Kinglux Magazine

ILLUSIONS & PHENOMENA OF THE MODERN WORLD VOLUME ONE / ISSUE ONE BALLARDIAN

Cover illustration by Yehrin Tong, www.yehrintong.com

Adjective: “Ballardian�

Of or pertaining to the characteristic fictional milieu of author J.G. Ballard, typified by dystopian modernity, bleak artificial landscapes, and the psychological effects of technological, societal, and environmental developments.

Welcome to Kinglux.

Contributors Andrej Horvath ..................Bratislava Bridgette Amofah..............london ...................... www.myspace.com/bridgettesmusic gigi Stoll ............................new York .................. www.gigistoll.com ian Bogost ..........................Atlanta ...................... www.bogost.com Jakub Klimo.......................Bratislava Javier Murgoitio ..................Madrid .........................www.javiermurgoitio.com Joanne Mcneil ....................Boston .........................http://tomorrowmuseum.com Jon Rafman ........................Montreal ................... http://jonrafman.com JosĂŠ luis TabueĂąa ..............Madrid .........................www.joseluistabu.com Justin Wu............................Paris .......................... www.jwuphoto.com lili Weiss Hill .....................london ...................... www.kinglux.co.uk Maria Modrovich .................new York.....................http://modrovich.com Mark Evans ...........................london ........................www.markevansart.com Michelle lord .......................Birmingham ...............www.michellelord.co.uk Miguel Domingos ...............Barcelona....................www.volitif.com Rosa navarro .....................Barcelona ................ www.capuccinocommotion.com Ryan Hadley .......................Birmingham Sam Jacob............................london ........................www.strangeharvest.com Terence McDermott ..........Birmingham ............. www.threewhitewalls.com Tony Hill .............................london ...................... www.kinglux.co.uk Yehrin Tong ........................london ...................... www.yehrintong.com

Studio Kinglux This magazine has been produced by Studio Kinglux, a trends based creative team located in the UK. They have developed award winning work for numerous high end retail, fashion, lifestyle brands and publications. www.kinglux.co.uk

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Contents 6 ............................................Editorial 7 ............................................Smoulder by gigi Stoll 8 ............................................Timecapsule 10 ..........................................Rip Yourself Open, Sew Yourself Shut 12 ..........................................Scarlet Harlots 14 ..........................................Manhattan Made From Mud 16 ..........................................Fido Dildo 18 ..........................................Rosa navarro 20 ..........................................Every Fifteen Minutes A Celebrity Dies 22 ..........................................Prima Belladonna 30 ..........................................game Poems 32 ..........................................Forgotten Souls Of Kingston 38 ..........................................Smoulder by gigi Stoll 40 ..........................................google Street Art 46 ..........................................Almost Plastic 53 ..........................................Thailand: Diversity & Refinement 60 ..........................................Smoulder by gigi Stoll 62 ..........................................lord Of The ultimate City 66 ..........................................Carved Flesh 72 ..........................................Mercurial Woman 80 ..........................................Mira & The Bearded Revolutionary 85 ..........................................Smoulder by gigi Stoll 86 ..........................................This Concrete O 93 ..........................................Smoulder by gigi Stoll 94 ..........................................Super nature 96 ..........................................Smoulder by gigi Stoll

Copyright and disclaimer. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is strictly prohibited.

All opinions and viewpoints expressed are entirely that of their respective authors and although are believed to be true, no guarantee is given for their authenticity. Please be aware!

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Despite leaving this life in 2009, the cultural influence of British author, JG Ballard has never been more relevant or indeed more prescient.

We live in a time of surveilled homogenity in which conflict is never far from the surface. Ballard understood this and created warnings from his suburban home that would last in a permanence that the body could never attain.

Beginning his writing career as a reluctant science-fiction author, he outgrew the pigeon-hole that trapped his contemporaries.

In retrospect he is finally defined as one of the great thinkers on the human condition in response to technological progress.

A major exhibition recently held in London in his honour featured heavyweight names from all areas of the creative universe – Helmut Newton, Damien Hirst, Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Rachel Whiteread amongst a roster of many more.

Here at Studio Kinglux, we find that many of the thoughts and ideas that make up our own creative philosophies are developed by his writings alongside others that have also taken inspiration from his legacy of opinion, discussion and intelligence.

For this issue we have curated a selection of writers, designers, artists, photographers, stylists, illustrators and seditionaries. The ones who live their lives in order to express urgent ideas to a world outside their own minds and studios. Inside, we look at ideas of beauty, travel, cultural idiosyncrasies, architectural legacies, digital emotions, and the eternal issues of life.

We hope that you find this magazine to be comparative to a small signpost on a secret highway. One that leads toward hidden vistas in your daily life or at the very least a second glance at the world that is enveloping you regardless.

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Opposite: Photography by Gigi Stoll www.gigistoll.com

Time Capsule – “an historic cache of goods and/or information, usually intended as a method of communication with future people and to help future archaeologists and anthropologists understand the time in which they were created”.

On this occasion chosen by Terence McDermott, Gallery Director 01 //

Paul Smith keyring It holds the keys to the gallery.

I always say if we were a fashion label then we would be Paul Smith, ‘traditional with a contemporary twist’.

02 //

www.threewhitewalls.com

The Oblique Strategies A set of over one hundred cards, created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. Each card is a suggestion of a course of action or thinking to assist in creative difficulties.

Why restrict them to times of creative blocks? Why not adapt them into everyday life?

03 //

Comme des Garcon perfume With CdG statement: ‘Words contain meanings like a bottle holds a perfume. Messages in bottles have always signified belief and a hope for the future. The original Comme des Garcons 2 pebble-shaped bottle has been lacquered in black to contain silver words of peace, freedom and love in several different languages’. ‘All you need is Love’ I say!

04 //

Paul Smith limited edition toy mini car One car I would own if I drove.

05 //

Johan by J. Lindeberg. Autumn/winter catalogue from a few seasons ago Beautifully shot and one of many fashion catalogues I have collected over the years.

J. Lindeberg is one of my favourites at the moment although I think he is more relevant to my three sons who range from 15 to 25...

06 //

Photography book Imagine Finding Me

by Chino Otsuka Part of a photography exhibition we ran in our gallery. The power of her work crept up on me.

Otsuka manipulates photos of her childhood by adding herself into the picture at the age she is now. ‘I become a tourist in my own history’.

Very powerful and emotive stuff.

07 //

Country life album cover by Roxy Music in jigsaw form The album cover caused a certain amount of controversy on its release in the seventies. Record shops in the States were forced to sell it in an opaque blue sleeve which Bryan Ferry said at the time made it even more erotic. With the jigsaw you can take away the naughty bits when the vicar comes round for tea.

08 //

Ziggy Stardust tour programme 1973 David Bowie and Roxy Music lit the fire. And as David Sylvian says: ‘Understand, these fires never stop.’

09 //

Arena - The British magazine for men – Winter 91/92 Arena and The Face were a godsend in their early days. Before that, the only art/fashion bible around was the womens’ Cosmopolitan. The Face no longer exists and sadly Arena and Cosmo are poor imitations of their former selves.

10 //

The Face magazine July 1986 This particular issue was quite controversial as it ran a photo shoot of models in the different militia uniforms from in and around the Middle East.

To be honest I found it quiet informative.

11 //

Paul Smith limited edition leather football in flower prints This collates a number of my loves in life.

Football, flowers, art and Englishness.

Paul Smith, you are a genius!

Photography by Tony Hill

In tribute to Chuck Palahniuk – author of Fight Club and Invisible Monsters – transgender discodolly, little James Lawrence Slattery has recently been tattooed with her favourite quote (see headline).

More than a motto, it’s been a way of life for the eighteen year old local art scene muse from an early age.

Her impromptu silent raves in supermarkets and fast food outlets have since progressed into regular appearances at art galleries (as the art), and real-actual-dancefloors where she mixes an empiric knowledge of cinema with a taste for the theatrical absurd.

This is the return of the dancefloor as stagefloor and body as manifesto.

