Issue # 34
Archive stories

New York City: She loves a backstory. She loves a uniform. She loves how one influences the other. For stylist and costume designer Miyako Bellizzi, the uniform is a study in how a person lives day-to-day. The uniform is practical, but never short on style. The backstory, on the other hand, is a way in, disclosing…

Somewhere in Brittany: Having been born and raised in the Mediterranean, it was a bit of a shock to arrive in a rainy place in late July. Nonetheless, after a two-hour ride from the nearest airport, I finally reached Ronan Bouroullec’s home—a former auberge turned sardine-canning factory, located at the entrance of a small harbour….

Kent: I started visiting Rose in her countryside home in Kent as a fan who became a friend. We first met when my gallerist, Kate MacGarry, introduced me to Rose, who had taught Kate’s grandmother painting in adult education classes. Soon after, I began filming Rose around her house and studio as the subject of a…

Presicce-Acquarica: Call it poetic justice, but there’s something deeply satisfying about interviewing an artist whose work is so connected to the visual landscape of Naples—an entity who has hijacked nearly all the forms and codes of Southern Italy—only to find she’s never where you expect her to be. For all the balconies, pools, religious niches,…

New York City: A figure both unassuming and magnetic, artist-archivist-activist-performer Agosto Machado’s transcendent life is a subcultural version of the American Dream. An orphan and former hustler of Chinese, Spanish, and Filipino descent, Machado, through collaboration with his coterie of outcasts and street queens, shaped the counterculture of the ‘60s and ‘70s, forever impacting American art,…

Edinburgh: Beca Lipscombe is an Edinburgh-based fashion and textile designer and printmaker. She is one half of Atelier E.B—a fashion label that leans towards social and cultural anthropology—together with the Scottish artist Lucy McKenzie, who is based in Brussels. (E.B stands for Edinburgh Bruxelles.) Their collexhibitions, which tease the intense yearning and unrequited love affair that…

London: At 30 years old, Celeste Epiphany Waite’s mezzo-soprano voice and versatile groove are redefining the landscape of alternative soul and jazz. Infusing her lyrics with an enigmatic, almost uncanny tone, her verses fade away in a soft breath. The young British musician caught the attention of a manager at only 16 when she was publishing…

Klovharun: Finland has many islands and almost as many names for them: island, islet, skerry, rock, and haru. Writer, painter, cartoonist, and author of the Moomin stories, Tove Jansson had two favourite islands in the Pellinge archipelago: Äggskär and Kummelskär. As a child, Jansson dreamt of becoming a lighthouse keeper on Kummelskär because it had a…

Brussels: Faced with a difficult economic situation at the start of the 1920s, many young German intellectuals such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer decided to leave the country and spend some time in Naples. One of them, less well-known but equally brilliant, derived from this experience a new idea of the role technology…

Brookhaven: I first met the photographic artist and printer Gary Schneider and his partner, the performer John Erdman, two years ago in Manhattan. On a warm October evening, we convened over dinner at a Venetian restaurant in Chelsea to discuss the life and death of their close friend, photographer Peter Hujar, whose biography I am writing….

London: The designer Bethan Laura Wood is not a morning person, ‘unless it’s a flea market or a flight’. Then, she can motivate herself with the allure of a new find or a fresh idea. On a normal day, she avoids rising until around 8 or 9am—or even 11 if she’s been up model-making until 3…

Punta Indio: Edgardo Giménez is an undisputed icon of the Argentine art scene. Self-taught, he has worked in such varied fields as advertising, painting, sculpture, and architecture, without ever settling on just one. Since the ‘60s, his career has been defined by the ability to conjure up worlds out of his own fantasies and challenge established…

St Ives: On a drizzly Monday in July, the painter Danny Fox picks me up outside of the Tate St Ives in a black pickup truck. Across the street, Porthmeor Beach is strewn with obstinate, blanket-wrapped tourists, as are the tiny lanes of the town, where damp holidaymakers huddled over fish and chips fight with enterprising…

New York City: When the painter Jane Dickson and her husband, the filmmaker Charlie Ahearn, lived in New York’s Times Square in the ‘80s, their apartment was like a tourist attraction for out-of-town friends. Jane knew it was an odd place to live, especially at that time when a level of lawlessness and neglect ruled the…

Yoxford: Towards the end of the London launch of their latest book, The Garden Against Time, Olivia Laing offered the audience this: ‘Trauma shapes the need to make a garden’. This sentiment is not only reflected in the hopeful tone of their latest book that ties in personal histories with the radical possibilities of gardens; it’s…

Rome: Luca Lo Pinto was already the artistic director of the MACRO—the most innovative of the contemporary art museums in Rome—by the time I moved to Italy. Soon after my relocation to the Eternal City, Luca and I began periodically meeting for lunch. Towards the end of one of our repasts, Luca asked if I would…

London: Molly Manning Walker first caught my eye as a cinematographer in the music video, commercial, and short form space where she was part of director (and fellow contributing editor at Apartamento) Frank Lebon’s team. As a big fan of Frank’s work, one of the many things that I love about his films is the…

The small desk was moving slowly, diagonally across the room. When it had almost reached the smooth, pale green wall where it would stay, she gave it a slightly harder push, and the slate-grey ceramic bust of Queen Nefertiti fell and shattered into pieces. Good. She found it annoying, that impenetrable little face with no…

  In Cy Twombly’s Roman apartment on Via di Monserrato, photographed by Horst P Horst in 1966, there is a sun-sloped wall dappled with paint in sanguinary colours. Mostly the carnal pinks of flushed light skin and the brown of oxidised blood; some dull blues, like the muffled bloom of a new bruise. I saw…

I. ‘Dear motherfucking cocksucker of an asshole’, writes Darío in his notebook, ‘I haven’t heard from you in a few days, you fucking dickwad. I’m guessing someone threw a bag of poop and barf on you in the street, and you can’t get rid of the smell of horse shit and sweaty socks, and on…

In ‘Tuesday Siesta’, the story that opens Gabriel García Márquez’s The Funerals of Mamá Grande, a woman and her daughter reach a village at midday after a journey by train in a third-class carriage. Dressed in ‘severe and poor mourning clothes’, and with the sun at its zenith, mother and daughter traverse the sleeping village…

Above a gift shop for the British Museum and four flights up a stairwell carpeted in a scuffed regal blue reminiscent of an old hotel, following a lacquered handrail, after passing closed door after closed door, 80 stairs up, I arrive at Celia Paul’s home and studio. Paul has lived here alone since 1982. Her…

I rented a 10-foot U-Haul to move to a tiny studio with a shared kitchen in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn in 2022. The apartment was $1,410 per month and about the size of the inside of the truck. I had to pay my deposit and first month’s rent in cash, which I extracted, sweating, from a constellation of…

The wife had a garden. A flower garden. Through the kitchen window, the blooms were visible, mounds of roses and pale daisies and yellow bulbs and frilly purple things that I had never before seen, could not name. Every colour, bursting up from the ground like confetti. In the first days after I moved into…

After the sunlight, the wind becomes echoes breaking the chest, twisting its density into a confetti of birds. Pardon me for I make this about the number of times that I have awoken into a garden watered down. I have become winged to enter the promise. And I have no relationship with birds, only with…

You’re overwrought—you’ve fallen asleep in your seat—you look like you’ve barely made it out of the zoo. You got in town after your boyfriend dumped you. You burned your ID; the smell of plastic made you nauseous. Before he left, he gave you a book called Autobiography of Red. You leafed through it, then put…