Port Issue 22 by Port

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Contents

The Porter Tilda Swinton, Foraging, Gavin Turk, Citrus Fruit Geoff Dyer, Nadav Kander, Pavements

Details Photography Robin Broadbent

David Hallberg Photography Pari Dukovic

74 38 40 42 112 128 147 153

Contributors To Fail Better Editorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Letter The Spring / Summer Collections Piet Oudolf Commentary Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Photography Mamadi Doumbouya Words Catherine Lacey

The lovely people who helped make the issue The genius of Samuel Beckett Photography Lola Paprocka & Pani Paul Photography Berber Theunissen Words Jesse Ball, Lisa Halliday, Will Self Samuel Beckett

Styling Scott Stephenson Words Ali Morris

104 6a Photography Tereza Cervenova Words Will Wiles

96 28

OVERSEAS A N I N V I TAT I O N T O T R AV E L

OVERSEAS CHRONOGRAPH

Contents

166 Flag Factory Photography Christopher Payne

158 184 194 254 256

Moving In Dune Space Stockists 10,000 Hours with Jim Dowdall

Photography Ahmet Unver Photography Rudi Geyser

Styling Rose Forde Creative direction and styling Dan May

Photography Gabby Laurent

208 Dee Rees Photography Maria Spann Words Liz Welch

City by the Sea Photography Kalpesh Lathigra Creative direction and styling Dan May

Springwatch Photography Rebecca Scheinberg Words Alex Doak

178

214 33

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Dan Crowe CREATIVE DIRECTOR Kuchar Swara FASHION DIRECTOR Dan May DESIGNER AND STUFF (RAISED BY WOLVES) Matt Willey DEPUTY EDITOR & ONLINE EDITOR George Upton ART EDITOR Ling Ko PHOTO DIRECTOR AND CONTRIBUTING ART DIRECTOR Max Ferguson FASHION FEATURES EDITOR David Hellqvist DESIGN EDITOR Will Wiles SUB-EDITOR Kerry Crowe EUROPE EDITOR Donald Morrison US EDITOR Alex Vadukul AUSTRALIA EDITOR James W Mataitis Bailey INTERIORS EDITORS Huw Griffith, Tobias Alexander Harvey ASSISTANT PRODUCER Hannah Geddes EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS Laura Francis, Cameron Hill, Jo Lawson-Tancred ASSISTANT PHOTO EDITOR Jack Orton WORDS Nicholas Balfe, Jesse Ball, Samuel Beckett, Joseph Cook, Dan Crowe Georges Duthuit, Geoff Dyer, Laura Francis, Lisa Halliday, David Hellqvist George Kafka, Nadav Kander, Catherine Lacey, Jo Lawson-Tancred, Ali Morris Darius Namdar, Christopher Payne, Will Self, Nicole Stott, Kuchar Swara Tilda Swinton, Vicente Todolí, George Upton, Liz Welch, Will Wiles PHOTOGRAPHY Robin Broadbent, Tereza Cervenova, Mamadi Doumbouya, Pari Dukovic Rudi Geyser, Suzie Howell, Kalpesh Lathigra, Gabby Laurent, Lola & Pani Christopher Payne, Rebecca Scheinberg, Maria Spann, Berber Theunissen Ahmet Unver

SENIOR EDITORS Tom Craig, Reportage Brett Steele, Architecture Alex Doak, Horology Fergus Henderson, Food Samantha Morton, Film Nathaniel Rich, Literature

MANAGING DIRECTORS Dan Crowe, Kuchar Swara

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Laura Barber Richard Buckley Kyle Chayka Kabir Chibber Alex Griessmann Leo Hollis Lily Robinson Albert Scardino Minnie Weisz Philip Womack

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PUBLISHERS Dan Crowe, Kuchar Swara, Matt Willey ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Andrew Chidgey-Nakazono

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Contributors

Jesse Ball Jesse Ball is a leading American novelist and poet whose recent works include A Cure for Suicide, Silence Once Begun and The Curfew. While studying for an MFA at Columbia University, Ball met the poet Richard Howard who became a mentor, helping Ball to publish his first volume, March Book, in 2004. In 2017, he was included on Granta’s list of Best Young American Novelists. Ball is a John Simon Guggenheim fellow and a recipient of the Plimpton Prize. He lives in Chicago where he is a professor of writing at the School of the Art Institute.

Tilda Swinton Academy Award- and BAFTA-winning actress, artist and producer Tilda Swinton has appeared in a wide range of films, from independent arthouse productions, such as Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, to Hollywood blockbusters. Swinton began acting in the early 1980s while a student at Cambridge University, and in recent years has starred in We Need to Talk About Kevin, Michael Clayton and The Grand Budapest Hotel. She lives in Scotland with her partner and two children.

Kalpesh Lathigra Kalpesh Lathigra is a London-based photographer whose work occupies the space between documentary and art. Lost in the Wilderness, published in 2015, is a collection of his photographs of the Oglala Sioux in the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The series, part of a project looking at forgotten communities, was featured in the New Yorker, the British Journal of Photography and the Financial Times. His work has been exhibited at Noorderlicht, the Brighton Photo Biennial 2014, PHotoEspaña and the National Portrait Gallery.

Pari Dukovic Born and raised in Istanbul, Pari Dukovic studied photography and art history at Rochester Institute of Technology in the United States. In 2006, he moved to New York to become a photographer and now works across portraiture, fashion, beauty and documentary. Dukovic has twice won SPD Gold awards, and his work has featured in many publications, including Vanity Fair, Time, GQ, Rolling Stone, Wired and the New Yorker.

Catherine Lacey American author Catherine Lacey’s debut novel, Nobody is Ever Missing, was named one of the best books of 2014 by the New Yorker and won the 2015 Late Night Library Debutlitzer award. Lacey also went on to win a Whiting Award. In 2017, she released her second novel, The Answers, which has been compared to the works of Don DeLillo and Margaret Atwood. Lacey currently lives in Chicago and is working on her first short story collection, Certain American States.

Robin Broadbent British still-life photographer Robin Broadbent moved to his current studio in New York in 1999 and quickly established a reputation for clean, detailed imagery that plays with a sense of scale, form and abstraction. In addition to shooting for publications such as Numéro, Vogue and the New York Times Magazine, he has completed advertising campaigns for brands including Prada, Bottega Veneta, Rolex and Balenciaga. A regular contributor to Port, some of the work featured in the magazine will appear at Reduction, Reduction, a solo exhibition held at Wren London gallery from 3rd May to 28th June.

Editor‘s Letter

Time to make some changes around here… Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of the world’s most exciting authors and an important and fresh voice on race and gender. Adichie holds a unique place in our current cultural landscape, existing, as she does, between the high-brow literary world, pop culture and fashion. Her books are made into movies; her talks get sampled in Beyoncé songs. She attends the occasional couture show too. Who else would we want as the first female cover star of Port? Adichie’s novels – Half of a Yellow Sun, Purple Hibiscus and Americanah – are monumental works that have introduced a new generation in the West to African literature, and won her several awards and a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowship along the way. Along with her Ted talks – of which one is in the top 10 watched of all time – her strength of mind and inherent style are inspiring a groundswell of young writers. Basically, she’s cool and smart and you should read and listen to her immediately. The accomplished author Catherine Lacey met Adichie in Washington DC to discuss her extraordinary books, the complexity of recent gender movements and to get a hint at a next big project. They also, of course, had a chance to consider the “lurking dread” of the 45th US president – who was, at the time of the interview, sitting 42

close by in the White House, perhaps lunching on a Big Mac and watching TV. The shocking results of the American election and the ongoing horror of Brexit were the catalysts that led us to the theme of this, our 22nd, issue: freedom. We wanted to talk to others about the nature of their freedom – what it means to have and not have it in death, in art, in food, work and play. And to question, also, some of the restrictions we had placed on ourselves at Port: such as the guy on the cover… We launched independently, seven years ago, as a magazine for men, but do we always have to feature a man on the cover? Who came up with that rule? We had more than usual amounts of fun making this issue, shooting stories in South Africa, India, America, the Netherlands and, with NASA’s kind support, the deepest realms of the observable universe. Edited in London and art directed in New York, Sydney and London, the founding team came together on this edition to rip up our rule book and claw back some creative liberties of our own. We hope you like the results. As Tilda Swinton wrote for us in homage to her late friend, the art critic, novelist, poet and painter, John Berger: “Long live freedom! Nothing to lose but our chains.” Dan Crowe, Editor

To Fail Better

Samuel Beckett is remembered for his pessimism: his belief in language’s inability to describe reality, coupled with a wish to expose the pointlessness of art and life. It is true, at times he could come across as a little negative. Yet great playfulness and warmth could be found in both the man and his work. Somewhat paradoxically, creating radical prose to explore how nothing meaningful or real can ever be expressed, generated new ways of writing – and not without the odd thunderbolt of humour. One such work is Three Dialogues. Published in 1949, it is one of Beckett’s lesser known texts, a witty yet dense correspondence 40

between the author and the art critic and historian, Georges Duthuit. They discuss the nature and purpose of art, with Beckett suggesting that all art is profoundly flawed. It is one of the most affectionate, rigorous and entertaining texts on art and friendship ever set down. At the end of one exchange, Beckett “Exits weeping” – a perfect moment of overstated tragicomedy. In a letter to Duthuit of the same year, Beckett writes: “I shall shock you often but you will be with me. I have other friends but only one Georges Duthuit. I feel it. I know it.” Go to page 155 for Three Dialogues.

