Flamingo.
Petra Barran Changing the face of UK street food
Alain de Botton On why architecture matters to us
Steven Newman Walking alone around the world
Flamingo. A magazine that celebrates doing it yourself.
“The more one does and sees and feels ... the more genuine may be one’s appreciation of fundamental things like home.” Amelia Earhart
Nick Weston The wild man of Ashdown Forest
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Flamingo Magazine #3
Life on water One Sunday morning, Beth Kennedy invited us on to her narrowboat home to talk about life as a water dweller. Words David Khalat Illustration Craig Jackson Photography Nathan Pask
It is a pretty big decision moving from land to water, yet narrowboat life is increasingly being seen as an appealing lifestyle. With all of the problems that modernity and and a time of unrest brings, I wondered if it was perhaps a form of escapism, or even counterculturalism, that initiated this trend. To find out a little more, I went to spend a Sunday morning with Beth Kennedy, whose cosy narrowboat is moored just outside London. Being a little out of the city, I could already understand the appeal: walking around I had a feeling of freedom, and peace. Surrounded by Beth’s belongings – the narrow kitchen, the obscure and inspiring book collection, the photos on the wall – I even came away with thoughts of moving to a boat myself. Looking out over the tranquility of the canal, I wondered, what brought Beth here in the first place? “I was living abroad for a while, in the jungle, where I had two working projects,” she tells me. “I was feeling a bit claustrophobic in the city after that experience, so I came to be here on the canal with three of my friends [who lived here already]. I liked the space and the way of living, so I wanted to try it out myself.”
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Beth Kennedy mooring her narrowboat in Watford
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Mr Bingo Leigh, Kent Illustration David Lemm
As one of the most successful illustrators in the UK, Mr Bingo has worked with the likes of The Mighty Boosh, Wired and QI (he designed the cover for the BBC series’ book). Now living in east London, he’s ascended to what some would call illustration’s dizzying heights. However, we decided to ask him about his sleepy hometown, and why he left. Where did you grow up? Can you describe the sort of place it is? “I’m 32 years old and I still haven’t grown up. If you mean where I lived when I was younger, it was a village called Leigh, in Kent. It’s a small, middle-class village where only white people live. People play cricket on the village green and the most important thing that ever happened there was when it won the Tidiest Village award in 1951. The village and its entire history is summarised on its Wikipedia entry in 66 words.” What was your favourite place to hang out there? “As a child the village green was pretty amazing; we used to play a lot of football there. The village was surrounded by fields too, so there were a lot of adventures to be had out there.”
What are your strongest memories of being a teenager there? “At the age of 13 I was keen to take up smoking as a recreational hobby. We would buy ‘20 B&H’ from the Royal British Legion vending machine and then smoke them either in the railway station shelter (only one train per hour) or sometimes just in a field. There was also a disabled toilet which would occasionally be used as a base to smoke a little bit of weed. “I was a fairly clichéd teenager so decided to ‘hate my parents’ for a couple of years. The hate was based on nothing but seem to come very easily. I basically ignored them for two years and looked the other way if we ever happened to share the same space. Thankfully they’ve forgiven me for this period of my life.” Would you ever live there again? “No, I don’t think so. There’s nothing there for me; I’m such a city person, I like (almost) everything about living in a city. Life back in Leigh is so slow; there’s nothing to stimulate my mind and I end up falling asleep all the time. I always miss London when I go there and after 48 hours I’m itching to get back.” • mr-bingo.org.uk
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Flamingo Magazine #3
Indica: a home for counterculture Words Michelle Siddall Illustration Holly Stoves
Take a walk around London’s Mayfair and you’ll notice that the streets are peppered with stuffy art galleries – impenetrable to anyone on less than a six-figure salary. It seems an unlikely part of town to have housed one of the most important experimental galleries in London’s history, yet between 1965 and 1967 Indica provided a home to some of the more unconventional artists eschewed from other galleries in the area. Indica was the base for one of the first underground newspapers, The International Times; it was where John met Yoko (at one of her shows), and conversations that took place there inspired The Beatles’ songs. Needless to say, in just two short years it completely changed the way the underground art scene operated. Started up by three young, and somewhat privileged, art admirers – Peter Asher, Barry Miles and John Dunbar – and with the help of a £2,000 loan from Asher, Indica quickly became a significant outlet for radical art and literature. The space would host the art shows, beat poetry and happenings from counterculture artists of the time – events regularly attended by the likes of Mick Jagger, Roman Polanski and Dunbar’s wife, Marianne Faithfull. In fact, at times it seems that there are more records of who attended the art shows than what took place there – perhaps a testament to the founding trio’s schmoozing skills.
