Design Reviewed #1 by Disegno

DESIGN REVIEWED

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THE DOCTOR WILL SEE YOU NOW Words Oli Stratford

Hello and welcome to this new publication, brought to you from the team behind Disegno, the Quarterly Journal of Design. We’re delighted to host you here in our second home, which henceforth will be occupied in the winter and summer months. In contrast to the magnificent stately home of Disegno, we though we’d try out a new build, which, in the fine tradition of new builds, is lovingly held together by powerful staples. I hope you can see that we’ve decorated a little differently here. While Disegno remains our beloved spring/autumn residence for long-form reporting, in-depth interviews, and emerging project stories, this new companion title is a space in which we can get a little more hands-on. Each article is a review, although not necessarily a qualitative assessment of its topic. Instead, they’re 10 essays that engage with design as it is experienced by its users, and which are cut through with their writers’ own perspectives and memories. What they offer, we hope, is a look at design that moves out of the abstract, and into something a little more concrete (not literally, in case you were still thinking about new builds). Hence the format change. As opposed to our regular journal, we’ve tried to create something a touch less mannered: it’s a publication designed to be practical and portable, and which speaks of field guides, school jotters, and technical manuals as opposed to the glossy magazines that tend to dominate the design field. It’s been designed to sit loyally in your bag, ready to emerge at a moment’s notice and help lead you along design’s highways and byways. Hence its structure. Each essay corresponds to a different form of design output – be they interfaces, objects, systems, policies, or what have you – which

certainly aren’t exhaustive as categories go, but which aim to provide scaffolding for a field that can, at times, feel painfully expansive and diffuse. Mostly, however, it’s just a pleasure to finally have a publication with a title people can actually pronounce. Over the years we’ve had more than our fair share of “Dis-egg-nos” and “Design-os” (quite like that one, to be fair), so this time round we’ve opted for something more straightforward: Design Reviewed or DR for short. It’s an abbreviation that has seen us start referring to it round the office as “Doctor”, which is rather nice too – a welcome shot in the arm that, we hope, will leave readers feeling refreshed, vitaminised, and thoroughly doctored to within an inch of their lives. We hope you enjoy the procedure.

MAXI SLIDING PANELS, SELF BOLD CABINET. DESIGN GIUSEPPE BAVUSO

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VISUAL STAGED BY SNØHETTA ARCHITECTS

ILBAGNOALESSI design Stefano Giovannoni - washbasins

Editor-in-chief Oli Stratford oli@disegnojournal.com Deputy editor India Block india@disegnojournal.com Senior creative producer Evi Hall evi@disegnojournal.com Creative assistant Lara Chapman lara@disegnojournal.com

Founder and director Johanna Agerman Ross Creative directors Florian Böhm and Annahita Kamali akfb.com Designer Jonas Hirschmann info@akfb.com Fact checker Ann Morgan

Publisher and commercial director Chris Jones chris@disegnojournal.com Advertising representative – Italy Carlo Fiorucci carlo@fiorucci-international.com Distribution and stockist enquiries MMS London info@mmslondon.co.uk Intern Natasha Campbell

Contributors Amelia Abraham, India Block, Helen Brown, Khorshed Deboo, Elizabeth Glickfeld, Vic Parsons, Oli Stratford, Matthew Turner, Sanjana Varghese and Lily Wakeley. Paper and print This issue of Design Reviewed is printed by Park Communications on Edixion Offset 80gsm by Antalis. The cover is printed on Edixion Offset 170gsm by Antalis.

Thanks Many thanks to the Edition Hotel and Purple for hosting our launch event; Natasha Campbell for all her superb work; Tetsuo Mukai for our marble soap; Will Howe for his help in researching the Elizabeth line; the team at Desa Potato Head for making us so welcome; and everyone at the Rose Lipman Building, but especially Porridge, for welcoming us back. We are very grateful to all our contributors, and for the help of everybody who has supported us and made Design Reviewed #1 possible – not least Annie, Briar, Colt, Eames, Edward, Reilly and Tilly, our seven founding felines. Contents copyright The contents of this journal belong to Disegno Publications Limited and to the authors and artists featured. If you are tempted to reproduce any of it, please ask first.

Contact us Studio 4, The Rose Lipman Building 43 De Beauvoir Road London N1 5SQ disegnojournal.com The Crit You can keep up with Disegno and our work by listening to The Crit, a podcast focused on the design world and its impact on current affairs. disegnojournal.com/ podcasts/the-crit Disegno Works Disegno also runs the creative agency Disegno Works. disegnoworks.com

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Find an authorized dealer near you at CARLHANSEN.COM

Flagship Store, London 48A Pimlico Rd, London SW1W 8LP

VLA26

Vega Chair by Vilhelm Lauritzen

THE SOUND OF DESIGN

Slender yet durable, the VLA26 Vega Chair was originally created for Copenhagen’s historic concert hall, Vega. Many decades after its debut, Carl Hansen & Søn proudly launches Vilhelm Lauritzen’s functionalist masterpiece with meticulous attention to craftsmanship and detail.

1956

Let’s weave a greener future

Carpets made with care for our planet and our future generations At Ege Carpets, circularity is built into both our minds and our carpets. We’ve been working intensely with sustainability since 1996 and today we’re proud to have an EcoVadis platinum rating which is equal to a top 1% position among the 90,000 rated companies. On a product level, you get access to a 100% Cradle to Cradle Certified® assortment – whether you choose wall-to-wall carpets, rugs, carpet tiles or planks and whether you design for an office, hotel or cruise ship.

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MEE TING

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brain-work Not just a video conference, a meeting! Face to face. Concentrated. Focused. The thinking spaces of tomorrow should be distraction-free. Everything is harmonious. Communication is at the forefront in a secure, transparent and well-structured environment. For effective learning, designing, researching, negotiating and compromising. brunner-uk.com

STOCKHOLMFURNITUREFAIR.SE

SCANDINAVIAN DESIGN AUTHORITY SINCE 1951.

07—11.02.2023

Stockholm Furniture Fair Welcome to the world’s leading meeting place for Scandinavian design. Since 1951, we have brought together the leading contemporary designers and architects for a week of news, creativity and innovation. This year with an exclusive exhibition by Front Design Studio, the guest of honour.

CONNECTION IS MEDICINE Words Helen Gonzalez Brown

Image courtesy of Apple.

Technology

Apple Watch Ultra

When my Apple Watch Ultra arrived on loan for this article, I did not want to open the package. In fact, I engaged in some light self-sabotage, leaving the unopened box to languish on my desk as my deadline inched ever closer. I’ve had health issues this year. As January opened, I watched the frightening unravelling of a loved one’s sanity. In the grip of this ongoing crisis, my appetite evaporated, and I awoke each day with the blind panic of a monkey falling from a branch. My skin sprouted with acne, and when I did manage to eat, my belly bloated and gurgled painfully. During this time I came face to face with the quaking, infantile animal that lives inside us all, who tenses for reverberations long after disaster has passed. It was a shapeshifter – sometimes a hummingbird beating against my ribcage, other times a baby deer curled in a knot in my heart, or a quivering rabbit in my throat. Often it was grotesque, roaring belches like a gassy dragon, and bulging like a digesting snake. I spent many months despising this vulnerable part of myself that, reeling with grief, prevented me from responding to emails or socialising in spaces where I could not cry. I feared being asked what I’d been up to in case it revealed how inept I’d become at working. As activist Jessica Gaitán Johannesson puts it in her book The Nerves and their Endings, I struggled with “the ingrained knowledge that I’m worth less than what I produce, especially if I produce less than others.” Forgiveness was the only way out – forgiveness for needing time to recover, for struggling with problems that most people would rather not hear about, for being unable to save someone I loved. Even though I was getting better, I knew my body still harboured stress. I felt my heart race at inconveniences that I had once found manageable, and I witnessed myself jumping out of my skin at the sound of my housemate entering the kitchen behind me. I started integrating earlier nights and regular exercise to help soothe my body, but forming new habits takes time. I tried not to punish myself for occasionally skipping a gym class when 20

it was raining, or recklessly staying up past midnight so that I could finish reading a chapter of my book. And so I feared the Apple Watch nagging me to stand up, exercise and burn calories, conjuring up new ways to fail within the day – and perhaps even revealing secret fault lines. The Move app frames clear objectives for its users, and infuses exercise with the pleasure of a game through rewarding messages, timely reminders, and the sheer satisfaction of closing the three multicoloured rings that track your movement, exercise, and the portion of your day you spend standing. The flip-side is that a lack of reward can feel like punishment; an ill-timed reminder or a gaping ring can deplete your self worth. Apple markets its latest watch, the Ultra, as “an incredible tool for endurance athletes or those who aspire to push beyond their limits.” Its newest features help you backtrack when lost on a hike, or perceive the depth of your dive – tools I wish I had a use for in my sedentary work-from-home lifestyle. Although it’s optimised for athletes, the watch’s other features are more generally applicable – I can use it to make calls, read messages, and listen to music. It’s also marketed as “the ultimate device for a healthy life,” as it can monitor my fitness, heart rate, sleep and menstrual cycle. Yet I find being encouraged to push myself beyond my limits rather daunting. When I finally start using the watch, I am pleasantly surprised. My daily circuits around my local park surpass its specified 30-minute exercise requirement. Given that I am prone to pacing, I easily meet my standing goals too. I feel great until I check my Heart Rate Variability (HRV). Although it may sound counterintuitive, greater fluctuation in the time between our heartbeats indicates that the autonomic nervous system, which regulates involuntary processes such as heart rate and respiration, is functioning better. HRV should hover somewhere between 60 and 100 for a healthy person in their mid-20s. My HRV is currently 10, and has been perilously low for the last two days.

As psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk explains in his book The Body Keeps the Score, the autonomic nervous system has two branches: “the sympathetic, which acts as the body’s accelerator, and the parasympathetic, which serves as its brake.” The sympathetic nervous system gears our bodies up into fight-or-flight, while the parasympathetic nervous system regulates functions that relax our bodies, such as sleeping and digesting. “Since the autonomic nervous system organises arousal in both body and brain, poor HRV[…] not only has negative effects on thinking and feeling but also on how the body responds to stress,” van der Kolk writes. With HRV, the more fluctuation, the better. Low HRV indicates susceptibility to potentially fatal illnesses such as cancer and heart disease, as well as life-diminishing depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is considered a harbinger of future illness. Quite frankly, I don’t know what to do with the suggestion that I am 26 and hyperventilating my way towards an early death. The feeling that I am failing at living seeps in like rot, and I desperately want to rip off the watch and throw it in the nearest body of water. I feel a deep revulsion and I’m not entirely sure what it’s directed towards. Do I hate my body for malfunctioning or do I hate the watch for telling me about it? Do I hate myself or the device? “Apple decided to make a watch and only then set out to discover what it might be good for (besides, you know, displaying the time),” writer David Pierce explains in Wired. But after tinkering with different ways in which people might relate to wristmounted technology, the team ultimately landed on the watch’s purpose as being a less distracting alternative to an iPhone. “People are carrying their phones with them and looking at the screen so much,” software developer Kevin Lynch told Wired back in 2015. “People want that level of engagement. But how do we provide it in a way that’s a little more human, a little more in the moment when you’re with somebody?”

The public first glimpsed the Apple Watch at Parisian fashion boutique Colette in 2014. Customers were only allowed to look at the device rather than try out its features, buy it or even glean its price; nevertheless, early morning queues formed. Fashion elites such as designer Karl Lagerfeld attended the event, and the watch had a 12-page ad in Vogue the next year. Wearable tech is still treated as a luxury fashion item – Apple has teamed up with Nike and Hermès to produce different straps for its watch, for instance, while its competitor the Oura ring is sold at Gucci stores. It makes sense: owning the latest tech is a status symbol, as is the luxury to prioritise one’s fitness and wellness. “Unfit behaviour like smoking or reclining in front of the TV with a beer [signifies] lower class status, while a dedication to health, even if evidenced only by carrying a gym bag or yoga mat, [advertises] a loftier rank,” Barbara Ehrenreich argues in Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer. The Apple Watch is a perfect form of conspicuous consumption, indicating not only wealth but virtue. Once the watch was finally released in 2015, Apple’s development and marketing placed greater emphasis on health and fitness as a way of competing with activity trackers such as the popular Fitbit. Subsequent editions offered ever more elaborate features, such as tracking your average lap pace when swimming. To bolster mental wellbeing, a 2016 update offered watch users guided meditations, and by the time of the Apple Watch Series 4 in 2018 it had evolved into a carer, offering fall detection and heart monitoring. When the watch was first conjured up, it represented wearable technology with no clear discernible purpose; now, however, Apple’s chief operating officer Jeff Williams is unequivocal when he calls it “an intelligent guardian for your health.” In the case of my own health, I discover that although regular exercise and sleep can help raise HRV, the technique that promises to provide me with the most instantaneous relief is actually offered through the Apple Watch’s Breathe app. Resonant breathing synchronises 21

two rhythms in the heart rate that correspond to the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems, triggering relaxation and emotional regulation. It is achieved by slowing your natural breathing rate from around fifteen breaths per minute to about six. And so I watch a mandala repeatedly bloom and wither on the screen, while the watch haptically tickles my wrist to encourage my inhales.

more explicitly gamified. While wearing it, you can visualise your brain activity on a game, using the focus of your mind to make a ball rise across the screen and earn you points. It is supposed to train your brain, “just like any muscle in the body.” But when spiritual practices come to be repackaged in the language of fitness, do they lose their true meaning? In Psychiatry,

The 2022 Apple Watch Ultra (image courtesy of Apple).

Tech moved into the wellness sphere with mindfulness apps such as Headspace, which was conceived by former Buddhist monk Andy Puddicombe and advertising executive Richard Pierson to spread meditation techniques to the masses. Headspace assures its users it won’t “ask you to chant mantras, burn incense or even sit cross legged,” instead marketing mindfulness as a “gym membership for your mind.” In 2014, the Muse headband was released, which measures the electrical activity produced by the brain to help people meditate properly. Users hear a light pitterpatter of rain when their brain is relaxed, building up to a storm to indicate wandering attention. Its competitor Mendi, first released in 2020, measures blood flow and oxygenation in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, and is 22

Colonialism and Indian Civilization: A Historical Appraisal, Shridhar Sharma explains the philosophy underpinning traditional practices such as breathing and meditation. “The ancient Indian emphasised the theory of unity of body and soul,” Sharma writes, “and also explained how to deal with the health and mental health problems in a psychosomatic way.” But the Breathe app – which is set by default to one minute of resonant breathing, and only stretches up to five – seems designed to offer quick relief between corporate meetings. Instead of marrying together body and mind, it encourages us to force our bodies to submit to our minds within a handy timeframe. The Apple Watch is full of tech solutions to problems caused by tech: mindfulness to aid

our waning attention spans; standing reminders so we won’t be endlessly hunched over our computers; breathing exercises to soothe the crippling anxiety brought on by technology itself. Tech critic Evgeny Morozov calls this “solutionism”, the short-sighted idea that technology can solve all of humanity’s many problems. But as Mindful Magazine highlights: “technology can be distracting, not only from where we are in any given moment, but from where we ought to be going.” Perhaps the insecurity about getting meditation “right”, which justifies the use of connected headbands, is mistakenly focused on brain activity instead of intention. “Buddhists differentiate between Right Mindfulness (samma sati) and Wrong Mindfulness (miccha sati),” management expert Ron Purser writes in his book Beyond McMindfulness. “The issue is whether the quality of awareness is characterised by wholesome intentions and positive mental qualities that lead to human flourishing and optimal well-being for others as well as oneself.” By offering its users tools to manage mental and physical wellbeing, the watch seems like a one-stop shop for self care. The concept of self care was popularised by the civil rights movement and the women’s movement. Aisha Harris describes in Slate Magazine how “women and people of colour viewed controlling their health as a corrective to the failures of a white, patriarchal medical system to properly tend to their needs.” Just as mindfulness practices were aimed at stopping our collective suffering, self care was also intrinsically linked to supporting our wider communities. The Black Panther Party, for example, used it as a tool to counter activist burnout through community care, by providing access to food and healthcare. But according to Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, author of Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession, self care became mainstream in the late 1980s and 90s as a means to improve quality of life. As self care was commercialised through expensive yoga classes and face masks, it became more emblematic of the white middle class than political activists. Nowadays, the message I hear the most is that taking care

of yourself helps you to become more productive at work. “We’re always paranoid. We live paranoid,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told CNBC in 2015 about his company’s work culture. “We always want the very best product. And so if we’re not beating someone else we’re trying to beat the thing that we have currently shipping. Everybody here lives on edge.” I hate to say it, but my heart goes out to the tech bros, because that sounds horrible. Silicon Valley is the epicentre of biohacking – experimenting on one’s body through fasting, ice baths, meal replacements and more in order to reach professional goals and help to extend lifespan. Speaking of the drivers of biohacking to The New Economy, clinical psychologist Niketa Kumar calls out the culture of prioritising professional achievement above other areas of life. “When self-worth depends on our success professionally, we become motivated to go to extreme measures,” she says. The Apple Watch entrenches the idea that we should handle our traumas privately and seamlessly, and if we fail to do so, well, that’s on us. “The doctrine of individual responsibility means that the less-than-fit person is a suitable source not only of revulsion but resentment,” Ehrenreich writes in Natural Causes. In the UK, where I am based, the systematic depletion of benefits for people with disabilities and chronic illnesses, and recent announcements that the only increase in mental health funding will be spent on getting people back into work, rather than helping the more than 1 million people on waiting lists for specialist mental healthcare, is evidence of this cruel mindset in action. “Why should the mind want to subdue the body systematically, repeatedly, day after day?” Ehrenreich asks. The answer is simple: to meet life’s incessant demands more easily. The Apple Watch acts as an overbearing project manager coordinating between body and mind, using tools of liberation such as meditation and self care to help us submit to the status quo. While I rage against tracking devices, I am painfully aware that one is currently being 23

used to keep my uncle alive. Rik Kirkland has a loop recorder in his chest monitoring his faulty heart, which he’s previously supplemented with Noom, an app for tracking food and exercise habits. I ask whether having diagnosed health issues heightens his anxiety about missing his step count. “No, I’m too old for that,” he says, age 71. “When you’re younger, you’re afraid of not having lived.” It begs the question: does the watch inadvertently play on fears of an untimely death? According to analysis by software company BrandTotal, the watch’s target market has stretched over time to concentrate more evenly on all age groups, but the product’s advertising still focuses most heavily on 19to 54-year olds. In What Remains? Life, Death and the Human Art of Undertaking, radical undertaker Rupert Callender describes modern society’s horror of the mundane realities of death. Writing of the traditional funeral industry in a way that is hauntingly applicable to the world at large, he decries “the hijacking of our mortality by corporate bodies that only pay lip-service to the sorrowed and only engage with the void in order to conjure it up to channel our fear and grief into unnecessary purchases.” It’s worth focusing on who is suffering the most from the commodification of health and wellness, and the overconsumption it fuels. In Who is Wellness For? writer and poet Fariha Róisín explores how wellness culture is built on the wisdom of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, yet excludes their participation by marketing it as a luxury good. For Róisín, true wellness involves prioritising global wellbeing by reducing our environmental impact and redistributing wealth. “I’ve come to understand that wellness isn’t for anyone if it isn’t for everyone,” Róisín writes. “Otherwise it’s a paradox.” True wellness also involves decolonising healing practices by embedding them in their histories and appreciating their true meaning. “The action of meditation is to reach a state of consciousness that’s outside your connection to mortality,” Róisín says. “It’s about the beyond.” According to some Silicon Valley 24

leaders, however, all death is untimely and mortality is yet another problem to be fixed. The start-up Nectome, for example, promises to preserve its clients’ brains to upload onto computers in the future. “For Nectome’s procedure to work, it’s essential that the brain be fresh,” Antonio Regalado writes in MIT Technology Review. “Its plan is to connect people with terminal illnesses to a heart-lung machine in order to pump its mix of scientific embalming chemicals into the big carotid arteries in their necks while they are still alive (though under general anaesthesia.)” While wellness practices rooted in spirituality can provide a relationship with the divine and a greater acceptance of death, wellness practices powered by technology point toward a defiance of death itself. But death can be instructive about how to live. It orients us towards what is important, such as love and connection, and away from what is only fleetingly meaningful, such as the relentless accumulation of money and objects. Focusing on love and connection, incidentally, is a wonderful way to raise one’s HRV. At the peak of my watch-induced anxiety, I was getting ready for a Halloween party. Having read that alcohol intake and an irregular sleep pattern both lower your HRV, I suddenly felt hesitant about going. Maybe the sensible thing to do would be to soberly contemplate my imminent demise and hope for an early night, I thought to myself as I walked to the corner shop. “Hello princess! How are you?” Ozzy the shopkeeper asked, with genuine concern. “I haven’t seen you for a while and I’ve been wondering how you were doing.” I immediately felt my body start to exhale, and the smile I offered was sincere. Connection is medicine; even someone on the periphery of my life expressing care for me is profoundly regulating. Our autonomic nervous system is influenced by the emotions of the people around us – it picks up on furrowed brows and rigid necks as well as curved lips and wrinkled eyes as signals that either stress or relax us. “Our culture teaches us to focus on personal uniqueness, but at a deeper level we barely

exist as individual organisms,” van der Kolk explains. “Our brains are built to help us function as members of a tribe.” Expanding on the ways in which we influence each other, Gaitán Johannesson conceptualises all of humanity and the planet as one expansive nervous system. “Everything an individual consumes[...] gains significance when you realise – as in, make emotionally real – the connection between your way of life and the risk of societal collapse,” she writes. “You

do not end with your physical boundaries. Your nerves, then, seem to stretch beyond what is visibly yours.” So no, I don’t hate my body. Its limitations aren’t a betrayal; they are an understandable reaction to an unreasonable world. But I do hate the watch, for perpetuating a society that doesn’t allow us to ail, fail, and recover. Helen Gonzalez Brown is a journalist who writes and runs events about art, design and health.