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Photography by Tony Hill

Recognising a compliment in whatever form it takes, Birmingham band, Scarlet Harlots, were delighted to be called “shambolic� by Alex James in a television indie Pop Idol contest.

Since then they have continued to inspire a degree of devotion unseen in teenagers since the days when Facebook was interesting.

Coincidentally, a random status update from the band suggested a Crash-era Ballardian influence in a new track, leading to their inclusion in these pages.

We are looking forward to hearing the intriguing sound of metal plated lust music colliding with the Gang Of Four choruses and nineties G-Funk sing-alongs that the band have become known for.

Photograph by Andrej Horvath

Oasis Shibam in the desert Valley of Hadhramout, known as “The Manhattan of the Desert”. Up to eleven floors high and built from local clay, it is estimated that there approximately five hundred of these ‘clayscrapers’. Home to around seven thousand Yemenes, Shibam is recognised by UNESCO as a World Heritage sites.

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‘He’s caught a rabbit’ by Ryan Hadley.

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Illustrations by Rosa Navarro “My main inspiration is the people I know, my closest friends plus a few public people like Nobel Prize winners. On the other hand, the animal portraits represent pure sincerity. Sometimes I feel it’s easier for me to show my feelings through an animal.” www.capuccinocommotion.com

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Tokyo, Japan: In the absence of vegetation, posters of natural environments are used as subliminal psychic vacations from the urban sprawl. The pictures above and left were taken from the entrance of building sites near Harajuku station.

Photography by Tony Hill

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In the future, a famous person will die every fifteen minutes. Already it’s happening. The ascent of the microcelebrities, the twenty-four hour news cycle, citizen journalism, and our darkest fantasies all collide on Twitter now.

The website’s question “What are you doing?” sometimes feels more like “Who died today?”

Every day on Twitter, news of another death. Les Paul, John Hughes, Farrah Fawcett, those big names, but also the editor at this publication, the founder of this startup, the people who we might not all know, but someone you know knew them and they are using the space to remember them.

Sure, Maria Shriver’s euology made me sit up straighter and think I want to be like that. But, I mean, was I supposed to be shocked that Eunice Kennedy passed on? I guess it’s small talk of a darker sort. You could talk about the weather or whose heart stopped.

Sometimes I feel like I don’t want to sign on Twitter, precisely for that reason. What if David Cronenberg died?

Or Bill Callahan? Sophia Coppola, Rachel Maddow, Tilda Swinton, anyone I like.

Although you don’t even have to be a fan to feel affected by the death of a celebrity. Something about Dash Snow really hit me hard and I had a few dark days thinking about it. Perhaps because it felt so retro — the overdose — those kind of tragedies used to happen all the time in the nineties.

I have as many friends now with babies as I had friends who were junkies when I was a teenager. It’s a relief, but sometimes I miss the high stakes of things.

Then there’s Michael Jackson. The Twitter crashing, diverting attention from Iran, OMGWTF?!?! death. Now as the smoke has cleared, when I see his image in TV clips it feels like he’s still alive. He’s so far removed from our everyday existence, living a life as though written by a pathological liar (Lou Ferrigno as his personal trainer, midnight buying blitzes on eBay, the nose that disappeared from the mortuary, and Gunther von Hagens friendship, among the countless strange things).

I wrote a short story a few years ago — a science fiction mystery — about a computer programmer hired by a gossip glossy to design software to help them find actresses wearing the same dress for their “who wore it best” feature.

Instead he becomes obsessed with the like clockwork weekly deaths of nubile teenage singer/actresses.

I’m going to spoil the ending because I wrote it three, almost four years ago and it’s lingering unread by anyone but me as a text file on my desktop. Plus, with things like TinEye now, the matching software MacGuffin feels a little dated.

So, he uses the software to find that no fewer than twenty

five of the girls died in the same unusual shape — their arms and legs contorted oddly. The causes of death varied — car accident, overdose, plane crash, flu, cancer; but the shape of their bodies were the same.

A number of adventures lead the protagonist to a manufacturing center where he finds a secret assembly line building pneumatic female androids. Tomorrow’s stars.

Since every time the newest Miley dies, her song is number one for the rest of the week, music corporations eventually decided to build popstars rather than breed them.

Planned obsolescence of celebrity. The title of the story is “The Daily Death,” after a morning TV program they watch that is simply rattling off every dead celebrity that day like an irreverant speeded up version of Stephanopolous’ “In Memoriam.”

“Scepticism is the natural response to all web content. If you read about Owen Wilson’s suicide attempt online, your first reaction was likely that of disbelief. Rumoured “suicides” of everyone from Winona Ryder to Jaleel White were debunked in the same minute they were spread, and yet, there seems to be no end to these kinds of morbid lies.

On the internet, mourning has surreal or even sanctimonious undertones, especially for those who only knew the deceased as a web presence. It could be because emails and blogs are the worst places to communicate sincerity. You can easily alt-tab from a deceased person’s website to view ‘LOLcats’, or you might get an instant message “ZOMG, I got sooo drunk last nite.” The time-shifts that are the natural web-crawling experience prevent us from ever really dwelling on a tragic experience.” (from The Web is the Worst Place to Grieve) I still think the web has the capacity to bring out the best and the worst in us. We’re going to look back at the spectacle of Jade Goody’s wedding last year and think how innocent it was, how damn near respectful people were to her and her family. It’s all downhill from here. Death is just something you think about until the next 140 character tweet appears.

Written by Joanne McNeill, http://tomorrowmuseum.com Illustration by Studio Kinglux

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dress: Marcel Holubec necklace: Fried Frères shoes: Agent Provocateur

dress: Maaike Mekking hat: Noemi Kolcakova Szakallova

dress: Maaike Mekking

Photography: Jakub Klimo Art Direction & Styling: Lili Weiss Hill Make Up & Hair: Stacey Okafor Set Design: Teres Arvidsson Production: Maverick Tamu Liberty Model: Bridgette Amofah

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dress: Maaike Mekking necklace as belt: vintage shoes: vintage

Lyricist, singer songwriter Bridgette Amofah‌ seductive retro-nostalgia meets modern poetry‌ www.myspace.com/oivavoi www.myspace.com/bridgettesmusic

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dress: Boris Hanecka necklace: Rony Plesl earrings: Swarowski shoes: vintage

dress: Boris Hanecka necklace: Rony Plesl earrings: Swarowski shoes: vintage

dress: Maaike Mekking hat: Noemi Kolcakova Szakallova

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dress: Maaike Mekking headpiece: Katarina Ondrejkova shoes: Poste Mistress

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Described as ‘one of the ten most anticipated games of the year’ and running on a three decade old video game console, ‘A Slow Year’ is one part digital poem and one part attempt to explore the hidden depths of an extinct electronic device.

A Slow Year is a collection of four one kilobyte games for the 1977 Atari Video Computer System, each about a season. But unlike most games, gameplay comes from observation rather than strategy or action. The player observes a changing scene, for example a hibernal dawn in the winter game or a windy day in autumn, and responds through simple interaction in the pursuit of goals. In summer, the player closes his eyes and predicts where a piece of driftwood on a lake will have floated by the time he opens them. In winter, the player attempts to prolong the enjoyment of a cup of coffee. The player definitely plays, and the games are in some ways very traditional: they have rules, and goals, and challenge. This is not video art nor digital art. But the experience of playing is quite different from more traditional games.

As games, these rely on the procedural representation of an idea that the player manipulates. As poetry, they rely on the condensation of symbols and concepts rather than the clarification of specific experiences. As images, they offer visually evocative yet obscure depictions of real scenes and objects. They are inspired by ideas or experiences I encounter, as attempts to capture something fundamental about how they work. Game poems aspire, perhaps, toward a kind of videogame version of Imagism, if we expand “image” to include a logic or behavior as its subject.

Photography is one of my hobbies... there’s a famous Garry Winogrand quote about it: “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.” Photography is an art form that deals with how things look, and what it means to look at things. A Slow Year is similar in some ways.