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PORTER:

TI LDA

SW INT ON

FO RA G IN G GAVI N CI T RU S GEO F F N ADAV

T U RK F RU iT DY ER KA ND ER PAV E MEN T S

ORANGES AND LEMONS Vicente Todolí My grandfather was a farmer who specialised in citrus. Together with my father, he developed new ways of pruning his trees and built a nursery near Valencia, selling cuttings to local farmers. When, in 1985, I returned from studying in New York, I fell back in love with the culture and landscape where I grew up and bought a piece of land next to my father’s, to start a small citrus collection. Some years later I happened to visit a nursery in the south of France that grew an amazing variety of citrus but kept the trees in pots so they could be brought indoors between October and March. I thought about how, in Valencia, we have one of the best regions in the world to grow these plants (when the Arabs were here in the Middle Ages they referred to their citrus orchards as paradise on Earth), but we had no place to grow and celebrate the diversity of the fruit. So, in 2010, I expanded my father’s and my land and started a foundation. We now have over 400 examples of the genus, and recently we were recognised for our efforts to preserve the environment from development. Our aim is to focus on the history of citrus plants. Most of the bioengineers and universities that specialise in this area are commercially led and only know the types that are sold in supermarkets – oranges, lemons and limes – but the diversity of the fruit and the way it has evolved and mutated is fascinating. The varieties that existed a hundred years ago, for example, were different to what is available now, because farmers would graft on to less commercial plants. In studying the core of the trees, you can uncover this history; working this way, I discovered a new pear-shaped blood citrus that has never before been recorded. The foundation is dedicated to research and to preserving lesser-known types, but it is also somewhere people can discover the beauty of the fruit and its culinary possibilities. I’ve done projects around art and food, such as with Ferran Adrià of elBulli and the artist Richard Prince, and we hope to continue this work at the foundation, inviting chefs to learn about the different varieties and ultimately to hold a citrus dinner. Curiously, there’s a long-established relationship between citrus and art. Cosimo de’ Medici, one of the greatest patrons of the arts in Renaissance Florence, collected the fruit and commissioned paintings of it. It became an elevated, fashionable pursuit for the aristocracy, who built elaborate orangeries alongside their picture galleries. In many ways, I am returning to that tradition. As told to George Upton. Vicente Todolí was director of the Tate Modern in London between 2003 and 2010. In addition to founding Fundació Todolí Citrus, he is currently artistic director of Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan and advises the director of the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art.

The Porter

Photography Suzie Howell

REMEMBERING JOHN BERGER

John Berger looks at paper with a hungry passion. He takes up his pencil, rubs the end of it – invoking a talisman? More likely cleaning off dust… and gets to work. The magic analogy holds: He draws as if under a spell or, at least, a sort of fever – stroking out the lines, setting down the shape of what is up, willing something strenuous into being. Squinting and scowling, mashing his mouth, growling and grumbling and purring: a zoo of concentration and engagement, almost in argument, a set-to. I have sat pinioned in the headlights of his basilisk eye on many occasions. It’s like being fried very gently in baby oil: the initial pinch of knowing there is nothing he will overlook, tenderly mitigated by the fact that exactly what you hope he might miss is exactly what he loves the most, what he’s looking – on the hunt – for.

The Porter

This is how John Berger draws. How he drew. This is, also, how he writes and wrote. And how he lived and lives. Grinding the salt of experience between finger and thumb, pressing the seed down into the soil, merciful, merciless, tooth and nail. Workmanlike, almost bellicose, this most pacifist of thinkers takes on existence itself. I realise now that this state of dedicated mental wrestling I describe above reminds me of nothing so much as a bull terrier I once saw demolishing a football in a park. The most tender, most gentle of gentlemen. This most faithful, most human of humanists. His shoulders those of a prop forward, of a prize fighter, of a bull. John saw freedom ahead, over the hill, and he made for it, scrambling and barrelling and burrowing towards it through the bogs and marshes and up the rocks of its foothills. He took – he takes – no quarter. There is no alternative but freedom in his sights. Human beings deserve better chips. He sees – he knows – the con. He understands the mechanisms of the trick: His outrage is palpable. Fucking cheats. Pure scorn and outrage. Long live John! Long live freedom! Nothing to lose but our chains.

Still by Sandro Kopp courtesy of Taskovski Films

Tilda Swinton

Geoff Dyer Garry Winogrand had found it relatively easy to break free of the established idea of what constituted pictorial decorum. He achieved his own photographic style early on, with a minimum amount of agonising and fretting, through the simple expedient of going out and photographing a lot. People who at first were resistant or sceptical came to understand and appreciate what he was doing. They gathered round to see his work, came to admire the way he would not be confined by earlier paradigms of picture-ness. “It’s all a question of how much freedom [you] can stand,” he once said, confident that his own appetite for freedom was so immense that any kind of shackle served as a stimulant and incentive as well as a restraint. But then he came to suspect that it was possible to become imprisoned by the idea of freedom he had established. Liberty in itself inevitably grew constricting. What to do? Set himself new challenges? Find new ways of wriggling out of a way of working which had itself become routine?

Like many of the sights recorded in Public Relations – the series Winogrand began after he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to photograph ‘the effect of media on events’ in 1969, and published as a book in 1977 – the image here is of a performance or enactment, a photograph of something intended to be seen, to attract a crowd. The onlookers look on in the style of rapt boredom or disinterested fascination that street performances tend to generate. They know the escape artist is meant to be able to free himself but to really get their money’s worth – so what if it’s free? – they’ll have to see him fail. Ideally, he’ll still be there struggling, caught in his self-imposed bind, when they’ve wandered off to see something or someone else. For photographer Thomas Roma, Winogrand, at this late stage of his life, was involved in the dangerously radical enterprise of “allowing himself to fail constantly”. Like John Coltrane, Winogrand fell sick, became terminally ill, before he was able to see if this enterprise might itself yield a breakthrough, a breakout. The cuddly panda, head propped on the money bucket as though slurping water from it, is a symbolic escapee from the pictures Winogrand made at zoos (published in his book The Animals), when he succeeded over and over again. Geoff Dyer’s book The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand is out now from University of Texas Press

The Porter

Image courtesy of University of Texas Press

THE STREET PHILOSOPHER

CALIFORNIA DREAMIN' David Hellqvist For its SS14 campaign, Italian brand President’s featured an image taken by Los Angeles-based photographer, Hugh Holland, entitled ‘Hangin’ in Balboa’. Shot in 1975, it shows three boys relaxing on a sun-kissed pavement and skating underneath palm trees on Newport Beach in California. It’s an image that perfectly sums up the photographer’s obsession with the early West Coast skate culture, as well as reflecting the personal and professional interest of President’s creative director, Guido Biondi, in Californian board sports.

Photography Suzie Howell

The Porter

Four years later, the brand’s SS18 collection sees Biondi moving away from the skater boys, but not venturing too far. Crossing from the pavement to the beach, he looked to the surfers living on the West Coast in the 1960s for inspiration. A period of dramatic change in the US – with rock ‘n’ roll and pop art steering the youth away from traditional modes of expression – whether you skated or surfed, life in the ’60s was about breaking away from older generations. The concept of leisure was practically invented on the beaches outside of LA. And the clothes mirrored that attitude. Loose and slouchy, they broke with the stiff, stuffy fashions of the ’50s, and T-shirts, shorts and bowling shirts became the norm. Biondi has once again steered the casual luxury of President’s in that direction, incorporating the attitude and energy of that time into his latest collection. Supplied by a print house based near Lake Como in the north of Italy, the pattern printed on the shirt here is Biondi’s way of putting his own Tuscan spin on US youth cultures and the American style of the late 20th century. And, although it’s a style that has, over the years, been lazily stereotyped as ‘Hawaiian’, this bowling shirt owes little to oversized tourist wardrobes in Honolulu and everything to Hugh Holland’s trendsetting skater boys. 5151

The Porter

ICE ALIVE Joseph Cook

Image courtesy of Moncler

Established in 2009, the Young Laureate programme is part of the wider awards for enterprise that Rolex has been running for over 40 years. Designed to support those between 18 and 30 at a crucial point in their careers, each laureate receives 100,000 Swiss francs as well as international publicity and access to a network of more than 100 past laureates. Joseph Cook received the award in 2006. This photograph shows the speleologist and cave explorer, Francesco Sauro, and myself, a glacial microbiologist, abseiling into a moulin on the Greenland ice sheet. Formed by melt water drilling down through the ice, moulins allow water to be transferred to the bed of the ice sheet, and ultimately to the sea. Its fate once it disappears into a moulin, however, is uncertain – scientists have tried to infer using geophysical techniques from the surface, but Francesco and I wanted to find out first hand, so we applied our experience from caving and climbing to access the interior of the ice sheet, and with it a vault of microbiological material that dates back thousands of years. The frozen regions at the northern and southern extremes of our planet seem unlikely environments to find microbiology, and equally unlikely places for microbiology to have such a big impact, but they are teeming with life. It’s a hidden, secret complexity that I find fascinating, and which compels me to spend months at a time in these vast terrains, stretching over hundreds of thousands of kilometres, shaped by activity too small to be seen by the naked eye. With the Rolex Young Laureate programme – which enabled me to access the Greenland ice sheet and to develop bespoke technologies – I was able to study two specific microbial habitats. The first are small melt holes, formed by cryoconite – granules of algae, mineral dust and other bacteria that clump together, heat up in the sun and melt down into the ice. The second are glacier algae which grow on the surface of the ice, blanketing all melting parts of the glacier, and produce dark pigments to protect themselves from being damaged in the all-day summer sun. These pigments, heating up in the sun, accelerate the rate at which the glacier and ice sheets shrink and melt away. It’s essential that we study these processes and factor them into climate models – the ice sheet could be disappearing at a much faster rate than the current prediction. This work, which I came to through rock climbing and a love of wild landscapes, allows me to engage with these places on a physical, geographical and intellectual level, but also to do something to protect them. Although it can mean working in extreme and inhospitable locations, I don’t see it as taking an unnecessary risk – it’s a worthwhile pursuit to gather new knowledge about an environment that we simply can’t get from satellites or analogues elsewhere in the world. It’s work that has a significance not just for our own planet, and our future on it, but for the potential for finding life elsewhere in the universe, and it can only be done by camping out on the ice sheet, or dangling down a melt hole. As told to George Upton