BODERLINE PRODUCTION Words Lily Wakeley

Image courtesy of Jessica Lutz.

Ecology

Sotol

I took my shoes and socks off to wade through the slither of the Rio Grande – at that time of year, more mud than water. Leaving Big Bend National Park in Texas, I emerged into the small Mexican border village of Boquillas, slick with sweat and floppy with heat-induced fatigue. Both sides of the river, and the roughly corresponding border, are part of the vast Chihuahuan desert. Overhead, birds and floating seeds make the same journey that I just have indiscriminately. You might struggle to identify the periphery of the Chihuahuan desert on Google Maps; quite possibly the cartographers have too, bearing in mind that it’s roughly the size of Afghanistan and traverses one national and many state borders. The national border, however, was rendered hyper visible when the United States closed the Boquillas border station after 9/11. Despite reopening in 2013, the poverty that this closure inflicted on Boquillas is palpable, as is the commodification of its culture through the sale of embroidered Indigenous textiles as a necessary lifeline. Today, the border is made tangible in its barbed wire detention centres and amongst the young white, Black and Mexican boys who are cooling off in a reservoir on their breaks from the continued building of Trump’s wall. Regardless of geopolitics, the landscape on both sides of the border is much the same: white rocks that burn rose-gold as the sun sets; stretches of arid land scorched by a heat that refracts off the floor in waves; and cactuses, fat with stored water. It is in this impossible ecosystem that the native dasylirion plant grows best. Also called “desert spoon”, dasylirion takes approximately 15 years to mature, at which point its leaves can be peeled back to reveal a giant pinecone-like heart. When roasted in an underground wood-fired pit for three days, before being milled and stored in a vat to ferment and the residual liquid distilled, the spirit sotol is born. Sotol was granted a domestic Denominación de origen (DO) classification in 2004. Similarly to the stipulation around the production of champagne and parmigiano reggiano, this classification from the Mexican authorities recognises that sotol is culturally tied to a ring-fenced region: the three Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila and Durango. Historically, the Pueblo peoples ate dasylirion stems like artichoke leaves and used its fibres to make sandals and baskets as far back as the 12th century BCE, but around 800 years ago, the Native Rarámuri people began to produce a lowABV sotol drink similar to beer or kvass, most likely for its medicinal and spiritual properties. It wasn’t until Spanish colonisers brought distilling

techniques in the 16th century, however, that sotol became the spirit it is today (a drink of around 38 per cent ABV). Small distilleries quickly mushroomed throughout the desert, springing up wherever the plant grew. Either drunk long and neat or in cocktails, sotol tastes clean and smooth. Juan Pablo Carvajal, co-founder of the brand Los Magos Sotol (“mago” meaning sorcerer in Spanish) describes it as “tasting of the ancient land it comes from”. Carvajal means this both metaphorically and literally. His brand’s website features a dramatic video with squawking eagles diving across the desert plains, burning embers, and floating spirits to evoke the drink’s mysticism. The 16 dasylirion varieties are flavoured by the prairie, forest and mountainous environments in which they grow, tasting like anything from leather, wet earth, tobacco and pine, to Carvajal’s own grassland variety, which is light and citrusy. History, however, has put a deep chasm between sotol’s celestial origins and its being elevated to a protectable product. The spirit was outlawed in 1944 by the Mexico government, which peddled the narrative that sotol was akin to moonshine (aided by the fact that sotol had been bootlegged across the border to Americans thirsty from prohibition), and produced in small, local distilleries throughout the desert. It proved a statesanctioned justification for the persecution and killing of sotoleros (sotol distillers) and this history proves the backdrop to the industry’s future relationship with the US. With its roots in Indigenous culture and Spanish colonisers, wrapped up in US-Mexican relationships, sotol embodies the region’s mestizaje (racial and cultural mixing) process. A melange of land contestation, persecution, survival and mysticism, sotol defies easy categorisation. It wasn’t until 1994 that the Mexican government finally reversed its position, legalising and promoting sotol as a cultural asset and potentially lucrative commodity – a decision that was presumably not unconnected to the global rise in popularity of drinks such as mezcal and tequila. Despite sotol’s ancientness, its commercialisation and status as a product are still in their infancy. “If you want artisanal, this is the real thing,” Carvajal says with a knowing smile. “We’ve been working in the peripheries for hundreds of years – it just hasn’t had the opportunity to get out there. We’re still making it the way we did 100 years ago. This is the real deal.” This sense of lineage is important to the drink. Ricardo Pico, a Chihuahua native, is the co-founder of the sotol compendium Sotoleros and brand Nocheluna, and a sotol

educator. He works, he tells me, in partnership with Don Lalo, a fourthgeneration distiller. “Of the 12 main sotoleros in the region,” he tells me, “I regard Don Lalo as the master of the desert because he’s taught so many others. He’s a real survivor, and I feel so proud to be able to partner with him. He’s like a second father figure to me.” Pico describes the desert sotol that he

The dasylirion plant (image courtesy of Israel Palacios).

and Don Lalo create as “mineraly, herbaceous, tasting of honey from the cooked sotol hearts, and with a mid-note of mint, and cacao that hits at the end.” On the Texan side of the border, there is no existing lineage of sotoleros. Despite both this lack of historical precedent and the Mexican government’s DO, the US’s first commercial sotol producers, Desert Door,

opened in 2017. While the US had agreed to honour the DO status of tequila and mezcal through the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), sotol was excluded by virtue of its then illegality in Mexico. An opportunity to redress this exclusion arose when Donald Trump replaced the NAFTA agreement in 2020 with the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, and, for all of a moment, it was – at least in the draft version of the bill. Yet a group led by Texas’s Republican senator John Cornyn and backed by Desert Door intervened before it could be enshrined in law, arguing that sotol’s inclusion would kill Texas’s one-company sotol industry. The possibility of American recognition of the Mexican DO receded once more. If DOs are the stamp of certification, however, terroir is its marketing device. Most commonly associated with wine, terroir is understood to be the taste of the soil, topography and climate that a drink has grown from. But it is much more than that. In a paper about the contestation of wines grown around national borders, anthropologist Daniel Monterescu describes terroir as “the palatable characteristics of place as a branded story of geographic distinction.” Physical characteristics are important, but storytelling and design – the soaring eagles and apparitions of Carvajal’s video – also help to thread taste and value into a cohesive narrative about the culture it espouses. Terroir becomes an organising principle that delineates edible authenticity from non: good vs. bad; tasteful vs. tasteless; real vs. fake. These ideas have been picked up by the latest generation of Mexican sotol producers and storytellers. I asked Carvajal if he considers himself a cultural mediator of sorts. “In a way, yes,” he replied. “I’ve got friends who found the smokey part of the drink something difficult to get their palates around, often likening it to burnt tyres. So when we thought about our flavour profile, we wanted something that people would feel comfortable trying for the first time and would help them realise that the associations they had in their head were built on myths and stories,” he added. “So by triple distilling it and leaving it to rest before bottling, we made it less smoky, softer, but very flavourful and aromatic. It’s not like we invented anything really; this is still very much the flavour of the plant.” Gaston Martinez, the founder of IZO spirits, recently added sotol to his existing repertoire of agave spirits. For him, the DO helps enforce quality control, which is important given that the vast majority of IZO’s market is in the United States and he sees his products as representative of

his home region Durango, one of the three DO-mandated sotol states. “Having a DO is like going to the Olympics,” he says. “You’re going to put your shirt with the Mexican flag on and you’re going to do your best to win. Similarly, the DO becomes representative of Mexico, so you’ve got to do your best. When you drink sotol and recognise it’s been 15 years in the making, you start to respect the whole process and the people who made it,” he explains. “We wanted to reflect how refined and sophisticated the drink is. You’ll see our bottle is minimalist, elegant.” This bottle is long and lean, tapering slightly as it descends, while the sotol inside is burgundy in colour. It would not be hard to mistake it for wine. Martinez’s bottle, however, offers a very different take to Pico and Don Lalo’s Nocheluna range. Their bottles are chunky, the liquid ice-blue – everything about it is cool, down to its endorsement by Lenny Kravitz, the new celebrity face of Nocheluna. Martinez and Pico’s interpretations of the same drink are worlds apart. What is deemed worthy of cultural protection or not is typically the result of political evaluation of the intersections between geography, tradition, craftsmanship and other similarly murky concepts. The government of Mexico, however, argues that DO-protected products exist first and foremost as those that are “factually” recognised by the public – it is following this ubiquitous recognition that the government protects it “through the corresponding declaration”. This, however, implies that some things are simply and unanimously important, but culture does not operate in this way. What we come to recognise as an emblem of culture is not natural: it comes into being through a series of particular decisions made by those in power, and which inevitably represent and elevate a particular group’s interests and interpretations. Culture is a shapeshifter that resists stratification: to suggest otherwise would also imply that culture has the immutable and clearly delineable contours of a cookie-cutter cut out, much like the hard edges of a political border. Sotol shows us that this is never the case. Before travelling to Big Bend National Park, I stopped off in Marfa, Texas. Known primarily for its association with artist Donald Judd, the founder of the Chinati Foundation, as well as for housing Elmgreen & Dragset’s satirical Prada store sculpture, Marfa feels like a toy town. I arrived at the El Cosmico campsite in the dark of night and woke in a stupor, enchanted by Marfa’s

seemingly infinite flow of orange juice, proliferation of bohemian head scarves not dissimilar from (but extortionately more expensive than) the ones found in Boquillas, and fleet of airstreams that suggest nomadism, despite being permanently moored. In Marfa, surrounded by its pastiche saloon doors and hanging third-eye motifs, it’s possible to forget your proximity to Mexico. Yet, ironically, it was here where I first came across

The Texan distillery, Desert Door (image courtesy of Allyson Campbell).

sotol. Bottles of liquor made by Desert Door and the Marfa Spirit Co., which launched its sotol in 2021, were being sold in a beautiful concept store with an accompanying handout informing consumers of the recent “controversy” surrounding the spirit. Both companies have been smeared as “culture vultures” by the likes of Sandro Canovas, an activist who is a native of Mexico City and naturalised US citizen. “I just want people to understand that these gringos are stealing my people’s heritage to make a profit off tourists,” Canovas told Texas Monthly in May 2022. “They are taking business from Mexican sotoleros who have done this for generations.” Yet Josh Shepard, one of the three founders of Marfa Spirit Co., tells me that sotol’s culture is nuanced, and is one “that crosses the border [river] daily.” His collaborator – the sixth-generation sotolero Jacobo Jacquez of the distillery Sotol Don Celso – insists that it’s a “heritage that we share.”

Terroir is always in dialectical relationship with what it is not: can the introduction of one border neutralise the violence of another? Does the ringfencing of a DO product help to overcome the effects of an international border, elevating sotol to the status of a product that can compete on the international market? Or does the perpetual construction of borders through the pinpointing of origin breed spaces in which appropriation can flourish? The history of DOs can be traced to the 1935 French “appellation” label regulation system, which was couched in the French colonial project in Algeria. At that time, French producers introduced protectionist terminologies to help compete with FrenchAlgerian colonists on the other side of the Mediterranean. What attempts to present itself as being grounded in natural landscape, is in fact rooted in political landscape. After all, the perimeters of sotol’s DO protection are expansive: it contains a variety of different ecosystems, as well as cultural histories around production processes. The artisanal is sprawling. So what exactly is the DO protecting? Ninety per cent of sotol is produced in Chihuahua and very little in Coahuila, so why is this state included in the DO whereas others, where the plant also grows, are not? Does the category’s expansiveness flatten sotol’s internal specificities and differences? Similar debates have played out in the work of food art-activists Cooking Sections, who have investigated how cultural narratives tied to “terroir” are challenged by climate change in France’s cheese and wine industries. When Cooking Sections asked one producer how the terroir of their cheese has been affected by the changes in temperature, she replied: “We are producing cheese exactly like my great-grandmother, using the exact same method, the same cow, the same village,” before clarifying that “the grass is completely different, there is more drought, there is less rain.” In a nutshell, the cheese produced today is not the cheese it once was, despite its immobilising protection. Similarly to the circumscribing of culture, are DO’s anthropocentric claims over nature too essentialising and unyielding? In an essay published in food newsletter Vittles, writer Mina Miller discusses a public spat between two east London smoked salmon producers. The producers H Forman & Son’s “London Cure” salmon was the first of the two to receive a PGI (protected geographical indicator): the salmon must be cured and smoked with rock salt and oak smoke in the London boroughs of Hackney, Newham and Tower Hamlets. When the Secret Smokehouse, a local competitor, manufactured a product in keeping

with the category’s stipulations, however, H Forman & Son accused them of being “fakes”. Miller hints at the issue at the heart of the matter: the PGI was introduced to “preserve the East End’s rich heritage of salmon smoking, but of course, Forman’s was the only smokehouse meeting that criteria at the [time]”. For Forman’s, sharing the PGI status diluted its value. Similar discussions now seem to be swirling around sotol, with the DO having proved a cursory but important first line in the sand for the spirit. “A bunch of people have said how important it was to get recognition, so that they could feel empowered to have these conversations that we’re talking about,” Carvajal tells me. “If we recognise who we are and what we have, then I can recognise what you are and what you have, and then we can sit down and talk about what we can do together.” This is particularly true in a geography where the movement of people and the colonisation of land has been so violent. Back in Marfa, I visited The Blessings of the Mystery, an exhibition by artists Carolina Caycedo and David de Rozas at the Ballroom Marfa museum. It looked at the ways in which Indigenous and settler knowledge of the land collide, including a film in which Juan Mancias, chairman of the Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, looks angrily and unforgettably down the lens of the camera. Swwathes of Indigenous lands were appropriated through the US’s 19th-century Westward Expansion project, with the Public Land Survey System aiding this occupation by displacing most tribes into reservations. The fact that 95 per cent of Somi Se’k – “Land of the Sun”, which is what the Carrizo Comecrudo people call the occupied land known as Texas – is private land is testament to this legacy. In their exhibition, Caycedo and de Rosas ask what immeasurable things – such as genocide and exploitation – have been excluded from the processes by which we map and understand land? After battling with the separation of time-zones, Mancias and I speak over Zoom. “Sotol was a big part of us before the white man came here,” he says. “It wasn’t only a food source – it’s got great healing properties, beyond alcoholism! It allowed us to homemake: it was a source of survival and meant we didn’t need to travel far because it grows so vociferously.” The desert knows no borders and yet is almost entirely defined by them. For such a young and emerging (as far as commercialisation goes) industry, sotol’s reclaiming of terroir may present a unique opportunity to fashion a new cultural narrative that goes beyond the static political economy of the DO. Pico, for instance, postulates a future in which the DO

may become far more localised, allowing for better communication to be made within the desert, and between the two countries. “At the end of the day,” he says, “there’s a lot more in common between Chihuahua and Texas than between Chihuahua and Chiapas.” Pico, Carvajal and Martinez all agree that language is an important place to start. “If something is traditional, it already has a name,” says Pico. “The word ‘sotol’ comes from the Nuhati word ‘zōtolin’, which means palm. So if Texan distillers want to go ahead and make their own drink – great. Just don’t call it sotol. It’s their opportunity to create a new story.” Thanks to some grassroots campaigning, as well as close relationships with Mexican producers such as Pico, the producers behind the Marfa Spirit Co. released a liquor earlier this year named “Far West Texas Desert Spirit”, which they did “in respect for our friends and producers in Mexico,” Shepard tells me. They do, however, still produce “Chihuahuan desert sotol” that is distilled and uses plants harvested in Mexico. “Our cultures are interdependent at the end of the day,” Pico says. “Governments and private entities should be closer. I get along very well with the guys from Marfa Spirit Co., and I respect that they changed their name. There is so much hate in politics right now. Food and beverages can unite us. Let’s get closer, have discussions and go from there.” These conversations are vital. Until recently, sotol has been made from wild dasylirion. To ensure future sustainability of the plants, the DO mandates that only 40 per cent of all wild growing, mature plants can be extracted within a given area over a five-year period. The same is not true in the United States. “In Texas, there is no regulation about what you can take from private land [which accounts for 95 per cent of Texas], so we’re limited by the political border in a way that they aren’t,” Carvajal explains. “It’s not fair to have to compete and share shelf space with a spirit that has the same name but comes from a different tradition, has different terroir, and is governed by different regulations.” This legal discrepancy advantages Texas producers, whilst also causing concern for the plants’ posterity. With the growth of the sotol market, however, producers are starting to farm plants on both sides of the border. “We need to make sure we don’t run into the same problems as agave, where the use of GMOs and monocultures have bred disease,” Pico continues. “That’s why we’re partnering up with researchers and farmers. It’s important we get this right.” There will need to be some joined-up thinking. The terroir of farmed dasylirion will be different to the wild kind – the possibilities of its future

and all that it represents is wide open – but Pico is diplomatic and calm in expressing his concerns and hopes. “My biggest worry about production in Texas is that they decide not to take care of the land in the way that it needs,” he says. “I don’t mean to tell people what they need to do, but I do want people to take care of the land. It is important for people to show respect to other people. My biggest hope is that we can sit down and show the respect

Los Magos sotol (image courtesy of Los Magos).

that is needed to everyone involved. Hopefully from that respect, a community can grow. I would rather not be pissed off; I would rather work towards building a stronger community.” The taste of sotol is still new to me. As I swilled the liquor around my mouth, I picked up on some tastes and smells that were discernibly familiar: dried fruits, smokey grass. But there are other things my palette can’t quite distinguish. Sotol’s taste and the crafting of its multi-threaded terroir will continue to evolve. As producers attempt to heave this drink’s cultural ancestry into the present, we must remind ourselves of the constant and ongoing ruptures necessary in the process of placemaking. It calls for transparency, respect, and the forging and redressing of relationships – old and new. Perhaps over a long glass of cold sotol. Because sotol is, in many ways, the tale of how the local is always nebulous: it is local only insofar as it is connected and even puppeteered by a giant web of largely camouflaged global policies. It has become the totem of its own history: like the insistence

and resilience of sotoleros, the plant grows in the most belligerent conditions. And thanks to the controversy around Texan production, it is an emblem of its geopolitical history and arguable cultural erasure. Despite this, however, terroir is here to stay. “If the spirit tastes of the land, then we can reference it and let people know of the beauty here,” Carvajal says. “Then they can come to understand that there are rich cultures here, and these cultures are beautiful. This desert is magical, and it tastes like sotol.” Lily Wakeley is a freelance writer based in London.

