Subset Festival Athens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rainy Miller

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

NR · Magazine
Published · Online

Feature · Rainy Miller
Words · Melis Özek

Between Noise and Narrative: Tracing the Raw Vein of Expression

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In order of appearance

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

Listen to Joseph, What Have You Done?.

Mucho Flow Festival 2024 Guimarães

Posted on 13 de April de 202513 de April de 2025 by nr

2024 Mucho Flow Snow Strippers Photography João Octávio Peixoto

Guimarães breathes different air during Mucho Flow. The city—a UNESCO-stamped history lesson of medieval charm and serpentine alleys—undergoes a subtle, intentional rewiring. There’s a low-frequency thrum beneath the cobblestones, a collective hum of anticipation. The festival feels curated—not in a hyper-branded, algorithmic way, but with a deliberate touch, as if each act was chosen not just to fill a slot but to complete a circuit. Live music diehards, experimental sound-scapers, and club kids orbit around a shared axis of sonic exploration.

Between sets, the crowd spills into the streets like smoke escaping a room—only to gather itself again, folding back into the next venue like a recurring dream you can’t quite shake. There’s something spectral about it. Mucho Flow doesn’t just stage performances—it conjures a language. One built on shared frequencies, sidelong glances, the tacit codes of experimental sound and improvised aesthetics. It’s what Sarah Thornton would call subcultural capital, but here it feels less academic, more lived—felt in the way people move, dress, speak without needing to explain.

The city’s venues serve as emotional coordinates: CIAJG with its brutalist echo, Teatro Jordão’s plush nostalgia, the minimalist CCVF, the chipped elegance of São Mamede. They don’t just host—they haunt. Dotted across Guimarães like pressure points on a map, they pull you through the city’s dark arteries. You don’t attend Mucho Flow. You drift through it. Between a late-night bar, a staircase conversation, a courtyard cigarette.

It isn’t a festival with borders. It breathes. It evaporates. It reforms somewhere else.

In Guimarães, the festival pulses against a backdrop of tiled facades and baroque silhouettes, casting silhouettes of tomorrow’s sound against the texture of yesterday’s stone. It’s a place where friction becomes fuel—where the soft violence of distortion slips easily into the grace of a medieval alleyway. Tradition holds hands with rupture. Beauty hums beside abrasion.

2024 Mucho Flow Black Angrymen Photography João Octávio Peixoto

2024 Mucho Flow Angry Blackmen Photography João Octávio Peixoto

Mucho Flow feels like an affair whispered rather than advertised. There’s an intimacy to it, a charged closeness, like being folded into something sacred and fragile. The boundary between stage and floor dissolves; what’s performed becomes shared. It’s not about headliners or recognition—it’s about resonance. Gabber, jungle, ambient drones, deconstructed club, folk mutations—all colliding like weather fronts in a sky that won’t settle.

The audience doesn’t just listen—they lean in. There’s a quiet literacy in the room, an alertness. No one needs translating. Newcomers and cult favorites coexist without hierarchy, because here, curiosity is the only currency that matters. And everyone seems rich with it.

The festival’s diversity defies tidy summation. In the fog-drenched Lynchian haze of The Jordao Theater Auditorio you get an almost opera-esque experience with the likes of Rita Silva, Nadah El Shazly’s voice at sunrise, or Bianca Scout’s performative immersion. Across the Jordao Galeria and Vila Flor’s walls you get out of the dream sequences and into the action with live sets by Snow Strippers, Angry Blackmen, University, Florence Sinclair, and more. A jolt to the senses in different directions, with sonic detournements all having in common one thing: An in your face approach to live music. Each night closes with a club sequence: Gabber Eleganza, TOCCORORO, DjLynce, Alex Wilcox, Crystallmess, Violet. The momentum builds, collapses, regenerates. The only issue would be the lack of sleep. But that’s what all festivals are all about, don’t they?

2024 Mucho Flow Crystallmess Photography João Octávio Peixoto

The first night begins with hesitancy. Outside Teatro Jordao, the air is wet and electrically charged. My first cigarette tastes like metallic fog. People are dressed like ghosts from a nightclub that doesn’t exist yet. No one I know. Good. Mucho Flow isn’t about reunion—it’s about detachment. The opener struggles to ignite the room, fragmented between local catch-ups near the bar and out-of-towners scanning the scene. Then Florence Sinclair recalibrates everything. Avoiding cameras with paranoid grace, he becomes a conduit on stage—unrelenting, eyes obscured by a durag, pulsing forward with uncompromising presence. The crowd yields. The club energy locks in. Cashless bars, quiet alliances, subtle nods exchanged in corners. Thornton’s theory at work again—subcultural identity forged in shared frequencies.

Still House Plants follow. Slacker swagger meets glacial dissonance. A sound more at home in a gallery than a nightclub. Someone calls it “California post-rock elegy” before realizing they’re from London. The loops fracture. The party stretches. The line between set and sunrise begins to blur.

I get lost in the street on my way to Jawnino, an Italian searching desperately for a Negroni. That’s because I love clichès, but maybe this is an unnecessary detour. The Vila Flor venue surprises me with its architecture, and how people responded to it: Have you ever seen a pogo and a seated audience in the same room, inches from one another? No? Well, you should have been to Mucho Flow.

2024 Mucho Flow Hypnosis Therapy Photography João Octávio Peixoto

My battery is running low, but i had to check Crystallmess’ set: Even though it is by now the 5th time i listen to her DJ, she always finds a way to surprise me. Icon.

Day two shifts gears. The crowd now surges with energy rather than observation. At the hotel, a group of Berliners say they came just for Crystallmess—and are still recovering. “You don’t get nights like that back home,” one says, already on his second beer. Papaya follows with forty-something musicians unleashing beautiful, cathartic noise. The younger crowd takes over, the older ones still reverberating from the night before. The festival avoids retro revivalism, instead inhabiting a pre-indie, post-genre liminal zone of raw experimentation.

At night, the concert halls give way to club transformations. Rita from the festival team shares Mucho Flow’s beginnings—cramped rooms, high-risk bookings, a taste for the unknown. The dressing rooms buzz with burlesque charm and lived-in chaos. Artists drift through in towels and glitter. Phones become DJ decks. Sharpie graffiti fills the walls. It feels like a séance backstage. A cabaret run by witches.

Gabber Eleganza melts me at 5AM. I’m unsure if I’m alive or in a rave-sponsored hallucination. On the cobblestones outside, someone plays Snow Strippers on their phone at volume 3. No one speaks. We just listen.

Morning. Church bells, clean sun, €1.20 espresso. Guimarães returns to itself, but I don’t. I walk slower. I observe less, feel more. I realize I’ve been reporting from a distance—an anthropologist at a séance. But Mucho Flow doesn’t want to be understood. It wants to be surrendered to.

So I stop writing.

And let the frequency take me.

Outside, a handful of us perch on a bench, finishing final cigarettes. Someone plays a track from the night before, barely audible. It’s enough.

Guimarães, by daylight, resumes its identity. But for those touched by the temporal dislocations of Mucho Flow, something lingers. The realization comes: the people here aren’t observing. They’re experiencing. And that is everything.

It’s not about understanding.

It’s about surrender.

And perhaps, in that surrender, lies the true essence of Mucho Flow.

Credits

Words · Andrea Bratta
Photography · João Octávio Peixoto
More information on muchoflow.net

In order of appearance

Snow Strippers
Angry Blackmen
Crystallmess
Hypnosis Therapy

TOCCORORO

Posted on 2 de April de 202514 de April de 2025 by nr

NR · Magazine
Published · Online

Feature · TOCCORORO
Words · Andrea Bratta

NR sat down with Spanish sensation TOCCORORO just before her set at Mucho Flow’s closing club night. Backstage, sipping on a Red Bull and picking at some fruit—fresh from her post-flight beauty sleep (ah, the DJ life!)—she dives into her musical calling, her approach to a set, and what keeps her in love with the game.

Andrea Bratta Hey Claudia, how are you? Thanks for taking the time to speak with me ahead of your show.

TOCCORORO I’m good, thank you! I wish I could have get here sooner, I really wanted to catch Snow Strippers live, but I had to get my beauty sleep before tonight’s performance. I love festivals like this—similar to Unsound—they are really cozy, and I have the feeling everyone here is truly for the music.

AB Yeah, I get it. Some festivals, people just want to see the big names, snap photos..it all feels more like a 360° experience, rather than just a music festival, you know?

T Exactly, but here’s kinda different. I prefer festivals that focus on music, period.

AB What’s interesting about Mucho Flow is that each venue has its own atmosphere and way of building a different atmosphere for the audience.

T Yes, that was the impression I had, also.

AB I think that this is something that could be interesting particularly for you as a performer—how people move through different spaces, gradually deepening their involvement, until it all culminates here, where we are right now, in the club.

T Yes! I think I’m gonna have a great night here. This room is gonna be insane, there’s such a great line-up.

