Issue # 31
Archive stories

Spring / Summer 2023

Featuring: Tal R & Emma Rosenzweig, Pedro Costa, Dayanita Singh, Alexander Calder, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Laura & Deanna Fanning, Misha Kahn, Abdellah Taïa, Lucia Di Luciano & Giovanni Pizzo, Robert Barber, Bas Princen, Seyni Awa Camara, Supriya Lele, and William Strobeck. Plus: ‘The Goodbyes’, a short story by Abdellah Taïa, and texts by Khushnu Hoof, Oscar Perry, Layla Benitez-James,  Diana McCaulay, Estelle Hoy, and John Douglas Millar


  • Copenhagen: I walk down to the shoreline to see if I can see Sweden over the Øresund—I can’t, just choppy grey-green sea and some birds. I’ve just been to see Tal R and Emma Rosenzweig at their home in central Copenhagen, and now I’m in Hellerup, a neighbourhood about 20 minutes north, killing some time before…

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  • Goa: On one of the main streets in the centre of Göttingen, Germany, Gerhard Steidl has set up what most of your favourite photographers consider to be the Mecca of publishing. The building sits alongside a historic Günter Grass archive and hotel reserved for Steidl artists, all contrasted by the uber modern museum space, Kunsthaus, where…

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  • I was drawn to Dayanita Singh’s work by her book Privacy. I got my copy back in 2005, and was impressed by its portrait of India’s middle class. My roots are a humble farming family from Punjab, so that mixed with the very narrow, exoticised gaze of Western mainstream media meant that it was refreshing for…

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  • London: On a Sunday afternoon, Deanna Fanning and Kiko Kostadinov make a little lunch. In matching Charvet slippers, the couple navigate their galley kitchen with peaceful, unspoken methodology. Their flat is covered in textured wallpaper from the ‘50s, carpeting that seems an unavoidable feat for London renters, and a stained-glass door that goes out to a…

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  • Bignona: Talking about Seyni Awa Camara is not easy, as her life and work are linked to many mysteries and rumours, deliberately maintained or perpetuated by the chasm that can exist between her reality and that of the art world. Amid an abundance of contradictory information, the following text attempts to provide insight into Seyni’s personal…

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  • New York: If you’re a skater, you know skating isn’t what a typical video looks like—three minutes of highlights. You go with your friends, you talk a lot of shit, you sit on the curb, and when you get the spark, a trick could take you an hour, four days, or a second. It’s just about…

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  • Tucson: Neglected, ignored, unknown, or unrecognised, the artist garnering little or no attention during their lifetime who nevertheless keeps plugging away is a common cliché. A stereotype covering the spectrum from those who toil in obscurity to be forgotten forever, which is normally the case, or the ones discovered and in some cases celebrated posthumously….

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  • We could call Bas Princen a photographer, but above all he is an image-maker, an artist that plays somewhere between architecture, landscape, and design. He has had a strong influence on our generation of architects, and in a tangential way he has flown over several of the conversations we’ve had with others in this series….

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  • Paris: We walk up the steep hill in Belleville. In this quarter of Paris at least a hundred nationalities live door to door, innumerable people from all over the world, each with their own reasons for moving to the city. Moroccan-born writer Abdellah Taïa tells me his reason. I wanted to live free as I,…

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  • And France, how’s France doing? Every time the question was asked, we all started to laugh. A nervous laugh at first, then sincere, carefree. What else is there to do after living and surviving these three days of misunderstandings, of quintessentially Moroccan tensions and tragedies? Laugh. So: let’s laugh, let’s laugh. Laugh, laugh, no one…

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  • Saché: The artist Alexander Calder arrived in Europe in the summer of 1926 aboard the British freighter Galileo, a fitting coincidence, as Galileo—the father of modern science—was a master of kinematics, the ‘geometry of motion’, and Calder would rise to fame as the creator of kinetic sculptures known as ‘mobiles’. At 27, Calder made his…

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  • New York City: A few weeks before interviewing Misha for this piece, our mutual friend Nina Johnson invited us (and several other bright lights) to dinner in the East Village. It was Indian food. One of the spots with chilli lights hanging so low you have to stoop to make your way to a table. Conversation…

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  • London: Supriya Lele makes clothes that are visually striking and chromatically intense. Intricately constructed from swathes of fabric in colours that seem to sing (marigold, copper-sulphate blue, emerald green, or the brown you would have found on the soft furnishings of an English office block in the ‘80s), they both follow the form of the female…

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  • Amadora: Pedro Costa’s cinema is intimately linked to homes and inhabiting. His first full-length work, O Sangue (1989), starts with an outdoor scene in which a father abandons his children. It’s as if the home has been destroyed, and this is the opportunity to reconfigure it. Nino, the youngest of the children, wants to move the…

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  • Los Angeles: Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s deceptively straightforward studio portraits often depict himself and his circles of friends and lovers in various stages of undress and interconnection. These distinctive, classical, multiracial, homoerotic images have hit a cultural nerve and are celebrated at museums and galleries all over the world. His sensibility strikes a delicate balance; he creates…

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  • Formello: About 40 minutes by car from the centre of Rome, north of the industrial warehouses and the marble stores for cemetery headstones, there’s a small village called Formello, surrounded by olive trees and maritime pines. There, until recently, lived Lucia Di Luciano and Giovanni Pizzo. A couple in life and art for nearly 70…

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  • Some of my most cherished memories of my grandfather are of him being fascinated by nature. Watching monkeys jumping and lazing around, surrounded by peacocks and peahens, deeply engrossed by trees swaying in the breeze and light filtering through fluttering leaves, while listening to birds chirping, silently conversing with nature—these were daily rituals for him….

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  •   Mortality is a gorgeous framework. —Anne Boyer The photographer Peter Hujar had a large kitchen table at his East 12th Street loft that was painted cobalt blue. Friends and subjects would sit here to talk, drink coffee or wine, or to eat a simple meal of chicken and rice before a shoot. It was…

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  • ’? Chips are yellow potato slices. Potatoes come from the soil. For many years humans only ate potatoes and bugs. Then, as you know, we got boats and fishing rods. But yeah, chips are from potatoes, we peel them and cut them into different shapes and fry them in pools of oil. ? Condiments are…

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  • Text by Layla Benitez-James

    Corners

    La aurora de Nueva York gime por las inmensas escaleras buscando entre las aristas nardos de angustia dibujada  From ‘La Aurora’ by Federico García Lorca Arista: border, edge, corner, ridge My work desk is set into a corner. A monitor sits at eye level with an edge running along each wall. The left-hand wall is…

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  • [matin] Etsuko stands in seagrass by the porch at 3am, grappling with moody winds that take the day, watching silly waves of caution and anxiety. There are endless harbours and lakes on the fringe of this coastline, infinite children playing with albatrosses and other sea birds, arms extended, small voices in high-pitched caws, and windy…

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  • There are rooms in my house we just walk through. The dining room is basically a passage from the kitchen to the veranda, but it contains a six-seater table and a breakfront full of china left to me by my grandparents. The carpet smells slightly of the rubber backing. We always eat in the kitchen….

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