LET’S UNPACK THAT Words India Block

Image courtesy of Witch Beam.

Media

Unpacking

I still have unpacking to do. This is my nineteenth house move in my 30 years on the planet, so it’s a familiar routine. I am usually an advocate of the immediate unpack method. On holiday or work trips the first thing I do in a hotel room is take everything out of my bag and put it in place, creating an instant sense of belonging and a temporary home. But my most recent move – back to a city I love, but in a time of what historian Adam Tooze has dubbed “polycrisis” –1 is complicated. Instead of tackling those last few boxes, I’d rather curl up and play Unpacking (2021) on my Nintendo Switch. Simple and soothing, Unpacking is a video game from Brisbane-based indie developer Witch Beam that fits environmental storytelling into a satisfying, chilled-out puzzle. As a player you inhabit the life of an unseen main character, meeting them at eight moments of unpacking a new home. These threshold moments are played as un-timed, freeform levels, starting with a childhood bedroom before expanding out to multi-room sets, each filled with cardboard boxes. The point, click and drag gameplay mechanism is immediately graspable with no need for complicated multi-button combos. Don’t just take my word for it that the storytelling is good; Unpacking won the BAFTA for Narrative at the 2022 BAFTA Game Awards, along with the public vote for Game of the Year. Completing a level is achieved once all items are out of their boxes and set up in a generally correct location. The game will gently alert you if something is out of place by highlighting it in red, but messing around with silly placements will earn you achievements in the form of virtual stickers. Putting the toaster in the bathtub earns you a cute electrocuted skeleton collectible, the kind of nihilistic 1

“Polycrisis” is a Greek word brought into modern parlance by former president of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker in 2016; Tooze defines its current application thusly: “Polycrisis is not just a situation where you face multiple crises. It is a situation like that mapped in the risk matrix, where the whole is even more dangerous than the sum of the parts.” Thanks. I hate it.

meme-ish comedy that adds some black humour to an otherwise fairly saccharine game in which plushies are a recurring motif. There’s also a delightful queering to this game of life, where the protagonist’s identity as a bisexual woman is slowly revealed. “In later stages of the game, we unpack more objects loaded with meaning,” writes reviewer Christina Sylvester in i-D magazine. “Queer signifiers or indications of exploring a nascent sexuality – everything from plaid shirts to a favourite mug bearing the colours of the bisexual flag.” As a queer woman, there is joy in seeing yourself reflected in the media you consume. The signifiers of the items queer people surround themselves with often contain messages for other community members; my Switch, for example, is covered in iridescent stickers from the LGBTQ+ site Autostraddle’s fundraising drives. Unpacking’s queerness was always a part of its creative director Wren Brier’s vision. “This is a very personal game and [bisexuality] is a part of my life,” she says in an interview with Eurogamer. “Not including it felt like a weird omission.” The game’s pixel-art lends a lo-fi, nostalgic appeal2 to the mundane experience of taking out mis-matched cups and plates and placing them in a less-than-inspiring student kitchen, or stashing pads and tampons under a sink. Unpacking’s charm is underscored by sound design that is instantly calming from the opening credits, where the game’s logo is written out in a just-the-right-side-of-squeaky sharpie pen – like labelling the side of a moving box. Props to the foley team,3 who provide 2

Although, a recent TikTok video vomited up by the algorithm educated me that original pixel art was designed to look rounded and higher resolution on old screens. As such, the high-contrast blocky art style popularised today, while valid in its own right, is actually a nostalgia for a past that modern high-resolution screens mean we can never return to. It’s a digital hiraeth. Jeff van Dyck, Witch Beam’s sound designer, recorded 14,000 foley sounds of various objects being put down on different surfaces for Unpacking.

ASMR levels of satisfaction with the repetitive scrunch of mystery items being removed from brown paper wrapping. Items shift subtly as you arrange them, books slotting into neat rows on a shelf or clothes folding on top of each other. The game plays with this expectation: in one new-home epoch the main character moves in with a Bad Boyfriend who hasn’t made any space for her on his shelves, leaving you to awkwardly shift things about to try and squeeze into someone else’s story. Unpacking is a cosy game. There is no conflict or jump scares, no skills to level up on. It’s comforting to the part of the psyche that enjoys categorisation and order. It’s a digital doll’s house, with a story as a further doll’s house inside that doll’s house – threads of a life unravelling like a gentle mystery. There’s no crime to solve, but you do find the fingerprints of a life with its passions and triumphs told in ephemera. In a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything), Brier revealed the game was inspired by her moving in with Tim Dawson, Unpacking’s technical director, Witch Beam co-founder, and her life partner. “We were unpacking his stuff and there was something game-like about the process,” writes Brier. “I was looking around the house as we were unpacking and thinking how much you could tell about Tim and me from the items in our home.” In their Eurogamer interview, the pair add that the inspiration behind the format was ‘The Bed Song’ from Amanda Palmer & The Grand Theft Orchestra’s album Theatre is Evil. The seven-minute-long song narrates the story of a romantic relationship through shared sleeping spaces, each vignette labelled Exhibit A through to E, like evidence held up in court. Do you ever wonder what a stranger would make of your life right now if they rifled through your bedroom with a detective’s eye? Unpacking offers the same slightly voyeuristic thrill, except you are the stranger. Although, by the end of the game, you feel like a friend. Cosy gaming has come into its own as a genre. At first I thought it was confined to my hyperspecific TikTok algorithm,4 which has the 40

uncanny ability to preempt my interests thanks to my dedicated training of it. My For You page is full of cosy game reviews and adorably aesthetic gaming set-ups. But the genre is definitely out there on the internet proper too, from SEO-friendly roundups that offer ‘8 Cosy Games to Play While the World is Falling Apart’ to headlines encouraging us to ‘Prepare for Cosy Gaming Season’. Cosy gaming is for life, of course, not just for one season, but my desire for games designed to offer peaceful enjoyment over prowess in battle or survival in a hostile environment filled with enemies is shared by many. “I’ve always been a cosy gamer,” says Sian Fan, an interdisciplinary artist who uses video game technology as a medium. “Even as a kid I gravitated towards less stressful experiences. I love being able to immerse myself in fantasy worlds; I like exploring and collecting.” Fan’s work combines her background in performance with technology, blending live action and digital in pieces that draw heavily on the fantastical and nostalgic worlds of media familiar to many 90s kids: Pokémon, Final Fantasy, Sailor Moon. Her pieces are meditations on the natural world, magical girls, and her mixed British-Asian identity. But as an artist who works with games every day, gaming in her downtime has become a bit of a busman’s holiday. “I actually much prefer watching other people play games than playing them myself,” says Fan. “I still love getting lost in the world of games, so I make my partner play them.” Cosy games are “about relaxation, not competition,” says Paola Antonelli, senior curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. While a cosy game can transport you to a fantastical landscape, there is also “a cocooning effect, making your world smaller and safer.” It’s something that Antonelli looks for in her own gaming experience. “I’m a very competitive person so I never get into competitive games, because I don’t want to be stressed out,” she says. “I have enough 4

See ‘Enter the Washing Machine’ (p.66) in this issue for a full discussion of the TikTok algorithm as an interface.

stress in my life, thank you very much.” Along with MoMA collection specialist Paul Galloway, Antonelli has co-curated the new exhibition, Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design (2022), which displays many of the 36 games painstakingly acquired and preserved by MoMA over the past decade. Interestingly, none of these games are those “where the violence is amoral or immoral”. So, a niche title such as This War of Mine (2014) from indie Polish developer 11 Bit Studio, a survival simulator where you experience the horrors of war from a civilian’s perspective, is in MoMA’s archive, but none of publishing titan Rockstar Games’s wildly popular Grand Theft Auto series has made it in. “Ideas of morality might change in the future,” says Antonelli. “I’m not sure that shooting up pimps and prostitutes will ever become morally acceptable behaviour.” I have no such qualms about my personal gaming archive, but this conversation did make me think about the ways in which I play games, even violent ones. I’ve never played quite how the game wants me to. My gaming journey started out when I was still in single digits. My parents were usually exceptionally careful about age-appropriate media – I still dream of the hallucinogenic quality of the saladmaking factory minigame from the nutritionthemed game 5 A Day Adventures (1995) – but I was somehow given an unvetted copy of Nine Month Miracle (1995). While I certainly enjoyed all the information about human reproduction, the adults in my life where less thrilled when they discovered I was using its live birth footage as a DIY sex education tool for friends who were less knowledgable about the facts of life. The CD-ROM was mysteriously lost, but I was happy to move along to teaching myself basic hex coding to customise my own content for Petz 4 (1999) and the original and best cosy game, The Sims (2000). At first, games where I was given a gun were too scary. I loved zapping my enemies with Tesla coils or running them over with tanks in Red Alert 2 (2000), but Tomb Raider (1996) would have me screaming and dumping the controller when a rogue pixelated lion or gorilla attacked me. I had

Grand Theft Auto III (2001), but I would rather tip the sex workers and visit them for healthbar restoration than murder them. But by the time my father had networked our two home PCs so my brother and I could take turns playing Ghost Recon 2 (2004), I knew I had to beat them and join them. So I would play the field medic, dashing to resuscitate my fallen comrades with my handy defibrillator. Playing games against the grain they were designed for is also a form of cosy gaming. Content creator Navami is a queer Tamil gamer who flies the flag for femmes taking up space in games traditionally dominated by gamer bros (derogatory). Under the TikTok handle @pinkjujitsu, they illustrate how games such as God of War: Ragnarök (2022), The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015), and Elden Ring (2022) are, in fact, cosy games perfectly suited for “glossy girly gamers”. God of War? More like God of Cosiness. “It’s so cottagecore,”5 they say of a game that, at least nominally, sends you into bloody battle against the Norse pantheon, pointing out God of War’s shelves of trinkets and animated butterflies swirling around glowing mushrooms. Think The Witcher 3 is about fighting eldritch monsters? It’s actually a dressup/dating sim where you can “dress [protagonist] Geralt in goth chic armour, make his swords glow pink and have him romance a pretty sorceress”. “I’m not being dramatic when I say that I would rather sit naked on a hot grill,” reads one of Navami’s captions, “than play a game in hard mode when there’s a story mode.” Many of their videos are a direct troll of the archetypal gamer: men determined to play to win and validate their toxic masculinity with gamified conquest. However hard certain elements of a game’s fanbase may insist it is dark and gritty, popular game mechanics present in most big-name games have cosy elements: you can customise your appearance and collect 5

Another nice meta-cosy detail about Unpacking is that part of its development process was undertaken at Stugan, a nonprofit games accelerator held in a cabin in the middle of the woods in Sweden. Deeply cottagecore.

a wardrobe of fashion options; gather flowers, mushrooms and sparkly rocks to make potions; ride a pretty horse around a world filled with beautiful scenery. Despite its reputation for difficult combat and gruesome deaths, for example, Elden Ring has been embraced by many of its players as a cute horse-riding sim that recalls the nostalgia of the popular games of our girlhoods. “In Barbie Horse Adventures: Riding Camp, you can take your horse on trails and get rewarded for collecting stars,” Jenny Zheng writes for Fanbyte in ‘Elden Ring is a Horse Girl Game, Actually’. “I’ve substituted collecting sparkly stars for collecting the heads of enemies. It’s basically the same thing.” This isn’t a new phenomenon. “There’s a subversive element to it,” says writer and video game consultant Alex Wiltshire. “Ten or fifteen years ago, shooters were the de facto main genre, but then you started to see people not playing them in the intended way.” Players would use screenshots to take beautiful photos while exploring landscapes to share with fellow fans online, and began using games with online multiplayer designs as a place to socialise and hang out virtually. Customisation options allowed for a riot of creativity. “Even [in] Counter-Strike (2000), the default, emblematic hyper-competitive game where you can buy and sell beautiful gun skins,6 there’s an animation where you can show other players your gun,” Wiltshire says. “[You’d see all] these pink guns with anime characters down the side.” Wiltshire observes that many violent games feature a cosy domestic element, no matter how dark the world-building. “Monster Hunter is a super hardcore game about smashing up monsters with swords,” he says. “But you have a house where, at the end of every hunt in the old games, you would save by going to bed.” In a Proustian moment, I recall the joy of getting my own house in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011), secured in between calling down death-dealing dragons from the sky. 6

For any gaming n00bs, a skin is a purely aesthetic modification that you can download to change the appearance of a character or an object in a video game.

“It was the moment that games stopped being purely a place where you did what the game told you and became a place you could go,” Wiltshire explains. “As soon as games become a place, people want to start making them homes.” Unpacking, I realise, has been tapping into this universal urge to nest. But beware simply labelling cosy games such as Unpacking as “wholesome”, warns curator and video game expert Marie Foulston. “A lot of LGBTQ+ communities and people of marginalised genders take issue with the word,” she says. As cosy gaming establishes its niche, there’s the risk that by defining these games by their cuteness and lack of combat, you flatten any conflict or knottiness that could be unpacked from the narrative – particularly when they are built around the lesser-told stories of marginalised identities. “People felt that branding this genre as ‘wholesome’ was denying the complexity and nuance of some of the games,” explains Foulston. “It’s potentially denying the ability to look at the politics that are within these works,” she adds. “You can have violence, you can have competitiveness and still be radically different from what we consider mainstream games.” Queer stories come under extra scrutiny for dark themes, but by embracing a veneer of uncomplicated wholesomeness we risk playing the losing game of respectability politics. Because while Unpacking is charming, it’s also tinged with sadness for some players. “I had a really strong reaction to this game,” admits Foulston. “I loved the fact that it built in all these subtle cues that it’s a queer relationship. [But] I’m a woman in her 30s who is single and has not had a relationship trajectory that has gone up, my income has not been on an upward trajectory, I do not feel my career trajectory has gone upwards.” While the Unpacking protagonist does boomerang back to the family home at one point, they ultimately build towards a happily coupled home-owning life with a spouse. For uncoupled millennials like me and Foulston, playing the game from sub-par rentals that take a too-large chunk of our arts career salaries,

Unpacking’s narrative arc feels crushingly unobtainable. “You suddenly realise that she’s got into a relationship, her career has gone in the right direction, she’s moved into a bigger house,” says Foulston. “It was this moment playing the game where I just felt really fucking sad. I felt like a failure.” Foulston, it should be noted, was the curator of Videogames: Design/ Play/Disrupt (2018) at the Victoria & Albert Museum, a defining moment in gaming’s entry into mainstream design discourse, as well as the co-founder of indie game collective The Wild Rumpus. So, hardly a slacker by any standard, but society’s narrow, heteronormative and capitalist definition of success often comes down to shared asset ownership. In a way, Unpacking’s milestonebased format is unrecognisable to younger generations. For Millennials, our adult years have been one long rolling series of economic

and housing and climate crises that make any kind of linear progression through life seem laughable. I realise that, perhaps, I have been self-soothing with the game. “Cosy games are messes that you go in and clear up – Unpacking is the epitome of that,” says Foulston. “You’re restoring order.” I’ve found the game to be the mental equivalent of snuggling under a warm blanket on a rainy dark evening. I would like to have an actual warm blanket, but all the electric ones I want are sold out online because everyone else has already stocked up on them, too scared to put the heating on, and our friable supply chains mean that I have no idea when I’ll be able to get hold of one. I should probably tackle those last few boxes of my possessions, but I think I’ll play Unpacking through just one more time. India Block is the deputy editor of Disegno and Design Reviewed.

FURNITUREHEADS Words Elizabeth Glickfeld

Image courtesy of Florian Böhm.

Object

Fauteuil Kangourou

Can you imagine hankering for a table more than you would an Hermès Birkin handbag? Or coveting a couch over a pair of Dior Jordan 1s? Swiss furniture brand Vitra seemed to be banking on as much when, earlier this year, it began circulating teasers for a lounge chair via email marketing, its website and on Instagram. In a video, the camera pans down over horizontal oak wood back slats. Register now. A house plant casts a moody shadow across a close-up of cobalt-blue bouclé upholstery. 12 days, 5 minutes and 36 seconds to go. A hero shot shows the chair seemingly staring out to a view of the sea, the main protagonist in the living room of a modernist house. Only 150 pieces. Then on 15 June comes: the drop. In a matter of minutes, the chair sells out. The object at the centre of this preamble is 20th-century French “constructeur” Jean Prouvé’s Fauteuil Kangourou. Today, Prouvé is considered the designer’s designer. Having trained as a metal craftsman during World War One, subsequently becoming a manufacturer and entrepreneur, Prouvé is admired for his life-long commitment to unearthing the poetics of then-new industrial processes – an ingenuity evident in the tapers of his blade-like chair and table legs. Prouvé applied his talents to everything from a letter opener to prefabricated housing and modular building systems, lighting to furniture. His signature was his structural approach. With an engineer’s understanding, he laid bare the modernist credos of “form follows function” and “truth to materials”. His designs went beyond simply exposing the logic of a chair’s construction, but also made legible where forces played out across its structure. The Fauteuil Kangourou (Kangaroo Armchair), one of his lesserknown furniture pieces, is no exception. Designed in 1948, the armchair gets its marsupial-inspired name from its sculptural wooden “haunches”. These slope back towards the floor to support the chair where the sitter exerts the greatest stress, allowing for light front legs made of thin steel tubes. But the Fauteuil Kangourou is not your usual attention grabber. Its no-fuss attitude is the source of its appeal. Except for the nuanced curves of the wood, the statement blue of the upholstery and the woolly caress of the bouclé, you’d almost be forgiven for tripping over the Fauteuil Kangourou at a house party. You wouldn’t be scared of sitting on it either. The chair is at once elegant and elemental, so much so that it makes its 20th-century peers look like they’re trying too hard. Robin Day’s Recliner (1952), too rectilinear; Hans Wegner’s Papa Bear (1951), too exuberant; Arne Jacobson’s

Egg (1958), too round. What is significant about Vitra’s 2022 re-edition is not the Fauteuil Kangourou’s enduring appeal, however, but rather the fact that the chair was produced in a run of only 150 pieces. A second run of the chair, this time in ecru bouclé with brown trim and dark wood, followed in September. Still, one imagines the sale of 300 chairs will represent barely a dint in Vitra’s bottom line. Limited editions are not new to the design industry. In the noughties, many contemporary designers favoured limited editions as a way of exploring the potential of objects and materials outside of the constraints of industrial production and the market. Blue-sky designing aside, however, designers and architects have long created high-end bespoke commissions, of which the Fauteuil Kangourou is just one example. While most of Prouvé’s furniture designs were intended as contract furniture for the likes of schools, hospitals and public administration buildings, the armchair was a commission for a private house. Prouvé created the Fauteuil Kangourou for the beachfront Villa Dollander in Le Lavandou, Cote D’Azur, that he designed with his brother Henri for the Dollander family. According to Christian Grosen, Vitra’s chief design officer, only around 10 to 15 of the original chairs were ever made,1 a fact that finds some symmetry with the small numbers being produced in 2022. Due to postwar material constraints, Prouvé looked to wood when designing Fauteuil Kangourou instead of his signature steel. The result, Grosen explains, is that fabrication of the chair requires “a great deal of woodworking and craftsmanship”. But none of this is enough to justify such frugal production numbers. What is most interesting about the 2022 Fauteuil Kangourou is that the powers that be at Vitra have purposefully made it play hard-to-get. Today, the webpage for the chair on Vitra’s website is emblazoned with the words “sold out”. With its online campaign, Vitra has harnessed the internet’s capacity for fuelling our sense of FOMO, or what Byron Hawes, author of the 2018 book Drop, calls “social media’s push to make having something other people don’t, our primary reason for getting up in the morning”. In economic terms, this approach means cultivating demand to deliberately exceed supply. In practical terms, this means a “product drop” and the manufacture of all the associated hype that product drops entail. By most accounts, these drops have their origins in the 1990s, when early players in street- and skate-wear, GOODENOUGH (GDEH) in Tokyo and 1

The Dollander family ordered four, while others were produced for select clients.