AB I mean, I’ve got my flight at 9.00, and pick-up is at 6.30, so now that you make me think of it, I wish I had a nap or two too

T You’ll have to pull off an all-nighter, but I wouldn’t worry about it, just enjoy it [laughs]

AB Did you prepare something special for this set?

T Actually, for this weekend I have some brand new stuff that I’ve also been testing lately. There are some new tracks and transitions that I want to incorporate and try on this crowd.

AB How does it feel to test new stuff around? I get to always prepare in advance before interviews, there’s the research phase, “testing” the questions in advance. I rarely get to improvise.

T Yeah, it’s a bit of a risk, but that’s part of the thrill, right? I like testing how different crowds respond. This time, I’m maybe 60% confident they’ll love it—but I’m also curious to see how it plays with a different audience. I already know it works in other contexts. Like, playing a set in a club isn’t the same as at a festival. Take C2C, for example—the crowd there was pretty young. So when I drop a track that samples a show from my generation, layered with drums and everything, it hits in a fun, unexpected way. It’s got that diva energy, and I can tell it lands

AB One thing I wanted to ask about is the festival’s strong identity—it feels really intentional, with a lineup that brings together both live music lovers and fans of more experimental sounds, while still leaning into that atmospheric, club-like vibe. I imagine your set will spark some interesting conversations with the crowd, though you’ve already touched on that a bit. So maybe we can go a little deeper into your own project—CAOTICA.

T My party is something really special to me—it’s like a marriage. Nitsa was one of the first clubbing institutions to really support me in Spain—they saw my vision and offered me the opportunity to create my own night, my own party with them.

We started last year, doing a series of three nights with me, Merca & Cardopusher. Each time, we curated a lineup of three artists—it’s not a monthly thing; it happens when it makes sense, when the right energy is there. For me, it has to feel natural, organic. The artists I bring need to align with my vision—I’m not here to push names just for the sake of it. It’s important to me that this party represents what I believe in, and it serves as a reflection of my work. The first two parties leaned toward a more Latin-Club sound, maybe more aggressive, with a strong South American influence. But then, with Cardo, there’s that UK touch—deep, bass-driven, but still carrying Latin influences from his background. There’s always this dark, intense sonic thread that ties it all together.

I am also very very happy to be in the position of introducing and giving a platform to new talent like Blood of Aza. For me, this new wave of artists is really exciting—they’re pushing things in the right direction with a strong artistic vision. Bringing her to her first Boiler Room, her first big festival, and her first gig in Spain—at my party—was something I was really proud of. I’m a huge fan of hers.

Next year, we’re taking things even further. People think CAOTICA is just a Latin club night, but it’s much more than that—it’s everything I truly believe in and feel represented by. The next one is going to be really special—bringing in two legends, two friends, and collaborating with a label I really respect. You should stay tuned for it.

Everyone is welcome in my house. I don’t care about labels, I don’t care about boxes. If you believe in the vision, if you’re pushing the sound forward, I fuck with you.

AB Indeed. You know, some might say that the concept of a “scene” is fading because everything has become so global. Festivals now showcase everything, bringing what was once underground into the mainstream of electronic music. But I think that, while it may have seemed that way for a moment, we’re actually seeing a resurgence—scenes, parties, and more collaborative efforts between artists are making a strong comeback. Even festivals like Mucho Flow, whose focus is having a grassroots approach to music. It’s exciting to witness and be part of. Speaking of scenes, could you walk me through some of your main influences?

T My main influences—well, I have to say, and I’m a little embarrassed to say it, but before starting my career as a DJ, I was actually much more involved in dance. I grew up obsessed with movement. As a kid, I was the type to stay home all day just watching performances, completely fascinated by them. I remember always asking my mom, “When am I going to do that?” I loved the idea of being a musician, a dancer, or maybe both. I was constantly curious, always diving deeper into music.

But at the time, I didn’t really see a clear path into that world. Maybe it was because I was a woman or because I wasn’t surrounded by a community that encouraged me in that direction. I didn’t come from a scene or a party culture—I came from the music industry, but not in a way that felt immediately connected to what I do now. I was the first in my family to take this path. So when people ask me about my biggest influences, I struggle to name just one. I wasn’t looking up to a specific artist or trying to emulate anyone. Most of my friends had been immersed in music since the beginning, but for me, inspiration came from everywhere—movies, fashion, art, whatever caught my attention.

The real turning point came when I was in college. I thought I wanted to work in fashion or film, but I kept feeling like something was missing. And that missing piece was always music. It had been there all along, even when I ignored it. Funny enough, I actually studied journalism—I even considered becoming a music journalist. I loved radio, absolutely hated writing, and wasn’t into filmmaking, but radio shows and podcasts? That was my thing.

After university, I started getting involved in the local music scene in my city. At first, I was mostly surrounded by rappers and DJs—almost all men. And I hate to frame it like I was being “sht out” because I don’t want to victimize myself, but the reality is, at that time, things were different. There weren’t many women in my generation stepping into that space. Things have changed so much in the last five years, and now there are so many incredible female DJs, which is amazing to see. But back then? I was one of the very few.

I started throwing parties with one of my best friends, who’s actually now one of my dancers at Sónar. We put together a party series in Vigo, Galicia, and I handled the creative direction. It was a monthly event, and by the second year, I was fully immersed. At first, the DJ lineup was mostly men—I knew that was the standard. But at some point, I realized we could change that. It wasn’t just about booking DJs; it was about building something new. I reached out to my friends who were already into it, and they helped me learn how to use a controller. I ended up practicing for four hours straight—it just felt natural, like something that had always been inside me. I guess it makes sense, considering I’d been imagining it my whole life.

But honestly, I started feeling even more inspired once I began touring and meeting people in the industry. Seeing different scenes, playing in different places—it all shaped my perspective. Every city, every crowd, every moment on stage has influenced me in some way. I feel like my experience has been built entirely on what I’ve lived firsthand.

AB I mean, the way you talk about it really resonates. You approached music through community—by being surrounded by people, by the energy around you. And in a way, you channeled that community into your own journey.

T This was something that was always meant to be—I just didn’t realize it at first. As a kid, I knew I had a sense of rhythm, but I didn’t quite understand what it meant or where it would lead me. And then, eventually, it all clicked. Like, okay, this is it—this is what I’ve had inside me all along. It’s a beautiful feeling. Finally, for the first time in my life, I know what I’m meant to do. And even if I have to pay the price for it, at least now, I know why.

AB For me, it was the opposite. I resisted things like interviewing or writing, the more journalistic side of things, but it turned out to be what I was actually good at. I went to fashion school because I wanted to work in fashion, but somehow, I ended up where I was meant to be, just like you. And, here we are. Life’s funny. Anyway, I hope you have an amazing show tonight. I’m looking forward to it. It’s been great talking to you. Thank you!

Photography ·
Listen to TOCCORORO Live From Mucho Flow
More information on muchoflow.net

Entrance Gallery

Posted on 3 de November de 20246 de December de 2024 by nr

NR · Magazine
Published · Online

Feature · Louis Shannon
Words · Andrea Bratta

NR and The Salon by NADA and the Community are excited to introduce a media partnership for the novel invitational fair’s first edition.

Spanning three floors of 30 bis Rue de Paradis in the 10th arrondissement of Paris, a historic location that once housed the Baccarat crystal factory, The Salon is designed as an alternative cultural experience during Paris Art Week, showcasing a dynamic selection from over 50 galleries, art spaces, and non-profit organizations spanning 18 countries and 24 cities, including Basel, Cologne, Dubai, Glasgow, Oslo, Guayaquil, Los Angeles, Mexico City, New York, Paris, Tokyo, and Warsaw.

NR’s comprehensive media coverage will highlight The Salon’s unique model and amplify the fair’s vision for a cultural experience that challenges standardised models, emphasizing the importance of supporting new voices and underrepresented creators in the art world, while bringing together new, and established, voices in contemporary culture.

As part of our coverage, we spoke with Louis Shannon, founder of Entrance Gallery, one of the most interesting Lower East Side spaces in NYC.

Let’s start by taking a little step back. This is not the first time you work with The Community, right?

We had a show in The Community’s space in Pantin last November, titled LA RENTRÉE. It was the first of The Community’s invitationalformat, which I guess they also expanded, in a way, with The Salon. It was a beautiful, very spontaneous show –the reasoning behind it was bringing everything that fitted into a single suitcase. [laughs]

This time, with more preparation, we brought a fuller range of works reflecting our gallery’s vision in a more organic, and complete, manner. The selection gives an overview of what we’re aiming to accomplish in New York—primarily supporting artists ready for their debut solo exhibitions. I love working with emerging artists, and here at The Salon, we’re showcasing artists who’ve never shown before. For instance, Ethan Means, a remarkable oil painter from Flatbush, Brooklyn, is showing his work for the first time here, at The Salon, and it has been an exciting experience to see the public’s response.

