Stories by name

The photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. —Roland Barthes We often say we ‘consume images’, thereby yoking vision to gastrointestinal processes. The act of consuming evokes various emotions such as guilt, comfort, and, for those fixated on the uncertainty principle of spoilage inside…

 Fulda: Amongst the brick-heavy rye that Germans call ‘bread’ in his parents’ Fulda bakery in 1954, Franz Erhard Walther began his career sketching live models with their own artistic ambitions. His parents rose at dawn to watch bread and their son rise higher and higher, the latter to international artistic acclaim for his sculpture, installation, conceptual,…

Albion: During the lockdown, stuck in my apartment, living through screens, observing environmental disasters and massive failures of infrastructure in-between Zoom meetings, it was easy to daydream about a better way of living. A possible alternative emerged on Instagram, where Salmon Creek Farm presents its aestheticised update of communal living to 38,000 followers. Given the…

Growing up Judd Las Casas, Texas: When Flavin and Rainer Judd think of home, no single image comes to mind. The son and daughter of the American artist Donald Judd (to whom they refer as Don rather than Dad), Flavin and Rainer grew up in New York City and west Texas—but also all over the world…

New York City: Françoise Mouly has lived life on her own terms and arrived at her prominent position as art editor of the New Yorker through a lifetime of experiments in publishing and design. She entered the boys club of American underground comics in the ‘70s and proceeded to reshape it in new and exciting…

You know that house that you have often seen and long dreamt of living in? Maybe you pass it every day, or maybe you catch a glimpse during your annual vacation to the same well-loved coastal town/mountain hamlet/other picturesque location. Or maybe you only saw it once but it was love at first sight, and…

Learning to See Arles: As I drive to Arles I realise I don’t know much about the person I’m going to meet. Of course I know his work extensively; he’s one of the most prolific photographers in the world, THE interior photographer. For the last 30 years he has photographed everywhere and everyone—for sure the homes…

I like to photograph the ordinary. When I was a child, I spent endless hours drawing. I had very little interest in drawing fantastical or extraordinary scenes. I only wanted to draw what I saw in my daily life. I drew the shopping cart at the supermarket, the children on the playground, the food on…

  Laboratorium began as a nomad atelier, later setting up its base of operations in Florence. It has since relocated to the third floor of an old building in the historic city centre. It is neither an industrial space nor a loft, as is frequently seen in the architectures of graphic design studios and communication…

Like most people, I don’t know a lot about my brain and how it actually works and I’m not sure that I want to. I think that even neuroscientists don’t know that much about the brain. They can run experiments and make presumptions about areas, relations and interactions of and between those areas, but they…

Outdoor living and cactus misfits Rotterdam: Frank Bruggeman is an artist/designer, widely acclaimed for his oeuvre of blue objects. He frequently works with plants. For him, nature is an essential precondition for life. I visited him at his home/studio in Rotterdam on a warm summer’s day. What do you enjoy about living in a former school?…

Richard is a father and Cosmo is his only son. Richard lives in a big converted warehouse in Hackney, East London. Although Cosmo lives in a squat nearby, he spends a lot of time here, especially on weekends. I visited them one cloudy spring Saturday afternoon and we talked together over tea and cakes. Richard…

The cosmopolitan witness Buenos Aires: Felisa Pinto, in the year approaching her 80th birthday, maintains the vitality, happiness, rage, uncertainty and curiosity of her youth. Muse and magnet for artists, of an autodidactic nature and innate elegance, this Argentinian culture journalist is an untiring generator of human and necessary projects. She defines herself as a rare…

We wait to buzz until 2.21pm, the exact time we have been appointed. Fernando receives us with his usual double pair of glasses covering his forehead. ‘Nothing is true or false, it all depends on the colour of the lenses you look through’, he says. Arrabal is considered one of the most important playwrights alive…

The world in a suitcase London: Faye doesn’t like titles, she doesn’t like to be placed in a box, she would rather put all of us inside her magic suitcase, together with the fantastic world of collections, atmospheres and obsessions she has been dreaming of creating since she was a little girl growing up in the…

Pietrasanta: Where and when to meet Fernando Botero? It’s not an easy task to meet the 86-year-old Colombian artist. Known worldwide for his volumetric stylisation of figures and objects, Fernando Botero still navigates between five countries throughout the year. You can find him in Monaco in winter, in New York in October, in Italy and Greece…

If I were offered a choice of decades to travel back in time to, I’d choose the late 1960s. No doubt this is because of my grandma’s home where I always feel like I’ve caught a glimpse of that intoxicating decade. It’s a refuge of family, with rooms that house the history of several generations….

New York City: The classic aspect of film editing is the splicing together of two separate unrelated images to create a new meaning out of the result. The meaning created is invisible as it’s just a perception, not an actual thing. The meaning is in the cut, not in the actual images themselves. This is also…

New York City: On the Upper East Side of Manhattan, through a posh façade and up five flights of stairs, artist Curtis Carman, the charismatic life partner of Flawless Sabrina, greets me and ushers me through a jam packed room that has elements of both a nightclub and a study. He delivers me to sit…

Concept by Ana Dominguez & Omar Sosa          

It all started like four years ago at one of those Parisian dinners. People, girls in particular, were talking about eBay, explaining how excited they were about buying vintage St Laurent blouses or modernist furniture on the website. ‘You’ve never been on eBay?’ Sylvie asked me. ‘No, never.’ I replied. OMG, they all were so astonished…

Milan: An entrepreneur: Patrizia Moroso, Art Director of the homonymous family company. A journalist: Silvia Robertazzi, director of AtCasa, the portal of design of Corriere della Sera. A designer: Alisée Matta, in Italy since 1993 signs ideas branded Nobody&Co. with her partner Giovanni Gennari. We met them in Milan at Casa-Museo Boschi Di Stefano, to have…

The idea of more space, more room and a more organized studio sounds great. And it is, in theory and in the long run, but in the immediate present, there is something unsettling about it. After working from home for so long, opening a new store/studio space took some getting used to. It just wasn’t…

«Si vos sciences dictées par la sagesse n’ont servi qu’à perpétuer l’indigence et les déchirements, donnez-nous plutôt des sciences dictées par la folie, pourvu qu’elles calment les fureurs, qu’elles soulagent les misères des peuples.» Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinées générales, C. Fourier. (1808) Nothing seems more remote today than the peculiar social order dreamt…