Supreme in New York, realised that they could generate an air of exclusivity about – and higher prices for – hoodies, t-shirts and skateboards by making them available in limited numbers. Sneaker fever grew among hiphop and basketball fans at roughly the same time, having catapulted into mainstream consciousness with the success of Michael Jordan’s eponymous Air Jordans for Nike. In 2002, however, Nike’s dominance had diminished

Jean Prouvé’s furniture within one of his Demountable homes (image courtesy of Florian Böhm).

its cultural currency in the eyes of the growing skater community. To help recapture underground cool, the brand launched a limited-edition drop in collaboration with Supreme. Only 1,250 pairs of the resultant sneakers, the Supreme x Nike SB Dunk Low Pro, were ever made. By 2010, many other sneaker brands were following suit, as was luxury fashion. When Louis Vuitton collaborated with Supreme five years ago, for instance, The New York Times ordained 2017 to be “the year of the drop”. This kind of cross-pollination, whether between streetwear and high-fashion, or highend designers and high-street brands, allows labels to leverage credibility while expanding their reach. Today, the limited-edition collaboration is a mainstay of fast-fashion. Think Gucci x Adidas or Uniqlo x Jil Sander. While Vitra has stopped short of marking their Prouvé collaboration with the now customary “x” between two names, the campaign bears many of the hallmarks of the above legacy. The promotional materials

for the Fauteuil Kangourou channel design history into hype. A booklet advertising the chair features the neutral-coloured version artfully photographed by Florian Böhm in idyllic timber and leafy surrounds. The double-page spread interrupts archival black-and-white photographs of Prouvé and the Villa Dollander, accompanied by sketches and technical drawings with authenticating stamps. These show the chair’s evolution from a four-legged object into its final kangaroo-like stance. At their zenith, product drops resulted in riots. In 2005, on New York’s Lower East Side, the release of influencer Jeff Staples’s Nike SD Pigeon trainers was met with knives, machetes, baseball bats and, finally, SWAT teams. And in March 2022, crowd unrest over the release of the MoonSwatch, a collaboration between watch brands Swatch and Omega, forced Swatch’s London Carnaby Street store to close at 10am. At their best, however, product drops spawned a culture and a community – legions of dedicated fans who congregated around their consumerism, either online or in the street, and who used their sartorial choices to signal to anyone else who also happened to be “in the know”. Hawes is nostalgic for the days when, “[if] you waited outside Supreme, all the kids knew each other. They would put on their fuckboy finest[...] and check each other’s outfits out.” Product drops also gave rise to their own lingo and to the figureheads of the “sneakerhead”, someone who collects sneakers, and the “hypebeast”, someone who closely follows trends and dedicates themselves to acquiring hyped products. But can riots over sneakers translate into frenzies about furniture or even into online forums full of furnitureheads fervently discussing the merits of a Prouvé over a Le Corbusier? Full disclosure: I have never queued for anything (even a nightclub), although I can envisage getting involved in a Prouvé/Corbusier debate. Vitra did cause a frenzy though, when, for one night only in 2019 at its headquarters in Weil am Rhein, the usually straightfaced design elite were subsumed by a hoard of autograph-seeking twentysomethings walking around in their socks, waving their sneakers in the hope that they might be signed by the evening’s guest of honour. The object of this rock-star reaction was Virgil Abloh (1980-2021), a designer widely recognised as a horse-whisperer for the millennial market. The founder of Off-White and artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear, Abloh was described by Michael Burke, chief executive of Louis Vuitton, as being “incredibly good at creating bridges between the classic and the zeitgeist

of the moment,” and he did just that with the three limited-edition products he designed for Vitra. These comprised hacks of Prouvé’s 1950s Antony chair and Petite Potence wall lamp in Abloh’s signature orange, as well as an individually numbered decorative ceramic breeze blocks.2 “One of the intentions of the collaboration was to address a much younger group of people,” Vitra’s CEO Nora Fehlbaum explained, which is something that Los Angeles-based fibreglass furniture manufacturer Modernica also achieved when, in 2018, it engaged graffiti artist Futura (then known as Futura 2000) to decorate some of its classic shell chairs. The Modernica x Futura collaboration is now in its fourth iteration and includes an armchair, coffee table, daybed and storage cabinet for paint cans. These are released in lots of 25 to 50 pieces that regularly sell out in a matter of seconds. Grosen acknowledges that “making 20th-century design relevant to a younger generation” is central to Vitra’s current objectives. Prouvé, however, hardly carries the same pop cultural cachet as a New York graffiti artist or even Abloh, who routinely bandied around the names of Marcel Duchamp, Pharrell Williams and Mies van der Rohe in the same sentence – the kind of synthesis between art, pop culture and design that brands seem, increasingly, to be chasing. While the Prouvé re-edition’s marketing campaign may be an indication that Vitra is trying to coax millennials into buying high-design furniture, it is more likely a sign that the product drop has simply become the modus operandi of retail. Certainly, Vitra’s intention for the Fauteuil Kangourou to be a primarily online purchase seems underscored by the fact that, at the brand’s new London flagship store, the sales team were not keen for me to sit on the display chair when I visited. Whether this was because the chair is a rare specimen or because it was precariously perched on a mirrored tile, was hard to know. Either way, their reluctance seemed to nullify the showroom’s conventional purpose of offering customers a chance to road-test designs. In the era of Instagram, perhaps appearance and backstory trumps comfort or ergonomics. This does not mean, however, that Vitra is necessarily trying to convince people to change their chairs as often as they do their shoes. Vitra, according to Grosen, vehemently “avoids all short-lived trends”. At circa £3,500, the Fauteuil Kangourou will set you back a little bit more than a £140 orange Virgil Abloh brick. The price tag on the chair is something Hawes perceives as a potential obstacle to Vitra’s success. “The drop strategy will probably work better in the industrial design sector with lower cost 2

See Felix Chabluk Smith’s ‘Ceramic Block by Virgil Abloh’ in Disegno #24.

items,” he says. “It’s easier to get people to impulse buy a $350 1970s Italian hyper-maximalist plastic planter than a serious sofa.” By virtue of the air of scarcity fabricated around them, these objects also accrue value with the help of the secondary market. This was the

The Fauteuil Kangourou (image courtesy of Florian Böhm).

case with Abloh’s now-notorious brick. Individually numbered in an edition of 999, the brick today regularly appears on resale sites such as eBay and 1stdibs for thousands of pounds. A quick search on 1stdibs reveals the same dynamic now at work with the 2022 Fauteuil Kangourou. A blue iteration of the chair has already fetched nearly £10,000. This, according to

Hawes, is where the opportunity lies for Vitra. “You end up getting secondary branding and marketing where the perceived value of your product rises,” he says. “Lots of people will pay thousands of dollars for a specific colourway even if at the end of the day it’s the same $50 shoe.” In this respect, the chair embodies what 19th-century economist Thorstein Veblen called, as part of his theory of conspicuous consumption, a “Veblen good”: a luxury item for which demand increases as the price increases, thereby making it a status symbol. Colourways produced in limited numbers are just one way of making a factory-produced item appear special. Only time will tell whether the demand for the Fauteuil Kangourou will continue to escalate due to the fog of desire that Vitra has created around it. In some ways, this fog seems at odds with such a straighttalking design. For its part, Vitra is tight-lipped about discussing anything as mercenary – and transitory – as its sales and marketing strategy. The company is, after all, in the business of selling – and anointing – design classics. When I speak to him, Grosen continually returns to the values of “simplicity, honesty, logic and longevity”, both in his discussion of Vitra’s philosophy and in the story of the Kangourou. But this is precisely the point. In 1957, Vitra signed a licence with Herman Miller to produce Eames furniture in Europe and the Middle East; I can’t help but wonder about how those designs, now classics, initially fared on the market. “It takes time for designs to mature in people’s minds,” confirms Grosen, “It’s like good music. You have to listen to it a few times until you really get to love it. But then you will enjoy listening to it for many years.” In other words, icons are not just born, but made. In the case of the re-edition of Jean Prouvé’s lesser-known Fauteuil Kangourou, Vitra is making an icon, one click at a time. Elizabeth Glickfeld is the co-editor of the independent design magazine Dirty Furniture.

RELIEF Words Vic Parsons

Image courtesy of the Gender Spectrum Collection.

Body Chest binders

By the time I bought my first commercial chest binder in my mid-twenties, I had been experimenting with different ways of flattening my chest for several years. What worked best was wearing a too-small sports bra under layers of baggy clothing, coupled with perpetually hunched-over shoulders. My first purposemade binder, from an underwear company called Underworks, was a revelation. Marketed as a sports bra and chest binder that would flatten and compress, it was a black, cropped tank top made of cotton, elastene and nylon, and it cost £34.99. The specifications detailed how the material offered a four-way stretch and double layers of Underworks’ hybrid cotton-wrapped spandex and nylon MagiCotton, although I confess that having typed “chest binder” into Amazon, I simply went with the one that would ship soonest. But when it arrived it was obviously too small: getting it on or off meant contorting my arms behind my back to drag the binder down slowly and painfully over each inch of flesh; I often wondered if I’d be stuck in it forever, or never able to get it on. After a day of wearing it, I would have sore, red grooves in the skin under my armpits. The next binder I bought, from a USbased company called gc2b, cost $35 plus extortionate shipping and customs fee to the UK. It was made from nylon and spandex, in a light beige colour – the company has five skin-tone shades to choose from in half-tank, full-tank or racerback styles – and it offered a much better fit. I’d measured my chest and shoulders according to the instructions, which made a difference; the binder was easier to wriggle over my shoulders and slide down my chest, didn’t leave marks on my body, and was comfortable enough that I mostly forgot that I was wearing it. gc2b says you can swim in its binders, though I never did. Sadly, however, this binder didn’t compress my chest as well, and seemed to lose effectiveness over time. Because it gave me the flatness I wanted, I normally went with the Underworks binder. I could usually wear it for about six hours before becoming so uncomfortable that I could think of nothing except getting it off me, which meant

I typically either bound during the workday and then avoided socialising in the evening so I could go home and take it off, or had a slouchy, unhappy work day not wearing a binder so that I could go out in the evening wearing one. In the summers, binding was a sweaty, itchy, spotty, breathless experience. It was only after I stopped needing to wear a binder that I realised how much energy I used up planning the logistics of my day around binding. But despite what might appear like a long list of downsides, wearing a binder made me happier, more confident and more at ease than I had ever been in my life. Throughout history, people of all genders have used clothing to shape their bodies: from corsets to push-up bras, high heels to body armour. And trans people, too, have shaped our bodies to feel more at home in them. Trans men such as Michael Dillon (believed to be the first person to take synthetic testosterone for transition, in 1939), and Brandon Teena (whose 1993 murder was the subject of Oscar-winning film Boys Don’t Cry (1999)), used long bandages wrapped tightly around their chests to flatten them. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many trans men simply lived as men – working with other men and fighting in wars and marrying their wives in church – without anyone knowing they were trans until they died, when a coroner inadvertently discovered their anatomy and outed them posthumously. In a time before binders, they must have flattened their chests to pass as male. Going back further, Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut ruled as a man nearly three millennia ago, wearing a fake golden beard and men’s clothing. Ancient art depicts Hatshepsut with a masculine body – although much of this was later destroyed. Whether Hatshepsut’s chest was bound with strips of fabric we don’t know. We can’t know the gender identity of people from another era; speculating about it is fraught. Although cloth worn that long ago could have survived, fabric used for binding is unlikely to be recognisable for what it was. Lorraine Smith, a researcher of 20th-century underwear and developments in textiles, has 53

found that people in ancient Greece and Rome wore garments to alter the shape of their chests. One example comes from a mosaic in a Roman villa that depicts athletes, with “some women, or people with breasts, pictured in this, and many people have said that it looks like [they’re] wearing a bikini,” says Smith. “I found a book on Roman clothing and dress and it seems to be a kind of breast band, so actually it was like binding but for sports purposes – to keep everything tucked away for exercising.” Today, we have binding options that our trancestors could only dream about. Contemporary commercial binders cover the torso and pass over both shoulders, usually in either a half- or full-tank style, and are worn under clothes. Binder companies offer guidelines: don’t bind for more than eight hours, take breaks from binding, don’t sleep, swim or play sports in a binder, never layer two of them together, and make sure the binder you’re wearing is the correct size for your chest. A binder should be tight, but not painful. “Binders are designed to safely create a flatter, more masculine, chest silhouette without causing discomfort or affecting breathing,” says Jack Jones, founder of Spectrum Outfitters, a small family-run company that’s been selling binders made from recycled fishing nets since 2017. “Our binders feature a rigid front panel that doesn’t stretch, and a compressive back panel that pulls the front flat,” Jones explains. “This differs from other brands which use stretch fabrics to compress all the way around. We believe this gives the best results while putting half the pressure on your body for the most comfortable feel.” But while privileged trans and nonbinary people living in the UK like me can buy safer commercial binders, many of the companies selling them only ship to Western countries. Young people with transphobic parents may struggle to get a commercial binder, as might people without the money to buy one, or an address to have it posted to. So, many trans people still use DIY binding methods. While this can be done safely, it takes practice. Unsafe binding methods include using duct tape or clingfilm to bind, which can lead 54

to broken skin, chest and back pain, and bruised or fractured ribs. While trans people have, throughout history, accepted these risks and bound however they could, the production of commercial binders means that safer binding is within reach of more people than ever. Ever resourceful, trans mutual-aid groups help get binders to those who can’t otherwise access them. Many organise events where people can bring binders they no longer need or want to donate, and others can have a donated binder fitted to their chest. Informal donations or swaps often happen too; after I had top surgery, a queer Nigerian activist I follow on Instagram posted that their friend was about to travel from London to Lagos and could take binders with them, so I donated my binders this way. “The market for binders is growing,” Jones confirms. “Optimistically, I feel that attitudes towards transgender people are also changing and that’s why more people feel able to come out or even to experiment with their gender. Binders are great for experimentation as they are a non-permanent option.” However, as is often the case when we make progress for oppressed communities, there is currently a huge backlash in the UK to trans lives. In British politics and media, a manufactured moral panic spreads misinformation about trans people and relentlessly attacks trans women. Young trans people are being targeted, first with the high-profile court case of Keira Bell vs. the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust that attempted – and initially succeeded – in banning puberty blockers, and now binders are also under fire. Trans charity Mermaids has been subjected to relentless abuse and harassment from anti-trans campaigners and the press for the supposedly harmful practice of sending binders to young people who want to try them (in September 2022, The Telegraph reported “massive safeguarding red flags” surrounding this). This comes after years of transphobic campaign groups such as Transgender Trend (a self-styled anti-trans pressure group identified as “dangerous” by LGBT+ charity Stonewall) publishing pieces

describing binders as “serious self-harm” as well as a route to “grooming unhappy young girls”. As a trans person, I know from my own experience, as well as that of my friends and community, that a commercial binder was effective in its stated purpose of flattening my chest and had multiple other beneficial effects. If it hadn’t, I wouldn’t have kept wearing it. This should be all the evidence needed to stop maligning binders and start getting them to more trans people who need them. Trans people shouldn’t have to convince those who don’t share our experience to allow us to wear a garment designed to shape bodies in a way that brings joy or, at least, reduces depression. Bodily autonomy – whether it’s for abortions, contraception or transition – is a foundation of gender equality and human rights. There is also scientific evidence that supports the use of specially designed binding garments. The first proper research into binders was a landmark 2016 study published in international journal Culture, Health & Sexuality that confirmed both the negative side-effects of binding – including pain, shortness of breath and dizziness, skin infection and scarring, overheating, and itching – and the positive results of binding for people who experience gender dysphoria, the clinically significant distress at the mismatch between the gender a person is assigned at birth and their gender identity. Numerous scientific studies and editorials in major medical journals have found that affirming trans people’s gender – whether that’s through binding, using a person’s correct name and pronouns, allowing them to access puberty blockers, surgeries or hormones, or through gender-affirming counselling – leads, broadly speaking, to happier, better functioning, less suicidal trans people. Despite this evidence, and with none of their own, the transphobic lobby continues to claim that binding is harmful. Anti-trans activist Denise Caignon, who started her blog 4thWaveNow in response to her child questioning their gender identity,

called binding a “frankly dangerous” and “mutilating” practice pushed on young people by “strangers” from the internet. “There is quite a big debate currently in the media on the risks associated with binding and I understand people’s concern,” Jones says. But he says that something which “often gets left out of the conversation” is “the mental health and wellbeing of the wearer”. “Gender dysphoria can be devastating for sufferers,” Jones says. “I know from experience that it can impact every aspect of your life. It’s a horrible fact that depression, suicide and self-harm rates are significantly higher for trans people. For many people, wearing a chest binder can alleviate some of the immense pain caused by dysphoria.” Like most moral panics, this transphobic one will, eventually, end. In the future, we may see binders made freely available to those who need them, and engineered to remove negative side-effects. In 2019, Loughborough University student Miles Kilburn designed a “smart” binder using an alloy called Nitinol, controlled by a remote, that would allow the wearer to take compression breaks without taking the binder off. Kilburn worked on his design with trans students, and said he hoped his binder, Breathe, would one day be available on the NHS. “Top surgery is very much an expensive and permanent decision,” he said. “For many transgender people having a product like Breathe could be an alternate option which gives them more time to consider whether they want surgery whilst experiencing much less pain from binding.” Jones agrees that it’s critical to have people who wear binders involved in their design – he was binding, and had been for three or four years, when he started designing binders himself. “I had injured myself using an unsafe binder so I had soreness in my ribs on one side,” Jones says. “I think it’s important that someone that understands the dangers and the dayto-day experience of binding is involved in the development of a binder as they will understand the customer’s needs.” Although I only wore them for a few years, I can’t overstate how huge the relief 55

of wearing a binder was, how much it improved my mental health, and the knock-on effect this had on my relationships, work, my physical health and my confidence. Some trans people are lifelong binder wearers, others wear a binder temporarily. Either way, well-designed

commercial binders offer a crucial lifeline, and can provide a safer route to a flat chest. Vic Parsons is an award-winning trans journalist based in London, writing about queer feminism, politics and culture.

VACATION, ALL I NEVER WANTED Words Oli Stratford

Image courtesy of Potato Head.

System

The Desa Potato Head’s zero waste strategy

I’ve never reviewed a holiday destination before and I don’t really know how you do it. The problem is, I don’t much like holidays. I think they’re decadent and demonstrative of a lack of work ethic. It’s very easy to go on holiday and have a nice time expanding your horizons, but what shows greater moral character is staying in your lane and ploughing the same furrow until you succumb to a stress-related illness. Nevertheless, I accepted this assignment to review the Desa Potato Head resort in Seminyak, south Bali, so I’m duty bound to do my best. Anyway, I suppose I’m mostly here just to paint a bit of a picture of what holidaymakers can expect; a textual tease, as it were. Unfortunately, my notes from the trip largely read as things like “palm trees!”, “cocktails!”, “lovely bit o’coast!”, which aren’t hugely revelatory. But let’s be honest, Potato Head is a beach resort and beach resorts are all basically beach resorts. You can have a fruity booze; lounge around an infinity pool; threaten to swim in the sea while displaying no inclination to heave yourself from the recliner. Beach resort, innit. That’s probably a bit unfair to Potato Head. As resorts go, it’s a cut above. Jakartabased architects Andramatin and Dutch practice OMA have designed the various buildings and they’re lovely. Andramatin’s beach club, for instance, is hidden behind a coliseum curve of salvaged Indonesian window frames, while its Katamama hotel is built from handmade Balinese red bricks that have blistered black in the sun. The most recent addition to the resort, OMA’s Studios hotel (2020), is raised on pilotis, from atop which the building snakes around a central courtyard along a series of walkways that have been cast from grey and blush pink concrete – the result of leftover Katamama bricks having been ground up and folded into the mixture. The Studios building, Potato Head’s head of architecture and development Ade Herkarisma tells me, is full of references to Balinese architecture. “Our role was to inject [the design] with the abundance of craft that we have in Indonesia,” 58

he says, pointing towards the ventilating brick lattices that shield the hotel’s walkways from the sun. Each brick has been hand-made on the island and their perforation patterns are drawn from a Balinese lunar calendar, with the blocks variously cut into grids, circles, voids and crosses. “We did a huge study on the way Indonesian architecture cools down buildings,” explains the hotel’s architect, OMA’s David Gianotten, who admits to sensitives surrounding a Dutch practice operating in Indonesia given the region’s history of colonial rule.1 “Of course I have reservations about touching certain contexts,” he explains, “but the only way to do it is if clients allows me to construct something that isn’t me coming in, doing something, and then leaving again.” Hence the research project. “[We’ve used] vernacular and the sequencing of space to keep everything safe and climatised,” Gianotten concludes. “I want to actually build for Indonesians and for people who want to interact with Indonesia’s [architectural traditions].” Like I said, it’s all very lovely. I rarely felt clammy while pottering around, so two thumbs up because I’m a milky Englishman and Bali is very hot and close. The bedrooms are nice too, not least because Potato Head has brought in top-tier designers to do the furnishings. Furniture designer Max Lamb has made the chairs, lamps and a number of accessories, while clothing and furniture brand Toogood provided the rugs and textiles, as well as a natty robe you can pop down to the beach in. The whole resort is very tastefully done, extremely luxurious, and somehow smells heavily of jasmine, despite jasmine not being anywhere in sight.2 So if that’s your thing, do go on holiday there. Whatever Potato Head’s jasmine technology is, it’s unbelievable. 1

The Netherlands only recognised Indonesian independence in 1949, following close to 350 years of Dutch colonial rule. I fully expect to now learn that it’s actually everywhere, and I just don’t know what jasmine looks like.