Alongside him, we have pieces from more established artists in our program, like Hannah Lee, whose work references Caillebotte, whose work is currently being exhibited at the Museeè D’orsay. Having these artists side by side captures the essence of our program, emphasizing new voices and ongoing dialogues.

How’s working with artists who are just starting out?

It definitely adds a layer of curiosity and collaboration, allowing us to nurture meaningful relationships from the outset. This approach aligns with the salon’s ethos and its conversational format, fostering open interactions, much like NADA’s broader mission to connect communities in art.

As we’ve already said, this isn’t my first collaboration with The Community—I’ve known them for a long time—and it’s always been about intellectual curiosity, introducing fresh voices and keeping things innovative.

Was supporting emerging art always part of your mission from the start? Since you began collecting, has that focus always been there, or do you feel it developed over time as you gained experience?

It is a mission, 100%. Since opening our gallery in 2017, our goal has been to elevate emerging art. It started as a DIY space, driven by an underground spirit, and that ethos remains central to everything we do. For instance, Pat McCarthy is one of the artists I brought to the salon; his background in zine culture and punk aesthetics reflects our gallery’s roots in alternative art scenes, and his work blends high and low art in a way that resonates with our values.

I see each show as a collaborative journey that connects me with the artist on a deeper level. The Salon has been especially rewarding because it feels less like a conventional fair and more like a community of art lovers sharing ideas and engaging in meaningful conversations.

And those conversations become part of the story. Just like the way you work with artists, that same deep involvement in their practice. The way you described Pat’s work really shows the thoughtful, long-term relationships you seem to cultivate with artists. Is it challenging sometimes to keep that up?

Honestly, it’s good. It’s my everyday, my whole life—I live and breathe it, so I don’t think about anything else. For me, it’s all about the relationship, and when your work becomes your life, that’s when it’s truly rewarding. That personal, enduring connection with the artists and their work is central.

Speaking of connections, have you had a chance to attend any talks or activations here?

Not yet, but I’m excited to see Nick Sethi and pick up one of his books. He’s a friend and a talented artist, also involved with The Community for years.

Is there a particular medium you’re interested in curating right now? Or that perhaps you wanted to specifically focus on for a fair setting?

Not really. For me, it’s more about the artist’s intention. I enjoy working with artists at various stages of their practice, especially when they’re deeply engaged and obsessed with their chosen material. If they’re passionate about oil painting on panel, that’s fantastic. If they’re drawn to English porcelain ceramics or performance, I’ll support that too—as long as it’s an authentic pursuit. It’s not about creating what sells; it’s about creating because they have an undeniable drive to express through their art. Also, The Salon’s format is less costly than larger fairs, allowing us to take more creative risks.

How’s your feedback on The Salon experience so far? How would you describe it?

I think that there’s a more relaxed environment that lets visitors, including collectors, approach the works with an open mind, which fosters a greater receptivity to new perspectives. It’s refreshing compared to the high-stakes, high-commercial settings of other fairs. Plus, it’s nice to see students and young creatives engaging with the art, it’s different.

What are the next steps for you after The Salon?

Right now, we’re in the midst of our season, with several shows lined up through the end of the year, including a fair in Miami. I’m also working on a sculpture garden in Red Hook in collaboration with the gallery, an exciting new project focused on expanding our sculptural offerings.

Credits

Entrance Gallery booth at The Salon by NADA & The Community, Paris, 2024. Photography by Gabriele Abbruzzese.
Ethan Means, Fashion parents, 2024. Oil on wood panel. Photography by Stephen Faught.
Ethan Means, Doing some rooftop reading, 2024. Oil on wood panel. Photography by Stephen Faught.
Lizzy Gabay, Building at Night II, 2024. Oil on linen. Photography by Stephen Faught.
Lizzy Gabay, The Water Statues, 2024. Oil on canvas. Photography by Stephen Faught.

Discover more on entrance.nyc

The Salon by NADA & The Community opens on Thursday, October 17. Please use the link here to RSVP. and confirm your visit

Opening Hours
Thursday, October 17, 6pm-8pm
Friday, October 18, 11am-8pm
Saturday, October 19, 11am-8pm
Sunday, October 20, 11am-6pm

Address
30 bis Rue du Paradis
75010 Paris

Vincenzo De Cotiis

Posted on 22 de July de 202431 de July de 2024 by nr

NR · Magazine
Published · Online

Feature · Vincenzo De Cotiis
Words · Simone Lorusso

Vincenzo De Cotiis: Navigating the Intersection of Analysis and Experimentation in Architecture and Art

Vincenzo De Cotiis, an architect and artist from Milan, Italy, has built a career that blends the past and future through his unique design philosophy. After studying at the Politecnico di Milano, he founded his studio in Milan, which serves as both his home and the center of his creative work. De Cotiis’ designs result from continuous analysis and experimentation, merging space and time, cultural layers, and unexpected leaps. His projects, though complex, are powerfully expressed through their materials.

Your architectural philosophy is deeply rooted in a continuous process of analysis and experimentation. Can you elaborate on how this approach shapes your work?

My work is an ongoing dialogue between analysis and experimentation, where each project is a journey through layers of cultural and temporal significance. This process allows me to create spaces that resonate with history while embracing future possibilities. By continuously challenging conventional boundaries, I strive to evoke emotional responses through the interplay of materials and forms.

How do you select the materials for your projects, and what role do they play in your creative process?

Materials are chosen for their ability to convey stories and emotions. Each project requires careful consideration of how each material can contribute to the overall experience. I do not limit myself to a fixed list of materials but allow the concept and context of each project to guide my choices. This flexible approach enables me to explore new possibilities and create unique designs.

Your studio in Milan is the heart of your creative endeavors. How does the city itself influence your work?

Milan’s rich cultural heritage and dynamic contemporary scene provide a constant source of inspiration. The city’s architecture, art, and vibrant design community encourage me to blend traditional craftsmanship with innovative techniques. This fusion of old and new is reflected in my work, creating pieces that are both rooted in history and forward-looking.

If I asked you to take me to a place in Milan that holds special significance for you, where would it be and why?

I would take you to the Brera district, which is a hub of artistic and cultural activity. The juxtaposition of historic buildings with modern galleries and studios embodies the essence of Milanese creativity. It’s a place where tradition and innovation coexist harmoniously, much like in my own work.

Your work often balances between the future and the past. How do you achieve this equilibrium in your designs?

Achieving balance involves a deep respect for the past while being open to future innovations. I draw inspiration from historical contexts and reinterpret them through a contemporary lens. This approach allows me to create designs that are timeless yet progressive, embodying a sense of continuity and evolution.

Can you give us an example of a project where materiality played a crucial role in shaping the design?

It is difficult to choose a single series, as all my projects hold deep importance for me, and each explores materiality in unique ways. Every project is an intellectual exploration of how materials can interact and transform each other. In every work, I seek to discover the intrinsic properties of the materials and bring out their expressive potential, creating a dialogue between material and form that transcends time and space.

Your work often involves unexpected interactions within spaces. How do you approach creating these unique experiences

Creating unique spatial experiences involves a meticulous process of layering different elements to provoke curiosity and engagement. I aim to disrupt conventional expectations by integrating unexpected materials, forms, and textures, encouraging viewers to explore and interact with the space in new and meaningful ways.

What are some of the intellectual and artistic challenges you face in your design process?

One of the primary challenges is maintaining a balance between artistic expression and functional design. While my work leans heavily towards sculptural and conceptual art, it must also serve practical purposes. Navigating this dichotomy requires continuous experimentation and refinement to ensure that both aspects coexist harmoniously.

Looking ahead, what directions or projects are you excited to explore in the future?

I have a profound appreciation and understanding of the history of art, which deeply influences my work. Each of my series is rich with references to the past, yet my aim is always to reinterpret these elements in a contemporary way. I am excited to continue this exploration, blending historical influences with contemporary art principles to create innovative and timeless pieces. I am particularly enthusiastic about projects that allow me to delve deeper into this fusion, bringing forth new and unique interpretations that resonate with today’s discerning audience.

In order of appearance

Vincenzo De Cotiis Foundation. Photography Wichmann + Bendtsen. Courtesy of Vincenzo de Cotiis Foundation.
Vincenzo De Cotiis. Installation View, Archaeology of Consciousness Exhibition, Venice. 19 April – 24 November 2024. Photography Wichmann + Bendtsen. Courtesy of Vincenzo de Cotiis Foundation.
Vincenzo De Cotiis Foundation. Photography Wichmann + Bendtsen. Courtesy of Vincenzo de Cotiis Foundation.
Vincenzo De Cotiis Foundation. Photography Wichmann + Bendtsen. Courtesy of Vincenzo de Cotiis Foundation.
Vincenzo De Cotiis, DC2316 VENICE, 2023. Hand-painted recycled fiberglass, German silver, fabric. Courtesy of Vincenzo de Cotiis Foundation.
Vincenzo De Cotiis, DC2310 VENICE, 2023. Hand-painted recycled fiberglass, Murano cast glass, German silver. Courtesy of Vincenzo de Cotiis Foundation.
Vincenzo De Cotiis, DC2312 VENICE, 2023. Blown Murano glass, cast brass. Courtesy of Vincenzo de Cotiis Foundation.