It’s a game about looking, a game that asks you to look, persistently, and to respond to what you see.

The Atari, for me, is a slow machine. The rush of setting up scanlines, of “racing the beam” as we say, is fast, but the experience of programming it is slow. Every cycle counts.

Nothing is wasted. It’s computational Jainism.

Moreover, there’s no rush. Thirty three years hence, there will be no more upgrades, no more gimmicks, no more killer apps. For once, it’s possible to plumb the depths of a game console.

With A Slow Year, I wanted to let this slowness become the game. It would be a game about sedate observation, but one that would be a game more earnestly than my earlier project, Guru Meditation.

While it’s true that I am very fond of the Atari VCS (I co-authored a book about it), I did not choose it as a platform for this work arbitrarily, nor in the interest of retro nostalgia.

The Atari applies certain constraints that contribute the ideas I wanted to get across with this work.

For one part, it all but eliminates the need (or indeed the possibility) of creating complex instantial assets like images and sounds. Many of today’s “artgames” adopt coarse visual and sound design as a way of recovering the simplicity of earlier games while extending them to new subjects. The Atari invites such designs by necessity. Its limited technical abilities and small file size demands invite symbolism.

For another, it lets me harness the platform’s history of more abstract gameplay, even if such gameplay was once about concrete things like dogfights or dungeon crawling. This fact should remind us that older forms are worth returning to for their aesthetics. Just as we might still choose to write a sonnet, take a black and white photograph, paint with oil on canvas, or construct relief prints with a letterpress, so we can also choose to write new games for a machine like the Atari.

For yet another, even in its commercial heydey Atari games were created by a single person, which mirrors the production process for a poem. And for yet another, it imposes serious constraints on development while still allowing for many different kinds of games. And finally, it gives me a natural excuse to adopt a very small file size as a constraint.

Games do many things. Like any medium, they can be used as tools or as art or as anything in between. The key development for games will be to avoid thinking of a key development, and instead to focus on the many individual things one might do with games.

A Slow Year is available from www.bogost.com Article editted from two interviews with Ian Bogost, the creator

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A photo essay of humanitarian relief in Kingston, Jamaica, in association with Missionaries of the Poor

“A few years ago during my undergrad studies in Canada, I decided to join a humanitarian relief mission. Rather than support the development of homes or schools in Africa, a common relief activity for youth, I was presented with an opportunity to support an ailing community in Kingston, Jamaica instead. Much of the city is wrought with extreme gang violence and poverty resulting in starvation and unacceptable levels of health care.

There I supported an organization called Missionaries of the Poor and although, I am not Catholic, I found their goals very meaningful. Their mission was to offer relief in the form of medical supplies, expertise, and emotional support to those who need it the most: the sick and dying, the orphaned, and the starving. The photo essay attempts to offer a glimpse of this lesser-known impoverished city.

When we arrived, the overwhelming heat resulted in beads of sweat forming as we walked off the plane. The view along the coast side was drastically different than I previously anticipated. The sight of dilapidated homes with broken wooden walls and seemingly malnourished children crawling the streets were commonplace.

Since we were living in a monastery, we had to abide by their guidelines. Our typical routine would be waking up at exactly 5.30am for mass and then individually assigned to various health centres in Kingston. We travelled around on the back of a caged open top truck. There are a total of five centres – Faith Center, Lord’s Place, Good Sheppard, Bethlehem and Jacob’s Well.

The woman in the photo opposite is among many in the centre diagnosed with Aids. Alongside her is a wheelchair made from spare parts by the brothers.

I developed an attachment to the place and to the people there. The patients were kind and respected our work.

Typically, I would start by giving the orphaned children a short piggy-back ride through the gated compound and shake the hands of all the patients to make them aware I was there that day. There were limited medical supplies and staff have barely the basic first aid training we take for granted.

Unfortunately, in most cases we just bandaged patients over their existing wounds after spraying it with peroxide, a weak disinfectant. Generally, these are meant only for psychological relief as painkillers were sparse.

Mostly, I helped them by bandaging wounds, feeding, cleaning up after them, and lending my ear.

There was a room with many cribs left unattended simply due to the lack of staff. The children are predominantly underdeveloped that struggle to gasp for air or have enlarged heads or bellies.

A lot of the children there have autism and were left alone to starve on the streets.

I had the opportunity to spend an afternoon with a child in my hands and feed her. Periodically she had seizures because of the mere lack of proper medication to treat it. I do not remember many of the patients names or their backgrounds as I assisted many dozens during my time.”

Written and photographed by Justin Wu www.jwuphoto.com For more details on Missionaries of the Poor www.missionariesofthepoor.org

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Photography by Gigi Stoll www.gigistoll.com

Canadian artist Jon Rafman scours the digital pavements of Google Street View to discover the newest form of automatic documentary photography.

New media and net artists of the previous generation were heavily concerned with the topic of surveillance and the infringement of privacy that the internet and emerging technology threatened. The art collective JODI were the first artists to point to the military roots of the internet. This concern was also reflected in popular culture, for example, in movies like Hackers (1995), which expressed the anxiety that the new technology would permit government and large institutions to access private information and use it to their benefit and to our detriment. I come, however, from a generation raised with the internet and reality TV, a generation that is less suspicious of ‘Big Brother,’ a generation which, rather than suffering the anxiety of being spied on, often blatantly desires it. People willingly give up their privacy and talk about themselves endlessly online, on blogs, Facebook, Myspace. Surveillance is less associated with big government and corporate espionage and more with the banal everyday status updates of friends on Twitter. Rather than a distrusted invasion of privacy, online surveillance in general has gradually been made friendly and transformed into an accepted spectacle. I am interested in why it is that many of us desire to be surveilled and often enthusiastically give up our privacy. As one commenter on an article I authored, aptly wrote: “A friend recently found a photograph on Google Street View of my wife leaving our old apartment. The effect was unexpected and odd, as if she were famous in an infinitesimal scale”.

My artistic practice is heavily influenced by internet surfing culture. As my fellow net artist Guthrie Lonergan put it in an interview with Rhizome.org: “Part of it is the feeling that there’s so much stuff out there already that it seems pointless to make something new, from scratch – which is perhaps a bit of a cliché response, but not untrue. The ephemeral nature of the internet inspires a kind of disrespect for objects – for whole, perfect, ‘created’ things”. The whole question of authorship is being influenced by the internet age. With the immediate availability of information overload, the role of artist as curator has become increasingly important. It is the particular way the found object is framed, framed in all the senses – how I write about it, where it fits in a collection – that makes it a creative act. I am not the literal author of the images. I am the author of the selections. I feel less of the preciousness you might feel towards a material object, anyone could google these images. There is a sense that all

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digital data is equal, but it is up to the artist/critic/curator to make sense of it. I do not feel I “own” the images I present and often I find them on blogs or through friends. It is the way they are framed, contextualized that is my artistic act. I don’t want to fetishize anything about the process or make the pictures precious in anyway. My collections of Google Street Views both celebrate and critique the current world.

As a company, Google is not necessarily imposing their organisation of experience on us; rather, their means of recording manifests how we already structure our experience.

Is it not appropriate that Google hides our identities for do we not already see our neighbour’s face as an indistinct blur?

This way of photographing the world or organising the world has not changed the way we perceive the world.

The grounds for this were laid before Google existed, rather the reason Google is so successful is that it is the ‘barest’, most extreme purest expression of modern consciousness.

Everything is turned into information rather than knowledge.

This very way of recording our world, this tension between an automated camera and a human who seeks meaning, reflects our modern experience.

Many of us already feel that we are observed simultaneously by everyone and by no one, that everything is recorded, but no particular significance is accorded to anything. The detached gaze of the automated camera, the Street View image is merely a reflection of a pre-existing consciousness.