That said, people should probably stop going on quite so many overseas holidays, so for God’s sake please don’t go. “Internationaltourist arrivals around the world have gone from a little less than 70 million as of 1960 to 1.4 billion today,” wrote The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey in 2019. “The root cause of this surge in tourism is macroeconomic. The middle class is global now, and tens of millions of people have acquired the means to travel over the past few decades.” Which is not in itself a bad thing, but alarming when you consider the attendant environmental and social effects. Everybody is aware of the airline industry’s impact on the climate, for example, but vacationing is frequently environmentally and culturally deleterious in other ways too. Thailand, for instance, closed its Maya Bay beach in 2018 for three years to try to allow the beach’s ecology to recover after visitor numbers reached 5,000 per day. Tourists, apparently, had become fixated on seeing where Leonardo DiCaprio filmed The Beach (2000), which is a form of environmental damage even DiCaprio’s Prius can’t compensate for. In Cambodia, meanwhile, wooden platforms have been installed at the historic Angkor Wat temples in an attempt to box off the structures to try and prevent damage from people climbing onto them in the hunt for selfies, while still providing optimal sightlines for photography. Who clambers around a near 1,000-year-old temple for the sake of Instagram? Idiot tourists, that’s who. Across the board, sites of cultural, spiritual or environmental significance are suffering rapid deterioration as a result of overtourism, which is one reason I don’t like it – I don’t want anyone blaming me for accidentally kicking a cornice off Angkor Wat while Blue Steeling for the camera. “If tourism is a capitalist phenomenon,” summarised Lowrey, “overtourism is its demented late-capitalist cousin: selfie-stick deaths, all-you-can-eat ships docking at historic ports, stag nights that end in property crimes, the live-streaming of the ruination of fragile natural habitats, et cetera. There are just too many people thronging popular destinations.”

A good deal of that seems to resonate with Bali’s tourism industry. I wish I could tell you more about what an extraordinary place Bali is (which I have no doubt is true), but during my brief stay there I rarely left the resort. Which isn’t unusual, because that’s not what you do when holidaying at a resort – a fact that Potato Head is well aware of. “You’re missing a lot [if you don’t leave Seminyak],” explains the resort’s Pete Kean, who works on Potato Head’s cultural programming. “There is such a vast abundance of nature and magic [in Bali] that people can miss out on. It’s really important for people to actually get out there as well.” But you tend not to, because beach resorts aren’t typically about culture, or even respectful engagement with a surrounding area; they’re about on-tap luxury, and the idea that you deserve said luxury because everyone, apparently, deserves a holiday.3 That’s certainly Bali’s pitch, to the degree that Sandiaga Uno, Indonesia’s tourism minister, acknowledged in June 2022 that the nation’s international appeal had historically been grounded in the “three S”: “sun, sea and sand”.4 Tourism currently accounts for around 60 per cent of Bali’s economy, with 6.3 million international tourists visiting in 2019 when visitors were at their peak ahead of the pandemic. For context, the island’s permanent population is around 4.2 million people. “Bali as a whole is a mass tourism destination,” says Maitri Fischer, chief technical officer of Mantra, a Balinese environmental engineering consultancy. “There is nothing sustainable about mass tourism. It destroys the environment and local culture.” But still, we all deserve a holiday, so 🤷. To its credit, Potato Head knows these issues better than most, having conducted a series of environmental surveys around the impact of tourism on Bali in conjunction with Fischer and his team. Tourism in Bali currently generates around 1.5m tonnes of waste per 3 4

Strongly disagree. Endless work and misery for me, thanks. And given that Bali is an international party destination, I reckon you could probably add stiff drinks and sex to its portion of the appeal.

year, which is roughly 15 per cent of the waste produced on the island as a whole. “But that’s the waste that comes from specific locations, so it doesn’t take into account how businesses and organisations work in relationship to the hospitality and tourism industry,” clarifies Simon Pestridge, Potato Head’s chief experience officer. “So I think the actual

mitigating those effects in an age of climate collapse and overtourism. “Having lived in Bali from the age of one,” Fischer concludes, “I have witnessed profound change to Bali’s environment and culture over my lifetime and I am pessimistic that we can address the issues on an island scale.” Close the resorts, if you ask me.

Recyling facilities at Desa Potato Head (image courtesy of All is Amazing, Paulius Staniunas).

number will be way higher.” Regardless of the precise figure, the majority of the island’s inorganic waste is either burned, dumped within the environment, or sent to landfill. You don’t get much of a sense of this when you’re lounging by the pool, however, so I’m going to rely on Fischer to summarise the current state of Bali’s ecology on my behalf. “The main issues facing Bali,” he says, “are ground water shortage, water quality, waste pollution in the land, rivers and oceans, habitat and nature loss and hence biodiversity loss, urban heat island effect, and lastly, the effects of climate change. Climate change will cause extreme weather, more floods, more droughts. We will see coastal erosion with sea level rise and our coral reefs will die or be damaged. We will see crop yields be affected by extreme weather and if local farmers are marginalised, we could see social unrest.” If that sounds bleak, it becomes bleaker still when you consider the likelihood of the island 60

Except you can’t, because that would trash 60 per cent of Bali’s economy, which is more or less what happened during the pandemic. Indonesia shut its borders during spring 2020 as a means of containing the spread of the virus, and did not properly reopen to international tourists until October 2021. Across the whole of 2021, Bali received 43 overseas tourists. “Hotels laid off employees, which is very sad, because they didn’t really have any other option,” recounts Amanda Marcella Christanto, Potato Head’s director of sustainability. “The island was dead. I stayed here during the first four months of the pandemic and [the island] was like a zombie. Every time you went out from your home, it was like you were entering a cemetery.” Potato Head retained more employees than some resorts, but still dropped down from a staff of 1,200 to a skeleton crew that kept essential operations running and laid groundwork for the reopening. “We paid everybody a certain

amount for the first year that we were down and then people started to move off and do other things,” Pestridge explains. “We knew we would need 500 staff when we opened [back up], so everyone was paid a nominal amount that kept their insurance and medical and everything in check.”5 During a rare car trip I took on the island, a Melbourne-based journalist started joking around with our Balinese driver. “It must have been nice to not have all the Australian tourists,” he said. Our driver was adamant that this was not the case. “It was so hard,” he replied quietly. “There was nothing.” So, that’s the dilemma facing Bali: tourism is destroying its ecology, but also propping up its economy. What’s a holiday destination to do? Which is the main reason I wanted to see Potato Head, in spite of my general suspicions of its industry: the resort believes it may have found the beginnings of a route through Bali’s tourism dilemma. Since 2017, Potato Head has been moving towards becoming a zero-waste resort, investing in recycling systems and design initiatives to help limit its impact on its surrounding environment. “We work in the hospitality industry, which is one of the biggest polluting industries in the world: [everything] from air travel to where you take up land from local communities,” Pestridge summarises. “But if we can’t change the whole hospitality industry, then we can change absolutely everything we do.” As such, the resort has banned visitors bringing in single-use plastic, created sorting systems to sift through and categorise its organic and inorganic waste, and developed design initiatives that can transform said waste into new products. Potato Head is full 5

Tourism is a major employer in Bali and Potato Head currently operates with around 700 staff. It is not a closed ecosystem, however. “One of the biggest [recent] outflows of labour talent has been cruise ships – once they got back up to speed [after the pandemic], everyone looked to Balinese hospitality as the talent base,” says Pestridge. “You’re on the water for nine months a year, so the amount of money [staff] can send back to their families after two years is too good to pass up.”

of sumptuous spaces, but it’s also home to a whole backend of rooms in which seafood shells are separated from the residue of meals served in its restaurants; where buckets of single-use, colour-coded plastic are stored ahead of being reformulated into panels of recycled plastic; where industrial shelving is stacked with old styrofoam packaging and tubs of used cooking oil; and where coconuts from the resort’s bars and kitchens are shredded into fibrous compost. “We’re now running [the route through these spaces] as a tour,” says Maria Garcia del Cerro, Potato Head’s communication director, “so people can follow the waste through the desa.”6 She warns us about odours as she opens the door to the room in which organic waste is sifted. Ripe rot emanates, but I kind of like it: it doesn’t smell like a resort. It’s not very jasminey. To date, Potato Head has proven incredibly successful in its waste initiatives, with Mantra having analysed waste streams through the hotel and subsequently set targets for their reduction. “We completed our first energy, water and waste audits by the end of 2017 and we set targets for 19 per cent energy savings, 45 per cent water savings and 80 per cent reduction of waste to landfill,” Fischer explains. “By 2018 we had achieved our water saving targets and have achieved about 50 per cent of our energy targets. By the end of the year, the responsible material management systems we implemented reduced waste to landfill down to 24 per cent from about 50 per cent in the beginning of the year.” As it stands today, less than 5 per cent of the desa’s waste goes to landfill, with the remainder processed in order to create new materials and products for use in either the resort or its offsite Sweet Potato Lab – a farmland R&D space founded during the pandemic where the team grow crops for the resort’s restaurants and test out new materials. “It’s only waste when you put it in landfill,” Garcia del Cerro summarises. “If you don’t put it in landfill, 6

“Desa” is an Indonesian term meaning village, with its use by Potato Head suggestive of how they would like people to perceive the resort as an interdependent community.

it’s a material.” The systems put in place to facilitate this idea aren’t necessarily complicated or technically sophisticated, they just require work. While I was at the resort, for instance, the hotel’s assistant sustainability manager, Dewa Legawa, let me mix up some old styrofoam, paint thinner, limestone, and oyster shell, which we then reformed to make the body of a soap dispenser for a hotel room. “We realised that we could make the amenities from this material,” Legawa told me. “We could turn waste into a product.” The whole thing took about 10 minutes, much of which I spent trying to flick styrofoamy oyster shrapnel off my hands like a toddler. So that should give you a sense of how straightforward many of Potato Head’s processes are – once groundwork has been laid. “Separation at source is the key,” Christanto confirms.” If the waste is all mixed, we cannot reuse it, we cannot recycle it.” A lot of the waste, once sorted, can be processed onsite, with Potato Head having invested in machinery during the pandemic to recycle plastics, while other materials are sent to external facilities. “Metal is currently on our R&D lists because we don’t want to keep putting it in storage,” Herkarisma says. “Whenever we find a facility that can deal with that, we’re donating it.” The fact that waste management in Bali is not centralised, he adds, has helped the resort’s efforts. “Bali’s flow of waste management is quite complex,” he says. “In Singapore, it’s a top-down process, so people don’t really bother separating waste because they know it’ll be taken care of by the government. In Bali, because that process doesn’t exist, it’s a lot easier to convince people to recycle because there are so many initiatives that come from the ground up.” I ask the team what accounts for the 5 per cent of waste that is still entering landfill. “We have medical waste, which we can’t really do anything about because it’s dangerous to deal with in-house,” Christanto replies. Pestridge mentions cigarette butts too. “There’s a company making glasses out of them [overseas], but then we have to weigh up [the environmental cost of] cleaning and shipping,” he says. “Rather than just 62

saying, ‘Oh, we’ve got rid of it, we’ve done it,’ we want to make sure it’s truly a sustainable venture and isn’t creating more impact without actually dealing with it.” All things considered, I think under 5 per cent is pretty good going, but Christanto is keen that I not brush over the statistic. During the pandemic, single-use plastic started to creep back into the desa as a result of hygiene measures, she says, while waste separation also began to fall apart. Waste to landfill rose to 40 per cent and Christanto’s team have only just managed to bring it back down. “We need to be honest, and failure is not something bad,” she says. “At the end of the day, people will ask the question. You might as well be frank rather than inventing answers.” Underpinning most of Potato Head’s sustainability initiatives are interventions from designers. Since the resort’s establishment in 2010, its founder Ronald Akili (supported by Potato Head’s former creative director Daniel Mitchell) has invited a series of practitioners to develop products and amenities for the resort. All of these objects are made from the waste streams of the hotel and its surrounding area (Potato Head regularly buys in additional waste from around Bali) and designed to make use of the manufacturing techniques available on the island. “Basically, everything is handmade,” summarises Garcia del Cerro. “There are no machines here and people do things by hand that are just not possible in Europe anymore.” Certainly, en route to the resort from the island’s Ngurah Rai International Airport, you see a lot of stores selling craft goods, many of which unfortunately fall into the category of “island tat” – driftwood-heavy tourist tchotchkes that could be from anywhere, and which get no more culturally specific than being possessed of a faint air of the tropics (general). “There is all that stereotypical tropicana,” confirms designer Max Lamb, who has made multiple trips to Bali from his London studio, “but when you go behind the shopfronts, you see another side: the more traditional side of what their craft can achieve and offer. They’ve got an incredible artisanal ability, because as an island, they were self

sufficient for such a long time. Even now, their government’s import strategy is incredibly strict and they charge super high import duties on anything coming from the outside, so there is a real motivation to continue to be self-sufficient.” As with the OMA-designed Studios, Potato Head’s ambition is to pair Bali’s craft

feature shades made using ijuk palm fibres, paired with bases formed from offcuts of the volcanic rock utilised in construction of the island’s Hindhu shrines – materials Lamb came across during research trips to the island. “I was initially a bit sheepish about being the foreign designer turning up and pretending that they know what they’re

OMA’s Studios building (image courtesy of Kevin Mak).

tradition with alternative modes of design. “Bringing in international talents and encouraging them to work with local artisans and materials forces them to think and combine different approaches, which creates new and beautiful solutions,” summarises Akili. Lamb’s chairs, for instance, are superbly slabby, produced from sheets of reconstituted waste plastic whose smeared, spiralling colours bely their origins as waste. During a tour of the desa, Pete Kean pointed out one that’s a pointillist blur of reds, orange and white. “So this one, for example,” he said, “is probably orange juice bottles, Coke bottle lids, and oil canisters.” The plastic is beautiful – like swirling marble, but hyped up and giddy because it’s synthetic as hell – and all manufactured on-site by Potato Head (having previously been imported from Smile Plastics in Wales), before being sent to a Balinese woodworking shop for assembly into furniture. Lamb’s lamps, meanwhile,

doing,” Lamb acknowledges, “but I felt like I was a good fit for the job, because so many of my projects are based on collaboration and travel.” Which is true. Lamb has carved a career out of treating design as something approaching a natural outflow from landscapes and the craft techniques they contain: some classically Lamb-ian projects, for instance, include pewter chairs that are sand-cast on Cornish beaches, and granite boulders cut into furniture in a stone yard in Hebei, China. His Balinese projects, he says, could not have been created from his London studio, but similarly grew out of their context. “They’re not my materials, they are their materials; they’re not my workshops, they are their workshops,” he says. “I have to go and listen, watch and learn, and then see how we can collaborate and work together to deliver something. It’s a question of what you’re asking a craftsperson to make. Does it fit their skill? Does it celebrate their ability and the potential of the material? Or 63

does it try to lead them astray, which could potentially result in inferior quality?” It is a point echoed by Jan Rose, creative director of Toogood, who has developed the bulk of Potato Head’s textiles. “We talked a lot about the idea of designing for the island, and producing on the island,” he says. “It is all produced locally, so we’re really designing within the context of local manufacturers and within the materiality of Bali.” I guess the pertinent thing to take away from all that is to recognise that this materiality is now a mixture of Bali’s indigenous materials and the waste generated across the island. It’s a mongrel materiality that has shifted over time to encompass both the natural and synthetic. Plastic bottles, empty oil cans and styrofoam represent as much a part of Bali’s palette as ijuk or rattan – a fact brought home when even a short walk down the beach from Potato Head shows you Tetra Paks washing onto the shore, like horseshoe crabs returning to lay their plastic-coated paper eggs. “We need to find a way to weave between these two polarities and live with the discomfort and the comfort,” summarises Seetal Solanki, the founder of the Ma-tt-er design consultancy who is now helping the resort map Bali’s materials. “There’s recycled plastic on one side, which is indicative of human behaviour and how damaging that has been to Bali; then bamboo, rattan and teak on the other, which are native to the island. There’s this juxtaposition or contradiction that exists, but they somehow need to create harmony.” Part of that harmony is attempting to manage ratios: Potato Head, for instance, still generates more of certain types of waste than is required for the creation of objects and materials for the hotel. “A lot of things [in a hotel] are consumable – glasses break all the time,” says Lamb, who designed the resort’s glassware using empty beer bottles, “but the number of people drinking a beer every day exceeds the number of people needing a brand new drinking glass.” As such, Lamb is now consulting with Akili on the creation of a product range that could be retailed more widely. “The ambition is to achieve zero waste 64

and ensure that nothing is leaving in the form of waste, but only leaving in the form of a converted product,” Lamb says. “So this ongoing design programme has a view to commercialise, which is a bit of a horrible word, or share the story through products.” It is a bit of a horrible word, but then that’s the thing with Potato Head – it’s trying to improve an industry that is, if we’re honest, pretty horrible, but which is also unavoidable within Bali at present. “Bali will always be a tourism destination, and what we are trying to do is make sure that we move the industry towards a more sustainable future,” Akili summarises. “It is why we aim for regenerative hospitality. We want to encourage travellers to travel with the mindset of receiving and giving instead of just taking and consuming.” Well, I hope that works, because the resort has made impressive strides in setting up systems to manage its own footprint, but it’s also aware of the limitations of its approach. The resort, as it stands, predominantly speaks to self-styled expats and international tourists, for example, while engagement with the local community remains lower than its staff would like. “Some of [the desa] is quite intimidating,” Christanto acknowledges, which is probably inevitable when you’re operating a luxury resort with massive OMA architecture. The desa has a cultural programme that welcomes both international and local dancers musicians and artists, but day-to-day engagement could be higher. “We’ve approached the head of the surrounding village, Petitenget, and asked him to invite all the families around the area to come and see what we’re doing, because of course there’s a barrier to entry,” Christanto says. “We need to approach them and not the other way around.” Christanto and her team are running free sustainability workshops to try and aid this outreach programme, with visiting designers also leading programmes while they’re onsite. “But we know that moving forward, we cannot only focus on ourselves,” Christanto adds. “We have guests coming here on long-haul flights, so we need to offset the carbon too. We’re having conversations with local initiatives about how we can work

together. Maybe we could ask guests to donate an amount of money to offset their travel, which is something we’re thinking about moving forward.” This notion of restitution and restoration is not a bad idea, and it’s one that’s partially encoded in the resort’s name. “You know what ‘Potato Head’ means, right?” OMA’s David Gianotten asks me when we speak over Zoom, inadvertently highlighting the fact that I didn’t bother asking anyone the entire time I was in Bali. I flail for a bit, so he puts me out of my misery. “It’s what the Indonesians called the Dutch colonists – white potato heads.” Which I hope leaves you feeling well prepared for going on holiday to Potato Head. We can probably all agree that I’ve reviewed the heck out of it and, if you’re a beach resort person, you’ll have a ball. If you’re not a beach resort person, perhaps it will make you reflect

on tourism’s impact on the places in which it holds sway. “Because this is really a discussion about privilege,” notes Solanki, who I’m roping in to write my conclusion for me. “So who is benefiting from tourism? Is everybody winning? Because if everybody’s winning, there’s no problem. But if everybody’s winning, then that means a little piece needs to go to the craftspeople; a little piece needs to go back to the island to regenerate it in some way; and a little piece needs to go to the people working in the hotels. It’s about care and respect and it’s also about setting up the infrastructure, because I really want this to work for the Balinese people. That, for me, is the big win.” Happy holidays everyone! Oli Stratford is the editor-in-chief of Disegno and Design Reviewed.