Parker Ito

Posted on 22 de July de 202431 de July de 2024 by nr

NR · Magazine
Published · Online

Feature · Parker Ito
Words · Andrea Bratta

Expected Value and the Sublime:
A conversation with Parker Ito

Art and poker. If life’s a gamble, then the two must have more in common than it might appear at first glance; American artist Parker Ito is pretty sure of it. On one of the busy days leading to his show at Climate Control in San Francisco, NR conversed with him on the similarities between the career of a poker player and that of an artist, the notion of value, and markets vs communities to retrace his past production as an artist, and figure out his next moves. Expect also: A detour on sartorial matters and style, a crazy night out in San Francisco leading to a disappointing encounter with the giants of Impressionist painting, and an exploration of the Sublime, but make it Las Vegas Sphere.

Hi Parker! How’s it going?

Good, you? I’m running on a few hours of sleep because of poker, but other than that I’m great.

I’m great! You preceded me mentioning poker, that’s what I wanted to use as a conversation starter! How are you managing that with art and everything else?

Well, I’m getting ready for a bunch of shows and new projects. The building where my studio is stays only open ‘till midnight, and that creates some unfavorable timetables for me to work. I used to have a lot of assistants, so I had to be up when they were working. But now it’s just me, and I’m naturally more active at night. So right now my sleep schedule is really bad. I’m going to bed at, I would say, between 6am and 10am, some nights.

Really?

Yeah, you know..Poker just goes on all night.

Working in your studio, and playing poker, which, by the sound of it, it’s starting to become something that you are doing quite professionally. Seems like a packed schedule.

I don’t feel like I’m good enough to say that I’m a professional poker player. Had I been speaking to a real pro, I would feel embarrassed to call myself that. Poker is just something I’m super obsessed with right now, and I’ve had some success doing it; I want to be good at it, I love it. But art, of course, is always going to be my number one thing. I tend to work in my studio usually in bursts of intense periods –I don’t really make work outside of a planned exhibition, I’m not someone who just goes to their studio every day. So sometimes I won’t be there for like a month or something, and then, when I have a show, I’ll be there like every day. Lately, I’ve been there all the time because the building my studio is in closes at midnight. I’ve been basically spending the night there, something I had never done before until last year’s New York show.

The Lubov one with Jon Rafman?

Yeah. That show with Jon, even though it was a two person show, it’s probably the hardest I ever worked on a show. That was the first time I’d ever had to do any kind of overnight session in my studio —It’s really weird to say something like this because I’ve been working for over a decade now as a professional artist. But I just realized how much I like overnights. Lately I’ve been going to my studio, I get there between 2 to 5pm, and work all night, sleep a little bit, and then wake up and work all the next day. I’ve been doing these like 30 plus hour-days in my studio, sometimes it’s super productive, I get really high on Adderall and get so much done, other times I just play poker the whole time. Poker can definitely be distracting, but I’m good with deadlines, and I’m good at multitasking.

What parallels are you finding between poker and art, as practices, if any. For example, the Lubov show was titled “Poets, Gambler, and Fools,” so now I’m wondering if your experience as a poker player might have informed the show’s narrative in some capacity.

I thought of Jon as the poet, me as the gambler, and then we’re both sort of fools. I guess It could be that there’s a lot of gambling in art, a lot of parallels to the nature of poker. And I think the careers of artists are similar to those of professional poker players, something I explored in a text that I wrote in 2021, which talks about this idea of Expected Value. Expected Value is a concept that’s been around for a long time, it’s not a poker-specific notion, but it’s used in poker to think about decision making. And it’s not necessarily about making the right decision at the right moment, but understanding that if certain decisions are made, again, and again, and again, they will yield a +EV outcome. EV has to do with the nature of variance in poker, which makes it a really interesting game. Chess, for example, is a game of complete information, while poker is one of incomplete information –in chess, a really high level chess player would never lose to an inferior one; In poker, even the best poker player in the world could lose a hand to an amateur, because of variance, and unknown factors. I think there’s a parallel in art there, even though poker is a game that clearly has winners and losers, unlike art –Like I said in this text I wrote: “As an artist, you never really win, you just kind of hope to get to your next show.”

Also, the idea of who’s a better artist than who, is something very subjective. In poker, I think the results can tell who’s the better poker player in the long-run, but if you broke down individual hands, they might tell a different story, because of luck and other factors: It’s not always the best poker player that’s winning. I think there’s another parallel there to the way that artists are sometimes received. Poker is also very psychologically challenging in its swings. When you’re running good, you feel that everything comes naturally to you, but then you start running bad, and you feel like it’s the end of the world. As someone who’s had an art career and experienced the swings, I’d like to think I’m prepared for the ups and downs in poker a bit more.

Earlier you mentioned that you’re experiencing some novelty, working without assistants, doing overnights and extra studio sessions. What do you think is changing or has changed in your practice throughout the years, especially maybe in correlation with the movement that you’ve been associated with at the beginning of it, Post-Internet Art, which you recently felt the need to reconsider thematically for Poets, Gamblers, and Fools.

I view “Post-Internet” as a term with multiple meanings. In the art world, it’s often seen as a market term. To be honest, I wasn’t actually even in a lot of those post-Internet curated shows -maybe I was in only one of those?- As an aesthetic, I don’t see my work as closely related to what’s typically associated with it, even though my work happens to be the current main image on the post-internet Wikipedia page. In terms of Post-Internet as a scene -which I usually just refer to as “net art” I was definitely a part of that. It initially felt like that scene existed outside of the art world but was eventually consumed by it. And it really had felt at times, at least for me, once Post Internet became part of the mainstream artworld there hasn’t really been another unified art movement. Maybe some market movements, defined by shared formal qualities, but there hasn’t really been a group of artists working as a real community with shared interests, like what happened with Post Internet. Recently, I’ve been exploring the contemporary NFT scene. I never got into NFTs because I felt so turned off by the art world’s smash and grab motivated by profit, and I just didn’t want to do an NFT and turn it into that kind of thing, I wanted to do something that felt like it was specific to the medium, because it is an interesting technology. Also, a lot of the NFT aesthetic was really corny. Recently, I’ve just been looking at this new NFT stuff through Twitter, or X whatever you wanna call it, and the aesthetic I’m seeing is really different from what it was a couple years ago, and there’s also just a whole scene of people communicating with each other – they all work under pseudonyms and it feels exciting! It feels like when I was discovering the net-art stuff when I was in college, and I realized there’s this whole scene of people talking to each other on the internet, who have the same shared interest and communicate with one another to insure the evolution of this thing they care about. This new NFT somehow feels like a continuation of the net art scene I was a part of, in terms of just like other areas for artists to communicate and share, and that’s really cool.

One could say that NFT art was almost doomed from the beginning, it really had an incredibly accelerated, almost meteoric rise, then that bubble quickly burst. Conversely, It almost seems that when market expectations were lifted from the NFT world, a scene proliferated and the medium felt fertile again. I’d be very curious to know a bit about that project you mentioned that never was. Are you going to experiment with the medium further in the future?

I’m actually working on a new project right now, coincidentally, all of this stuff kind of just came together. Someone had asked me to do an NFT project, and I agreed to do it –that was at the end of last year. I spent a lot of time on Twitter and went down this wormhole of new NFT stuff; that was just kind of an accident, because I previously decided to just do the NFT project and not care about what was happening in the NFT space, but then I found myself in the midst of it all and had all these realizations. There are a lot of aesthetic similarities between these new NFTs and the kinds of photoshopped collaged paintings I was making in 2015. A lot of these NFT projects are made with generative programs and therefore can be easily made into large quantities. Sometimes a drop can be 10,000 images. I made this print for a show in 2013 –I can’t even remember what the print says– but it’s something along the lines of “when Picasso died, he had made 250,000 pieces,” whatever the number, it was an approximation of the amount of work Picasso had made over his entire lifetime, and I claimed that I could make that many JPEGs in five minutes. When I made that print NFTs were yet to exist, but now the premise of being able to make 250,000 images in 5 minutes is an actual reality. This new project I’m going back to an image I used for the first paintings that people recognized as my work- The Parked Domain Girl series which was these paintings based on a widely circulated stock photo that was everywhere on the Internet from 2006-2012. Primarily this image was used as a placeholder image on websites that were “parked”. I’m trying to create a high volume of NFTs constructed around that Parked Domain Girl image, loosely in the framework of a PFP project. This collection of NFTs will be presented in a website format that mimics the layout of the Parked Domain website template, which has a text component that will be constantly changing every time you visit the page, and then the image area of the template will have a newly generated NFT every time you reload the page as well. You can mint any of the images as well as pay an additional fee to have an oil painting made of any of the images at various different sizes. The paintings will be produced in a Chinese painting factory just like the original Parked Domain Girl paintings.