The Porter

VISITING GAVIN TURK George Upton Gavin Turk was never awarded his postgraduate degree from the Royal College of Art. Presenting only one, controversial, work for his graduate exhibition, Cave – his whitewashed studio, empty but for a blue English Heritage plaque stating ‘Gavin Turk worked here, 1989–1991’ – he drew the ire of his tutors, but established himself as an artist who confronts fundamental questions of authorship and artistic identity with an incisive irreverence and wit. Exhibited as part of Charles Saatchi’s notorious 1997 exhibition Sensation, alongside other Young British Artists, like Damien Hirst and Rachel Whiteread, Turk’s eclectic body of work has come to include repurposed artworks, realistic bronze sculptures of Styrofoam cups and bin bags, and the use of rubbish as readymades. Port went to Turk’s east London studio to meet the artist who continues to inform the direction of British contemporary art. Why did you start making art? Some people have a story, a narrative; they can remember a moment when everything became clear for them and they wanted to be an artist. I never really had that. I went to art school to figure out whether I would like making art or not, but I still haven’t worked it out; I’ve just got a much more sophisticated sense of not knowing the answer. To what extent do you identify as a YBA? I mean, the YBAs wasn’t an art movement like futurism or the surrealists. It was much more a movement created by the media, which my name was associated with. There were positive benefits to that; it worked as a form of marketing, but it provoked a lot of questions about the audience of the work: Who am I making the art for? How relevant is my work to the audience? Do you feel you know your audience better now? It’s hard to say. I make quite a diverse range of work, and I’m always surprised at how that which I find awkward or embarrassing does well, while the work that I know and have controlled, people don’t really like. Do you mind that? No, I try to be quite pragmatic. The audience will always bring their part of the deal into it. I don’t want to make art that is totally dogmatic. I’m not saying ‘Here’s the artwork, it equals this,’ and, of course, the time and the context changes. People today look at my work differently to how they did 20 years ago. You came to prominence at a time of great energy and activity by young artists. How does that compare with the situation now? I’m very nervous. There doesn’t seem to be much freedom for young artists to play and experiment. It costs so much money to study art today. The artists I meet who have just graduated want to know how to make money to pay their debts; they feel like they have to play the game, and it’s not helped by the galleries. Young artists either see artists who have sold out to some degree, and think it is success, or feel that if they’re creative and experiment they won’t be rewarded for it. How important is your studio to the way you work? My current studio in Canning Town, where I moved a few years ago, is surrounded by recycling plants, which is exciting for someone like me who is into recycling on lots of different levels. I spend a lot of time watching what people throw away. I want to look at the point at which something achieves Photography Suzie Howell

value, and I think the easiest way is to look at the point that it achieves no value, when it’s just something someone wants to get rid of. With my studio, I’ve created a space that lets you take things apart, or go around the local area to collect rubbish and arrange it in cabinets, or archive ideas that you can return to later when they actually make sense. Do you conceive new ideas in your studio? I get asked to do the occasional public work and to be part of various gallery exhibitions or museums and institutions, which can have an effect on the work you’re going to make… how it’s going to go. And then I’ve got a backlog of work that I would still love to make. But I don’t really have ideas in my studio. They usually come to me when I’m doing something else, reading a book or riding my bike or half asleep. But, eventually, half-formed ideas will join up with each other to become something I can’t resist making. It’s this wonderful thing of being an artist: You’ve got be clever enough to have an idea and then stupid enough to actually make it.

The Porter

ARMANI LAB Laura Francis

How did you first become interested in hair design? It’s a passion: Hair design is something that I’ve wanted to do since I was a little boy, going to school during the day to please my father, and studying at night. You can’t make good work without passion. 58

The Porter

What are some of the challenges you face day to day? I do a lot of research before I start working on a project. Getting the history right is as important as getting it to look good, and one of the main challenges is making the designs appear natural to the period, giving them a connection with reality. I also like to keep an eye on modern designs and what is around me at the moment. That allows me to give a little of the contemporary in a period design, something believable. This creativity is vital – it’s all about creating a character. What attracted you to work on Armani/Laboratorio? It was exciting to work with Armani on this initiative; he’s such a special person and I thought it would be a great challenge. I liked the focus on discovering new talent, which is so important for the industry itself. Everyone who works as a mentor on the programme has so much experience, from editing to set design – which you should always try to pass on to the next generation.

Image courtesy of Tommaso Gesuato

Aldo Signoretti is one of the foremost hair and wig designers working in film today. Having cut his teeth alongside Federico Fellini and Tinto Brass in the 1970s and ’80s, he has gone on to work on films as diverse and celebrated as the Italian horror classic Suspiria, Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (during the production of which he was kidnapped by Mexican gang members and held until Luhrmann paid a ransom of 300 dollars). Oscar-nominated for his work on Il Divo, Moulin Rouge and Apocalypto, Signoretti has recently been sharing his experience as part of Armani/Laboratorio: a series of workshops for film students spanning all disciplines of filmmaking. Port speaks to him as he prepares for the premiere of the film that is the culmination of the project, Una Giacca (A Jacket).

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57 Brompton Road, Knightsbridge, London SW3 1DP TEL: 020 3105 6212 www.seikoboutique.co.uk

wild herb salad with poached duck egg, pancetta and fennel Serves four as a light lunch or starter This recipe is very adaptable, so feel free to add whatever wild herbs or vegetables you come across (or buy in the supermarket, if worst comes to worst). ingredients for the salad 4 handfuls of any of the following: chopped three-cornered garlic, wild leeks, Alexanders leaves, fennel fronds, nettle tips (blanched), wild garlic (blanched), samphire (blanched), sea purslane or sea aster (blanched), wood sorrel 1 bunch of watercress 1 handful chervil 1 handful dill 1 head of fennel, thinly sliced 1 bunch of radishes, thinly sliced A dozen or so cooked new potatoes (optional) Two thick slices of good quality bread A clove of garlic A drizzle of olive oil 4 duck eggs 100g diced pancetta Sea salt and black pepper

FORAGING Nicholas Balfe Foraging has shot to prominence in recent years with the rise of chefs exploring ancient techniques, ingredients and flavours in their food – but using wild food in cooking is nothing new. I was introduced to the idea of using wild ingredients by my mum and grandma when I was young. I have vivid memories of picking elderflowers in Dorset and cooking them up in fritters, dusted in icing sugar and served with thick clotted cream. When I began cooking professionally in my mid-20s, some of the chefs I came into contact with were already using foraged ingredients in their dishes. Back in 2007, the idea of pairing mussels with sea purslane, or pork with fennel pollen and wild herbs seemed mind-bogglingly exotic, yet inherently native at the same time. When I opened my own restaurant, foraged ingredients became an important part of the food we serve. Being heavily guided by the seasons, it makes sense to look to nature for inspiration. I like to use what’s abundantly available at any given moment, and to source ingredients as locally as possible. If I can pick the ingredients from a local park or hedgerow, then all the better. There’s no specialist equipment you need to go foraging – just a carrier bag and some rubber gloves if you’re picking nettles. Good foraging etiquette is to never take more than a third of what you see, so there’s some left for the next person, and don’t worry if you don’t recognise everything immediately. Start with one or two types of wild food, keep your eyes peeled, and slowly you’ll build a nice repertoire of things you can pick and use.

for the dressing 100g crème fraîche 1 dessert spoonful of Dijon mustard Juice of one lemon Pinch of salt and black pepper Handful of finely chopped three-cornered garlic or chives method Pick through the ingredients you’ve foraged to remove twigs, stems, dead leaves and grass. Wash thoroughly and set aside in a large mixing bowl with the watercress, chervil, dill, fennel, radishes and cooked new potatoes. Prepare the dressing by whisking together all the ingredients and check the seasoning – you might want to add more salt, pepper or lemon juice. Sauté the pancetta in a drizzle of vegetable oil until nicely crisped. Drain and add to the bowl with the herbs. Toast the bread, rub with a clove of garlic, drizzle with olive oil and tear into bite-sized pieces. Add to the herb mixture. To poach the eggs, put a deep pan of water on the stove on a high heat and add a generous slosh of white wine vinegar. Crack the eggs into four separate cups. When the water reaches a rolling boil, swirl it around with a slotted spoon, add the eggs and immediately turn the heat down. Leave to poach for two minutes. Remove from the water and drain on a cloth. Season with salt and pepper. Add the dressing to the herb mixture and gently toss together until everything is nicely dressed. Season with salt and pepper and divide into four bowls. Top each bowl with a poached egg and serve immediately.

