Issue # 26
Archive stories

London: London is woven into the fabric of Martine Rose’s collections. For once, it’s not hyperbolic to claim so; in her Autumn/Winter 2020 collection, the designer included shirts and sharply tailored jacquard jackets inscribed with the words ‘Tottenham’, ‘Croydon’, ‘Tooting Bec’, and ‘Clapham Junction’, among others—all names of places the designer has lived in over...

Verona: Carlo Rovelli writes bestsellers. But he doesn’t write detective stories, family sagas, or other kinds of novels favoured by the general public. Rather, he’s a physicist, and in his books—like Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, translated into over 40 languages—he explains quantum physics, the theory of relativity, and the history and role of science....

Pasadena: How to describe Ottessa Moshfegh? I could tell you that she is an American author and novelist, that she was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and was a finalist for the Story Prize, that she’s won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the Plimpton Prize for Fiction, the Fence Modern Prize in Prose, that the...

Biesenthal: The water slowly evaporates from the wet cement under the summer sun. The house of Thomas Demand seems strangely artificial on a quiet afternoon, and if you know his artworks, you can’t avoid thinking about them, the entire history of photography, the potential nostalgia it bequeaths, and all the illusion it can bring, when...

I’m a painter, but I often look to photography as much as anything for lessons on how to think, how to see, and then, how to make. Last year I was offered a dream opportunity to curate an exhibition from the vast archives of one of my favourite artists, the Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri (1943–92)....

Stockholm: Before this interview with Kali Malone I took a long walk from my house to my office, listening to her record The Sacrificial Code. Three of the tracks were recorded at the concert hall Studio Acusticum in Piteå, roughly a thousand kilometres north of Stockholm. I was there for a residency, creating a sound...

Milan: Andrea Branzi is an architect, designer, and theorist, a giant of ‘the project’ whose work is based on research and experimentation. His is a complex anthropological vision that, from the outset, has been nourished by ideas that go far beyond the traditional discipline of design, moving between philosophy, economics, art, music, and literature, but...

Possible architectures Anne Holtrop (1977, the Netherlands) has a unique approach to architecture that has always caught our attention. His work starts from shapes, or material gestures, that don’t usually come from the world of architecture. He examines this material, trying to look at it with other eyes, as someone who can see a butterfly...

Depending on where your own interests lie, it’s possible to arrive at the life and work of Charles Perry in more than one way. Born in LA, in 1941, Perry’s known as one of world’s foremost experts on medieval Arabic cuisine, having majored in Middle Eastern studies at Princeton and then UC, Berkeley, and having...

In his silvery Swiss-French-inflected English, Olivier Mosset always answers the phone with a crisp and emphatic, ‘Yes!’ There’s a magnanimity and enthusiasm in those greetings, heralding a genuine willingness to engage in a spirited reciprocal dialogue. At the zenith of the scorching Sonoran summer over a period of two afternoons, first at his studio, then...

Moving to Lispenard Street Willi Smith purchased one of the few remaining derelict lofts on Lispenard Street in the early ‘80s. A few artists had already taken up residence in the crumbling building, the editor and co-founder of Paper magazine, Kim Hastreiter, being one of them. She was shocked at first when she found out...

Concept by Apartamento Studios in collaboration with Marta Armengol        

Givraines: It’d been five years already that I’d wanted to go to the house of Denis Charignon, after ambling around one of the websites on art brut/singulier that I regularly consult. I’d come across some photos of his house and was struck by the force of the frescoes, both naïve and controlled, which adorned the...

New Orleans: After 20 years away, Tunde Wey is finally going home. The cook and writer was 16 years old when he left Lagos to move to the United States. He landed in Detroit where he enrolled in community college to ostensibly pursue a pharmacy degree to precede the medical degree his parents wished for...