It all feels very much in line with some of the themes you’ve always dealt with throughout your career: The circulation of images, their production and reproduction. And maybe this has always been something present in your work, an almost fixation with certain themes and even symbols or tropes, the way of utilizing determined symbols, like in Clear Sushi, or even the Parked Domain Girl, the repetition of an image or visual patterns or through and through. What is it that draws you to certain things rather than others, in your work? What drives you?

I really love being in my studio and I really love making things and that’s had a lot of different manifestations. When I was working with a big team of people that was a very different process. Now that it’s just me, it’s something new again, but at the end of the day, I think I’m just thinking about and making art. These things I make are just something that I feel should be in the world. If I made something it’s because I wanted to see that thing exist, and most of the things I make are somehow about me, they’re just about my life. Sometimes I have these discussions with my artist friends, and they’re like “I want to release this project, but I could never do it under my name because it’s not my aesthetic or conceptually irrelevant. ”I’ve always been driven more by making things rather than trying to adhere to ideas about what my art should be or shouldn’t be. I never wanted to have a thesis to my art per se, but of course, because all these things are made by me, the same shit shows up all the time – there’s reoccurring themes and characters, mostly having to do with the fact that when I think about making things, there’s always a million different ways it could be done; So I always I try and do as many of those things as possible. I think the NFT format is a great way to explore this because it’s so easy to make multiple iterations of something at the push of a button.

It seems like you used to be, or wanted to be, more personally distant from your art than today. Now, at least during this conversation, you feel very present in it, even just in the way you speak of it –I’ve read that you never really liked too much to talk about your art, and for a time you even stopped doing interviews, while now you are even writing, maybe not about your art or practice per se, but about things that are still very much a part of what you do and the way you create. What changed?

My relationship with the art world has changed a lot, many times in the course of my career. Nonetheless, I don’t know if my relationship to art ever changed. It may have outwardly seemed so, maybe things I said in interviews may have indicated that it was different, but I think it’s always been the same for me. I didn’t get into art to be smart or intellectual, so for a long time I think I intentionally just acted like a dumbass; I just probably didn’t care at the time if I or my work was perceived as having any kind of depth. But time went on, and I got annexed to Zombie Formalism, a market movement, and for two years everyone that was looking at my work only talked about prices and nothing else.That frustrated me a lot, I was making all this stuff, and there were all these ideas embedded in it, but none of that has was being communicated because of the shadow of market speculation. And I mean, for me, art is about a lot of things, but one crucial thing in art is communication. And so I went the opposite route, stopped doing any interviews, I stopped having my photo taken for a long time, stopped having press releases, stopped having openings for certain shows, stopped exhibiting with my CV, which is still not publicly available. During the Zombie Formalist era there was too much stuff around the work being discussed, and I only really wanted people just to look and focus on the art solely, so I tried to remove an extraneous material. But it turns out when you remove a lot of that material it doesn’t mean people are actually going to look any harder, they are probably going to pay less attention to it because people are lazy and there is just too much art being made these days. So it got to a point where I realized there were so many ideas in the work that audiences were likely missing in this total absence of language. So I turned to writing, something I honestly never liked doing, but wanted to try it. These texts that I’ve written the last couple years are part of a book that I want to eventually publish about my art.

I’ve really only written two, one in 2020 and one in 2022 –I had so much to say, the second one is like 60 pages or something like that. Now I’m working on a new one that’ll probably come out in the falI- I want to look at the sublime through the lens of Thomas Kinkade, AI, and the Las Vegas Sphere. I’m really obsessed with the Sphere right now. I’ve also always wanted to write something on the subject of style, both personal and in its relation to art practices, maybe I’ll tie that into some of the discussions around Zombie Formalism.. Sorry but I digress a bit, I actually forgot what your original question was.

I forgot too, but I like where we are going with this so let’s keep it freestyle. Your interest towards a theory of style is not something entirely novel, in one of the texts you wrote I found quite a bit of fashion references, especially to particular archival items, you seem quite fond of maybe not fashion per se, but for sure clothing and its importance. Could you elaborate a bit on that?

I really like clothes! I traded a painting with my tailor a couple years ago, so I have this huge credit with him –I make clothes with him and get stuff altered. I’ve actually made a couple of custom things for myself. I don’t know, it’s just very similar to how I used to make things in my studio. My tailor essentially operates like one of my assistants, and I kind of just bring him something, an idea, or a source material, and we modify it and adapt and play with it –It’s creative and fun, something that is outside my job but still related to aesthetics. I guess there are some parallels between how I’m thinking about style in art and personal style, specifically related to my personal experience. What I mean by that is, when I was associated with Zombie Formalism, it actually had very little relationship to the current work I was making at the time, it was all this work that was probably a year or two years older that was really present in the auctions etc. The main stuff showing up at auctions were these reflector paintings that I made on a Scotchlite material in 2012-2013, and those were going bonkers in 2014. In 2014 I was making what you could technically consider figurative paintings, these super dense Photoshop collages that I was turning into paintings, which is what I’ve returned to now. So I always felt there was this disconnect between the way my work was being thought of and what I was actually doing. I don’t know if this is clear in my work, but I’ve never really wanted to have a recognizable style as an artist. And I would say there are some parallels in my personal style to this concept because I never wanted to dress in a way that would be, how do i say it?

Expected maybe?

Not necessarily expected. I just never wanted to be dressing so that I could be lumped into the Zombie Formalism equivalent of fashion, but it’s really fucking hard because brands have these associations, I think the associations are stronger in fashion than in the the formal qualities of a painting. It’s kind of dumb, you know?

On one hand, It’s really fucking stupid to even care about this stuff. But then on the other hand, it says a lot about where culture is. One of the things that I often think about is that when I was growing up you couldn’t really wear a band shirt without actually listening to the band and being a fan of them, so there used to be really defined subcultures that were communicated through clothing, and we just don’t have that anymore. And I don’t actually think that’s a bad thing, but when Vetements is making a Marilyn Manson tee that anyone can buy, it’s a very different thing than being a middle schooler who gets made fun of for wearing a Marilyn Manson shirt. So the way that people dress now I think is not a reflection of their interests at all –It’s something that I find quite fascinating. But I guess there still are aesthetic groupings of stylings that people are a part of. For example, there’s certain brands that maybe I think something they are doing is interesting, but I would just never wear the clothes because I find the people who wear those clothing annoying, and I don’t want to be associated with them, and it’s really really stupid but I can’t help it.

It’s how human beings work. I think it’s a very, very basic yet important emotion: The unwillingness to be associated with something or someone we don’t fully embrace. Or maybe, more precisely, an antinomic feeling towards certain aesthetics, or certain things, elements in our style, or other people’s. It’s the Hipster Fashion Circle. But let’s back up a bit to another feeling, that of the sublime. You mentioned that it would be the overarching theme of the latest text you are working on. I want to know more!

There’s a lot of stuff happening in this text. One funny anecdote in there is about me during my college years going to see an Impressionist show at the de Young Museum that had traveled from the d’Orsay. I’d never been to Europe, never been to France, never seen any impressionist painting. My aunt loves impressionist painting so she really was pressuring me about going to check that. It was one of those things where you had to buy special tickets and they were all sold out by the time I actually tried to go see it. One night, I was out partying in San Francisco, and got really, really fucked up. I woke up the next day, and I had tickets to the exhibition in my pocket. I was like “What the fuck? Where did these come from?” I was so confused; Turns out, that during our night out one of my friends had found a leather jacket on the street with tickets to the impressionist show in its pockets, which is insane. And so I ended up going, and I think I just went by myself. It was a really disappointing experience.

How so?

All of those paintings need to be protected, because of conservation issues. The lighting was really low, they were under glass, so there’s this weird thing that you’re looking through to look at them. At the time, I was on my computer a lot you know, and I was a part of the net scene, so everything was being mediated by a screen to me. Looking at those paintings on the screen, I just thought they were so much more interesting on the screen than when I saw them in person. I was actually let down. So that’s the story kinda opening the text and then leading into a digression of what it means to have a more visceral reaction to jpegs than actual paintings. I spent a lot of time in Las Vegas, and I had been visiting the Sphere regularly. That thing is fucking insane, arguably the best artwork created in the last 20 years. It’s sublime. I believe there will soon be one in every city, altering the urban landscape significantly. Despite not having been inside it yet, I’m constantly amazed by its impact. Moving on to Thomas Kinkade- I’ve always been a big fan of his. Whether it can be considered sublime is a big question of mine –some Europeans I’ve spoken to aren’t familiar with Kinkade, but in America, he’s a household name, despite not being embraced by the mainstream art world. There’s something intriguing about his popularity. This led me to contemplate AI and its potential poetic and visceral capabilities compared to human-made art. Some argue that AI will never match human creativity. Whatever, that’s sort of boring conversation but I think it’s a good way to think about what sublime actually means in this current moment. When considering how image-generating programs function with prompts, it parallels the process I used with my studio assistants in 2014-2015 –”paint this hand, but painted in the style of Philip Guston.” The best prompts are crafted by individuals with extensive references. All of this feels interconnected- Impressionism, the Sphere, Kinkade, AI – especially concerning style and how it’s conveyed.