Nicholas Balfe is the founder and head chef of Salon

The Porter

Photography Suzie Howell

Photograph by Name Surname

A FINE CIGAR... Darius Namdar A cigar, put simply, is a rolled-up bunch of fermented tobacco leaves, but if you want to be a little more romantic about it, it’s an hour of precious time that completely takes over your senses – a carefully thought out part of your day spent with an expertly crafted product and the rich tradition it comes from. Smokers appreciate the level of detail and skill involved in the production of a cigar, and the journey the tobacco has gone on before it reaches them. It’s a process that has changed little over the centuries: It’s still incredibly labour intensive – there are over 500 highly skilled manual operations in the preparation and construction of each one – and every cigar will be made from tobacco that was planted at least three years before. Cuban cigars remain the gold standard, the benchmark to set everyone else against, despite years of embargo-enforced isolation. While other cigars generally maintain a consistent flavour, a Cuban changes as you smoke it, as a result of being rolled with the thinnest part of the leaf at the top and the thickest at the base. The tips burn first, but the sugars and oils that give the intensity are lower, in the rest of the leaf – creating an experience that gradually deepens and develops. 62

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It takes a lot of smoking to be able to identify a particular flavour or brand and, as Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But if you think about where these cigars come from – a humid, equatorial country where oxen still plough the fields, where the soil is red and rich and the tobacco is cured and stored in barns – an idea might be given of the flavours you will be able to find. Possibly wood: cedar wood, damp wood, dry wood; spices and pepper; sweetness: honey, vanilla; or sometimes gamey flavours: hay, wet grass, damp manure. Whatever you taste, there’s always something timeless and nostalgic about cigar smoke. Most of the people I speak to have looked up to someone who smoked. For me it was my father – even now, 15 years later, when I smell cigar smoke I’m brought back to that moment in time with him. As told to George Upton. Darius Namdar is the director of Mark’s Club and one of only 33 people in the world certified as a master of Havana cigars. In March 2018, he won the prestigious International Habanosommelier Contest in Cuba, the highest qualification for cigar experts.

Photography Suzie Howell

LET THERE BE LITE David Hellqvist Sometimes acclimatising to the demands of the summer season – when less is more and form takes precedence over function – can be difficult for fashion brands. How best to translate double-faced cashmere, designed to withstand the cold winter days, into lightweight equivalents, suitable for more clement weather? It’s a problem faced by Mackintosh: the Scottish coat brand – founded when chemist Charles Macintosh developed a rubberised water-resistant fabric in 1823 – that is so closely associated with wet-weather clothing it gives its name to the generic word for a rain jacket. Cue an almost two-century-long head scratch about how to become relevant in drier (less Scottish) weather. “Mackintosh’s SS18 season sees the evolution of our classics,” says company director Andrea Austoni of the brand’s solution to the problem, which starts with, in the case of this particular season, a reworked colour palette. “The colours evoke our luxury heritage,” he explains, “ranging from cedar green to soft blues, as well as featuring poppier colours, such as vivid pink and yellow. Many styles find influence from our rich archives, whilst others come from innovations in technical fabrics.” A key distinction between a summer season and an autumn one is, of course, the textile choices, and Austoni explains that a focus for Mackintosh has been on getting the right balance between breathable materials and their signature rubberised one. “The introduction of lighter cloths, such as Loro Piana Storm System linen and lightweight nylon, creates a juxtaposition with our characteristic rubber cotton. However, the rubberised styles have also received an update, with the introduction of the jumpsuit and block-colour hooded pieces.” Also worth noting this season is the inclusion of two completely new designs: a field jacket and a Harrington – both classic menswear staples and now part of the Mackintosh wardrobe.

The Porter

Photography Suzie Howell

66 Photography Suzie Howell

ANCIENT INSPIRATION Jo Lawson-Tancred Chairs of the Ming Dynasty possess an oddly modernist elegance. Built from precious hardwoods and typified by their simple, unornamented design, clean lines and gestural shapes, they lack the intricate carving and lacquer-work of the tables and chests from the same period. It’s this comfortable practicality, spare but sturdy, to which the eminent Italian architect and designer Antonio Citterio has looked for inspiration in his Jens collection for B&B Italia.

Of the four chairs in the series, two feature a gently curving frame that pulls the back into slim armrests, almost in direct homage to the Ming archetypes, and the slight slant with which the Jens’ front legs meet its arms is a subtle nod to the more exaggerated Chinese curves. For Citterio, the chairs’ shaping necessitated rediscovering the craftsmanship of turned and curved wood, and the thick leather seats and solid wood frames further articulate a Ming-era simplicity and respect for the materials’ natural qualities. Citterio has also cited 19th-century Shaker chairs, and styles from the 1950s as reference points, but the Ming influence is far more than a distant memory, providing an enduring model that translates seamlessly into a fresh, contemporary form.

IN PRAISE OF SVENSKT TENN Kuchar Swara

It’s no overstatement to say that Josef Frank and Estrid Ericson – who founded the interior design store Svenskt Tenn in Stockholm in 1924 – did more to shape Swedish modernism in the 20th century – and by extension, Swedish cultural life – than any other designer or company. Through their collaboration, they formed a brand that carries an underlying message of comfort, elegance and restraint – an ease that can be rare to find 68

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when modernism gets too brutal or functional. Frank – the celebrated Austrian-born architect and designer, who adopted Swedish citizenship in 1939 – is close in spirit to the Arts and Crafts movement and the ideals of William Morris, but both his and the Svenskt Tenn aesthetic are far more confident and relaxed, using bolder colours and motifs. He set out his philosophy in 1934: “The home cannot just be an efficient machine. It

must offer comfort, rest and domestic harmony â&#x20AC;&#x201C; repose for the eye and refreshment for the senses. There are no puritanical principles within good interior design.â&#x20AC;? A parallel can be drawn with the work of the Scottish designer, Christopher Dresser â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a central figure in the Aesthetic movement who, like Frank and Ericson, drew on inspiration from Ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt, as well as Japanese art Photography Suzie Howell

and craft. Many of the prints and botanical patterns Frank produced for Svenskt Tenn have historical influences, from frescos found in Crete dating back to 1500 BC to 17th-century Chinese brocades. This educated reference to the past, whilst thriving in the present, gives the brand its continuing allure. To this day, no self-respecting home in Sweden is without something, be it a tray or a coaster, from Svenskt Tenn. 69

TO BE PRECISE Nadav Kander

When I was young there was a walk-in cupboard in my house that smelt of the leather cases of equipment stored there… various mechanical things such as movie cameras owned by my grandfather. I would go in, wind the cameras up and listen to them whirl in the dark; I must have been eight years old. To this day the smell of leather still reminds me of machines and quality. I was 12 when I caught a bus to a store called Dion in Johannesburg. I looked at the cameras and started saving, and a year later returned to buy a Pentax Spotmatic F, the last camera to use a screwin lens rather than a bayonet. I also bought extension tubes, which are used between the lens and the camera body to get extremely close to things. My first pictures were of dead flies on a windowsill. It was 1974.

I didn’t stay with the Pentax but I see a thread that runs through my work, from those early fly pictures to the present. I’ve always liked to look into things, to show things not easily seen with the eye, or that are not easily noticed – things photographed beautifully that are difficult or hard to look at. I take pictures of vulnerability, terror, love, horror – never of people smiling; I like to look at what is underneath. This camera is still in perfect condition. I loved it as an object, the clicks it made and the feeling of focusing the lens. I loved its precision, and it’s that that led me into photography – not the need to make pictures, but the need to use an instrument with great precision.

The Porter

Photography Suzie Howell

As told to Dan Crowe

CURB ENTHUSIASM

Image courtesy of Library of Congress

George Kafka Often when we think about public space we consider only squares, parks, plazas and the like. Perhaps a grand boulevard here and there. But what of the pavement? Is this not the real substance of the city, the veins of the urban organism? More than just the stone lining A to B, the pavement is the physical interface between the city and pedestrian. This physicality is vital; paving stones are where people move, where they feel the city through the sole of a strolling shoe or wandering wheel. The pavement is the realm of bodies, cruelly portioned and separated from the realm of automobiles by the curb. The curb is a frontier. When the pedestrian crosses it they are vulnerable to the whims of a new speed, a new set of rules. Yet when the automobile crosses the frontier and mounts the curb it strikes us deeply; it’s an invasion of space that incites terror and destruction – an anxiety of our time. The pavement is a sacred space. And like a sacred space it contains symbols. Runes and rhythms, carvings and caves. Tactile paving for the visually impaired contains a language of mobility, a set of codes designed to facilitate access and warn of what lurks beyond the frontier. In the UK, blocks with dots indicate the

presence of a crossing, while blocks with bars indicate a stairway. Spray-painted arrows and numbers, circles and brackets in varying colours are a familiar sight but are often illegible to the city-dweller. These markings left by and for the engineers of our utilities reveal life (or at least infrastructure) beneath the surface of the pavement – the invisible forces that allow our lives to run, made visible. If the curb keeps us out of the road on one side, what’s it doing on the other? Is this the hard divide between private and public space? The cement barrier between an Englishman’s castle and the great unknown of… everywhere else? Or is it an extension of the living room? A communal space for gathering and chatting? In Amsterdam, benches often line residential streets, a welcome invitation to make the civic more sociable and an extension of homely welcome (in case the Dutch window isn’t welcoming enough). Stroll on a Sunday in Buenos Aires and you will see porteños sweeping the streets in front of their houses. There, it is the responsibility of landlords to maintain their slice of street. Perhaps it is a gesture of communal goodwill, or a bold marker of ownership – either way it is a task carried out on the threshold between municipal citizenship and the domestic inner world.

HERMÈS: A LIMITLESS SPECTRUM Jo Lawson-Tancred Every Tuesday morning, on a narrow street in central Paris just down the road from the Élysée Palace – the French president’s official residence – and along from the embassies of the US and UK, a specially formed committee comes together at Hermès’s headquarters. Dedicated solely to coordinating the colours for the maison’s iconic silk scarves – its carrés – the committee analyses trends, experiments with minute variations in tone and, eventually, after much deliberation and prototyping, decides upon the final colour scheme. It’s a process that can take up to two years.