I take the view that the very instruments that estrange us from ourselves us can also inform us about the nature of our alienation. As this detached, indifferent mode of recording often parallels our own mode of perceiving the world, by framing and reframing the images, I hope to undo familiar conventions and alter our vision of the world. When I re-frame a Google Street View, by re-introducing the human gaze, I reassert the importance, the uniqueness of the individual. My altering of the perspective challenges the loss of autonomy and individuality. In my selection, I aim at transforming our perceptions and thereby create a new freedom. Despite the often-impersonal nature of these settings, the individuals in the images are no longer purely objects of the robotic gaze of an automated camera.

Images curated and written by Jon Rafman http://jonrafman.com

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shirt: Amaya Arzuaga lingerie: H&M earrings, bracelet, necklace, ring: Luxenter

dress: Alma Aguilar pearl earrings, necklace, bracelet and rings: Luxenter

dress: Lydia Delgado diamond earrings and bracelet: Luxenter

shirt, skirt and shoes: Amaya Arzuaga bracelet with diamond: Luxenter

dress: Elio Bernhayer shoes: Maria Lafuente pearl necklace, bracelet and rings: Luxenter

Photography: JosĂŠ Luis TabueĂąa www.joseluistabu.com Hair & make up: Javier Murgoitio www.javiermurgoitio.com Styling: Oscar Morales Model: Eliisa Raats www.francinamodels.com

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dress: Alma Aguilar diamond earrings and bracelet: Luxenter

dress: Amaya Arzuaga necklace and diamond ring: Luxenter

Inspired by an official tourist board promotional message, this photo essay documents some of the cultural curiosites that await the offbeat traveller in Thailand.

Photography by Tony Hill

Albino Lucky Fortune Cat According to Thai folklore, albino creatures bring good fortune to all those around them. Unfortunately this same superstition does not hold true for the afflicted animal. Caged in miniscule glass tanks, a variety of pigment-deficient beasts – a cat, turtle, crocodile, snake, bird and others – were on display in a zoo in Bangkok.

Desperately lonely and frustrated, they seemed to be cursed from birth.

Bangkok market satellite dish An impromptu night market in Bangkok. Whilst the stall owners often live in nearby shanty-style settlements, it is not uncommon to see these same constructions adorned with large ‘Miracle’ brand satellite TV receivers.

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Fanta deities To honour the spirit world, small tokens are left on shrines and by plastic icons. The most common offering is a bottle of Fanta with a drinking straw.

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Burnt Buddah On the holiday island of Koh Samui, we discovered a Buddhist souvenir shop that had been burnt down by an unseen force.

Guarding the front door was the charred remains of a praying statue.

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DIY car repairs An inspired makeshift repair – papier mâché was found to be an adequate solution to keep this car moving.

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Organised chaos (above) Two workers take a short break from stripping down a moped.

The workshop may look a riot of colour but it is actually highly ordered.

Queen Gatoi (right) A young Nordic girl looks on admiringly, as the leader of a lady-boy dance-troupe shows some of her modelling shots on a Nokia phone.

The girl remained unaware that the carnival princess began life as a prince.

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Photography Photograph by Gigi Stoll www.gigistoll.com

Michelle Lord’s art traces the links between fiction and architecture in a such a way that a collision with Ballard’s stories was unavoidable.

Kinglux wanted to know more.

MICHELLE LORD: “My recent work has been about exploring the connections between fiction and architecture, drawing upon literary texts which refer to architectural or geographical idylls. By focusing on specific narratives which deal with differing perspectives on the opposing concepts of utopia/dystopia, I was naturally drawn to Ballard’s literary visions of modernist architectural design and his prophetic views on the technological demise of the urban environment.

After reading several of his novels including Concrete Island, High Rise and Crash, I came across the short story ‘Ultimate City’ and was immediately struck by the parallels between its narrative and the urban landscape of Birmingham. I decided I wanted to construct a photographic critique of the urban planning legacy of the 1970’s in a way that related to Ballard’s socially relevant stories of the same period.

What do you enjoy most about his themes?

Ballard’s stories are frequently considered to be as much works of architectural theory or criticism as they are fictions.

His novels are regularly situated within a certain type of architectural non-place: motorway flyovers, factories, office blocks, urban tower block projects, underpasses or empty car parks. Ballard once said that “architecture supplies us with camouflage”. His writing frequently examines the man-made environment and the impact the modern world has upon it, frequently evoking images of cityscapes that are increasingly transformed by science, technology and ecological anxieties.

In ‘Ultimate City’, I wanted to push these concepts forward by recreating existing sites where industry, landscape, technology and humanity overlap each other to form a visual and spatial hybrid. Situated alongside iconic buildings and

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landmark structures, inner city areas suddenly become reconfigured through human intervention as sites for DIY monumental structures of discarded technological detritus.

The backgrounds of these pictures feature the Brutalist architecture of sixties Birmingham. Why did you choose this city? What is it about the concrete shapes that inspired you?

I found that Ballard often described the beckoning future of the modern metropolis in terms of the utopian ideology of Brutalist concrete architecture; it acts almost like a reoccurring ‘backdrop’ to many of his novels. This was an architectural practice that dominated much of sixties and seventies Britain that sought to erase inner city decline and post-war dereliction from the landscape. As an architectural movement originally associated with social idealism; it is now widely criticised for disregarding the communal, historic and built environment that surrounds it. Set against Birmingham’s few remaining concrete structures; I wanted to highlight the temporality of this landscape, particularly at a time when Birmingham has embarked on a process of urban regeneration in order to redefine itself.

This recent large scale city regeneration project has a complex history. Engineers had a profound influence on Birmingham starting from the 1960s, with the building of roads to bring fast, free-flowing traffic into the centre, including the inner ring road. Post-war high rise development and office blocks resulted in the building of many concrete, rectangular shaped towers where people would live and work, together with Spaghetti Junction and the infrastructure of concrete ring roads that surround the city. I guess a key question I want to pose with these photographic works is whether the cement based legacy that remains is still a necessary part of the architectural fabric of the city, or if it is final proof that the modernist ideology of a utopian future is now obsolete?

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What has happened to your pictures since they have been created and where have they been shown.

Just before Ballard’s death, I was invited to show ‘Ultimate City’ as part of the major retrospective J G Ballard: An Autopsy of the New Millennium at the Centre for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona. The show was officially authorised by Ballard himself, and explored both the artistic and literary referents of his writing, focusing on his vision of anti-utopia. The work has also been included in a number of other exhibitions in Lithuania, China and in the UK. Do you relate to the viewpoints shown in your pictures – the excessive consumption, the loss of humanity in contemporary life? What do you see as the trajectory of the current western civilisation?

As a dystopian view of an abandoned city after all fuel supplies have run out, the inhabitants of ‘Ultimate City’ are forced to live a more eco-friendly life in rural suburbia.

Reflecting this, I wanted the images to ask important questions about the material legacies of consumerist societies, the ephemeral nature of technology and the futile aspirations of Western industrialism.

Modern life has arguably become dominated by ‘disposable’ culture. The digital age pushes us toward a myriad of technological and material innovations; where consumerist objects are replaced, superseded, out-dated and deemed unfashionable in the blink of an eye. A recurrent hallmark of this work is to show in a small way how contemporary developments and the impact of new technologies speaks of the huge waste this potentially represents.

I guess I think of these assemblages made up of discarded appliances to be modern icons of throw away culture, anonymously erected rusty monuments to Western civilisation. They also have a strong visual rapport with the recycling of objects as seen in Dadaism and the ‘readymades’ of Duchamp and Schwitters: simultaneously making everyday objects into works of art while reducing works of art to the level of the mundane.

Do you consider these thoughts in how you live your day to day life?

Like most people, I’m aware that architecture has its cycles of construction and deconstruction, as does the role of technology within it. We live in a world of dwindling natural resources, and the design of our environment has an obvious relationship to our future survival.

As a consequence, I’m increasingly interested in the work and ideas of architectural groups such as Archinode for example, who integrate design and ecological principles with urban development design. Groups like this who view design philosophy as something that incorporates visions of sustainability and longevity, push technology and architecture in a non-disposable direction. However, I can’t help but wonder how or when progressive ideas such as ‘climatic tall buildings’, ‘performative material technologies’ will really become commonplace though? I know it sounds like science fiction but it’s these conceptions of the future evolution of our cities that persistently drive my work.