There’s a connection with AI that harkens back to the importance of language and its utilization in prompts, which are inherently linguistic. I’ve been thinking a lot of the resurgence of writing as a crucial skill due to its role in guiding both people and AI. It’s similar to communicating with others to convey a desired outcome effectively. It’s paradoxical in a sense, considering our image-centric focus until now, even considering what was the rise of social media. But with evolving technologies, there’s a shift towards language and its incorporation of imagery and concepts, making for new intriguing possibilities; Perhaps we’re on the cusp of another significant shift, or maybe not. Regarding what you just said about the sublime, I’ve recently visited Venice during the Biennale’s opening weekend and visited the Guggenheim Collection. While traditional works by European masters are considered sublime, growing up with instant access to art through the web and installation views, I struggled to connect with that supposed sublime I had to feel. It makes me consider how our perception of it is evolving, especially with monumental new artworks like the sphere. All these topics are maybe what we should be thinking more about, especially in terms of asking ourselves where is art ahead, and what’s the value of it now? As for AI, the debate often revolves around its potential to either end or augment human existence.

My friend once told me about a German philosopher who postulated that something is sublime when it has the potential to kill you, or something like that – He was commenting on the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. I guess the threat of AI destroying society is what makes it sublime, perhaps? For me AI is just like any other tool that an artist has access to, though its implications are a lot more; There’s a lot more going on with AI, and I hope it just means that we can all quit our jobs, eventually, and everyone can just be an artist or whatever.

That for sure would be the good ending.

We’re at a point where I don’t really think art history exists anymore in the way that it used to. I think art is moving closer towards entertainment, something I honestly don’t have a problem with. This is a really obvious example, but think of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms – I had recently heard about a museum de-acquisitioning a Rothko to buy a Kusama Infinity Room. And I think that makes a pretty big statement of what museums’ agendas are. But at the same time, I have never been to a museum like the Broad. I think those are pretty annoying in some regards. The Broad is not even really a museum, it is one man’s private collection turned into a vanity project, it doesn’t represent societal interests as whole- not that any museum really does this, at least in America anyways where there is so much reliance on private funding to run museums. But on the other hand, the Broad has been really good at bringing non-art people into art –The Broad is like the number one selfie Museum, it’s very good at getting people excited about going to the Museum and taking photos of themselves in front of art. And I think it’s important that non-art people are brought into these spaces. I think it’s a positive that art can function as entertainment and have a more mass appeal. I’m not really sure how AI is going to impact that. But if you think about Web 2.0, and all the tools, and things that people all of a sudden had access to so that they could just make cool shit at home –that had a huge impact on visual culture, and I’m sure this trend it’s just going to be so much more extreme and exponentially growing in the next decade. Everything is so weird! The art world has gotten a lot bigger, but its impact on culture has shrunk, maybe. I mean, I still think it’s definitely, in the long game, super influential, but just in terms of visual culture there’s so many other things that it’s competing with now.

I think all these things are connected in a way. Had we been speaking 30 years ago, maybe we would be lamenting that not many people are going to museums, discussing an ideal state of things where everybody should be in museums, have access to culture, and be able to be present in the cultural movement that art produces. But art nowadays, I think, is carving its own territory in a fundamentally new world, and it moves towards entertainment and towards being more mediatic than ever. The question is how do we find the balance between surfing art’s unprecedented mediatic pull and mass appeal, without diluting too much its cultural impact, significance, and role. And what is that role, anyway, today? Because maybe I am thinking of a role that it used to have, and it simply does not possess anymore. And a similar discourse could be applied to cultural operators, curators, artists, and so on and so forth, especially in a future where everyone has potentially access to all the tools to be one. And don’t get me wrong, all of this is an amazing thing, an incredible possibility. But it’s something that can be exploited too, and it has already been, to a certain extent. I don’t know about you, but I’m actually quite hopeful for the future, even though the world from a societal and cultural standpoint might seem a little bit..bleak. I think we are right at the precipice of either a great leap into the future, or, if things don’t work out, something that’s more similar to a good old Orwellian dystopia. What’s your take on the future of culture? Are you an optimist or a pessimist?

I think I’m just an artist that will just continue making stuff no matter what, I’m much more driven by the desire to make things than anything else; If art didn’t exist, I would just find another outlet or something.

There’s this quote on your website: “The Power of Art.” What is that, for you?

I don’t know if I could articulate that, I think it’s something that I just feel. I do believe that there are people in the art world who believe in the power of art, while others may prioritize different powers like money, fame, or prestige. But the power of art, well, the best way I could sum it up is like the first time I saw Jeff Koons in person. Art is this weird, nonsensical place where we create things without utilitarian value, and because of that, it can really be anything. It’s a way to think about the world, a language of its own. Koons, controversial as he may be, has produced some mind-blowing work, like his polychrome sculptures. Seeing those, it dawned on me, when I visited the Louvre and saw medieval polychrome sculpture, it was like, “holy shit.” Koons is tapping into that, but in his own way, like with a woman holding a pink panther stuffed animal or something, you know what I mean? There’s something about art that’s uniquely experiential. While other things, like the Sphere, may serve specific functions, art is different. Even these JPEGs from old books of medieval sculpture that I’ve been using in my work lately, they evoke a particular feeling. I’m not sure if it’s an unconscious formal thing that works by association or something else entirely. I mean this is what I want to try and get to the bottom of in this text I’m writing. How does genre and style affect our relationship with art, because I think that has always been something that I have really tried to tap into in my work. I have always been, seeing images and then being like “why do I have a visceral, compelling reaction to this image versus this other image?” and then trying to apply those things as filters to my own work. The power of art..I still really believe in the power of art, and I think that means a lot of different things, things I am not sure I know how to articulate, really.

Maybe some things are better left untold, un-articulated.

That’s the other thing about art: It doesn’t need to rely on language to communicate effectively. And that’s a big part of its value, impact, and appeal sometimes.

Yeah, because you can develop your relationship with the artwork into something uniquely personal -Wow that was a very romantic on the verge of cheesy thing when said out loud- I guess the less you know, the less language you have pre-absorbed about a work, or an artist, the more you feel like you can develop a spontaneous connection to it without over-intellectualization. So maybe what we are really saying is that the power of art is something that resists articulation. And it’s just there. And maybe that’s what Sublime is: the impossibility of mediation.

Credits

All images courtesy of the artist

Bastien Dausse

Posted on 19 de July de 202431 de July de 2024 by nr

NR · Magazine
Published · Online

Feature · Bastien Dausse
Words · Simone Lorusso

A Journey into the World of Acrobatics

Bastien Dausse’s acrobatic journey began at the Bordeaux circus school, leading him to the Académie Fratellini in 2011, where he specialized in acro-dance. Under the guidance of directors like Jérôme Thomas and Yoann Bourgeois, Bastien honed his skills and explored new dimensions of performance. In 2014, he co-founded the Barks company, creating the acclaimed show “Les idées grises” and earning prestigious grants. His talent shone at the IN d’Avignon festival in 2016, solidifying his reputation as a dynamic force in acrobatics.

Today, we caught Bastien Dausse in a moment of temporal and physical suspension, providing us with the perfect opportunity to delve deeper into his story and discover the essence of who he truly is.

Thank you for joining us, Bastien. Can you tell us about your journey into the world of acrobatics and how you discovered your passion for it?

Thank you very much for this invitation. I’ve always been fascinated by the acrobatic body and the body in motion. When I was very young, I was already trying to reproduce the stunts and impossible jumps I saw in martial arts films. I wanted to surpass myself, to be able to run up walls, jump from rooftop to rooftop – in other words, to play with gravity.

I then trained in circus arts, which was an extremely complete discipline for my taste. I could develop my passion for acrobatics, while discovering dance and theatre. Basically, an immense creative freedom.

The concept of equilibrium, derived from the Latin “aequilibrium,” holds different meanings for different individuals. What does it signify to you personally?

Equilibrium has always been a particularly concrete notion for me. When I was very young, I taught myself to walk on my hands; it was almost natural for me. Then there was the notion of perfect balance in my acrobatic practice. A little more height, a little less speed, a little more grip, a little less inclination: the success of an acrobatic figure was the result of the perfect equilibrium of a multitude of small actions.

It was only later that I realized that equilibrium could have a much broader meaning. The “equilibrium” I portray in my shows is open to interpretation and reverie. It’s a notion that speaks to everyone, and can mirror the world around us.

What drew you to specialize in acro-dance at the Académie Fratellini, and how did your experience there shape your artistic development?

The choice of discipline came very naturally. It wasn’t circus in particular that interested me, but rather the creative freedom I could find there.