ENTER THE WASHING MACHINE Words Sanjana Varghese

Images courtesy of Disegno.

Interface

TikTok

For a while last year, when I was overwhelmed with an endless to-do list and not enough time in the day to do it (just like everyone else), I would go on Instagram Reels in the Explore section of my app. I started to do it in the mornings, before I even put my glasses on, watching random videos from people I’d never met. I referred to this as “reel time” when I talked about it to my friends. Before long, my flatmate and I, trying to motivate each other to get work done, would take each other’s phones away, then wordlessly hand them back on a break, with the implicit understanding that we were entering reel time for five blissful minutes. I understand how seductive an interface can be – if Instagram had specifically asked me whether I wanted to watch videos of strangers doing dances or saying hyper-specific things about attachment styles, I would have navigated away. But presenting the option as part of a puzzle – the mosaic of Instagram’s Explore page usually features a reel, moving in the corner – makes me want to press play, even when I know that half of the time it’ll just turn up drivel I don’t understand. By contrast, TikTok is something I’ve resisted using for a long time. The majority of the TikToks I’ve seen have been shown to me on someone else’s phone or through videos cross-posted onto Instagram. But for this article, I wanted to experience it myself and see if the smooth hollows of my already internet-addled brain could become smoother still. Despite my preconceptions of TikTok, in practice it was a blank slate – somewhere I’d never been before on the internet. I was excited, embarrassingly so; I told my friends and the majority of them expressed surprise that I didn’t already have it.1 “Perhaps no social media embodies our daydreams more fully than TikTok,” Leslie Jamison writes in a 2022 essay for Astra Magazine. “People act out their daydreams, make fun of themselves daydreaming, reproduce the interiors of their daydreams as absurd picaresque microdramas: endless food without calories, fantasies of flight.” The TikTok basics: the first page after you sign up prompts you to choose your interests. I had options such as Oddly Satisfying, DIY & Home, and Art. The first video was of three cats, all swaying to a sped-up version of 50 Cent’s ‘In da Club’. Videos are short, snappy and easy to understand; often based on a trending audio or meme format; and presented with a plethora of tags in the caption, with the option to search for more of the same if you like what you see. The widest possible range of videos, viewed in such a short amount of time (navigated through a simple swiping up motion), should 1

“You spend so much time sending me dumb videos already,” said one.

have put me off, but it worked. Unlike other social media – such as Facebook or Instagram – you get fed a random range of videos until the algorithm narrows down what niches you’re interested in, as opposed to seeing content from people in your in-app social network. In September 2022, executives at TikTok revealed that this was (understandably) a core part of how their app has been designed. The first eight videos that you’re shown feature different music, trending topics, and users – and the app iterates from there. The last time TikTok revealed details about its algorithm was in 2020 – Axios reported that the platform seeks to gain “enough data about the user” to “map a user’s preferences in relation to similar users and group them into ‘clusters’. Simultaneously, it also groups videos into ‘clusters’ based on similar themes, like ‘basketball’ or ‘bunnies’.” Through machine-learning technology, TikTok’s algorithm then “serves videos to users based on their proximity to other clusters of users and content that they like.” Consuming an endless stream of disjointed, hyper-personalised clips like this definitely had an effect on both my brain and my willpower. The first thing I noticed is that I couldn’t see the time on my phone anymore, because the interface took up the whole of my screen. The second thing I noticed was that at least 20 minutes had passed since I signed up. My opening minutes on the app were both hypnotic and incredibly annoying. The first five videos on my For You page were, in quick succession: a teacher-student shuffle battle; some guy playing the video game Skate 3 and emphatically saying into a podcast mic, “I just got called out”; a teenage boy doing a POV of when your mom calls your name (I don’t think that’s what POV means, but that’s neither here nor there); a targeted ad for the Swarovski Calendar that had apparently been reduced from £90 to £24, which two earnest looking 15-year-olds were nodding about; and a posh boy imitating other posh boys, based on which university in the UK you went to. Every tenth video I got was an invitation to join a Live, which I can only describe as some random, ordinary person talking to the camera. I steered clear of these. Every other few videos presented a Stitch – a video in which a user can piggyback off the opening clip of another’s. You will rarely see two videos from the same person in quick succession, and videos often cap out at 30 seconds. Sound on TikTok becomes a meme too. Sped up, chipmunk-y versions of popular songs (right now, it’s Steve Lacy’s ‘Bad Habit’) are as

much of a way to navigate the app as the tags themselves. In May 2022, Sonia Rao at The Washington Post wrote about how pop musicians took to TikTok to publicise how they were being asked to manufacture viral moments on the platform. “Months ago, Charli XCX mentioned her label asking her ‘to make my 8th tiktok of the week,’” Rao wrote. “In March, Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine posted a video singing a cappella because ‘the labels are begging me for ‘lo fi TikToks.’’ In a since-deleted post, FKA twigs said she ‘got told off today for not making enough effort.’”2 There are other forms of sonic markers on TikTok too, such as the robotic female voice that reads out text on screen, which I’ve heard too many times to count. This retrofitting of an existing accessibility tool to aid content creation seems to be a Gen Z invention – something about the voice’s uncanniness is hard to miss and it also feels context agnostic, making it quick and easy to replicate. Even though the audience most commonly associated with TikTok are teenagers, or at least people in their late teens, its influence seems to have rippled outwards. TikTok’s chokehold on monetisable authenticity is part of its seeming appeal, even as this has looped back in on itself with corporations now spending thousands of dollars to create something low effort in order to look authentic. All you can post on the app is videos, meaning that users film and produce daily vlogs, or else videos about making a certain meal or a specific workout. It means that a greater range of content has made its way onto the app through a purely visual format (unlike Instagram, for instance, where you may see mostly captions or replies, or even YouTube, where descriptions can be extensive and accompanied by tons of links). Early on in my TikTok experience, I wondered how long it would be before the app showed me things I was actually interested in seeing. But I found it mind-numbingly easy to navigate – the haptics needed no explanation because I’ve both seen other people use it, and seen other apps mimic its swipe, tap, tap, tap, swipe, tap, functions. I’m not the first person to say this and I won’t be the last, but it was wild how quickly I felt the algorithm adapting to me. I’m a 25-year-old woman in a major city, and it seemed to cotton on quickly to the kind of content I was interested in (vegetarian recipes, day-in-the-life blogs,3 politics explainers) but it never managed to fully satisfy the itch. I felt myself being sucked in, constantly swiping up, even after a string of videos that I knew I didn’t like, the algorithm morphing gradually to deliver content that kept me coming back. 2 3

Ironically, these videos gained millions of views, leading some to ask whether it was all a publicity stunt. Semi-ironically.

I had thought that getting on TikTok would help me pinpoint trends or phrases or memes earlier in their trend cycle, but it felt more like being in a washing machine, unsure of what came first and what was coming next and when the cycle would stop. Rebecca Jennings at Vox has written about TikTok outstripping Instagram or Pinterest to become the dominant platform to forecast emerging trends, brands, clothes or even micro-trends (like a subsection of a trend, often even more fleeting). “While Tumblr and Pinterest were tools for curating inspiration to define and explore one’s personal aesthetic, Instagram was meant for performing it,” Jennings says. “TikTok, however, combines both in a single app.” Trends materialise and coalesce from TikTok to the street and back again, creating a kind of accelerating feedback loop that feeds into consumer culture. “Together, with the help of the supercharged TikTok algorithm that blasts viral content to millions of users within hours or days,” she says, “these videos shape what mainstream culture considers stylish, which therefore can affect what we choose to wear ourselves.” Overwhelmingly, what TikTok seems to prioritise – or at least what it enables – is a proliferation of thousands of micro-trends, endlessly iterating and re-iterating in a version of what trend forecaster Ayesha Siddiqi calls “aesthetic submarkets”; essentially online microgenres. The visual language of TikTok lends itself to increasingly hyper-specific niches. These are given signifiers that fall into the noun-core pattern (cottagecore, goblincore, fairycore), and are accompanied by products that you too can buy to fit into the genre – a kind of headband, or sports bra, or mug, or keyboard, or pair of shoes. If TikTok can squeeze money out of something as nebulous as y2k fashion,4 it can squeeze even more out of subdivisions such as y2k fairycore and y2k gorpcore. Every niche is content that can be monetised, and every bit of content can be turned into a niche for monetisation. TikTok’s Creator Fund, for example, pays users when they get 100,000 views in the previous 30 days, although this is further dependent on their precise content and number of followers – the app notes that it is not only the number of views that it accounts for, but also “the authenticity of those views [and] the level of engagement on the content”. Influencers may also have deals with specific brands that will pay them thousands of dollars to post videos featuring their product – usually something that looks authentic.5 But while branded content exists on TikTok, it proliferates slightly differently than it does on other platforms. 4 5

y2k fashion includes things such as butterfly motifs, low-rise denim jeans and rhinestoned velour tracksuits. Rather than a highly stylised photoshoot featuring a product, creators will post a day-in-the-life video in which they host a dinner party where all of the products used happen to be from a particular brand. Recent regulations mean that influencers now have to disclose when they are being paid, but there are still workarounds.

As John Thornhill of the Financial Times explains, “AI-trained algorithms promote content to those on the platform with similar interests, rather than it being spread via networks of followers. In theory at least, the app allows more ‘nobodies’ to become somebodies.” This structure means that anyone, in theory, could become a part of that Creator Fund or start to slowly make a living from viral content – all it takes is for one or two videos to gain traction. For a long time, American social media companies had cornered the market on the attention economy and everything that spawned from it. As such, TikTok, which was founded in 2016 by Chinese company Bytedance and took off globally a year later, has sparked geopolitical consternation in the United States over what access to the app’s 1-billion-strong global user base the Chinese government may have. In July 2022, US Senators Mark Warner and Marco Rubio called for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to open an investigation into the app. “TikTok, their parent company ByteDance, and other China-based tech companies are required by Chinese law to share their information with the Communist party,” Warner said. “Allowing access to American data, down to biometrics such as face prints and voiceprints, poses a great risk to not only individual privacy but to national security.” In the second half of 2022, the typical American TikTok user spent an average of 82 minutes on the app per day, reported to be twice as long as the time they spent on Facebook or Instagram. It’s not surprising that every app wants to look like TikTok. Part of its success can be put down to its slot-machine interface, which makes it hypnotically easy to scroll what’s happening on the internet without ever leaving the app. This interface has a bearing on the way that information is passed around, what becomes prioritised and what becomes devalued. You don’t see consecutive posts from a person unless you go on their feed, and the actual videos that you see can range drastically in production value and content, even within a one-minute span. In the midst of this runaway success, TikTok has run afoul of the same murky practices as other platforms. A 2022 investigation by TIME and the Bureau for Investigative Journalism found that poorly paid microworkers in Colombia and other countries in Latin America were being tasked with monitoring the platform for offensive and violent content. Inevitably, they were failing to keep up with the scale and immensity of the content they face, with one worker listing the subjects he is regularly expected to sift through as “[murder], suicide, pedophilic [sic], pornographic content, accidents, cannibalism.” The same worries about

addiction that circulated around Facebook and Snapchat have now begun to find their way into lawsuits against TikTok. A €1.4bn legal action is currently in the Dutch courts, having been brought by parents concerned over the scale of TikTok’s data collection and the proliferation of risky challenges being attempted by users and promoted across the app.6 Yet every social media app, wishing to appeal to younger demographics, seems to be attempting to emulate TikTok. Facebook’s pivot to video may have come several years before TikTok was founded in 2016, but Instagram’s Reels feature is a clear imitation, with users often just reposting TikToks onto their profiles to boost engagement. On Twitter, generic popular accounts increasingly post screenshots of TikToks with no context, so the moving image becomes static again. It reminds me of what artist Hito Steyerl calls “poor images”: images stripped from their context that circulate until they’re a low-resolution version of their original; “ghost” images that have been “squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution”. As TikTok has grown, it’s transformed from just being a place where kids spend their time and money. A study by the Pew Research Center found that 26 per cent of American adults under 30 regularly get their news from TikTok, although the total number of American adults that do so is around 10 per cent. TikTok actively encourages this, with journalists and newsrooms increasingly maintaining strong presences on the app.7 If you watch one clip about a breaking news story – say, the Twitter takeover by Elon Musk – you can go as deep as you want, watching more and more. But misinformation on the app is rife, as are the now fairly standard stories about bad faith actors on other apps. “Similar to both its meaning in chemistry and to the meaning of ‘language,’ ‘interfaces’ are the point of juncture between different bodies, hardware, software, users, and what they connect to or are part of,” write Matthew Fuller and Florian Cramer in the 2008 book Software Studies: A Lexicon. With TikTok, I felt this weighty, nodal network of bodies, hardware, software, users, and connections wrapping itself around me. I felt overwhelmed, and I felt time compressing. The app was jarring, but I found myself picking it up time and time again while waiting in line for the self checkout, or on the bus for ten minutes. Memes and clips of videos that I’ve both never seen before and seen too many times proliferated on my screen, 6 7

The Blackout Challenge, for example, is alleged to challenge people to suffocate themselves until they pass out. Planet Money’s Jack Corbett, for example, is fluent in the vernacular of TikTok, and journalists such as Sophia Smith Galer use it as their primary way to disseminate breaking news and underreported stories.

alongside explainers of what interest rate rises actually mean, or why COP27 is a cop-out. Understandably, TikTok is a microcosm of the internet – I found myself on the app, typing in “fall soup recipe”, instead of searching through pages on Google or the NYT Cooking app, a functionality that the New York Times reporter Kalley Huang has observed means that TikTok is not just a social media platform, but “a search engine, too”. Rather than navigating through unusable web pages with broken links – or articles behind paywalls – I was unnerved at how quickly the app picked up on things I didn’t know I was interested in (crispy tofu, low-effort pilates, a sheep farmer in Wales) and turned it back around on me: how much it had spread its tentacles through the motions I was used to doing. In her essay for Astra, Jamison says: “Watching this TikTok, even just reading its caption, is like reading the CliffsNotes version of my deepest desires, outsourced to the internet.” People often compare TikTok and Instagram to each other, but the experience felt more like using a dating app. Inevitably, as you stare down the grid, you begin to circulate through the same questions: will the thing after this be better than what I’m currently looking at? Do I have to interact with it? How much time do I have to spend on this before this gives me what I want – and how much longer until this app can tell me what I want? Sanjana Varghese is a reporter and visual researcher based in London.

READING BETWEEN THE SIGNS Words Khorshed Deboo

Image courtesy of Khorshed Deboo.

Policy Section 36 (A) of the Maharashtra Shops and Establishments Act

A stroll in the Fort area in the southern part of Mumbai is an exercise in engaging one’s visual, aural and olfactory senses. Your inclination to wander around at will on a weekday is driven by the frenzied pedestrian movement and the onslaught of traffic. This largely commercial district contains banks, law firms, fuss-free lunch establishments, tea stalls, streetside hawkers, shops – from hole-in-the-wall kiranas (grocery shops) to international couture labels – and a few longstanding places of worship that are tucked away in its labyrinthine lanes. It is named after the erstwhile fort walls that were built by the British East India Company in 1716, and demolished during the 1860s. While these ramparts are long gone, the vast swathe where the fort once stood is now occupied by a number of historic buildings in varying architectural styles, as well as landmarks and streets that are often still referred to by the names that existed prior to the formal nomenclature being tinkered with by the city’s municipal authorities over the last few decades. I have walked through these streets for as long as I have lived in Bombay (as the city was called until 1996, when it was officially changed to “Mumbai”). Over the last three decades, familiar sights have conjured a mental map that is imprinted in my head, while unfamiliar ones await their entrenchment in my mind’s eye. Among the many elements that make up the visual fabric of the cityscape, signage is one that not only serves the dual purpose of communication and publicity, but is also capable of revealing stories and secrets if one peels back the layers. They are a defining part of the city’s character. While in Fort, stand on the axis of the Horniman Circle Gardens to face a brick-red building that houses the premises of the oldest-running newspaper in Asia, The Mumbai Samachar. Across the building’s facade, “The Bombay Samachar (Pvt.) Ltd.” is rendered in black metal lettering, blending English and Gujarati. Today, this metal signage sits cheek-by-jowl with a hand-painted sign in Marathi, the most widely spoken language in

the state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital. It asserts “मुंबई समाचार” (Mumbai Samachar), written in the Devanagari script that runs from left to right, and which is characterised by long, horizontal strokes at the tops of the letters, usually joined to form a continuous line. Turn right onto Cawasji Patel Street, punctuated by stationery and Xerox shops, and you arrive at a coral-hued building with wrought-iron railings that houses Lilson Tailors, whose English signage – deft, flat brushstrokes in red – has now made way for a mundane, screen-printed one in Marathi. The old sign in the Roman script still exists, but it is no longer prominent enough rues the store’s proprietor, whom I seem to have awakened from his postprandial torpor with my questions. A few hundred metres away on the corner of Gunbow Street stands the Art Deco-style Hornby View, where Ideal Corner – doling out plates of fragrant mutton sali boti and caramel custard for more than 30 years – occupies the ground level. The Parsi eatery’s frontage has a haphazardly suspended flex banner in Marathi, almost overshadowing the elegantly hand-painted, cursive-lettered English signage underneath. Amble past meandering lanes housing old buildings whose pitched roofs are covered with red Mangalore tiles and you take in the aromas of Kerala-style ghee roast wafting from the unassuming Rahmaniya hotel. Here, the round, smooth-edged flourishes of the ligature-heavy Malayalam signage has been relegated to a corner. As summer tightened its tentacles over the city earlier this year, a transformation was underway – a number of storefronts across Mumbai did away with their extant signage, replacing it with makeshift signs announcing their names in Marathi. What used to be a visually multilingual urban landscape is now stripped of its diversity. What’s wrong with having signage in Marathi, one may ask; it is the official language of Maharashtra, after all. Moreover, when the city is dealing with deadly potholes, collapsing overbridges, and a lack of potable water and affordable housing, how can 75

one lament the disappearance of aesthetically pleasing signboards? In March 2022, the Maharashtra government amended Section 36 (A) of the Maharashtra Shops and Establishments (Regulations of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act. As a result, the use of Marathi-language signboards using the Devanagari script, with a font size no smaller than that of any other language employed in the sign, is now mandatory for all commercial establishments. Those failing to conform, Mumbai’s governing Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) decreed, would be fined a penalty of rupees 1 lakh (roughly £1,000). The amendment applies to every commercial unit in the state, from tiny family-run grocery shops, through to international fashion and luxury heavyweights. While the rule warranting the use of Marathi on signage has been in place since 2017, the March amendment, cleared by the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly, added the restriction that the Marathi typeface has to be the most prominent language on all facades. Thereafter, in April this year, the BMC issued a notice that mandated all establishments across the state to change their principal signage to Marathi by 15 May. This move was quickly met by opposition from the traders’ and retailers’ associations in Mumbai, following which the deadline to install the signage was extended twice, first to June and then to September. Most shop owners felt hamstrung by the decision, a situation not helped by the ambiguity of official communication around the amendment and government threats in the form of hefty penalties. “This thoughtless compulsion has led to the loss of several historic signboards in the city, some of which were multilingual themselves, in terms of the scripts used,” says Simin Patel, city historian and founder of Bombaywalla, a digital platform chronicling Mumbai’s structures. “They reflected the original owners’ and customers’ community base, the areas of specialisation, the period of the shops’ establishment and the typefaces that were then in fashion.” For Patel, the diversity and particularity 76

of neighbourhood signboards – materials and typefaces that have endured for close to a century – are fast disappearing. One can rarely find hand-painted signboards any more, or letters crafted out of wood or metal, but these were once telling as to demographics across the city. “Through the signboards in the locality of Girgaum, for example, the clientele was largely Maharashtrian and Gujarati, whereas in Bhuleshwar and Kalbadevi, there was a predominance of Gujarati and Hindi languages.” Patel says. “In areas such as Colaba, signboards were just in English.” For a city that has seen waves of migrations over the centuries, Mumbai is bound by – and brimming with – a babel of languages and dialects from across the country, and a potpourri of invented lingos, too. The cosmopolitan nature of the city’s inhabitants means that the social structure of a certain neighbourhood had to be kept in mind while designing signboards, contributing to the larger integration of design within the city. “Lots of old, hand-painted signs in the Roman script had so much character, and have been replaced with poorly designed ones in Marathi,” says Tanya George, a Mumbaibased type designer, typographer and design educator. As part of her work, George leads Typewalks, where locals and tourists alike can sign up for a guided walk of Mumbai’s neighbourhoods, with a focus on acquainting people with the city’s varying signs. “In cases where there were smaller signs in Devanagari, we’ve lost examples of hand-painted solutions that newer designers could learn from. This, in some way, is an irreplaceable resource.” Lokesh Karekar, a visual artist and founder of design and illustration practice Locopopo Studio, thinks otherwise, however. “I don’t think this will affect the tangible heritage of multilingual signboards,” he says. “In fact, it will encourage establishments to use more regional type as signage.” Following the amendment, the Federation of Retail Traders Welfare Association (FRWTA) petitioned against it in the Bombay High Court. After the High Court rejected its plea,

the association approached the Supreme Court of India. The FRTWA submitted that the adoption of Marathi by the state was for official purposes and that its mandatory usage could not be forced upon individuals. It also stated that since Article 19 of the Constitution of India gives every citizen the right to freedom of expression – in terms of mode and medium

to shop owners whose reactions fall across the spectrum – from ‘annoyed that they have to pay for a new sign,’ to ‘indifferent about the old ones,’ to ‘excited about a brand-new sign,’” she tells me. “Mumbai’s constant, dynamic migrant population also means that someone’s loss might be another’s gain.” According to Karekar, however, the current use of flex

A hair salon in Colaba (image courtesy of Khorshed Deboo).