What other projects are you working on?

I’m currently reassessing Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities.

As an author who is uninterested in replicating ‘reality’ but who is concerned with the organising principles of cities and the kinds of visual juxtapositions that occur within them; in this collection of stories, narrative seems to obey no logic.

Usurping the language that architecture in the material world depends upon, Invisible Cities interests me because it maintains the furthest distance possible from what it means to be fixed or rigid.

With this project I intend to approach the city from a similar viewpoint, using Calvino’s novel as fictional stimulus; where urban design and architecture focuses on interpretations of the environment as built cultural assemblages, recycled urban cut-ups that resemble a nomadic metropolis.

www.michellelord.co.uk

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Using leather as a canvas, Mark Evans’ photorealistic etchings explore the delicate balance of life and death using a once living, breathing medium.

What is your art background?

I grew up on a farm in the Welsh mountains. My granddad gave me a knife when I was seven, I used it to carve images into trees and bark. I’ve also drawn with pencils since I was a boy. In my twenties I left Wales to study Fine Art at Middlesex University in London. For years I was working in more conventional materials, charcoal, oils, acrylics, but I couldn’t shake my childhood primal desire to play with knives.

So you were not raised by wolves then?

More like big dogs. Really big I mean though.

So why did you choose to work in such an unusual medium?

It was not my choosing, it was bizarre. Back in winter 2000, at the turn of the millennium, I was trying to clean a blood stain off a new leather jacket I had just been given that Christmas.

That jacket was the spark that led to my first ever leather etching!

What happened?

By sheer accident, or God-given providence, I scratched through the blood into the surface of the jacket. That tiny etched patch of contrast in the leather suddenly flipped on the creative light-bulb. It was my own Archimedes “Eureka” moment, as if an explosion went off in my mind. I saw a world of possibilities. I locked myself away for the next few years and just focused on developing this brand new technique.

I was living as part artist and part mad-scientist trying to perfect the process that I’d accidentally discovered.

How long have you been working with leather?

About ten years… since the accident.

What is it about leather that appeals to almost everyone?

Leather has both functional and aesthetic appeal. Leather is ancient, yet ultra cool. Leather has heritage, yet it is still rock ‘n’ roll. Leather just gets better with age.

Leather is masculine... from spartans and gladiators to wild west gunslingers. And also leather is feminine and sensual.

On a cold day a hungry man is drawn into a bakery by the smell of the warm fresh bread. Authentic leather has it’s own aroma that appeals to people. Kinda like good coffee, or grasscuttings, the scent evokes something.

What is it about leather that appeals to you as an artist?

Leather was once a living, breathing creature. In a plastic, synthetic, digital world, leather is authentic. Maybe my primal hunter gatherer roots somehow resonate with leather. Who knows… maybe it’s an ancient echo from my early ancestors?

I mean it’s knives and leather, I just love the finality of it.

Any cut or slice could go wrong. Every piece is made, quite literally, on the knife edge.

So leather itself is actually metaphorical for you?

It’s not purely an aesthetic, visual medium?

I’m cutting into skin, marking flesh. This is so important to me. Working in skin is a visceral experience for me. It’s something primal I’m trying to understand. We live in this

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nano, synthetic reality. Our lives, our food… its all shrinkwrapped and sanitized. Death and decay are not welcome here, we keep them at arms length, shut them out, but despite our best efforts eventually they keep coming back. Artists should look at this.

What do you consider Art to be?

What is Art?... God! You might as well ask me what is the meaning of life?

So what is your Art? It’s the contrast of light and dark, darkness and light, I mean that’s why I do what I do with leather. As I cut through the skin, etch through the layers of darkness I’m trying to reveal areas of light, of brightness. I’m taking something dead and gone, and hopefully trying to make something beautiful out of something that was very mundane. Something extraordinary out of something ordinary. Art should be something that confronts us, something that stops us and makes us think.

That’s why I love working with leather, I’m trying to cut back through the layers of crap and wax and polished surface to reveal what’s really going on beneath the veneer. I’m searching, aiming for something from below the surface. I guess I’m reaching for something magnificent. Something immortal. I keep aiming and not attaining. That’s the struggle.

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And you have no plans to return to painting?

Nope. I don’t use paintbrushes. I don’t do paint. Working with paper, paint, charcoals, even oils feels too artificial, too manmade. I want something more primordial and raw. There’s nothing more primal than death, to me cutting a leather hide or animal skin speaks in those terms. And yet even working in leather I cannot fully escape the artificial, man-made elements. All leather has been processed, and in the tannery the dead animal skin is made pretty, all traces of blood and gore removed. We forget leather was once alive. The stench of death is distant. Maybe that’s my point. We cover over what we do not wish to see. We hide from the inevitable, and just focus on the pretty, shiny surface… yeah, that’ll distract us for a while.

Is what you do an “undiscovered” art form, or does it have a historical precedent?

Both. I discovered my particular technique by pure chance.

I had no reference points but my own experiments and a fusion of my own alchemy and artistry. I have pioneered this technique and turned it into a new art form. I have lived leather for the past decade or so and I’m now discovering that leather art was an ancient tradition. There are rare, exquisite historic works in leather. Not many but they can be found, and of course there are still many Native Americans and South Americans who work with leather and knives… but very differently.

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Where do your source your leather?

My leather is sourced from all over he world. The cleanest hides come from Scandinavia where the cattle have lush pasture and no barbed wire fences to cut or snag their skin.

But if I’m making a darker, more violent piece I’ll choose a hide from South America where the animals are treated very differently. There the cows can be attacked by predators and get cut on razor wire. These wounds make for great scars in the piece. My hides all get shipped and tanned in Italy.

The Italians are the best at this. I usually use Aniline or Semi Aniline, Full Grain leathers, but not all leather can be etched.

For what special or functional purposes are your interior design pieces used?

It’s varied. In homes, castles, clubs, palaces, on leather furniture, in luxury car interiors. For my leather work in private jets, the aviation industry demand my hides be treated for fire-resistancy. And clients with super-yachts need salineresistancy. Technically, leather wall art is amazing. Leather is easy to clean, it’s a great waterproofing material and has natural soundproofing qualities.

How long does it take to carve or etch each piece?

It can depend on things like the size and the amount of detail involved in a piece. Some take weeks, other larger pieces take months. I see each piece as a ‘voyage of discovery’ because a hide will have it’s own unique history. My work requires so much attention to detail. It’s surgical precision, I have to take my time because if I ever screw up and slice through the hide I have to go back and start again from the beginning.

You encountered some problems when you were learning, how did you overcome them?

Painfully, very bloody painfully. So many times I just sliced right through the leather, ruining it, destroying the skin and the art... and my fingers! It’s not like paint where if you mess up the canvas you paint right over it, there is no ‘undo’ in my line of work, there’s no Apple Z. What’s done cannot be undone, but I love that, it means the pressure’s on all the time.

But I have slowly learned what knives can do.

Are your panels all one single piece or do you stitch the leather together?

On the larger works I have to panel or stitch hides together.

You just can’t get cows big enough! Not yet anyway. Who knows, there’s probably some evil geneticist in a lab on a remote island in the Pacific growing McCows the size of elephants.

Where do you exhibit or sell your work? And how much does it sell for?

So far in London, New York and Dubai. The prices depend really. Small pieces start at around ten thousand pounds, and the larger pieces can fetch up to a quarter of a million pounds.

So do you consider yourself as successful?

If you’re asking “Am I satisfied?”…Then no, I’m not. Will I ever be satisfied? Probably not. You just gotta keep pushing, keep stretching yourself, reaching for something. It’s the struggle that compels me. I think if I ever reached a point of being content I’d be bored and quit. That’s the beauty of art – it’s limitless. Once you think you’ve reached the pinnacle of what’s possible, you do something new and discover a whole new world of opportunities.

What do you have planned for the near future?