Acro-dance was a discipline a little less full of history, less restrictive, and therefore, for my taste, offering me more narrative possibilities.

My discovery of dance, of the choreographic art form, came through acro-dance. I learned a form of acrobatics that could find its richness beyond the circus cliché of the most dangerous trick.

Your art frequently incorporates suspension from the ground. Could you elaborate on the significance of this recurring element in your work?

What fascinates me is the universality of suspension. The universality of the relationship with gravity. I like the idea that spectators can identify with what I present on stage. People often ask me if they can try out my devices, as if they were easy, as if they were just forms of gravitational escape. Unfortunately, I have to tell them the truth, explaining that it takes years of acrobatic work. But these reflections are very flattering, because that’s exactly what I’m aiming for, to convey a feeling of weightlessness, a lightness, always in a form of visual minimalism. I’m quite convinced that you can tell a lot with simplicity.

Can you share a memorable moment from presenting “Les idées grises” at the IN d’Avignon festival in 2016?

It was a quite crazy experience for me. The very beginning of my career, my first show, presented at the biggest theatre festival in the world. In fact, there are very few acrobatic forms presented at this festival.

The most beautiful memory was quite simply the evening of the premiere: we were playing outside, in a magnificent courtyard, the walls covered with ivy. Nightfall came right in the middle of our show, creating a completely timeless moment.

If you were to improvise a performance right now, what music or sound would you choose, and why?

For something so spontaneous, I think I’d choose Nils Frahm or Hania Rani. What I like about their music is obviously the lightness that can emanate from it, but also their evident mastery of their instruments.

The history of cinema has long depicted a conflicted and troubled relationship between man and machine, often portraying them at odds, as seen in Kubrick’s film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” However, in this case, we are discussing love rather than struggle. How did this symbiotic relationship with the machine develop? It is intriguing how, philosophically speaking, your temporal and gravitational suspension is also facilitated by the “machine,” which assumes an artistic purpose in our lives because of your presence.

My relationship with the machine has always been one of fascination rather than fear. From the early days of my training, I was captivated by the possibilities that machinery offered in terms of extending human capabilities. The machine, in this context, becomes an enabler of artistic expression, allowing me to explore new dimensions of movement and suspension.

It is not just about overcoming physical limitations, but also the desire to create objects that will intrigue and question the curiosity of the audience.

What does the idea of “living human sculpture” signify to you?

I’ve always had a passion for the visual arts, and modern art in particular.

When I was younger, when I saw certain works of art in museums, I regularly felt like climbing on them, playing with them, bringing them to life in a way other than by looking at them. This is one of the reasons why I now create performances with a dual purpose. The first is aesthetic, the second choreographic.

I like spectators to wonder what my devices are for, to appreciate them as sculpture, and to rediscover them when the dancers start working on them.

Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian scientist, inventor, and artist—a true Renaissance polymath, renowned for blending science, technology, and pure art poetically. Similarly, I see a skilful integration of science, technology, and art in your performance process. What were the initial steps in testing the machinery? Where did the intuition to present it to the audience in this manner originate? And how do you envision its evolution in the future?

Thank you for seeing similarities with such a genius ! The integration of science, technology, and art in my performances began with a deep curiosity and a desire to go further with my practice.

The initial step begins with the idea of a movement. I imagine an action, or a sensation I’d like to achieve, such as simulating lunar gravity, or walking on walls. Then there are months, even years of experimentation and research. I work a lot on an empirical basis, to find the solution that best suits my idea. I carry out dozens, hundreds of trials, modifying and improving the structures I imagine, sometimes even starting from scratch if I have the intuition that it’s not the right track.

Only then, when the object has been created, do I start the choreographic work. This stage is usually fairly quick, because the basis of all my creation comes from the idea of a movement.

I like the idea of building up a collection of objects, each of which in its own way allows gravity to be varied. In the future, I’d love to be able to develop the museal aspect even further, presenting real exhibitions with regular performances, where all the pieces are activated at the same time, for example.

Looking ahead, what are your aspirations and goals for your career as an acrobat and performer?

Obviously, I want to continue defying gravity. It’s a constant I think I need in my life. I want to continue and go even further in my work around the hybridisation of forms. I like to bring together circus, dance, sculpture and science.

And finally, I’d like to pursue my work as a choreographer, and not only as a performer. I take immense pleasure in orchestrating bodies, and I’d like to take things further, especially in my next show where I won’t be on stage.

Team Credits

Photography · Matias Alfonzo
Styling · Elisa Schenke
Grooming · Miwa Moroki
Styling Assistant · Sintia Blakaj
Location · Cirque Les Noctambules

Styling Credits

Cardigan T/SEHNE, pants ANN DEMEULEMEESTER and shoes ASICS
Suit ANN DEMEULEMEESTER and shoes ASICS

Luca Werner

Posted on 11 de June de 202431 de July de 2024 by nr

NR · Magazine
Published · Online

Feature · Luca Werner
Words · Simone Lorusso

Embracing Lightness: A Dialogue With Luca Werner

Sharing one’s history is a challenging task. Yet, German photographer and filmmaker Luca Werner has skillfully and sensitively unveiled fragments of his past, capturing fleeting moments of youth, delving into the intricacies of relationships, and exploring the depths of his inner being. Transitioning seamlessly between photography and video, he showcases his expertise in both technical precision and narrative storytelling. With his recent project, “Pools,” garnering widespread attention, we were curious to interview him, not only to delve into the details of this latest endeavour but also to trace the roots and progression of his career.

I’d like to begin from the genesis, what sparked your interest in photography and filmmaking initially?

At the beginning, I wanted to become a professional snowboarder. However, my journey was cut short at the age of 16 after breaking my collarbone five times in a row. My doctor advised me to stop snowboarding for at least two years. Everyone made such a fast progress that I knew I will not keep up with a two year long break so I felt like my world collapsed and that my dream just faded away.

Somehow during my recovery, my interest in extreme sports continued. I watched a lot of GoPro and Red Bull films and I felt very connected to them. Their films embodied this feeling of being alive, they created this impression in their five-minute videos of “flying“ or being able to do whatever you want.

So after my recovery I convinced my parents to let me travel to Hong Kong with a roofer I met on Instagram. I think this ten day trip was basically the moment I understood I really loved photography and filmmaking. Being so young in a city that felt like a different world, climbing on rooftops, escaping from police, there were so many feelings coming up for the first time that I felt I needed to document everything to not forget it. On top of this, I had a very ill mother at that time, which made me reflect a lot, so I felt like after my snowboarding dream ended, I now had found something to hold onto again.

This is actually a link to the film I did in Hong Kong 9 years ago.

Which project holds the most significance for you, and what makes it particularly meaningful?

I think it is probably one that I have not released yet. This February I have directed a film for a Japanese art collective called ME that will be shown in Tokyo this autumn, in the form of a three channel installation. It includes three different human stories of everyday life in Paris.

It was a project that is really close to my heart as it includes a message that is very important for me and to the art collective. I felt that for the first time in form of an actual installation we will hopefully tell something to an audience who will take the time to listen.

What does Italo Calvino’s quote, “Take life lightly, because lightness is not superficial, but it is gliding over things, not having burdens on your heart,” mean to you personally?

I am always coming back to this quote because somehow our western society is so good in making you believe that certain things and values are important and those are actually so incredibly unimportant. Everyone is so good in creating stress and making you rush. I am always surprised how easily cars start honking in Paris.

I like the idea of being light in life and not taking everything so damn serious, at least not things that are superficial and don’t mean anything to our world or life around.

To what extent have the experiences you had in your youth influenced the approach you take in your current projects?

I am surprised that the moment I sit down, listen to music and try to catch a next glimpse of an idea, it so often leads back to my youth. I think when I am “fishing“ for ideas, I try with music to bring myself in an emotional state, where sometimes just for a few seconds a certain feeling comes up. Most of the time it is related to some kind of memory I had in my teenage days. As I mentioned before I believe it is because it was a period where we felt so many things for the first time, we were less rational and that somehow made these feelings so much clearer. That’s why I take a lot inspiration from this period of my life, it feels the purest to me.

When discussing youth, one of your recent projects, “Pools,” inevitably comes to mind. Could you share more details about this project?

The project was shot last year at the Barcelona olympic pool. We casted two swimmers and group of friends with whom we spend one full day at the location.

The idea was to rebuild Bel’s feelings and mine towards the ritual of jumping and swimming. We built a script but on location mostly followed our own feeling of what is essential to shoot. None of the cast had to play a role, everyone was just him or herself. The way we wanted to shoot was to recreate a real life situation at the pools so that Bel and I can observe and then pick the pieces that are the closest to our memory and feelings.

Could you share with us how your collaboration with Beltran Gonzalez came about and how you both embarked on creating the film together?

