing projects in London. These kinds of spaces are so important and so different from other types of green spaces such as parks.  They offer the opportunity for a genuine connection to soil and to land – one that is mutually nourishing and that brings you into contact with most important natural processes that we all depend on like the water cycle, photosynthesis, composting and soil formation.

Hawkwood and the other Market Garden City project Wolves Lane are leading the way in setting a precedent for socially and community focussed food spaces. We are looking to embed genuinely circular principles in the project, working with the resources available on site and integrating locally sourced natural materials wherever possible. The principal being that anything we are bringing onto the site can ultimately return to those natural cycles itself, in the form of mulch and compost.

Credits

Images · PRACTICE ARCHITECTURE
www.practicearchitecture.co.uk

Subscribe to our
Newsletter