Issue # 27
Archive stories

New York City: TABBOO!, aka Stephen Tashjian, has entered an exciting new stage in a life already jam-packed with excitement. The artist’s formative years were spent in parallel schools of culture: the art world and the drag world. He created a routine in which days were spent making paintings and nights were spent performing, with…

Shanghai: Since 2008, Luo Yang has led her audience into the homes of the many girls who’ve inhabited her personal project of the same title. These rooms, located all across China, have witnessed these girls’ lives, moments of their love and growth. But when we try to distinguish the details of their rooms, we find…

Mexico City: I like to think about liminal moments, when radical changes appear in your life, those events that arrive all of a sudden and interrupt the normal flow of things. As Žižek says, ‘That radical intervention after which nothing remains the same’. Most of the time you don’t see these changes coming, they arrive…

Brussels: The first time I heard of David Numwami, who back then was releasing music as Le Colisée, must have been in 2017 or 2018. I was about to launch an online radio here in Brussels, and my colleague at the time suggested I give his stuff a listen. I won’t lie, at first I…

Mexico City: A hundred years after its birth, Colonia Roma, the charming European-inflected neighbourhood developed in the early 20th century for Mexico City’s emergent bourgeoisie, is many worlds at once. While its northern section surrendered to a constant flux of tourism and foreign residents, its leafy sidewalks filled with concept eateries, fake mezcalerías, design shops,…

Valvignères: Our last morning in Valvignères, Anders dropped us a pin; it was a while after they’d got there already, but at the time we were still schlepping around the breakfast table. Business and pleasure were starting to blur. We threw our bags in the car and eventually located the ranks of Ardèche natural winemakers…

New York City: The French–American artist Louise Bourgeois lived in the Chelsea neighbourhood of New York City for almost 50 years. She purchased the narrow townhouse—a mere 15 feet wide—in 1962 with her husband, the art historian Robert Goldwater; their three sons, Michel, Alain, and Jean-Louis, were already grown and lived elsewhere. They furnished it…

Tucson: A lanky, rakish figure regularly seen riding around Tucson on various two-wheeled motorised machines accompanied by Jake, his faithful 15-year-old Chihuahua, Alex Streeter is a renowned jewellery designer, world traveller, and outstanding raconteur whose stories manage to beggar belief while being firmly rooted in fact. From seeing Roy Rogers at Madison Square Garden as…

New York City: In 2009, Victor Barragán was a hyper-creative 17 year old living with his family in Postal, a neighbourhood in Mexico City. In high school he studied architecture, bartended at his father’s taquería, and experimented with his sexuality at public cruising spots. Because he couldn’t afford the clothes he desired, he began silk-screening…

Los Angeles: Roger (pronounced ‘Ro-jay’ in the French–German manner of his hybrid hometown of Saarbrücken) Herman is an artist from Germany who has lived in California since 1977, and Los Angeles for almost as long. Roger is a painter and, since the mid ‘80s until recently, was an influential teacher at the University of California’s…

Milan: Before meeting Lucia Pescador I’d seen, and instantly loved, her work. When the moment came to meet her, it was like rediscovering an old friendship, tied together perhaps by similar personalities and our love of art and artefacts from the 20th century. Lucia was born in 1943 in Voghera, Italy—and the 20th century is…

New York City: In an old factory on Broadway and 12th Street, wedged between The Strand and Grace Church, you’ll find a Halloween store—the kind of store that defined a ‘90s-era NYC, one that supported hyper-specialised shops that knew their audience and could depend on it for survival. It’s a version of NY many hope…

We have just passed the one-year mark of the pandemic, and yet we’re still fully implicated. Restrictions are still in force, and mobility between countries is almost impossible. These circumstances make it difficult to carry out our conversation in person, but in the case of Leopold Banchini (Geneva, 1981), the situation becomes even more complicated….

They played poker in the old fifth-storey apartment that hung below the smog over the central train station. They played for no money, hand after hand, from four until the smog darkened into night. They ate cheese and sausage sandwiches and drank soda and the occasional shot of prune brandy at adjacent TV trays set…

London: At the musician Sabrina Fuentes’ house in London, her friend Ophelia Horton (nicknamed Opi) prepares some late breakfast sandwiches, navigating around the mould inside an old tub of olive spread. ‘Can I still use this?’ she looks to Sabrina, and again, ‘Does this need more ham?’ The inseparable pair chuckle as they wonder where the…

Fire Island: I discovered the work of Larry Stanton by chance, while searching online for information about an artist I love and have collected for years, Patrick Angus. That was in January 2018. Larry Stanton did not know Patrick Angus, because Larry died of AIDS in 1984, when he was just 37 years old. That same…