I’m really hoping to do a show in London and New York, and who knows maybe China too? I’m also creating a series of images etched inside leather-lined coffins.

Do you choose your own images or take commissions?

Both. So far the world has only seen my photo-representative commissions, which I get a lot of stick for. My own personal pieces and ideas have been kept under wraps until the show.

Why do you etch famous or iconic faces?

There’s a number of reasons. Most of the iconic portraits were commissioned, so I did it to survive, to pay the bills, feed my kids, pay my staff. Like Warhol said, it’s just good business.

But I am fascinated by the concept of the dead hero, the larger than life characters we aspire to. Most of us lead lives of quiet desperation, our mediocre culture needs the hero.

What do you do in leisure time?

I’m a real cinephile, I love the cinema. I reckon story may be the last great truth we have left.

Who is most likely to be interested in your work?

I hope my work appeals to many different people, but the people most likely not to be interested in my work are the animal rights activists and PETA people! What can I do? I’m not gonna keep everyone happy. I have no current plans to start doing Quorn art! Carved tofu? Etched vegetables?

Interview by Shaun Woolley, Yuyang Zhang, Gavin Bernard and Justin Ratcliffe www.threewhitewalls.com

Photography: Miguel Domingos Styling: Marc Piùa Sala Hair and make up: Emma Ramos Headpieces: Cynthia Castle – Tapia Model: Eliisa Raats www.francinamodels.com Production: www.volitif.com Special thanks to Carolina Cabanillas

Beige gauze dress: Givenchy

Black satin dress: Balenciaga

Beige gauze dress: Givenchy

Beige gauze dress: Givenchy

Green velvet dress: Gianfranco FerrĂŠ

Black dress: Givenchy

Black satin dress: Givenchy

Every day, every time Mira picked up the little brush and dipped it in a suitcase, her body was swamped by those feelings.

Her skin cells began to vibrate, gently, transporting the sensation to the tiniest nooks of her body. It was not why she had chosen the job though; she had no idea she’d feel this way.

Written by Maria Modrovich http://modrovich.com

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After the first month, they made them watch recordings from the security cameras. On her tape, she saw that at times, she almost closed her eyes when her hand with the brush swept over the contents of a piece of luggage.

She got scared her employers would notice, so from that evaluation day on, she forced her eyes to stay open.

Overall, her evaluation was one of the best ones. ‘An eye for detail,’ her boss, the boss of the Terminal G sector, wrote. Also, ‘meticulous,’ ‘tireless’ and ‘precise.’

‘Executing her duties relentlessly while remaining pleasant to the traveller (when possible).’

Her boss looked like a terrorist himself so maybe that was the reason for parenthesizing. Political correctness went only so far at this airport. She liked the parenthesis; it summed up not only what was asked of them, but also how they felt. The sternness she maintained wasn’t so much about being stern – it masked her fear that one day she might come across a real suspect. She was a ‘virgin’ – she hadn’t found a bomb yet. She hoped she’d never find one; they all did.

She imagined the warmth would leave her body on the spot, probably giving way to a different warmth, bound with unpleasantness.

Fortunately, the miasma of unease evaporated after her hand delved under piles of clothing and personal belongings.

The opening is already ceremonious – Mira tries to guess what’s going to be inside. It’s a matter of nanoseconds; she scans both the suitcase and its owner – do they have a tan, are they dressed sportily, do they wear jewellery? She prefers quirky pieces of luggage, enormous red or grass green suitcases. Women are better than men. Deep shapeless bags without wheels have an ambiguity to them; there’s more danger to sticking your hand in without being able to see the contents. It’s as if you were blindfolded, as if you were searching for landmines – blind. Of course, the risks are not ‘humongous’ (her boss’s quote); the luggage has been through various exams before it lands on her

table. Still, shapeless bags give Mira a rush of anxiety, and then another rush follows, another type. When she starts touching the things inside and fishing them out, she is a magician, fingering the insides of a cylinder hat, yet, instead of a bunny, pulling out faux flower bouquets and colorful scarves.

Even though she has her preferences, any piece of luggage can be interesting, really. And any person.

Businessmen in suits, with seemingly odorless black cases can surprise you when you turn them inside out.

Mira knows.

And when the day is dragging, with a line full of pensioners with soft flower-print suitcases, all she has to do is think back to her first day on the job. The sensation was the strongest; it came as a complete surprise.

She showed up in her proper & boring, B&W uniform, eyes still puffy from the abruptly terminated deep-night sleep. It was an early morning shift; the rookies always got those. She was chewing a gum, self-conscious about her nervous intestines. Her boss made her spit it out in the office, in front of all the other newbies; the gradeschool-like incident made her more nervous. There was a lot of talking about obligations and duties toward the state. The senior staff looked absolutely serious and also a little morose.

‘If you fuck up, you know the consequences’ came up in several alternations.

She was the colour of an unripe pear when she’d reached her position in the middle of Terminal G. She saw the people on the line a few metres to the left; their luggage went through the X-ray machine first. Then some of them proceeded toward her counter, set up in the middle of the hall, as if in an ad-hoc operation – there was no wall she could lean against or hide behind.

They approached her slowly, hesitantly, not sure what else they had to submit themselves to. Hand-picked individuals whose mistrust would soon be replaced by ingenious embarrassment. The boss had warned Mira

and her colleagues that they would go through dirty underwear and discover butt-plugs hidden in sidepockets. All the while, they had to remain calm, their face expressions unchanged.

The first subject to control was an old lady. It was the boss who asked her to open the crinkled-leather bag.

The lady’s hand clenched into a fist.

Then the fist hammered the air a couple of times.

The woman got hold of it with her left hand and sort of attached it to the zipper of the bag.

Mira caught herself praying the boss would recognise the disease; it was easy to imagine him yelling and shaking the old woman, having a squad of boys in overalls jump on the tiny geriatric and splat her on the ground.

She wanted to help the old lady open the bag but the boss just stood there and waited patiently. At the end of the day, Mira would ask if it was a rule that the people opened their luggage themselves; the boss would answer that ‘it was better.’

Finally, the hand obeyed and slowly moved the ringlet along the zipper line. When the boss took a fresh cloth and attached it to the brush to scan the bag, Mira was to look closely, her hands prepped in plastic gloves if he asked her to step in.

Mira’s eyes flickered between the uninteresting contents of the bag and the hand that continued to lead a life on its own, grabbing the air and pointing fingers at the boss.

The next traveller at the check-point was a young woman. The boss stepped back and made a welcoming gesture toward Mira, encouraging her to take over.

The girl – the woman – could’ve been a couple of years older than she, maybe thirty. It was hard to guess.

She was familiar-looking in general. Mira was perplexed by the visage; the features didn’t give away ethnicity or nationality. The young woman would’ve passed for a next-door girl almost anywhere.

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Before she got the job, Mira would lie around her apartment drinking green tea with mint leaves and reading the paper or a book she had read a review on in the paper. She would spend two thirds of a day in her striped orange-and-white pajama pants and an oversized grey T-shirt. On colder days, she wore socks too.

One time she was reading a story about an old man.

In the book, the man went out to walk his young wife’s new puppy and he buttoned his coat in a silly way – he realized the mistake only when he caught a glimpse of his reflection in a shop window. Mira looked down at her pajama pants. It dawned on her that not being like everyone else, not going out on dates, to clubs and shopping for new clothes sort of made her a sad old man. She didn’t want to rush into becoming an old person, much less an old man. She tried to analyse what triggered that emotion in her – was it really the pajamas? Or the teakettle the author of the book made the character obsess about? Or the cold relationship to the puppy? In any case, Mira wanted to be the young wife – not a wife of a silly pajama-ed old man, and not a wife per se, but if she was to be associated with a character, she wanted to be the young wife. She wanted to be young.

She wished she knew how to do it.

Of course she was young, physically and mentally. She was just a little coy, had left her only friend back in the City they both called Holy (mainly due to its limited size and the way the limited size affected people’s behaviour). Mira didn’t really know how or where to make friends – people in the Normal City already had all the friends they needed.