Hermès has developed over 75,000 colours since it debuted its first scarf in 1937; however, many never make it through the initial stages to production. Although, under the careful orchestration of artistic director Bali Barret, the decision-making starts with a mood board to establish feeling, it is primarily a technical process, with a vast range of samples consulted and compared. Balancing out chromatic theory with creative intuition, however, is crucial. As Barret puts it: “It’s not just about the colours, but the mood, the atmosphere.” Where other fashion houses rely on standardised colour scales, Hermès exists on a limitless spectrum, one that it navigates with precision. Barret explains that this is done manually, using abstract visual formulas rather than computer programming – something that distinguishes the committee’s process from that of those who print the scarves: Hermès recently merged its traditional screenprinting techniques with the latest digital technology, at their factories in Lyon. Yet, regardless of how they are made, the priority for Barret and her team remains the same as ever: to create styles that are innovative, maintain a continuity with the past and embody timeless, effortless chic.

The Porter

Photography Suzie Howell Styling Lora Avedian

Stainless Steel / black English bridle leather sekford.com

sekford.com

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When I dance I feel complete. It feels totally natural and honest.

The work behind it all isn’t truly work, but a sum to the equation, equally enjoyable. It’s not about one thing – the stage, the applause – but the entire process.

A good dancer has to have a balance PATEK PHILIPPE PERPETUAL CALENDAR REF 5327J-001 IN YELLOW GOLD between physicality and £65,110, patek.com To understand a perpetual calendar there are three things to know: 1. It displays the correct date every day, even during 30-day months mentality. You cannot and leap years, without adjustment (until February 28th in 2100, after which you’re good for another century). 2. There is a wheel in every perpetual calendar have the talent and lackthat completes a precise 360-degree turn every four years under the power of a tiny spring (think about that). 3. Patek Philippe makes the finest – the finest looking and the finest engineered. So much so, it hasn’t felt the need to significantly evolve its 240 Q the mentalmovement drive. in over three decades, so perfect is its rotor-driven constellation of gleaming micromechanics. Though this model’s scalloped 78

lugs are a welcome facelift.

VACHERON CONSTANTIN OVERSEAS DUAL TIME IN PINK GOLD £38,800, vacheron-constantin.com The irony of introducing gold versions to a brand’s sports-watch range is that their intrinsic chunkiness soaks up a lot more precious metal than the dainty dress watch; so, having started out as an entry-level endeavour, they rapidly promote themselves to the fanciest echelons. But when it comes to Vacheron Constantin, all is forgiven – mainly thanks to the Overseas’ signature Maltese Cross-inspired bezel and bracelet gaining monumental gravitas where things already felt plenty stately. It also helps that, being Vacheron, the hand-crafted mechanics inside are a work of art in themselves. Flip the watch over to view the self-winding movement whirring away through the sapphire caseback, and that pink gold case becomes an ornate frame.

I had to stop dancing because of injury for two and a half years. I felt like my instrument was taken away from me, like a cellist who lost his bow and couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t play. But I had to return â&#x20AC;&#x201C; I had unfinished business with myself as a dancer.

I was drawn to ballet by the discipline, the sweat and the drive to make it just right â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and it never is.

Dance is relevant forever. The way we connect constantly evolves but through dance we connect in a primal, instinctive way. 82

Styling Dora Fung Grooming Noah Ricketts

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COVER STORY

he restaurant is nearly empty. It’s an emptiness that exposes a sense of dread lurking in an otherwise bright spring day. People in suits, tunics, athleisure and burkas are streaming through the adjoining hotel lobby but here the only movement is of a member of staff, diligently preparing for an absent crowd. It is 2018 and this is the capital of the US. Even when ordering lunch, it is impossible to forget how close we are to a ceaseless squall of depravity and impending doom. The omelette, we are told, cannot be altered. So be it. Apologetic and star-struck, the waiter beams at the renowned novelist and public intellectual, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and cannot help but gush, “You look wonderful today.” Indeed, Adichie looks wonderful because she always looks wonderful. A commanding presence, she is one of those rare writers with a refined style both on and off the page. Adichie is certainly the only person to both win the Orange Prize (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction) and serve as the face of a make-up campaign – No 7. She is absolutely the only writer whose speech has been sampled in a Beyoncé single. Every aspect of her comportment is magnetic, a magnetism that is exceedingly rare among accomplished writers, who are often better read than seen.

To encounter a person of grace and eloquence in this particular era, in this particular city, only heightens her effect. Yet Adichie also has an unfettered, ebullient charm – she curses freely, laughs with abandon and has a sly, infectious grin. “The past month,” she confesses, “I was in Nigeria eating and laughing and not doing anything useful with my time.” She has the cheery disposition of someone who just returned from a holiday, but I recognise a distant introversion in her eyes, the novelist longing for another world. “I rationalise this by saying I’m absorbing material.” Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus was set in postcolonial Nigeria and dealt directly with her home country’s turbulent political history, while her second, Half of a Yellow Sun, tackled the Biafran War. Each won awards and acclaim; Chinua Achebe declared Adichie to be “endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers”. Then, in 2007, on her 30th birthday, she got a phone call from the MacArthur Foundation. “I was in Lagos. I was just about to go out with friends who were taking me to dinner, and I got the call. I was like, ‘My life is made!’” She pauses, and stares out the window a moment. “Did I actually even know...?” In fact, she had to google the specifics of her new ‘genius grant’: a half-million-dollar prize and a crowning validation from the American intellectual elite. After earning her bachelor’s degree in Connecticut in 2001, Adichie went to Johns Hopkins for her Fiction MFA, even though she had already completed her first novel, Purple Hibiscus. “I wasn’t necessarily a good member of the workshop... I hardly went to class because I couldn’t wait to get back – I had created this thing in my little studio apartment.” This little thing turned out to be Half of a Yellow Sun. “It was so emotionally draining. I cried... Days would pass and I wouldn’t shower. I wouldn’t pick up my phone.”

With two acclaimed novels under her belt, she was named a Hodder Fellow at Princeton, and then made the unlikely choice to earn a second master’s degree in African Studies at Yale. Why? “I went because I wanted to learn. It was really very simple. I remember thinking there’s so much I want to know about precolonial Africa. And I didn’t just want to read books, because I’m lazy.” Eyes widen at what seems to be self-effacing hyperbole, but she insists it’s true. “I felt like I needed some guidance. I needed to know what books will illuminate this part of my history.” One of these books, in fact, was her second novel. “I had to sit there in class and try not to roll my eyes at their... analysis.” Outside of class she was struggling to find time to write her third novel, Americanah. “I kind of thought I would be able to write as well but it turned out to be disastrous for my writing. I was quite miserable.” Eventually she did find time to work, and, satisfied that Half of a Yellow Sun was “a book that I really felt my ancestors wanted me to write”, she felt free to loosen up as a writer. “I was no longer feeling this sense of being the dutiful daughter of literature and that I wanted to follow the rules. You know what? I felt I had earned the right to write a terrible book.”

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Adichie, a self-avowed perfectionist and child of a “proper Igbo” household, seems to accomplish everything she sets out to do, but she failed, at least, to write that “terrible book”. Published in 2013, Americanah is an irreverent and biting commentary on race in the United States, but also a love story that spans decades and continents. It’s both serious and sexy, hilarious and profoundly sad. Adichie has called it her “fuck you” book, and it said “fuck you” all the way up that year’s bestseller and Top 10 lists, awards in tow. In recent years Adichie has demonstrated a particular talent for delivering smart answers to dumb questions. When a young American man asked her how she balances motherhood and writing – “Promise me you’ll ask a new father the same question.” When a French journalist asked her whether there are bookshops in Nigeria – “I think it reflects poorly on French people that you have to ask me that question.” When a young Nigerian reader said he stopped loving her work after she began writing about feminism – “You can keep your love.” And in a recent interview for the Atlantic she ribbed her friend Ta-Nehisi Coates, referring to the first time they met as “before he was James Baldwin... back when he was just Richard Wright.”

“ SO

It comes as a genuine surprise, then, when she admits there are times she only later realises the zinger she should have used. One live televised interview in Amsterdam, for example, during the middle of the 2016 American election still bothers her. “It had just been made public that Trump had said his thing about grabbing women’s...” We both grimace at the memory of the Access Hollywood tape and the weak effect it had on his public image. “And I was saying to him that Trump is really the embodiment of white male privilege. And this white man, this Dutch man said, ‘Well what do you mean?’ and I said, ‘One of the ways to think about it is to reverse it, and just imagine if Hillary Clinton had said that she goes around grabbing men’s... penises!’ And his response to me was, ‘It would be great, wouldn’t it?’” A fork is dropped against a plate. “This was one of the best TV shows in the Netherlands and I was so taken aback that I was like, ‘Uh no, I don’t think it would be a great idea.’ But later I was so annoyed at myself because I thought, ‘Oh come on. I could have said this and that...’” Of course, a person can only take so many interviews before something she says is fed like raw meat to the shark tank of Twitter. In an interview with Channel 4 in the UK, Adichie made a short comment acknowledging the differing experiences of cis and trans women. Voices on the Internet took up their torches so quickly and angrily – accusing her of not recognising trans women as women – that Adichie’s friends sent flowers and letters of condolence. Adichie later released a statement clarifying that her original point was concerned with variations within, rather than exclusion from, the female gender.

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Still, Adichie has already become accustomed to being a public intellectual, holding a lightning rod for other people’s assumptions and hate mail. “A friend of mine – she thought she was being funny, but it was actually quite disturbing – said to me, ‘You have to understand that anything you say... If you say you want to have a glass of water… Nigerian social media will go crazy!’” Her voice lifts into a dramatic register to mimic a mob: “Oh! So what is she saying about feminism now?!” Our laughter descends into bemused smiles, which quickly becomes sad resignation. The fraught cultural and political moment crowds the table. We eat in silence for a while. It seems that the more ways the world has to communicate, the more we use them to attack, to distance, to righteously take each other down. In a profile in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Adichie told her friend Dave Eggers that the American left “swiftly, gleefully, brutally eats its own. There is such a quick assumption of ill will and an increasing sanctimony and humorlessness that can often seem inhumane. It’s almost as if the humanity of people gets lost and what matters is whether you abide by every single rule in the handbook of American liberal orthodoxy.”