– the state could not dictate in what language a signboard must be displayed. What does the amendment mean for shop owners and the logistical challenges they’ve had to face? Prashant Shirole runs a photocopying shop in the Byculla locale. In business for the last three decades, he got his signage redesigned to Marathi in October. For Shirole, this was a cumbersome, expensive process, exacerbating the fact that businesses are still recovering from losses faced during two years of pandemic-induced lockdowns. He believes that arbitrary decisions by the government have resulted in a template-like emergence of signboards. “I don’t disagree with the new rule, but the government should make it permanent once and for all, instead of being fickle,” he says. “The signage is the face of a business, and the patchwork we’ve done owing to changing deadlines looks shoddy.” It’s one reaction amongst many, which is something George can attest to. “I’ve spoken

banners or vinyl text is only temporary. “I think it is a makeshift solution by most shop owners to be safe from the fine,” he says. “It’s transitory and establishments will come up with creative – and hopefully aesthetic – signages.” By early October, officials from the BMC visited shops across the city to check whether they had installed Marathi signboards, and about 75 per cent had complied, according to a report published in the daily Mid-Day newspaper. As of 4 November, the Supreme Court has restrained the BMC by passing a temporary order stating that no action should be taken against retailers who had failed to put up signboards in Marathi. The question of language in Maharashtra politics touches a raw nerve; moreover, this is not the first time that the use of Marathi has been made mandatory by the state. In March 2022, for instance, the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly passed a bill aiming to make the use 77

of Marathi mandatory within the official work of local authorities. In April, Uddhav Thackarey, the former chief minister of the state, said that “[knowledge] of English is important. I don’t hate other languages, but I will not tolerate insult to Marathi. There is no need to hate other languages but there should not be encroachment by other languages

1966 by Thackarey’s father,1 driven by the agenda of safeguarding the interests of the sons of the soil, maintaining “Marathi pride” (or an attempt to impose Marathi on the non-Marathi-speaking citizens) by instilling fear among those who wouldn’t comply with their demands through the use of violence, threats or legal action. Shiv Sena first won the

English-language signage in Mumbai (image courtesy of Khorshed Deboo).

too.” A look into Maharashtra’s political and administrative past reveals a history of language- and identity-based politics, using (or rather, misusing) Marathi as a means to consolidate nativist votes. The regional political party Shiv Sena was established in 78

BMC elections in 1985 and has held the reins of the civic body for five consecutive terms since 1997. Furthermore, its alliance with the 1

Uddhav Thackarey has led Shiv Sena since 2004.

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 1995 gave the party power in the Maharashtra Assembly. Although it was voted out in 1999, Shiva Sena returned to power in 2014. Over the decades, the party has become notorious for issuing warnings to shops in Mumbai to change their signboards from English to Marathi. Those who didn’t pay heed had their shops vandalised by party workers. After cracks between Shiv Sena and the BJP began to appear from early 2019, the two formally parted ways in November of that year, with Shiv Sena subsequently forming a coalition government with the Indian National Congress (INC) and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) called the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA). Today, even though Shiv Sena divided into two opposing factions in June 2022 after a group of rebels walked out from Thackarey’s cabinet to form a new party and eventually a new government, the Marathi-only diktat hasn’t deterred the current government’s push for Marathi signboards as a bid to consolidate the Marathi vote bank in the run-up to forthcoming municipal elections. Moreover, it is important to note that the amendment was made while Thackarey’s government was still in power. The design community in India seems to be divided on the amendment. Since Marathi is the local language of Maharashtra, Karekar feels that the shift is more about ensuring the presence of the language of the land, rather than imposing anything upon anyone. “Marathi has a rich cultural legacy, extending to literature and theatre,” he says. “The intention is to celebrate and preserve the Marathi language and Devanagari script, which is otherwise waning from public appearance.” George, meanwhile, feels conflicted about the revision. “While I dislike the identity politics that lies at the heart of it, the outcome makes spaces more accessible,” she says. “With establishments requiring prominently placed Marathi signs, spaces open up to a wider public. It might take away from a shop owner the choice of what kind of buyer they want to welcome. However, one could also see it as an invitation extended to those with purchasing power,

but who might have found English names on storefronts intimidating.” George believes the move will make Mumbai more inclusive for those unable to read whatever languages may have previously made up the urban landscape, given that Marathi is the most widely spoken language. It is also the language used for administrative matters and that which is typically preferred by locals. “It lets delivery persons navigate a little more easily, or helps people pronounce foreign names, given the phonetic nature of Devanagari,” she explains. “While there are numerous benefits, it’s just unfortunate that it’s not those benefits that have driven the amendment. If I had my way, we would have more languages to reflect the diverse backgrounds of the city’s inhabitants, but that’s probably wishful thinking.” Typographic decisions such as the curvature of the loop of a letter, the placement of dots and diacritics, or how well the shapes of consonant ligatures render when positioned side by side, all determine what the final outcome of signage in Marathi may be. “I was surprisingly happy to see the new well-executed signages in the Devanagari script, in the case of global brands such as Starbucks, Diesel, Superdry and Hugo Boss,” says Karekar. “It will be interesting to observe how brands adopt the Devanagari type as their main signage.” For Prathamesh Amberkar, however, the third-generation owner of Innova Signage (previously Vijaya Arts) in Fort, the amendment has not particularly translated into a jump in orders. “Even though the municipal authorities keep threatening establishments with fines, they are slow to act upon it,” he says. “Also, the deadline for changing signboards to Marathi has kept getting extended since May, and shop-owners developed a wait-and-watch approach.” Amberkar’s grandfather started the business close to 60 years ago, making hand-painted boards using cut-out letters. “Today, there are plenty of options available in terms of material technology,” Amberkar adds. “A lot of establishments gravitate towards the use of stainless steel or aluminium or even acrylic – they are more durable as opposed to flex or 79

neon-backlit LEDs.” While there are an emerging number of design agencies and independent designers experimenting with Indian letterforms, George feels that the botched-up flex banners have more to do with typesetting technologies that haven’t caught up to support Indian scripts at large. “It’s quite an effort to type in Devanagari and the designer needs to be familiar with the many facets of this process,” she says. “In the past, the job was handled deftly by sign painters who created custom signs using their skills. But since printing on flex is cheaper, and acrylic letters are bound to survive more monsoons than paint on a board ever will, it has become hard to find people who can afford to practise it or want to take it up.” There is, she argues, significant room for greater education. “It would have been wonderful to see training programmes to design signs for Indian scripts go hand in hand with the amendment, or it being tied with a programme benefitting those who might already be practising it,” she says. At a literature festival held in Mumbai in November 2022, Jerry Pinto – one of my favourite novelists – stated: “At best, we can only negotiate with a city, not necessarily claim it fully.” This perhaps holds true for decisions upheld by government agencies,

and in which citizens do not particularly have a say. Reigniting hope for the visual identity of Mumbai may be a far-fetched thought, but documenting its structures and their stories before they come undone is the least we can do. While there is a perceptible loss of older signages, for example, George says that she is grateful for the people and social media accounts who have been documenting them. “My own Typewalks, in some ways, try to build appreciation for signage,” she says, “getting people to notice and appreciate the skill [involved in their creation].” The temporary signboards may have added to the visual chaos of Mumbai, but do we only really notice things when they’re gone? The older signboards were ubiquitous all this while, hiding in plain sight. “While it’s still early stages, I hope for designers creating identities to think about the Indian language logos – in this case, Marathi – from the get-go rather than it being an afterthought,” George says sanguinely. “I’m hopeful that in the coming years, designs will improve as they will be competing for attention, leading to more readable solutions than the ones we see today.” Khorshed Deboo is an independent writer and editor living in Bombay.

A HOME IS NOT ALWAYS A HOUSE Words Matthew Turner

Image courtesy of Map Project Office.

Space

The Elizabeth line carriage

It’s 2014, 3am, and someone is trying to break through the door into my berth as the train progresses leisurely through Hungary. I’m glad I took a stranger’s advice to buy a strong bike lock for the door. 2016, I’m teaching in Norway and take a trip one weekend on the Bergen Line, northern Europe’s highest railway. The train emerges from a tunnel into Finse station (the highest point on the route at 1,222m above sea level) and the windows are suddenly covered with snow, which I’ll find out later is the fallout from a freak storm and avalanche. We are dug out, put on coaches and escorted over the mountains by snow ploughs like it’s any other day. My friend meets me in Oslo 10 hours after I should have arrived and explains that the 7.30am, the train I was originally supposed to catch, is still fully engulfed. On the way back from Kazakhstan in 2018 my flight is delayed and I have to layover in Kiev, where I get lost in the snow looking for my hotel and take refuge in the nearest metro station. I descend for what seems like hours onto the deepest metro platform in the world. I’ve sat, reclined and dozed on trains all over the world whilst looking vacantly out of the window, and while they may have been in different countries, the carriage interiors all have their likenesses. The way their windows, and the visual detritus around them, frame different landscapes in similar ways lends some homogeneity to the view. To the extent that once, while riding a train through Eskişehir in Anatolia, I thought for a moment I was passing some sleepy Scandinavian town. However, there is one train network that, to me, is completely unique and resists all attempts to find a parallel. It seems a bit of a boring choice since it’s the one I use every day, but in both carriage design and atmosphere the London Underground network is the one I miss most when I’m away, to the point that I now associate its musty smell, which I once thought repulsive, with a sense of home. When I first visited London, I approached the gates of the Tube at Victoria station and, disturbed by the rush of people coming toward me, decided to turn back and walk instead. Getting used to riding the Tube is a right of passage and acquiring an affection for its different smells is achieved only gradually. To my mind, it’s the most varied 250 miles of train track in the world. And people behave on it in ways I’ve not seen on any other train. Since I moved to London in 2011 I’ve witnessed: the cutting of toenails; a full manicure (Morden to Highgate); the scraping of dead skin from the heel of a foot; tea being drunk from real mugs rather than travel

mugs. There have been couples breaking up, getting together, and those enjoying a film while in each other’s arms. I’ve seen a woman using the draft from the window between carriages to dry her hair, and countless people at the peak of rush hour delicately and accurately applying makeup to their eyes as the train jolts and sways. More usual than these examples, without the distractions of the internet, people read, listen to music and bravely sleep while in the company of strangers. People often have a favoured carriage they get on every day, and perhaps also a preferred seat. I may have seen these things purely because I’ve spent so long sitting on the Tube’s dusty seats. But what marks the Tube out from other trains is that, due to the imbalance of work and life in the city, people treat the London Underground as an extension of their homes, using it to complete their morning rituals on the way to work, and in the evenings to get some extra time unwinding before bed. On other trains the prevailing atmosphere is one of patient anticipation of reaching a destination. On the Tube, people are comfortable doing private rituals in a public space; they seem as if they feel completely at home. It’s more than a pause between two places, it’s a momentary dwelling stretching between people’s actual homes and their places of work and play. It may seem strange to see a train carriage as an interior, and even more so as a home. But the home can blur into public places. In her book, Strayed Homes: Cultural Histories of the Domestic in Public, Edwina Attlee extends the domain of the places we call home to include all the places we use to order and maintain ourselves, rest and sit down for a while. “The soap-dispensing machine stands in an unmanned launderette,” she writes. “It enables me to wash my clothes. The sleeper train, hideously uncomfortable though it is, enables me to rest as I travel. And the experience of these spaces cements the idea that home, the container of housework and of rest, can stray.” Greasy spoons, pubs and fire escapes are also included. Attlee cites François Dallegret’s illustrations for Reyner Banham’s 1965 article ‘A House is Not a Home’ as more speculative examples of the roving dwelling and, with their multiplying pipes, pistons and moving parts, these houses could be easily mistaken for train carriages. Banham’s vision for a “transportable standard of living package” that was “uprooted from its dependency on static utilities” for an array of permanently mobile homes, was one of those ideas that already existed in the form of the train, albeit in more fleeting and subtle form. Perhaps the Tube is hard to see in

this way for some, but I’m sure even those who hate it have welcomed its balmy warmth on rainy and dark winter evenings. It’s with this notion of how the home can stray that I first took a trip on the Elizabeth line, which partially opened in summer 2022 and now stretches more than 100km from Reading and Heathrow in the west, through central tunnels and across to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east –

The Elizabeth line seating, designed by Wallace Sewell (image courtesy of Map Project Office).

connecting west to east and city to country. The tunnel I descend into from Tottenham Court Road Station is much larger than any of the others I’ve seen. While the line is obviously a new breed of light and bright transport interchange, there are still nods to the grids present in the Tube’s other walkways – the glazed tiles of the older lines, the iron and bolted panels used on the Jubilee line – only it’s all more curvy and fluid. A variety of architects have designed the Elizabeth line stations and this one is by Hawkins\Brown. The concrete panels from which its walkways have been constructed are solid at low level and perforated up high, lightening the material at the point at which it feels most oppressive on the Jubilee line. Here, there are no harsh corners and all surfaces blur into one. The platform, when I reach it, is both industrial and opulent, although there is less emphasis on the quasi-Victorian celebration of engineering that Roland Paoletti integrated into his design for the Jubilee line stations. These stations are now almost creepy in their dated futurism, while the approach to the Elizabeth line is less dystopian and feels more like a vast science lab.

While this will become subtler with age, right now the gleaming whiteness of everything hurts. Once on the platform, it’s hard to see the other end due to the space needing to be able to fit rolling stock that is just over 200m long. A vast strip-light emphasises the vanishing point plunging somewhere in the distance. The people on the platform seem miniature, as everything else has been oversized to match the larger scale. Massive circular chrome pendant lights hang from the ceiling – one instance of a circular motif that recurs across the tunnel’s form and the holes pressed into its cladding, and through to the Tube logo and the braille-like pattern of dots that covers the walls of the station. The similarity of all these elements means that Tottenham Court Road’s Elizabeth line station doesn’t have all the visual clutter that blights other, older stations, exacerbated by the infinite distractions of stressed people running around trying to catch trains. The new station is minimal, clean and airy, but almost disturbingly quiet, my ears being accustomed to the screech of the Northern line. The scale and hush of it all, however, makes waiting for the train seem special, like waiting for the monorail at an amusement park or a flight. When it arrives, it comes smoothly into the platform with a satisfying swoosh, and its doors open and close with similarly satisfying sounds. Inside, much like London Overground rolling stock, there is a clear view down the entire length of the train and, when travelling at quieter times of day, not being isolated in one carriage may feel safer with more people able to hear and see what is happening. The width of the carriage is generous and there is room under the seats for easier cleaning, and to store bags during busy periods. The strip lighting above defuses down the sides of the carriage, rather than glaring directly into your eyes if standing (if you’re tall like me, this usually feels like being at the dentist). Unlike on older lines, where the advertising banners are falling over each other, here there are gaps to avoid visually overwhelming sight-lines. The interior of the carriage is palatial and relaxing, matching the architecture of the platform so as to feel part of the same space. On a first glance, it’s seriously high spec, but without feeling corporate – a tricky balance to strike. The train’s interior has been created by industrial design studio Map Project Office, in collaboration with the practice’s founders Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby. Jon Hunter, head of design at Transport for London (TFL), describes selecting the studio because TFL wanted to take an