Sometimes, particularly on similar sad-revelation days like that one, she wondered why she had left home.

Bitterly nostalgic, or even a little angry, she would pull on the sweats over her pajama pants and run down to the newsstand. She would ventilate her feelings by directing them at the man who sold her the Marlboros.

But he understood, she knew he did. The country was full of bitterly nostalgic and slightly angry people.

Deep down, Mira was sure she did the right thing when she had left her hometown. The girlfriend got married and Mira had guessed correctly – her wedding day was the last time – or one of the last times – that she was allowed to comb her friend’s hair.

to feel when she combed her friend’s hair. And with what intensity!

It was as if she was caressing the girl’s skin, her auburn mane, and also – and that was possibly even more intense, and just plain better – the action felt reciprocated. As if the girl not only allowed Mira to caress her but also stroked her back. When the brush first touched the insides of the suitcase, tiny tingling sparks jumped onto Mira’s fingers and immediately started to rush up, onto her arms and travelling further.

When they arrived at Mira’s bellybutton, they spread in all directions, zipping her up in a familiar, almost erotic feeling. When the sparks reached her face, she wanted to close her eyes; it was so intimate.

All her worries were gone – all her thoughts for that matter. Her eyelids de-puffed, her senses sharpened.

It was not an orgasm, but not far from it. It might have been better, in its purity.

The girlfriend from the Holy City called. The phone call soon took the form of a monologue: ‘Yes, the husband was well. But that wasn’t interesting.

She had found the perfect match for Mira, wasn’t that exciting!

The husband and she have met a handsome bearded revolutionary at a rally.

He had a quirk, this revolutionary, just like Mira. He too was scared of life (Mira smirked) and sort of experienced it through other people. Mira dreamed about lives of her passengers (Mira imagined a Mira-like figure bringing breakfast to a huge bed where the auburnhair traveller-girl lay); this guy fantasized about life stories of dead book owners.

Surely Mira had heard about the book piles that started to appear on the streets of the Cities, right?

In case she hadn’t heard: all these old people who had immigrated here a long time ago – a lot of them came alone (Mira envisioned the luggage belt full of soft flower-print suitcases rotating in an endless loop), or they had outlived their relatives. Now they were dying – this was a generational thing – and after they were gone, their books ended up in the streets. Complete collections of books, orphaned, unwanted. Some of them really great, according to the Bearded Revolutionary.

Heavy philosophical volumes, complete criminal series, Russian classics, first-edition Hemingways.

Is this right? the Bearded Revolutionary was asking them after the rally in a nearby coffee shop. It isn’t, he answered himself. He said that our generation had no respect for books anymore. And no respect for books meant no respect for old people. For people (Mira could

“

“She didn’t want to rush into becoming an old person, much less an old man.”

Sticking her plastic-gloves-covered hands into the pile of clothing that belonged to the (as it turned out according to the passport) foreign brunette, she was unprepared to experience the same sensation she used

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hear a hammering revolutionary voice), period.

He could see and feel every person through their books. Every time he found a pile on the street, he would take time to sit down on the pavement and dig deep into the weathered pages. While he read snippets of the dead person’s favorite works, he compiled their life story. He said he wanted to start some sort of a project with the books. Wasn’t he great? Could Mira see how they’d make a perfect match?’

Mira said she guessed she could see what her friend meant.

She also said she didn’t like projects.

Men in general – these days she was vague about them. They created sensations in her but they lacked the sweetness of girls.

Like that guy in the shabby jacket and the indigo shirt.

“Sir, would you please open your suitcase for me,“ Mira asked him.

When he obeyed, it was as if a hut had popped out of the suitcase, like one of those 3D cards that you open and all of a sudden a colourful little castle rises up. The whiff that escaped from the humble piece of luggage was unmistakably hut.

At first, Mira dipped her fingers inside rather hesitantly, expecting moss at the bottom. After making room for the explosives-seeking brush, she scanned everything: the shoe-bags, the soles of the shoes, the seams of the bags.

The inspection didn’t produce any warmth in her body. It had, nonetheless, transferred her to her grandmother’s cottage. She found herself picking walnuts from underneath the walnut tree. It was a moist morning; the fog covered the tip of the roof of the tiny train station that stood on a tiny hill – a joke of a hill. Mira was wearing blue rain boots and her fingers and fingernails were black from the walnut shells. The air smelled of coal, rotten leaves and must.

The must that settled into one’s things immediately.

She hadn’t thought about her grandmother in a long time.

“How long was your stay, Sir?” “I’ve been here a week,” the man said. “Six days to be precise.”

Six days he must’ve been away from his hut, and the must was still holding on to him. Perhaps he was not a musty type by default, Mira pondered. Maybe he got infected here.

“Were you staying in the countryside, Sir?” “I was right here in the city,” the man said, now visibly unnerved by the questioning.

“This is my seventh security check,” he said under his breath, loud enough so that she could hear him.

Mira resisted tilting over her counter to sniff on the man’s beard in search for more traces of frowziness.

“Thank you for your patience. Have a safe flight.”

After the man left and before another traveller was sent over, Mira pictured the man’s wife distilling the must in a home-made distillery in the backyard of their hut.

‘You shall not forget your home,’ the (for some reason) small wife weepily said to the man. ‘Don’t be silly, woman,’ he muttered but it only made the woman cry harder. Tear-eyed, she sprayed more distilled must on the contents of his not-so-neatly packed suitcase.

Before she got the job with the Airport Security and while she was still living in the Holy City, Mira’s needs were met by occasional party hook-ups.

Usually, people considered her either too blunt or too quiet, depending in which phase of her life they’ve met her (she had traded bluntness for silence at some point, recognising that others didn’t know what to do with it, and, with her). She was considered pretty, or as she liked to say in Phase 2, avoiding the bluntness – ‘ok-looking.’ Non-committal sex was never too hard to find.

Since moving to the larger City, she had only slept with one remote colleague, once, after Terminals A, B, C, and G had celebrated the birth of another colleague’s son.

She considered it a mistake.

After the encounter with the auburn-mane girl on the first day of the job, Mira started to think of herself as a lesbian.

Maybe it was the girlie white-starred cosmetics bag peeping at Mira from the shiny red suitcase, or the purely pleasurable aroma of the girl itself – Mira was enchanted.

Suddenly things made sense. Being gay answered a lot of questions: why she had felt out of place wherever she went; why she never had a significant relationship; why her parents never particularly liked her.

“She also said she didn’t like projects.”

“

Mira was up at 2am, ready to take the bus to the airport and start her shift at three. Some planes flew in and out at wee hours, to make it comfortable for passengers who had boarded or were disembarking at distant exotic destinations.

Entering the staff room from the over-lit main hall, she greeted the girls, changed into her uniform and blushed her cheeks. She learned the trick with the blush from her girlfriend at home. Apparently it was something French women did even if they wore no make up. It was supposed to give the face a healthy glow.

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Sleepily, she dragged herself down two flights of escalators, descending to Terminal G. She’ll have the good coffee today, the over-priced cappuccino from the bar; screw the slipslop from the machine in the changing room.

She prepared the little brush and waited, expressionless, for the first round of nervous tourists who had to reveal the contents of their suitcases to her.

Enter, chronologically: Middle-aged man with mouthwash already spilled among his undies. His surprised silence was followed by cursing, followed by embarrassed apologising for cursing.

German actress going on about a German film festival that just took place in the City. She acted like Mira should know. Both suitcase and woman emitted a pleasant smell. However, she talked too much and too loud. Mira could see herself brushing that soft blond hair only if actress were asleep or shut up with a duct tape.

Smiling grandpa, probably on his way to visit one of his children, somewhere in Canada. He was too polite to bother Mira with details.

The man that came next had an ugly hard-shell suitcase, the type that used to be popular in the heyday of salesmen. Before she said ‘Please open,’ before she saw the faded covers and before she leafed through the yellow pages, she knew who he was.