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Checked cotton shirt and floral lace dress MIU MIU

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How, if ever, might we get out of this cycle? “I do have some ideas,” she says. “The first thing would be that we all get injections that neutralise self-righteousness. Because I’m a person who trades in stories, in human stories, I’m very much aware of human frailty and human flawed-ness. We fail and we’re flawed. I feel like on the left there’s a kind of... You know, it’s almost like there is no compassion for the members of the tribe. I don’t necessarily want us to have compassion for [conservative radio host] Rush Limbaugh, for example. Right? Because I think that he represents something evil. But I feel like people who fundamentally believe in respect and dignity for everyone and inclusiveness… There’s a sense in which... The left is so quick to – the slightest flaw and you’re out! And the denunciation is so extreme, and you don’t become a good person who had a bad idea; you just become a bad person.” Trauma often unites people, which makes me wonder whether Adichie, who splits her time between Lagos and Maryland, may have begun to feel more American after the disaster of the 2016 election.

“THIS

Immediately she says, “No.” A moment passes. More playfully she says, “No... I’m just terrified. I think it’s a disaster. And we don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s only been a year.” Her face takes on that distant trouble of someone remembering the dead. “I’m worried and anxious but I’m also deeply sad at what America has become. I felt that Americans wouldn’t bow to power in a way. But I see that that’s not true.” Power in the United States, of course, is synonymous with Celebrity. Though the election of Trump owes much to tenacious strains of racism, sexism and xenophobia in the most conservative parts of the country, it also seems that brand recognition may have been what pushed his vote count over the edge. Adichie considers this idea with a tilted head. She herself understands the power of celebrity from angles to which most people never gain access. “This is certainly a country and a culture that is deeply, deeply in awe of celebrity.” She follows this idea down a road less infuriating than the current contents of the White House. Though Adichie was already literary royalty when Beyoncé used a clip of the writer’s 2012 TEDx talk on feminism in her song ‘Flawless’, it inevitably raised her already high profile, if only, as Adichie puts it, by prompting a lot of teenagers to search for her on YouTube. Before the song was released, Beyoncé’s team invited Adichie to come to the studio for a listen. Adichie sent her manager in her stead. “I’m not very pop-culture savvy. I’ve never been cool in that way.” The onslaught of attention she received after the song was released was a cruel reminder of how diminished popular regard for literature is in comparison to pop music. “I don’t want to go into a rant, but I find this obsession with youth so stupid,” Adichie says, changing course to discuss how disappointing it is that American culture venerates “20-yearolds who haven’t figured out anything about their lives”. “There are two Jenners, then there are people who are Hadids...?” Adichie muses, considering the very young women that fashion magazines cover unceasingly. “There are women who are 55 who are gorgeous, and I’m fascinated by them, and I want to know what they wear, and I want to know about their mascara, and I also want to know what they’ve learned about life.”

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“Honestly I think by the time I’m 50 I’m going to be so cranky,” she continues. “There’s something that is reserved for films in this culture that I feel somewhat resentful of. So people will say to me, ‘Oh it’s so wonderful that your book is being made into a film!’ But I think what’s magnificent is that a book was written, not that a film has been made from it. I wish that this culture would be a bit more in awe of books.” Since Americanah, Adichie has released two works of nonfiction and several essays, but she confesses that she is sometimes annoyed by the deference that readers lend to nonfiction over fiction. “Storytelling is storytelling.” Like most prudent writers she’s hesitant to speak too much of what may be on her desk right now, but she hints that she might be writing a “fake memoir”. Like a memoir of a fictional character? “No,” she says with mischief, “like me writing a memoir that may or may not have happened. Because then you have to push people about what are you believing and what are you not believing.” But she adds, “Fiction is my first love. When I’m writing fiction, that’s when I feel transported.” Sighing, she explains she’s been trying to work both late at night and early in the morning but has been finding it difficult. “What’s happened is that I had a baby. So in some ways a different kind of creation but… Having a baby and writing fiction – I’m not sure that they really go together.” Yet, given Adichie’s achievements to date, it seems she will make it work, as she believes herself: “I’m ridiculously ambitious. I’ve always been. And I continue to be. Quite happily.”

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It was funny doing Al Jazeera,” says Stephanie Macdonald, one half of 6a architects. After a couple of decades in practice, latterly designing small but exquisite arts spaces, last year the studio abruptly found itself going global. Tom Emerson, Macdonald’s husband and the other half of 6a, picks up the story. “One of our very first clients, who we haven’t heard from in years, suddenly got in touch saying ‘Steph just floated above my head [on TV] in Bali!’, or Bangkok, or something: That was thanks to Al Jazeera.” In architecture – much like literature – the long lead times of projects mean that work often gets attention long after it was designed. And when a practice is working on multiple buildings sometimes their completion coincides, creating what appears to be an explosion of activity from a studio, even when it’s the culmination of half a decade of patient labour. In 12 months, 6a’s new courtyard at Churchill College, Cambridge, opened, as did its back garden for the South London Gallery, a collaboration with the artist Gabriel Orozco. The practice also won planning permission for its

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most significant project to date, an art gallery in Milton Keynes. But what really got the foreign press interested was their studio for the photographer Juergen Teller in Holland Park, west London. This austere but serene concrete and blockwork building, on a narrow residential site, is characterised by rhythmic beams, cool light and a pocket-sized courtyard garden. Of course, it helps with press attention if your client is a renowned and mischievous photographer who’s willing to pose naked on a donkey in your new building. But the studio also received critical acclaim, and was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize. As it turns out, Teller was, in fact, a model contractee. “He doesn’t take art direction in his work,” says Emerson. “If you commission Juergen Teller, you get Juergen Teller. You don’t tell him what to do.” And this was what he expected from his architects. “He’d say, ‘I picked you as my architect, you do it,’” Emerson says. “You would present things to him and ask his opinion, and he’d ask ‘Is it good?’, and you’d say ‘Yeah, it is quite good,’ and he’d say ‘Do it.’” “He really is an extraordinary artist. He’s very candid. He’s almost childlike in his directness and honesty about things,” Macdonald adds. “He would get really attached to things.” Fundamental to 6a’s concept for the site was to break down the boundaries of the ‘studio’. The brief called for a series of demarcated spaces with various functions: archive, office, kitchen, library, studio. “We knew that by temperament he would never confine himself to working in the studio; essentially everything was a studio,” Emerson says. This led to what he calls a “richer project”, treating every space as a potential subject for Teller’s camera. “Afterwards, he told

us, ‘It’s fantastic. I’ve photographed everything in here.’” “It was an idea that he totally took in, and almost made happen immediately,” Macdonald says. “He was photographing on site before the foundations went in.” “Before it was a building.” This happens often when talking with 6a, who met as postgraduate architecture students at the Royal College of Art. As they discuss the ideas behind a project, the enthusiasm in the room builds and they begin to talk over one another, completing each other’s thoughts. Looking back over the record of the conversation, it was striking how even-handed it was, with neither dominating, the couple instinctively sharing the space. Nor does there appear to be a division of responsibilities, with – for instance – one providing the ideas and the other the practicalities, as the division of labour often goes in partnerships. Which is not to say they don’t have specialisms: Emerson leans towards the academic side, and Macdonald – whose undergraduate degree was in fine art – brings a visual sensibility and crossdisciplinary approach, with connections made across many fields. The exploration of materials that forms a vital part of the practice’s reputation also hinges on their different strengths, Emerson’s in the construction and Macdonald’s in their narrative connection, although again neither exclusively. The way the studio space in the Teller project bleeds out beyond its boundaries points to something fundamental in 6a’s whole approach. Their career is dominated by art spaces, beginning with the two projects that made their name: Raven Row in the East End (2009) and the South London Gallery in Camberwell (2010). How does one make room for art – either its making or its display? Many

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would assume that this was a matter of purging a space of distractions and influences, as a laboratory might be purged of contaminants, creating the pristine ‘white cube’. “I think it’s one of the big myths of this subject,” says Emerson. “And it’s peddled both in the art world and in the architecture world: that there’s such a thing as a neutral space; that if you put enough white paint on it, it somehow neutralises it. When, of course, the white cube is actually extremely ideologically loaded; it’s a very rhetorical space. The moment you walk into a room with no features, all white, with flat light, it’s almost Kubrickian in its intensity.” Artists don’t particularly want that, Macdonald says, and it’s certainly not what 6a provides. “Artists want their work to connect, and they also like having a real or authentic Top right: The roof of the former Peckham Fire Station, currently being refurbished as part of 6a’s redesign for the South London Gallery extension. Right: The interior and facade of Raven Row in Spitalfields, east London: a Grade II-listed building, the shop fronts are thought to be some of the oldest in the city. Opposite: The interior of Juergen Teller’s studio in west London.