However, despite its cool credentials, Miles, Asher and Dunbar didn’t find it easy to keep the project up and running, and with no funding it took enormous effort from themselves and everyone they knew to keep the place alive. From Paul McCartney carting around wood in his Aston Martin to Jane Asher (Peter’s sister) donating an old till she once used as a toy, Indica’s formation and existence was described by Miles as a “complete disaster”. Aside from making next to no money and selling only two paintings a week (there is a story about how Argentinian artist Julio Le Parc, not expecting the gallery to ever sell one of his paintings, gave arbitrary prices to the works he donated. As fate would have it, a piece did in fact sell, at which point real prices had to be negotiated), Indica operated like the blurry haze of an artist’s imagination. However, in 1967, as the 1960s were nearing an end and the reality of debt finally set in, Indica closed. More than 45 years down the line, we now are in the middle of our own economic crisis and the thought of starting a up new gallery space seems either daunting or impossible. However, we can still see Indica’s legacy today: DIY art spaces spring up every day, and the grassroots nature of creation ensures that anything is possible, with or without the help of the art mainstream. As Yoko Ono said herself, “Indica gave me a space where I could be free and express my ideas; it was a comfort zone in an otherwise cold and snobby art world that didn’t get me yet.” •
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Flamingo Magazine #3
From London to Berlin We speak to screen printer and founder of Mother Drucker Dolly Demorati about leaving everything behind and starting again. Words Siobhan Leddy & Grashina Gabelmann Illustration Kate Copeland
There are a lot of reasons that people move away from their home town: boredom, debt, starting afresh. Screen printer and artist Dolly Demorati, founder of Berlin print studio Mother Drucker, moved for a girl. “I chased her over here, and now she’s back in England. She ended up not having such a good time here as I did, but now it’s my home.” And home it now seems to be. Mother Drucker – deriving from the German word “druck”, or print – is cluttered with paint, screens and found objects, the latest of which, an ancient orange exercise bike, was found on the street outside the studio. “I just liked it; I always bring stuff in from the road.” Dolly started out in London, first as a photographer and then as a screen printer at Pictures on Walls. “I worked really hard to learn how to screen print; I was amazed by the medium. When I was younger I built myself a darkroom, so I’ve always been obsessed with any kind of printing. I was also stencilling as street art, but I love screen printing. It’s the most complicated and messy printing you can imagine.” After moving to Berlin, Dolly managed to sell some artwork to fund the studio and, incredibly, turned the whole thing over in just a couple of months. “Money goes a lot further in Berlin; I couldn’t have done this in London or New York. But it all made sense here – I got printing withdrawal after I’d been here a while, so I did a bit of research for a studio and found it to be really impenetrable. Places were like, ‘Uh, we’ve got a slot next month’ and were really rude about it all. It’s like they couldn’t say anything apart from no. After seeing that, I figured I could do really well where people could be welcomed into a print shop, so we do a lot of out-of-house commissions for other people. There aren’t many places that do that in Berlin, so that’s basically what pays the bills.” Last year, Dolly also organised a enormous print festival, Druck Berlin, involving almost every screen
printer in the city. “It took about six months to organise, and we had about 1,000 people come along. It nearly killed me last time; I’m not an organiser, I’m a screen printer.” Druck Berlin took place in a gloriously abandoned 1970s swimming pool complex. The owner, apparently at a loss at what to do with the place, seemed relaxed about the space being used for art and music events, not an uncommon phenomenon in modern Berlin. As Germany’s creative capital, artists and musicians from outside the city exploit cheap rents and relaxed attitudes. However, there are many Berliners who are less than happy about the advancing changes. “A lot of artists live around here now, and I’m not really sure how all the older locals feel about that. I had an interesting conversation with a lady the other day. She marched in and said, ‘This scaffolding is bullshit! It’s all a big cover-up!’ She believed that the scaffolding was to make people feel uncomfortable in their own homes, so they’d move out and the landlords could raise the rent. I mean, I think it’s more to do with the fact that the wall was battered during the war, you know? But that’s how some people seem to feel.” Aside from elderly residents’ complaints, concern is also arising about gentrification, a side dish to any area popular with artists and other creative types. “Down the street [in the Kreuzberg district of the city], someone’s painted on the floor ‘yuppies out’, with a massive arrow pointing towards this café on the corner. This café has asked a lot of local street artists to paint the outside, but it feels really forced. No one wants to go somewhere that’s made in an image of what’s ‘cool’, so I think it’s already gone bust.” What happens to such a fluctuating city remains to be seen. However, unlike the cafe, Dolly is sure of one thing: here is her home, and here she’ll stay. • mother-drucker.com
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Dolly Demorati, screen printer and artist
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Flamingo Magazine #3
SOPHIE ALDA Artist’s studio Words Siobhan Leddy Photography Tim Bowditch
Sophie Alda and her beloved screen printing bed
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