Issue # 36
Archive stories

London: Isamaya, the eponymous cosmetics line helmed by the avant-garde makeup artist Isamaya Ffrench, is advertised with a three-word slogan that functions as a smart double-entendre: Beauty Without Restraint. On one level, its sly use of ‘restraint’ nods to the bondage-inflected aesthetic of the brand’s first collection, which included a mascara wand that came with…

New York City: It’s been nearly a decade since I first met Louis Fratino at his Long Island studio. His scrappy dog, Margaret, sat growling as he asked if he could draw me. That was the first time I saw him work—his eyes flicking calmly between me and the sketchbook, his focus both relaxed and razor-sharp….

Berlin/Eastern Georgia: I don’t use the word ‘masterpiece’ lightly, but Dea Kulumbegashvili has already given us two: Beginning and April. Rarely have a debut and follow-up felt so self-assured, perhaps not since Andrey Zvyagintsev stunned audiences with The Return and then The Banishment nearly two decades ago. I arrived in New York a few hours…

Tågarp: Along a swivelling road dotted with long-haired cows, a landscape opens up—the kind that makes you notice your own pace. There is no nearby natural wonder. No outstanding mountains or sparkling seas. Against this unassuming backdrop, the artist Moki Cherry and her husband, the jazz composer Don Cherry, bought a former schoolhouse in 1970…

Tokyo: Takashi Homma lives in a quiet residential nook on the outer edge of the Yamanote Line, in a beautiful, compact apartment designed by the famed architect, Junzō Yoshimura. The building has only five units and was built in 1979, making it—in the context of Tokyo architectural history—extremely ‘vintage’. It feels human scale and intimate…

New York City: The Lijadu Sisters—twin princesses of Afro-psychedelic funk—rose to global stardom in 1970s and ‘80s Nigeria. Their hypnotic soundscapes, filled with rallying cries to action, have defied genres and borders, from their performance at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972 to their tour with David Byrne in the 2010s, inspiring stars like Nas,…

Lewes: In 1927, in ultra-rural southern England, a beleaguered artist took drastic action. Vanessa Bell—painter, interior designer, furniture maker—needed a break from uninvited visitors to her house. So she put up a sign in a field: TO CHARLESTON. OUT. What seems at first like helpful guidance to the general public (‘This way to Charleston!’) turns…

Zürich: Christian Kerez is one of the most significant figures in contemporary architecture. While he often seems to operate from the margins, he never strays from a clear personal agenda. His studio is a fluid universe—its location shifts, and so do his collaborators, adapting to the evolving nature of each project. What draws us to…

Real estate listings didn’t even have prices that year, either for buying or renting. After the definitive failure of the convertibility law—a policy that had maintained a one-to-one exchange rate between the Argentine peso and the US dollar for over a decade—the local currency was in suspended animation. I had lived my entire adult life…

Los Angeles: Somewhere in sunny Silver Lake lives a criminally charismatic Greek artist with his husband, a sex and intimacy therapist, and their two unruly Boston terriers. This is their home. Despite having lived in the States for decades, this Greek artist claims to have never truly left Greece, and to this day keeps a…

by Konstantin Kakanias

Caniço: When the Portuguese artist Lourdes Castro (1930–2022) looked out the windows of her house, situated high on a hill on the island of Madeira, she saw the fruits of her labour: the stately dragon trees planted when the house was under construction in the late ‘80s; the coursing levadas, an irrigation system of water…

Cape Town: On a rare sunny Friday afternoon in a cruelly cold Cape Town winter, I cross the imperceptible boundary into  Salt River at the heart of the city’s business precinct. Zizipho Poswa’s studio, Imiso Ceramics, sits in burgeoning Salt Orchard, a former industrial site made up of converted warehouses. We have never met before,…

Mexico City: Callejón Heliotropo, the street where Graciela Iturbide lives, sits in the Barrio del Niño Jesús, itself part of the Coyoacán borough, one of the oldest areas in Mexico’s capital. Such stratification is necessary in Mexico City: there are dozens of streets with the same name, and a simple mistake in location can mean…

Launceston: While he was visiting Cornwall and thinking of relocating from London, Simon Costin came across Dockacre, the home he now inhabits. The farmhouse, built in the town of Launceston around 1520, was expanded in 1590 to become what is known as an Elizabethan longhouse. The place is famously haunted by the town’s former mayor,…

Rome: If you were to fly over Rome on a hot, sticky afternoon, like in the opening scene of Fellini’s 8½, your gaze would follow the curve of the Tiber River, shifting from baroque domes to imperial ravines before bending north. As you crossed over the city centre, passing Ponte Milvio and Corso Francia, a…

New York City: On a grey, damp day in the winter of 2023, I took the A train north from 14th Street to Washington Heights to visit Anita Vitale at the apartment where she has lived for the past two decades, a space she shared with her dear friend and fellow social worker, Tom Rauffenbart,…

Feat. Ignasi Monreal & Friends Madrid: Here there is no archaeology of time. Time cannot be traced. No order, everything overlaps everything else. We learnt to push back to contain this space and abandon all else. Machines for seeing. Eyes. Sky-scraping legs à la Gordon Matta-Clark. To unsee is to betray. Did you know that?…