ground,” she says. “So it is about reducing a space so that the art can be the centre of attention – that is important. But at the same time, I think generally we look for specificity in a space and to make connections through material narratives. Sometimes they’re just anecdotal and social narratives, things that come back into the building in a quiet way.” Raven Row was an extreme example of that narrative architecture, because the building itself had so much to say: The gallery comprises two Grade II-listed Georgian houses in the ancient neighbourhood of Spitalfields. “Pevsner [Architectural Guides] calls them the best facades in London,” Emerson says with a chuckle, “[so] we were starting at quite a high level. The building is 250 years old, and everything that happened to London in that time, happened to it. Booms and busts, fires, migration, slums – it kept giving more information, it kept chatting with us.” The couple were aided by the discovery of a remarkable cache of photographs of the building, covering almost a century. The mysterious past of the houses had led to a number of expert theories and opinions about their origins, many of which proved to be wrong. It was as much a work of social history as architecture: “Everything was evidence of something.” Many of the photographs had been taken in the wake of a devastating fire, and one particular image of charred wooden classical details above a doorway prompted a material experiment: skylights clad in scorched timbers, which did much to capture the imagination of the architecture press and bring the project acclaim. They could not have hoped for a better debut, and Emerson returns to a familiar 6a theme, evident again in the warm relationship with Teller – their good fortune with clients, in this case supermarket scion Alex Sainsbury: “A wonderful person to work with, totally engaged, very precise and thoughtful about things, both in terms of the architecture and the programme.” This good fortune often leads to long-lasting relationships, as was the case with the South London Gallery. “We tend to become friends with our clients,” says Macdonald, and nowhere is this better illustrated than at the venerable, community-minded Camberwell institution, run by Margot Heller since 2001. Having completed a substantial extension to the gallery in 2010, last year 6a opened the Orozco Garden, a warm, expressive, layered space of rough stone blocks. The studio is now working on another ambitious extension in a Victorian building across the road – a former fire station. “It was one of the first fire stations in London,” says Macdonald, “almost like a large house, and the firemen used to live there with their families.” Keeping that sense of communal living has become an important part of the plan for the building, and the kitchen and eating spaces are being kept intact. Just as at 109

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Raven Row, every addition is balanced by careful and creative conservation. “We’re making gallery spaces that have the old floors and keeping the stable entrance,” Macdonald continues, “putting a new stair in, taking people up differently, but really working with the languages that we found in the building.” As Macdonald and Emerson talk about the South London Gallery, their enthusiasm once again bubbles, and they start to talk over one another, almost conducting two conjoined explanations at once – an enjoyment of their subject that is utterly contagious in person: “The gallery, in a sense, wears its Victorian –” Emerson begins, and Macdonald joins: “It’s always been a house; it’s in a campus of houses.” “But it wears a sort of civic quality that Victorian buildings have, fire stations –” Emerson continues, and so does Macdonald: “Interestingly, that little bit of road had both the working men’s club and the fire station, those were the two civic buildings, and I love the fact that they’ve now turned into the art gallery, which works with all the local housing estates. It’s always had education at its core. It’s very civic.” 6a is now working on its most ambitious arts project to date, a hugely enlarged new home for the Milton Keynes Gallery in the Buckinghamshire ‘new town’ – now not so new, and a significant city of more than 200,000 people. It’s striking that this is almost a pure 6a project, for the first time: Whereas they have been known for their creative adaptation and extension of characterful existing buildings, here they are almost entirely building from the ground up. And it has a different tone to their work to date: more high-tech, more founded in grids and angles. But even this is not strictly a new build – it’s technically an extension, even though it dwarfs the former gallery it adjoins. “We’ve found that even in what appears to be an empty site, you have all this stuff to respond to,” says Macdonald. Emerson agrees: “In the end, I think we’ve got to the point where reuse projects and new builds are actually not at all binary; it’s a continuous scale of how much it has been constructed afresh, against how much is being reused. It’s never quite unique… There’s virtually no land that hasn’t been built on by someone.” To some extent this has been inflicted on them by the projects that have come their way and the fact that they mostly work on a smallish, well-populated, historic island. But is it also the way they prefer to work, to always connect with the history of a site? “I think it is something we look for,” Macdonald says. And in the case of Milton Keynes, the burgeoning city has evolved a character of its own, which 6a have drawn upon with obvious relish for their own contribution. “We were lucky enough to just tap into the generation that built it, all the first meetings were with them,” says Macdonald. “They had to make such a commitment [to the project]. It’s almost American really, to be uninhibitedly positive about a place.” They are effusive about

the “exquisite detailing” in the shopping centre, built by architects who had studied under Mies van der Rohe in Chicago, using working drawings “borrowed” from the studio of the urmodernist himself; and about the atmospheric Helmut Jacoby drawings produced to show how Milton Keynes would look in the future, which is to say today: “People smoking pipes in the communal swimming pool and helicopters everywhere,” Macdonald says. Another ‘pure’ 6a project is under way in south-east London, where the studio is one of eight firms contributing two buildings each to a new ‘design district’ on the Greenwich peninsula, just south of the O2 dome. The district will provide rent-capped homes for creative businesses and start-ups. As with the Milton Keynes Gallery, 6a’s pair are defined by strongly angular, diamondoid forms and, in a baroque touch, they will be clad in pink marble (or marble-effect Formica, if the real thing proves too expensive). “So it will either be pop or superpop,” says Emerson. Would they ever want to work on a genuinely blank slate? Emerson is sceptical. “The idea of

the empty site and the tabula rasa feels very old fashioned. It’s part of that 20th century, revolutionary modern, let’s start again [impetus] – it doesn’t fit our times. Our times are much more engaged – need to be much more engaged – in the conditions that exist.” Well, maybe; but if Abu Dhabi came knocking, and said it had a slice of desert, or was going to reclaim an island for a 6a building… “It’s an interesting example,” says Emerson. “Because at the Jean Nouvel Louvre in Abu Dhabi, which is talked about as this whole new thing, the literal layering of cultural references that he has to bring to it – to give it meaning – means that it’s actually anything but a tabula rasa. He has imported so much Middle Eastern and Arab imagery into it – he was obviously looking for it to connect to something. Even when everything is new, it’s still a very human instinct to connect it to culture in some way.” And it’s a very 6a instinct. “But we’ve never been asked to do a big arts space in Abu Dhabi,” Emerson adds. However, they do have projects in New York and Melbourne now – so it’s only a matter of time.

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see gardens as processes rather than decoration,” explains the Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf, speaking with the air of serenity that one might expect from someone who has spent their life surrounded by plants. “I want gardens in winter to have the same feeling that you have in summer or in spring.” It’s a philosophy Oudolf has developed and championed as part of the naturalistic New Perennial style of gardening since the outset of his career in the 1970s, and which has been brought to international attention through his work on some of the world’s most celebrated contemporary gardens, such as the prairie-like High Line in New York or the temporary garden that was built within the Serpentine Gallery’s 2011 pavilion in London. Planted with herbaceous perennials and grasses that are chosen as much for their structure and seasonal life cycle as for their decorative attributes, Oudolf ’s gardens resemble wild meadows. It’s a process Oudolf describes as “thinking in time” – imagining how each plant will sprout and bloom, how it will look when it’s dormant in the winter months, and how it will interact with its neighbours. “Everything in your mind moves psychologically with the seasons,” he continues. “If you can capture that in your work then you can touch people’s senses.” Oudolf ’s career began by accident in the early 1970s. Having made the decision to quit his job working at the bar and restaurant that his parents ran in the countryside near Haarlem, he took a temporary winter job at a garden

centre. There he fell in love with plants. “It’s something you discover,” he says, reflecting on his early days as a fledgling gardener. “At a certain age, you become open to things that you were not open to before, when life was too fast and much more about friends and socialising. All of a sudden you start to think about your future.” When spring came around, the garden centre asked Oudolf to stay on. He bought books about plants and started buying his own specimens. “It became a healthy obsession,” he

“I saw the plants as a medium to express myself.” reminisces. “I wanted to know more; I wanted to go back to school. I collected, I travelled a lot – suddenly everything was about plants.” After five years of study, Oudolf obtained his licence to practice and, by 1982, he had started a small design and build consultancy with his wife Anja. “I saw the plants as a medium to express myself and I realised I could do something that other people, who were mostly producing traditional English gardens, weren’t doing at the time. We wanted to make gardens that were more spontaneous.” Frustrated by the scant availability of the grasses and native perennials that he and Anja liked to use in their designs, the couple moved from their home city of Haarlem to Hummelo

Above: Oudolf’s archives of intricate hand-drawn planting schemes.

in the Dutch province of Gelderland, in the east of the country. Here they bought an old farmhouse with a large plot of land and set about growing their own plants for their projects. “Of course, it turned out a little differently,” remembers Oudolf. “Hummelo is very rural and there were no clients there, but soon the nursery became very well known, because the plants we offered were hard to find. We collected them from nurseries in England and Germany, and became a sort of bridge between the two for gardeners.” At a time when the garden world was small and intimate, and unusual plants were hard to find, their nursery attracted attention from across Europe. Despite the success of their nursery, Oudolf says their first real “breakthough” came in 1991 with the publication of his first book, Dream Plants for the Natural Garden. It led to a series of conference invites where he was able to establish a network with journalists, professors and fellow nursery owners who shared his enthusiasm. Oudolf ’s first commission in England came from his friend, John Coke – the owner of Bury Court, a former hop farm turned plant nursery, near Farnham in Surrey. Coke has since said that he felt that by hiring him, he was taking a huge gamble, as Oudolf was not yet known as a designer – but happily it paid off. On the old concrete farmyard, Oudolf created a contemporary walled garden filled with bold drifts of hardy herbaceous perennials and ornamental grasses. At the time, the style was deemed radical by the English gardening world.

Opposite: Oudolf in his garden in Hummelo.

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Oudolf and his wife Anja moved from Haarlem to a 19th-century farmhouse in the village of Hummelo in 1982. His striking brick-and-glass office, designed by the architect Hein Thomesen, was built in 2010.