Beltran once assisted me on shoot in Greece 4 years ago. We had a lot of fun and became friends from this time on. Beltran started to make more and more films and as we both are in love with cliff jumping which again comes back to this feeling of being alive, we decided to make a film together at Bels home pool in Barcelona. At first the jumping part should play more of a significant role but during the process somehow the swimming part became an image that carried the strongest feelings for us. As it was all self funded, it gave us the freedom to do whatever we want.

Same way jumping and swimming works, no rules and a lot of improvisation.

In one of your recent posts, you mentioned the “Pools” project and described swimming as something that now has become valuable. Could you elaborate on the significance behind these words?

I think swimming was always valuable but I feel when you were younger you were not so aware of it yet. I believe the older you get the more you need to plan your day etc. meaning you now understand more and more what gives you joy throughout the day and what not. Back in your childhood I feel a lot of things just happened to you, like swimming to me, you obviously didn’t overthink it as you often lived from hour to hour anyways and not like most of us now from week to week.

I was in a swimming club for a few years and I never really liked it so much at least the pressure of it, but I still remember after I finished the class I always felt very good. Like you are in balance. I came home, I was allowed to have frozen pizza and watch my favorite films. The class became kind of a ritual.

I now also understand that breathing rhythmically which you are forced to do in swimming just calms you down so much.

When you swim for an hour surprisingly your head often just goes blank and follows the rhythm.

You are more likely to live from hour to hour again at least while swimming.

When discussing the ‘Pools’ project, I’m intrigued to understand the significance of water in your life.

I think there are two components to the meaning of water for me: one is completely personal which is again connected to my swimming practice in my childhood as well as the cliff jumping in my adolescence and I believe the feeling of holiday and leisure time in general. The other one is a visual aspect.

I was always in love with images of Herbert list, Olivier Kervern and Sergio Purtell, who in my opinion, all captured so well how it feels to spend a day at the ocean. There is this image connected to water which most of the times only comes with a positive connotation. When you see these images, it sometimes gives me the feeling that everyone can be themselves in water. The beach or the grass in front of the lake becomes a big living room. It’s the only time were people comfortably lay half naked next to strangers. Most of us know how it feels to completely submerge in water; even in a bathtub when you float, it becomes reminiscent to the start of it all.

I appreciate your time today, and as we conclude our conversation, I’m curious: Where do you see yourself and what are you doing in the year 2034?

I would love to create more “art films“ and installation works, I feel that it’s a kind of medium unfortunately not really often reachable as you are always limited by space and huge costs for video projectors or screens. In my eyes watching a video installation can really transform the way you look at things or can create a certain feeling in a way that poetry works, something that you cant explain but only feel.

This is the type of filmmaking I love and I will try to pursue.

Studio HAOS

Posted on 24 de May de 202431 de July de 2024 by nr

NR · Magazine
Published · Online

Feature ·Studio HAOS
Words · Simone Lorusso

Through the Lens: From Photography to Design with Studio HAOS

Sophie Gelinet and Cédric Gepner didn’t have formal training in furniture design, but they shared a passion that led them to create their first lamp. That lamp became the foundation for a collection, and in 2017, Studio HAOS was born.

They believe in keeping things simple, using materials like oak plywood and sheet metal to create thoughtful furniture and lighting. They focus on clarity and proportions, avoiding unnecessary complexity. Now based in Lisbon, their work is recognised worldwide, and they’re represented by galleries in major cities like Paris, New York, and London.

Sophie and Cédric, thanks for being here with me. Could you narrate the journey of Studio HAOS, from its inception with the creation of your first lamp to evolving into a fully-fledged design studio?

We had the desire to work on something together, on the side of our regular jobs. We had a shared interest in photography, and that led us to a few personal projects in France and in the north of India. At some point I wanted to try something new and started working on the prototype of a first lamp, and Cedric soon joined me. It was just something we were doing for fun on the side of our regular jobs. From what was initially a single lamp we made a small series, we then reached out to the press, got some publications, started getting some orders, etc. It started like that, quite randomly. We created the studio in 2017, and a couple of years later reached the point where we could both work full time on HAOS.

How did your previous exploration in photography inform or shape your approach to design?

Looking back at it I think it helped in three ways. The first one was learning how to collaborate on a creative endeavour, which is not simple especially when you are also partners in life. The second was that it helped us develop our understanding of what makes a good picture: just as much as in photography, design is about arranging shapes, finding harmony, playing with light, shadows, shades, textures… The third and maybe most important is that it’s usually fruitful to be exposed to as many fields as possible. It’s often at the intersection of seemingly unrelated interests that cross pollination or creativity happen. Trying to understand and replicate the appeal of pictures by Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld or Alec Soth, to name a few, that must have permeated into our practice of design in many positive ways that we don’t necessarily understand.

Your design ethos revolves around elevating humble materials such as plywood and sheet metal. What attracts you to these materials, and how do you integrate them into your designs?

One key feature of photography is that the most vernacular subject matter can be transformed into singular, poetic images. And this kind of transmutation can be achieved with the most basic equipment. All that is required is an understanding of colour, form, and composition. We believe design should work in the same way. Very intricate and time-consuming savoir-faire applied to opulent materials, that’s where craftsmen can shine. In our view the focus of designers should be on shape and form. The more accessible the materials and techniques, the better, as it is the thinking process that then takes center stage. If a piece is thought-out, it doesn’t need to be loud to catch attention. On the contrary, we believe there is a particular form of elegance that lies in the ability to express or evoke emotions with restraint and with purposely limited means. It’s not exactly a new idea, it has been exemplified by many designers and artists for more than a century, just think of Gerrit Rietveld and his crate chair, Achille Castiglioni’s floor lamp based on a car headlight, or the works of minimalists such as Donald Judd or Charlotte Posenenske. But this conversation is not over and it’s especially relevant today.

What does the concept of “slow design” signify for you, and how does it manifest in your creative process and final products?

Actually our practice tends to go in the opposite direction. We are now trying to experiment faster, because the more experiments we undertake (with new processes, new materials, etc.) the more chances we have to stumble upon something worthwhile.

How has the environment and atmosphere of Lisbon influenced your creative process and the direction of your designs?

Lisbon happened by accident. The initial plan was to relocate to Tangier in Morocco, but as the pandemy picked up again late 2021, we decided to make a stopover in Lisbon until things settled. It’s a city that’s hard not to like, and the stopover turned into a long-term installation. Being here enabled us to open a large-scale workshop, where design, prototyping and production can happen side-by-side. We can go from an idea to a finished piece in a matter of weeks instead of having to wait months for a first prototype. And we now have a lot more freedom to play with materials, processes and finishes.

Studio HAOS is known for embracing simplicity while eschewing unnecessary complexity in design. How do you navigate the delicate balance between minimalism and functionality in your creations?

It can be tempting to free oneself from the “functionality” constraint, and make pieces that have more value as a work of art than as a functional object, and some do it very well. As for our way of practicing design, we feel it’s important to keep it because ultimately constraints are essential to the process of creation. Paradoxically the more constraints you have and the more creative you have to be, and besides functionality, we don’t have that many of them. We indeed have to balance this with quite a minimalistic approach, but they are not necessarily opposites. Minimalism for us is not about stripping everything out, it’s about achieving the desired effect with restraint, trying to be subtle rather than loud, leaning away from frivolous complication. In that sense ornament can be necessary, and functionality is not a cross to carry.

Reflecting on your journey so far, what advice would you offer to yourselves when you were first embarking on this path?

We were quite self conscious when we started, not having a product design background, and we would spend way too much time on each object. It usually doesn’t make them better, quite the opposite in fact. Looking back I would tell myself to be more confident, build more pieces, because with each new piece we make mistakes, learn, and get better at what we do. In other words, “it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey”.

As Studio HAOS continues to evolve, what are your aspirations and goals for the future of the studio?

I hope we’ll always have the curiosity to experiment with new ways of doing things, and that we will keep doing so surrounded by a team of talented and fun people. And above all, I hope that we always get to keep the immense privilege of being allowed to spend our days making beautiful things, and be paid for it.

In order of appearance

ANTIMATIÈRE Exhibition, 2024, Paris. Photography by Depasquale and Maffini. Courtesy of CONTRIBUTIONS Design
Aluminium Side Table. Photography by Inês Silva Sá. Courtesy of Studio HAOS.
Aluminium Dining Table. Photography by Inês Silva Sá. Courtesy of Studio HAOS.
Grid Chair. Photography by Inês Silva Sá. Courtesy of Studio HAOS.
Leather Chair. Photography by Inês Silva Sá. Courtesy of Studio HAOS.
Aluminium Lounge Chair. Photography by Inês Silva Sá. Courtesy of Studio HAOS.
Aluminium Arm Chair. Photography by Inês Silva Sá. Courtesy of Studio HAOS.
Aluminium Bench. Photography by Inês Silva Sá. Courtesy of Studio HAOS.
Steel Lamp 3. Photography by Inês Silva Sá. Courtesy of Studio HAOS.
Steel Lamp 1. Photography by Inês Silva Sá. Courtesy of Studio HAOS.

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