It wasn’t his looks – even though retrospectively, Mira had to admit that her friend’s description was pretty accurate. It was the atmosphere of the adjective ‘revolutionary’ that stuck around that made her recognise him before she even started with the security check. She hated his air of revolution; it was so pretentious.

THE BEARDED REVOLUTIONARY It was a good day for the book revolution. He had found a large pile.

At first, nostalgia almost took him over, but then he envisioned the owner of the books. The man would be old and wrinkled and he’d sit in his armchair peacefully, reading. He could be reading this lean ‘Epepe’ book. By Ferencz Karinthy.

When he opened the cover, right there, in the upper right corner of the first, blank page was written in pencil: ‘Martin M. owes 2.’ He couldn’t decipher the currency.

It was easy to give in to the gloom of the thrownout books. He had to admit he sort of enjoyed it. It went well with the whole revolutionary thing. Lately, however, he’s been feeling more content – he knew all the books he picked up in the streets would soon leave the cramped apartment in his old town and move into a creaking studio he had rented in one of the crooked streets of the City’s old port. There, people would leaf through them while sipping their espressos.

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He was walking down the street, imagining the small place full of intimate wooden tables, porcelain clinking and book-pages rustling. He was on his way to look for a mattress. He wished he had someone to share the good news with; he dreamed of a girlfriend he could surprise. He’d act like nothing has happened until they were in the mattress shop. Then she’d finally remember that today was the day of the lease signing.

She’d ask how it went. He’d pull out the contract and, all delighted, point out the line where it said Purpose of the lease: Antique Books / Café. She’d lean against his side and inhale the smell of his scalp right above his ear, where his hair was shortest and pointiest. She’d rub her noise lightly against that spot and when she’d do that, he’d close his eyes.

MIRA A school trip. Mira forced herself not to frown when she saw the clump of noisy teenagers. They all wore uniforms, monochromatic much like her own working clothes. They probably think I’m old, she thought when she noticed some of the boys peeking at her. Was she already in the category of the adult mistress who they fantasized about, eager to learn the secrets that without her skills would take them years to crack?

The girls were a different story – she was a rival.

They looked with jealousy at her spotless skin and the features that have fallen into their places comfortably.

With the same jealousy, if somewhat far-fetched, as if it were a prospective, anticipated feeling, she admired their tight asses and sparkling white teeth.

One of them – she lost track – had a lean hardcover book in her bag. Mira picked it up, and was about to leaf through its pages, as the procedure required. She paused on the first page, right inside the cover. There was nothing except for a note pressed in pencil onto the yellowed page that said ‘Martin M. owes 2.’

She couldn’t decipher the currency.

Opposite: Photography by Gigi Stoll www.gigistoll.com

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Phenomena | www.kinglux.co.uk | Kinglux 89

What Florence was to the Renaissance, what Paris was to Modernism, so was the hinterland of the M25 to a particular generation.

For a fleeting moment this non-place became the ephemeral capital of a brief moment in time.

The big outdoor raves of the early nineties changed the way we could occupy landscape. As The Orb put it in the layered samples that made up Little Fluffy Clouds, “to the traditional sound of the British summer – the lawn mover, the smack of leather on willow – has been added a new sound”. It was as though traditional events like the Stoneleigh Royal Show were ramped up and accelerated via man-machine-Detroit-fantasy, Kling-Klang-Jam-Stall, and Motorik picturesque to a hypnotic futurist vision. In between the urban acid house warehouse parties which preceded them and the commercialized metropolitan superclubs like the Ministry of Sound, these events marked out a different kind of territory.

They played out over the landscape of early 1990s Britain, organised through the technologies of pirate radio, telephone recorded messages, flyers with graphics fresh from newly accessible desktop publishing. What these devices gathered together was not so much a place as a network of transport and communication infrastructures overlaid with coincidences of chemicals, decibels, and demountable structures. Powered by generators, the technologies of pleasure – soundsystems, funfairs, lights, lasers – were wired up and switched on to form an instant city. Or at least what felt for a moment like something with its own instant and ephemeral geography, townscape, public spaces, neighborhoods, and other urbanistic tropes. It was almost like Archigram had predicted: phones, electricity, and gadgets with the suburbs and Home Counties as a backdrop. Vast crowds of us became versions of David Greenes “Electric Aborigine” dressed in performance fabrics, splashed with neon, threaded with shreds of new age, faux hippyness.

We gathered in places that were nowhere in particular: underpasses, fields, warehouses, fallow fields, and old airstrips, places that were neither urban, suburban nor rural.

The kinds of places between infrastructure and destinations that are hardly places at all. Non-places: The M25, service stations, the fields of the not-so-rural southern east England, the bits in between housing estates, agriculture and big box retail. Though it was often hard to pinpoint exactly where you were, there was never any doubt that you were in the strange reality of the contemporary British landscape.

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For a moment disparate populations of indie kids, football fans and travellers amongst loose agglomerations of equipment were held together by music which itself created a type of space. Piano breaks, squelching bass, trebly, speeded-up vocals and what the Criminal Justice Act described as “a succession of repetitive beats” formed a kind of immersive, sonic urbanism. The sound itself was spatial – it was non-linear, formed of juxtaposed incidents and layers of sensation suggesting distance. The music was overwhelming, relentless and constantly on the edge of a futurist sublime.

Deep in the moment, the ephemeral construction felt endless and timeless. Could 20,000 people standing in a field for a weekend be a town any less, or any more than 20,000 people in houses, flats, places of employment, education?

For a couple of summers, the M25 became a serotonin soaked ring of infrastructure, a periphery became both a destination and a symbol. In Shakespearian terms, it was a concrete O crammed with potential and possibility. This road without destination showed that it’s possible – or almost possible – to re-tune the infrastructures of contemporary landscape. It tweaked the channels of Thatcherite free-market neo-liberalism in order to deliver something different, a brief alternative.

These were imaginary landscapes and were always provisional. They never really existed beyond their immediate experience. Though rave culture itself was idiotic, hedonistic and apolitical – a shallow ephemera that achieved nothing of lasting significance – we might still be able to learn from it.

Networks intended to deliver one kind of ideology also might be able to deliver quite another. We might be able to inhabit what seem soulless, anonymous landscapes in ways that allows them to host exaggerated sensations of humanity. We might be able to believe there is a latent magic in the banal, everyday landscape that is powerful enough to transform the miserable landscape of late Thatcherism, even if only for a weekend. And that that might be enough.

Written by Sam Jacob, www.strangeharvest.com Photography by Tony Hill

About the photographs To illustrate this essay, Studio Kinglux visited the sites of historic raves from the early nineties and photographed what was there in the present day.

The first location chosen was Castlemorton Common. This was the most infamous illegal rave, when twenty thousand hippies and ravers converged on a picturesque part of rural England. After one week of nonstop music and a tabloid-media frenzy, British laws were rewritten to give police additional powers to ensure a similar event could never take place again.

Visiting the site seventeen years later all that remained of any kind of party atmosphere was a group of Kurdish men enjoying vodka and idle chat.

Cows roamed freely across the road that leads to the site and it was the picture of middle-England bliss. Locals talked about the rave with hushed tones, remarking how frightening it was to be in homes in the middle of the event. Horror stories of livestock being killed by hungry party-goers and the stench of human faeces still smoulder in the minds of the unwitting hosts.

The second site was a stadium in Northampton where a young act called The Prodigy made an appearance to an ecstatic crowd nearly twenty years previously. On the day we visited there was a hot-rod car race taking place.

As garishly coloured cars tore around the fenced off tracks, entire families from grandparents to youngsters swapped stories and spare tools in the pitstop repair areas. Spending time at these sites felt a little like being a pop-archaeologist. On the one hand, I had expected to find some kind of trace of the events that I had researched. I found none. I had wanted to capture scenes where an energy had once been but had now dissipated.

Instead, I found that somewhat inevitably, the world had moved on.

The era defining raves had been covered over by new networks of nature, memory and time in the years since.

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Opposite: Photography by Gigi Stoll www.gigistoll.com

Photography by Gigi Stoll www.gigistoll.com