Issue # 35
Archive stories

New York City: Am I about to draw links between Camille Henrot and rat poison? Yes, yes, I am, but hear me out. I’m staying in Henrot’s apartment on the Upper West Side of New York, 12 floors up but with an elevator, so I’m relieved. One bedroom explodes in blood-red paint, and other walls…

Paris: Bernardo Bertolucci. David Fincher. Michael Haneke. The Safdie brothers. Woody Allen. Alan Parker. Danny Boyle. Alejandro G. Iñarritu. Neil Jordan. Ari Aster. Marc Caro and Jean Pierre Jeunet. Wong Kar Wai. James Gray. Philippe Parreno. Sydney Pollack. Roman Polanski. Each of these directors have, at one point or another — and sometimes more than…

Ibiza: Catherine Schroeder and I met at Arsenic, a performing arts centre in Lausanne, where she was rehearsing for Nils Amadeus Lange’s play, Hildegard von Bingen, in which she sang a selection of Hildegard’s lyrical repertoire. Nils had referred to Catherine as his muse, and I was immediately drawn in by her bright-red hair, calm…

London: A few years ago, the musician Jason Beck began looking for a home in London. For a long time, he had lived on the European continent, with its high-ceilinged, single-level apartments. ‘When you start looking for places in London, you realise that 95 percent of them are terraced houses where you have three or…

Lisbon: Leïla Slimani is sitting at her desk. Outside her window, the sun is setting over the Jardim da Estrela. She has only been living in Lisbon for three years, yet she feels more at home here than anywhere else. Born in Rabat in 1981, Slimani moved to Paris when she was 17. She has…

On a pulsing, warm September night, I found myself waiting in Rockefeller Center with an excited crowd. Overhead, 200 flagpoles surrounded the iconic ice-skating rink, bearing custom black flags splashed with a stark white Luar logo. Stars arrived: Doechii, Offset, Tinashe, Honey Balenciaga, Hari Nef, and Amanda Lepore. In a climactic twist, Madonna and Ice…

Sidney: A whisper, a shared passion, has taken hold across Australia’s largest city. It’s bound to a place—a house, a garden—but also to the person who has given it such life. Most of the time, she needs no introduction. Her name is Wendy Whiteley, and those who know their way around town, those who find…

New York City: Two Fifth Avenue, a white brick residential tower in New York City that overlooks Washington Square Park, is a very buttoned-up kind of building. The lobby has a doorman and polished tile floors. Residents over the years have included New York City Mayor Ed Koch, Congresswoman Bella Abzug, and the playwright and…

Our goal in death should be the same as our goal in life—to make the world a better place for those we leave behind. To create contentment and well-being and beauty. To honour and enrich our fellow humans, to turn over to them our share of the universe with dignity and grace. And sometimes the…

Palmetto: Along the Florida coast, where God-fearing tourists tempt fate with cigarettes and sunburn, the trailer park where Robert Plunket lives has taken up the cross of Sherwin Williams pastels. Alligators blink at too bright houses where screened-in porches hide easy pets. Neighbours ask after each other’s lawns and latest surgeries. No one minds the…

Paris: I met with Huong Dodinh on a luminous Parisian afternoon. Greeting me with tea and ginger sweets, the 79-year-old French–Vietnamese artist took me around her two-floor apartment and studio located in a housing project from the ‘60s, very much dans son jus with tiled floors and large metal windows overlooking the neighbourhood. Born in…

L.A: Nothing he does is normal. His outfits. His online persona. Being from Kansas. He just did a Super Bowl commercial with Shania Twain, and before that, he was in the studio with Ye. His music, which has been described with a mix of terms ranging from dance to pop to jungle to drum and…

        INT. SITTING ROOM — MORNING EFTHIMIS is lying on the sofa. He gets up and lights a candle, even though it’s morning, and there’s plenty of light in the room. Facing him are THIRTEEN STOUT MEN, all around 68 years old, all wearing white cotton tees and dark-blue shorts. They are…

Fiskars: I first encountered Erna Aaltonen’s ceramics—her relentless testing of a material’s limits, her experimentations with colour—at her home studio in the Finnish village of Fiskars. I was researching the work of her late partner, Howard Smith (1928–2021), an African American artist and designer who spent most of his life in Finland. Smith arrived in…

Hangzhou: When I arrived at Zhou’s studio in the west suburb of Hangzhou, in a neighbourhood full of artists, he was painting on stacks of Louis Vuitton suitcases taller than him. The residential property, which has been converted into an artists’ hub, is filled with wooden stools and small artefacts that Zhou has collected from…

Center Valley: It’s fair to say Steve Bailey isn’t a household name, but within the global skateboarding underground, he has a justifiably first-rate reputation. Coming out of San Diego during the deadest time in skating’s history, the mid ‘80s, he impressed with an impeccably smooth style and one of the best frontside ollies of all…

Panajachel: The legendary allure of Vivian Suter’s life on a coffee plantation amid the Guatemalan rainforest falls into a romanticised storyline reinforced by the undeniable beauty of the setting, yet it fails to encompass the intricate choices it entailed, let alone the simplicity of her own account: ‘I just ended up here’. Born in Martínez,…

Both my grandmother and my ex-mother-in-law (or maybe mother-in-law—I still don’t know how to refer to her) always told the same anecdote about Miguel Milá. After praising his talent as an industrial designer and his coolness—and elaborating on the latter—they would explain excitedly how he was the first person in Barcelona to wear light chinos…

Chairs suffer from rheumatism, rugs from leprosy, shelves from cerebral thrombosis, door locks from glaucoma, armchairs from intestinal diverticulitis. What is there to see outside my window, in Buenos Aires, that is not decadent or decaying? There are days when I feel ubiquitous, and this is because I am an attentive observer. Any place could…

Life is not beautiful all the time. Life can be good, then you lie down, and stare up at the ceiling, and the sadness falls on you. Things move on, time passes, people go away, and sometimes they don’t come back. —Robert Frank Earlier this year, I was sitting on a bench in Palm Springs,…

What do you expect of course we have character. We were built with purpose we were built with principles we were built with intentions. This purpose these principles these intentions are within us. Four along sold recently for like what six hundred thousand a characterful modernist masterpiece that’s how they described it sold first day…

Zinedine, my father, became a street mime at the age of 18. His artist name was the Mime Zouzou. ‘I only wore dungarees and striped sweaters at that time’, he once told me. Other than that, the only memory he shared with me was travelling from France to Peru for three months to do street…

Clouds of hot steam drift through the bathhouse. A young Chinese woman, her eyes teasing with innocence and longing, wades through a pool of bath water. She swims up to another woman, grinning as she turns away shyly, pulling a carved jade hairpin from her long black hair, letting it cascade with a dramatic flourish….

The wall was alive. Morning light found satisfaction there. It started with a couple torn magazine pages pinned up. Then came others, blue-taped in. The wall became a constantly evolving, revolving collection: Polaroids, watercolours, drawings, concert tickets, notes, postcards. Shaky-handed sketches dashed off by Randy alongside Margo’s hasty watercolours made during her night shifts at…

It was my first week of the school year on crossing guard duty—my turn to put on the neon-green sash and make sure the children get to school and back safely. I say ‘duty’, but it isn’t that demanding; no one takes attendance, and we’re allowed to choose where we stand guard, meaning we can…