“architectural approach” rather than seeing it as yet another train. The designers, Hunter says, viewed it as a “space people can occupy”, asking the question: “What are the principles that people want in their own house?” While trains are usually designed with an emphasis on mechanical equipment that is then wrapped in plastic, giving them an odd and “gloopy” finish, Hunter explains that the Elizabeth line has a far neater interior with clean surfaces and lots of pleasing details. It has, he suggests, a “human scale”. Hearing him speak, Hunter has an almost obsessive passion for trains and he’s certainly refreshing in thinking of them in a way that feels reminiscent of the optimism around train travel in the 20s and 30s, expressing a love for 1938 Tube stock as “one of [his] favourite trains”. He says that he’s “fascinated that [trains have] been overlooked for so long, in terms of actually trying to get that experiential factor back in,” feeling that advances in this area have been made across boats, cars and planes, but that trains have remained static. It is something he wanted to put right for the Elizabeth line. To move train design forward, he explains, it needs to be treated more like architecture, reinstating the romance of the railways that was “definitely lost in the 50s and 60s”. Map has used the grandeur of rectilinear lines to emphasise the length of the train – strip lighting, ventilation grills and advertising boards stretching into the distance – while employing more organic geometry for the elements that people will directly interact with. Great care has been taken over the castings for the grab poles, which feature smooth, polished finishes reminiscent of those found on Bakerloo line trains, as well as the marshmallow curves of the standbacks that surround the doors. There is even a curve to the transition between different floor coverings, one acting as a welcome mat and the other indicating the main body of the train – a contrast that will prove useful for the partially sighted. The hanging straps, rather than cutting into your hand, are gummy and feel just right even after long periods of time. The enclosure itself has also been diffused through the use of dark tones at low level, midtones at eye level, and light tones for the ceiling, opening up towards a sky that isn’t there – a well-used architectural trick that I’ve never seen employed in trains before, making it feel less claustrophobic. As the train progresses quietly – almost too quietly – I think about how the rolling stock compares to other trains I’ve been on, and all their quirks and differences. London is a big place and explorers of the city often

concentrate on eccentric details to bring it down to size and make it more manageable. The way people talk about Tube trains is no different. I’ve heard people mention all manners of things and, interestingly, these are often not the facets that have consciously been designed, but more those that have come about by chance. Central line: the way the curved windows stretch the reflection of your face into something approaching Prince Charles. Northern line: changing branches at Oval can sometimes mean you get back on the train you’ve just alighted from. Bakerloo line: when the doors open, the fabric on the empty seats inhales and exhales dust. Victoria line: it’s fun to pretend you have phone signal when nobody else does. District line: you think it’s busy and stifling now, but imagine when people were allowed to smoke cigarettes and a cloud of smoke was released as the doors opened at each station. I’ve heard that the Northern line was supposed to go to Paris, and that UKIP once pledged to turn the Circle line back into a circle. These myths give the Tube personality, and perhaps make an inhospitable place feel something more akin to an insufferable but needed friend, or a place that we know really well – like a home. It’s a tricky design brief to bring elements of the home into a carriage while knowing, even with the space’s intimate scale, that you’re designing for a footfall of approximately 306,000 passengers each day. Although it may be a momentary home, a Tube carriage is one that, over the course of a day, surpasses the capacity of even the largest football stadium in the world. In response to these constraints, Map’s carriage is rugged and industrial, built to last, but also has moments of homely softness. There are the purple seats, for example, mirroring the new Elizabeth line model roundels, that offer a subtle sign of its connection with other TFL services. The seats’ moquette pattern was designed by UK-based textile studio Wallace Sewell, founded by Harriet Wallace-Jones and Emma Sewell, who were also behind the textile designs for the London Overground and the Central line. In interview, Sewell speaks about growing up with classic moquette designs by Misha Black’s Design Research Unit (the District line) and Marianne Straub (the Northern and Bakerloo lines) and associating them, even though she didn’t grow up in the city, with what she thought London felt like – to the extent that when the commission finally came around, she felt as though she had been “designing it for years”. While the design for the Elizabeth line is based on classic tube iconography, the studio has taken some influence from Black’s tiled District line patterns and

transformed it into a glitch that looks like a malfunctioning computer screen, all to capture something of London, or what it feels like to work there. Wallace-Jones describes the jacquard loom weaving process that creates moquette as being much like placing pixels of colour next to each other. The studio was limited to only four Pantone colours, using a Seuratesque pointillist technique to add tertiary tones for balance, which then creates a mysterious “fifth colour by mixing”. In the way the eye draws its colours and patterns together, each person may see them in their own unique way, appealing to many tastes rather than enforcing one fixed aesthetic. It’s engrossingly abstract, hypnotising even. Like a magic eye trick, the pattern means children, commuters and drunks can see whatever they want in it. At the moment, everything looks a bit too clean and fresh for it to be a genuine piece of the London Underground and, most importantly, it smells too good. Scott Barwick, however, who headed up the Map team’s work on the project, had the carriage’s future form in mind when designing, using the look, feel and nostalgia of the Bakerloo line to predict how the Elizabeth line carriages may look in years to come. In interview, Barwick describes how his team picked materials and construction methods that age well over time: stainless steel castings for grab poles, speckled rubber floors that will gain greater texture from intensive footfall, and high-density polyurethane armrests that will take on a shine with age. All materials, Barwick says, that “wear in, not wear out”. I’m on the Elizabeth line going to Woolwich and, at Liverpool Street, the whole train seems to empty out. I take this opportunity to walk down the carriage – it’s moving forward, but I’m going backwards, while facing forwards. I’ve never felt the need to do this on a train before. The view down the carriage is not uncannily repetitive as it is on the Circle line and others, it’s more a changing landscape or like looking down a street of varied shops. At the ends of the train, where I got on, the seats are grouped in forward and back facing transverse seating (otherwise known as “Chicagostyle”) extending across the carriage, whereas nearer the middle of the train the layout modulates to have seats that face inwards, as is familiar from most Tube carriages. Train manufacturer Bombardier, which was amalgamated into French manufacturer Alstom in 2021, designed the seating to allow for passenger flow, Barwick says. Those boarding at the Elizabeth line’s termini at Shenfield and Reading can enjoy the forward-facing seating of longer train journeys, and avoid the crush of people when the train hits central

London, while the classic Tube-style seating allows for greater capacity over comfort, suiting those who are only onboard for a short period. Taken as a whole, the train melds a suburban commuting experience with the urban. I hop off for a short period at Custom House station to see what it’s like and to see the train from more of a distance. The Elizabeth line stations become less grand as they leave the city – suggesting some kind of

The Elizabeth line train livery (image courtesy of Map Project Office).

hierarchy, which is a shame – but they have a scale that matches nicely with the types of settings you’re released into after your journey. I watch a train smoothly travelling east. Its livery is minimal stripes of blue along the bottom of the windows, black around them and white above, all finished

off with a parallelogram of purple on the driver’s cabin, angled backwards as an allusion to acceleration – a design whose intentions, Barwick says, were meta or postmodern, suggestive of how the landscape transforms as you move through it. When the train is stationary, it looks abstracted and reduced in complexity, as it would when travelling at great speed and viewed from a distance. Either way, it doesn’t hammily illustrate speed like the Great Western “dynamic lines” livery does, which looks like wavy car lights captured with long-exposure photography. Instead, it is genuinely what going fast feels like – an effect echoed once again in the textile designs. I get back on and the train is much busier, and most of the little details I noticed previously have become lost in the crowd. People are quietly dozing in the company of strangers, and I’m envious that I can’t be as trusting as them. Standing now, I can see two people sitting closely next to each other. Their elbows at first appear to be touching, but the armrest is split-level and two people can use it at the same time without nudging each other or encroaching on personal space. I think this detail sums up the success of the Elizabeth Line’s design: it gives people space and flexibility, and it doesn’t impose anything on you. This is truly unique on the Tube network. People from out of town often think it’s weird that strangers don’t speak to each other on the Tube, but little do they know that this unwritten rule is one of the saving graces of travelling in the city. The Elizabeth line design is the same. If you want to enjoy the experience there are lots of elements to choose from, and if you don’t – or if you’re drunk or having a bad day – the design won’t bother you and won’t impose anything either. As I reach Woolwich I think about how public services should work so well that they almost disappear. This fine balance between leaving an impression and leaving none at all, is the Elizabeth line train’s greatest achievement. Places that feel like this, which leave you alone when you need space and embrace you just the right amount when you need that, to me at least, can only ever be little bits of home. Yet there is still work to be done. Pubs, cafés, launderettes, and all these quasi homes have one thing in common: age. The Elizabeth line is still too young for someone to feel comfortable cutting their nails onboard. It has all the ingredients in place to be a Tube icon and a strayed home, but this will only come with time. Matthew Turner is a senior lecturer at Chelsea College of Arts and is currently finishing his first short story collection.

POPPERS ON MAIN Words Amelia Abraham

Image courtesy of Jerry Mills and Adam Zmith.

Phenomena

Mainstreaming of queer subcultures

If you have ever sniffed poppers, you will be familiar with the inimitable poppers high. The rush of blood to the head and the vacant but pleasing brain fog that the drugs bring about. After the high, often comes the headache. But poppers also have the effect of improving blood flow, relaxing the muscles and therefore easing penetration – hence their frequent use for increasing pleasure during sex. The high itself is a short one, frequently inspiring an instant urge to keep huffing, and you may have found yourself grabbing the small bottle of liquid for another intoxicating hit. Having first tried poppers as a teenager at the back of an English lesson, I was pleased to discover that poppers popped up here and there on the London queer club scene I came of age on in the early 2010s. I remember how at Hot Boy Dancing Spot, a club night held at the Dalston Superstore bar in east London, organisers lubricated proceedings by putting poppers in the smoke machine, their vapour gently emitting into the air. This wasn’t a new idea, but one borrowed from the vaults of queer history – rumour has it that New York’s Studio54 pulled the same trick in the 70s. At Heaven nightclub in London, punters reportedly dipped cigarette filters into poppers before smoking (something I have tried and would say is not for the lighthearted). If they lit the wrong end by accident, the cigarette would emit a fireball. While poppers use is not limited to gay communities, they have long been a staple of queer nightlife and sex cultures, as a recent book, Deep Sniff: A History of Poppers and Queer Futures by Adam Zmith, sets out. Poppers, aka amyl nitrite, Zmith explains, were first discovered in the 1840s by a French scientist named Antoine Jérôme Balard, who synthesised a combination of chemicals that expanded the blood vessels and therefore lowered blood pressure. In 1867, Scottish medical researcher Thomas Lauder Brunton became the first to use the substance as an effective treatment for angina. Shortly after, amyl nitrite became available in pharmacies, packaged within the casing of a glass ampule that could be snapped by an angina sufferer and inhaled to relieve 92

pain. How or when this crossed over from medication to recreation remains unknown, although – as Zmith tells me on Zoom – there is a rumour that it was a group of Harvard medical students in the 1930s who first experimented with poppers during sex. By the 1950s, records show that men who have sex with men had begun requesting poppers from pharmacies, with news of how they could enhance sexual experiences circulating by word of mouth. In the 1970s, the drug was actively marketed to this demographic in North America through adverts taken out in gay magazines, which often pictured cartoons of muscular men under brand names like TNT or Bolt. Zmith points our attention to an advert that depicts poppers exploding into a mushroom cloud reminiscent of Hiroshima – an ejaculatory image commingling sex and death. He cites one report putting the number of bottles of poppers sold in the US in 1977 at a staggering 4m, perhaps because the product had become associated with these adverts’ promise of “purity, power and potency”. When the AIDS crisis hit in the 1980s, however, poppers were erroneously associated by some with causing the spread of the virus. A period of police raids and criminalisation followed, with Zmith noting how, as a “sex drug”, poppers have, over the years, carried the double stigmatisation of sex and drugs. Just months after the publication of Deep Sniff, Zmith was contacted by Bompas & Parr, a London atelier of out-of-the-ordinary food and beverage experiences who describe themselves as “architects of taste”. Alongside their branded institutional commissions (Bompas & Parr have worked with names from LVMH and Bombay Sapphire to the Victoria & Albert Museum and Westfield), they produce a rolling programme of in-house passion projects. Robert Smith, their creative director, says they felt inspired to pursue one related to poppers after creating an office “poppers Christmas tree” a few years ago (think 30 to 40 cheap poppers bottles as baubles, and you’ve got the right idea).

In collaboration with London Cocktail Week, Bompas & Parr decided to create their own exclusive premium poppers brand, Excalibur XO – a limited edition design in a run of 10 bottles. An event at The Standard hotel in October 2022 launched the brand alongside a cocktail pairing event. Zmith was brought on board to curate a playful poppers “museum”, a panel discussion on the drug’s history, plus a “sniff-along” screening of poppers porn films, known as “trainer videos for popperbators”. Retailing at £100 per bottle, the profits of Excalibur XO are being donated to the Tom of Finland Foundation to support queer artists. For Bompas & Parr, explains Smith, the project felt like a natural extension of their work. “I think how it fits within our oeuvre is that it feels a bit different, like looking at something in a new light or from an adjacent or oblique angle,” he says. “We’re also interested in how we can affect you at different touch points – the flavours of the cocktail pairing, notes of the poppers, and the head rush, sound and lighting design, along with the videos, represent our approach to multi-sensual design, as well as just being a fun party.” It is not their first sex-related project either, Smith adds, pointing to a collaboration with New York’s Museum of Sex in 2014, for which they designed a boob-shaped bouncy castle and genitalia-inspired rock climbing wall called “Grope Mountain”. The Excalibur XO project takes a less knowingly juvenile, but equally playful approach, while also “elevating” poppers as a product. “I think there’s something really beautiful about taking an everyday object or something ordinary and making it extraordinary,” comments Smith. “It’s kitsch – in terms of the history of the art world – and camp to encapsulate the spirit of extravagance and exaggeration while also taking the topic seriously.” Bompas & Parr reached out to a local glass manufacturer, E&M Glass, to create Excalibur XO’s hand-blown artisanal bottle. Its stopper is like that of a decanter, referencing luxury spirits or wine, and the smell of Excalibur XO

has been fine tuned, accentuating the notes of almond and orgeat found in a common poppers bottle to “heighten and distinguish the aroma,” Smith notes. They work just as ordinary poppers do, as I discover when a sample arrives and I decide to try it, getting an instant head rush. The bottle, I notice, looks a little like a butt plug. “That wasn’t in the design brief,” laughs Smith when I put this to him, “but there’s a sensuality to it for sure”. While Excalibur XO fits the Bompas & Parr oeuvre, it breaks away from the general trajectory of poppers design: from ampules, to a later inhaler model, to the small brown glass bottles we tend to see on sale at newsagents and sex shops today, and which usually come with child-lock safety lids and plastic wrapping. Well-known brands include the gold plastic clad “Liquid Gold”, the fascist-looking “English” brand with a Saint George’s flag, or “Rush”, reminiscent of battery design with its redand-yellow colour scheme and lightning bold logo. “It’s all more or less the same stuff,” explains Zmith, “just with a different name and branding”. In the UK, it is now illegal to sell amyl nitrite for human consumption, so most labels are required to list another use such as “room odouriser” or “leather cleaner”. Excalibur XO’s bottle moves away from this. “We have kept the bottle clean, as it was a hand-blown bespoke bottle,” says Smith. “The warnings, however are very important, and we have a separate card that goes alongside them with all the relevant information. (i.e. do not drink!).” Excalibur XO is also much more “classy” or “tasteful” looking and weightier than your regular £5 shop-bought poppers – an objet d’art, something that might be mistaken for a vase on your mantel piece. Just as Zmith’s book explains, given that poppers have been intertwined with underground sex cultures, they are sometimes viewed as scuzzy, cheap hits that have – for better or worse – historically carried some of the societal shame placed on gay sex through association. In causing a kind of blankness of the brain, they have also come to be associated with sexual nihilism. (See Andrew Holleran’s 93

1978 gay novel Dancer from the Dance: “You put the popper to your nostril, you put a hand out to lightly touch the sweaty, rigid stomach of the man dancing next to you [...] and you are thinking, as grave as a judge: What will I do with my life?”) Some may be pleased to see the poppers lid lifted so freely, while others – who cherish their traditional design and underground

queers as a high fashion nod to our history and subcultures. In line with these shifts, Zmith believes we’ve witnessed a general move of poppers into the mainstream and fashion worlds of late: he references a 2022 New York Times article with the headline “Poppers, Once a Fixture at Gay Clubs, Now a ‘Party Girl’ Favorite”. Zmith’s friends who are longtime

Excalibur XO by Bompas & Parr (image courtesy of Bompas & Parr).

history – may balk at Bompas & Parr’s slick rebranding of poppers, and its accompanying £100 price tag. Excalibur XO seems to be giving poppers a makeover, almost gentrifying or sanitising their design. The event at London Cocktail Week, for example, holds the vague scent of turning something sordid into, well, “organised fun”. Then again, we are no longer living in the 70s or 80s; while queer sex still comes with a stigma, we’ve also witnessed its mainstreaming across the board. Queer sex parties are listed in Time Out magazine and the Tom of Finland Foundation recently held its first London-based arts and culture festival at Second Home, a co-working and members club. You might now also spot the accoutrements of leather communities, such as harnesses and chaps, on the red carpet, while JW Anderson sells a leather penis keyring and a handbag with a Tom of Finland design on it. These items are worn proudly by 94

queer club kids groan at this shift, causing him to pause and consider whether the collaboration with Bompas & Parr would feed into the increasing adoption of poppers by new audiences, and whether that was a bad thing. Zmith ultimately decided that working on Excalibur XO was about engaging more people in the conversation around how poppers have “contributed to our sexual freedom” as well as, importantly, how we can keep expanding said sexual freedom. Excalibur XO, he argues, also fits into the general evolution of poppers marketing over the years more broadly; since the ubermasc associations in the 70s, branding has diversified to include less heavily gendered editions to appeal to 21st-century customers. Over our Zoom call, we browse the many designs now available, which include: Ibiza, a sort of poppy party design; Juic’d, which looks not unlike the packaging of a Terry’s

Chocolate Orange; and Pig, which might appeal to those who enjoy pig play. Excaliber XO, notably, has a sort of universal, if luxury look. It could appeal to anyone across the gender or sexuality spectrum – if they can afford it. When I ask Smith at Bompas & Parr about the high price, he explains that everyone involved – from consultancy, to the cocktail week panel, to the glassblowers – needed to be recompensed, with enough money left over to send Tom of Finland’s way. We might not really need luxury poppers, he adds, but we might want them. “I think there’s a lot of stuff that people do in order to ritualise things, to spend time on themselves, to share beautiful experiences,” he says, “so we wanted to create something that embodies all of the ritual of the wine world, say.” In this sense, Excalibur XO bares comparison to the explosion of the luxury sex toy industry, which has led to, for example, the existence of silver-plated dildos. “I suppose if you’re going to spend £200 on a vibrator you want it to look nice,” muses Smith. “Flip flops can cost £5 or £100 – why shouldn’t poppers?” Zmith concurs, pointing out that you can still get the cheap bottles of poppers at the corner shop if you want to. I am inclined to agree with them both – if customers are willing to pay for Excalibur XO, if the price of poppers is not being driven up, and if no one is exploited in the making, then why not? Yet, in the era of the rampant commercialisation of queer culture, we do need to be wary of the “queer collab”, where brands team up with queer creators to score diversity points, often around Pride Month, with the end result being the sanitisation or homogenisation of queer history and aesthetics. Take, for example, the casting of gender nonconforming people in brand ad campaigns, but only under the dictum of what falls into “conventionally attractive” beauty standards, or the lazy tendency for brands to stick a rainbow flag on something and call it supportive of LGBTQ+ rights. What was important to Zmith about the collaboration with Bompas & Parr, even if it did knowingly break from the traditional aesthetic of poppers over the last couple of decades, is

that they have built poppers’ history into the product, and done their research. Excalibur XO is a reference to “XO” as seen on premium alcohol products as shorthand for “extra old”, but it also nods to queer history. Excalibur – as in the sword – is a reference to “Raging Sword”, the name of a pamphlet written by Karl Ulrich, who gave the first known public speech in defence of homosexuality in Germany in 1867 (as discussed in Deep Sniff). The project unearthed a history that is little known, even among many poppers aficionados, Zmith points out, while still supporting queer artists in the process. In this sense, Excalibur XO is, to my mind, comparable to a project such as The Aesop Queer Library – a Pride initiative from skincare brand Aesop that turns the brand’s stores into pop-up houses of queer literature (visitors can take away one book for free). In boosting sales for queer authors and championing queer stories, while the Aesop products take a backseat, it feels like a net win for queer people and for Aesop. While the impact of Excalibur XO is more limited, due to the small run and the fact that Bompas & Parr is an agency, rather than a global brand, it appears to be, all things considered, a fairly smart collaboration – the poppers seem not to have gone to Bompas & Parr’s heads. The bigger question is, should we be worried about the sex positivity movement’s gentrification of marginalised sex cultures and history, and the ways in which it is being supported and carried out through design? You might argue that it is part of the deal. We wanted to popularise non-monogamy, we got the slick interface of the Feeld app. We wanted to destigmatise female pleasure, we got silver vibrators and jade dildos. If the next frontier is to normalise poppers play, then we’ll likely get a poppers sommelier at a luxury hotel. Under capitalism, everything gets commercialised eventually, right? Then again, we should probably keep asking ourselves what it means to “elevate” design in the sex space. In the queer world, “respectability politics” refers to the harmful idea that there is a “right way” to be LGBTQ+ – 95

desexualised, heteronormative, inoffensive – in order to be seen as “acceptable” to society. It’s the same puritanical tendency that has centred same-sex marriage and kids in our rights movement and that has seen displays of kink kicked out of Pride. To what extent does design, branding and marketing contribute to this tendency? These questions are not going anywhere fast, and extend far

beyond the confines of the marbled bottle of Excalibur XO. So while capitalism and heteropatriarchy remain in place, I will leave you to dwell on them, while I go back to huffing on my sumptuous free bottle of £100 poppers. Amelia Abraham is an author and journalist focusing mostly on queer culture.