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“It is strange, looking back, that it was England – which was very conservative when it came to gardening – that was one of the first countries to invite me to do something.” He smiles. “It was the younger generation that started to pick it up quickly. I think it was part of the zeitgeist in the ’80s and ’90s – at that time you could really feel it was a movement.” “That was the turning point,” he continues. “It took 10 years for me to become aware of what I was doing. You start with an idea that you want to make gardens more spontaneous; that you didn’t want to be changing your garden all the time; that you didn’t want to replace plants through the seasons, which is what most gardeners do. We wanted to make gardens that could stay and change by themselves. But it was an idea that grew slowly.” In 2000, Oudolf was invited to create a garden for Gardens Illustrated at the Chelsea Flower Show, and in the years that followed completed a series of high-profile commissions

in England, which included Scampston Hall, Trentham and the Royal Horticultural Society’s site in Wisley. All the while, he was writing books to document his work and commissions in the US soon followed. In 2003, he completed the gardens at Battery Park in New York and the Lurie Garden at Millennium Park, where he says his work really moved into a “wilder” era. Arguably Oudolf ’s most high-profile design, the High Line, is a perfect demonstration of his interest in creating a sense of escapism. Located on the west side of Manhattan, with traffic jostling below and skyscrapers soaring overhead, the High Line opened in 2009: a 2.3-kilometre-long elevated linear park created on a former New York Central Railroad.

“I have always wanted to bring a certain wilderness into the city.”

Oudolf at his drawing table. He still conceives each design by hand.

“Of course, context is important but it’s mainly to do with scale,” says Oudolf, reflecting on the High Line’s urban site. “A garden should be a place in itself. I have always wanted to bring a certain wilderness into the city, into my gardens.” While, over the years, Oudolf ’s underlying goal to create wild, dream-like gardens has remained true, the scale and ambition of his work has increased. His comprehensive planting schemes, which are like pieces of artwork in their own right, have evolved from blackand-white sketches to glorious colour-coded plans. At the same time, the projects have transitioned from private to public. “At the beginning, most of my work was for private gardens,” he says. “Now I work with architects and landscape architects on larger urban projects. It’s nice to know that millions of people will see and be inspired by your work, as opposed to just two people. It’s more rewarding for me.”

HIGH LINE

Built in 1934, the West Side Line was a largely elevated section of the New York Central Railroad that served Manhattan’s largest industrial district. By the 1980s, rail freight was being replaced by interstate trucking and the line was abandoned, falling into disrepair until it became a project for regeneration as the High Line. In 2004, Oudolf was selected to join a new team of leading architects as their planting designer. His scheme – inspired by the existing self-seeded landscape sprouting from the disused railroad trestle – features perennials, grasses and shrubs chosen for their hardiness and sustainability, with a focus on native species. The garden is still under construction.

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The High Line was celebrated for sympathetically preserving the historic features of the 1930s elevated train line.

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Right top: The park runs alongside, and in some cases through, the high-rise buildings adjoining the line, and affords views across the Hudson River. Right: Before it was redeveloped, the High Line became well known among urban explorers and local residents for the hardy self-seeding grasses, shrubs and trees that had sprung up among the track ballast. Oudolf took inspiration from the existing plants for his design and, in some cases, used them in the final scheme. Opposite: Property owners with land under the line lobbied for the demolition of the whole structure in the mid-1980s. Since redevelopment, the value of properties adjacent to the line has risen by 10 per cent, sparking development in the local neighbourhoods.

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It’s partly for this reason that Oudolf is particularly fond of working in the art world, and many of his projects have seen him create installations and gardens for art events and galleries. In 2010 he created the first-ever garden at the Venice Biennale. The following year he was invited to create a planted garden for the 2011 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London, which was designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor; and in 2014 he created Oudolf Field – a large perennial meadow located at Hauser & Wirth’s Somerset gallery. Now 73, he continues to work from his base in Hummelo, where his garden is visited by thousands of enthusiasts each year. Rather than surrounding himself with a large team – as one might expect of the world’s most famous garden designer – Oudolf still works alongside Anja, though, by necessity, taking on only a fraction of the projects that are sent

their way. The selection process, he says, is mainly down to intuition and whether or not he is familiar with the team working on the project. “I’ve learnt to avoid a certain complexity,” he explains. Currently the Oudolfs are working on public gardens in Detroit and Stockholm, a botanical garden in South Delaware, a little garden for the NOMA restaurant in Copenhagen, and they have just finished another one for a small museum in the Netherlands. While his work is no longer considered as radical as it once was, Oudolf still likes to continually try and better himself. “There’s always a little progress, but it’s mostly down to experience – you know what will and won’t work, so you make yourself better and better, and that makes the garden better,” he explains. “You cannot jump – what we’ve done in 20 or 30 years’ time cannot be done in one moment. It’s a slow process.”

Oudolf’s planting schemes have evolved from straightforward black-and-white sketches to elaborate colour-coded plans.

SERPENTINE GALLERY PAVILION

The garden in the courtyard of Swiss architect Peter Zumthor’s pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery only existed for six months over the summer of 2011. Small and enclosed, the temporary nature of the commission posed a significant challenge, as such projects usually take years to grow and establish themselves. Oudolf, however, focused on plants that would only show between June and November, resulting in a richly flowering perennial landscape. For Zumthor, the pavilion was conceived of as a sanctuary within a larger structure, a peaceful retreat from busy Hyde Park, where Oudolf imagined “something to dream in, something loose and wild”.

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Enclosing Oudolf’s garden, Peter Zumthor’s temporary pavilion was designed as a sanctuary from the bustle of central London.

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SERPENTINE GALLERY PAVILION Opposite top: Overcoming the challenge of creating a full established garden in temporary space, Oudolf’s design features a rich perennial landscape, a “tableau vivant of grasses, flowers and shrubs”, in Zumthor’s words.

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Opposite bottom: Just as the rain is drawn to the flowers, the austere black structure directs your attention towards the garden, enhancing the meditative atmosphere of the pavilion.

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Top: A shed on the grounds of the Hummelo property.

Bottom: Oudolf stands in a part of the â&#x20AC;&#x153;wild, naturalistic gardensâ&#x20AC;? he has created in Hummelo, during the winter cut-back of the perennials.

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Using more than 60 plant species and approximately 26,000 coordinated perennials and grasses, Oudolf ’s garden in Maximilianpark is designed to change with seasons. It is a scheme where colour is treated as less important than structure, since many flowering plants are only in bloom for a few weeks of the year. For the harsh winter months in Hamm, during which it frequently snows, Oudolf emphasises the rhythms of the densely planted grasses, which can be explored on winding paths. The design is conscious of its wider surroundings, with the gardens delineated with crowded patches of trees that mark out Oudolf ’s sites.

Oudolf’s gardens in the Germany city of Hamm are situated at the centre of the 22-hectare Maximilianpark, which opened in 1984 on the site of a former coal mine.

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Opposite top: Paths wind through Oudolfâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s all-season garden, which is enclosed by tall trees at its perimeter.

Opposite bottom left: His site, which opened in 2011, uses more than 40,000 perennials and grasses and has been designed to attract pollinators like bees and butterflies. Opposite bottom right: Oudolfâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s garden is intended to accommodate the harsh winters in Hamm, using tall grasses that will appear through snow.

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A Brief Statement About Freedom Freedom is often considered a byword for individual liberty, and nowhere more so than in the US. Perhaps it’s time for a new definition jesse ball

et us picture a room, a rather small room, but one outfitted sufficiently that people may live there. Let us say four people can live there. These people wash their clothes, cook their meals, conduct their toilet, sleep, socialise – and all of it in the space of the room. Suddenly, one day, one of the inhabitants says: “It is my right to have one quarter of the space. None of you can come into that space. In that space, I may do as I like.” He has a toilet brought in and installed, a shower, a mini-kitchen, a washer. That quadrant of the room now is piled high with things. He sits in the middle of it. Meanwhile, in the other three quadrants, the inhabitants go on with their existence. They bowed to his demand, but in truth, the overall happiness of the denizens has decreased. This is because, in permitting him to go his own way without re-

gard for anyone, they have lost several things. They have lost one quarter of the space. They have lost the workings of consensus as to what happens in the overall (still contiguous) space. And they have lost him – a person, who, though perhaps somewhat selfish, helped them all to pass the time. The division of the space into quarters, and the taking of one quarter, is an artificial thing, and in its artifice, it injures the community as a whole. If you were living in that space, many things that you like doing would come to an end when the partitioning occurred. The full space of the room is no longer available for momentary uses, for games, celebrations. After the washing of clothes, there might not be much room for hanging. In any case, a rude wall must now be stared at, with all its negative implications.

And then worries would begin, at first on the basis of empathy: What is going on in the other quarter? Why doesn’t he want to share life with us? These feelings might eventually turn to distrust, tribalism.

reedom is thought of in many ways. As a word, it is, like any other, not just subject to use, but, in fact, is its use. It is the aggregate of its use. And so we cannot say a person is wrong to use the word freedom in one way or another simply because we disagree. There is nothing to disagree with. You can call your dog Freedom. We can, however, say that a particular use of freedom turns it into something vile. Or that a use of freedom is not continuous with the history of the word as we understand it. If

Image courtesy of Dorothea Lange / Library of Congress

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that is true, then it is important to examine it and see how we should receive it. The advantage of cloaking the new usage of words in words that have prior sacred meaning is that it makes them unobjectionable. Why is that? It is because people do not realise they should object to what is sacred. In America, people love to talk about freedom. We like to talk about religious freedom, and our right to self-determination. However foolish it is, Americans are proud to have crossed the ocean, pioneered across the plains, etcetera. Why is it foolish? Because we did not do it. Furthermore, in doing it, our forefathers demolished entire cultures, eradicating them

“Freedom is the freedom to be a realised person in relationship with the world as a whole.” from the face of the earth. Yet we are proud of this manifest destiny, of this constant pursuit of our pleasure described as freedom. Let us look at some specific uses of freedom. Freedom in America has become, on the one hand – in poor America, in black America – the right to escape the prejudice of others, to escape or avoid the impossible burdens of a tortuous legal, financial, educational system – even, in some remarkable cases, to transcend,

to defeat it, for a short while. We will return to this definition. On the other hand, in the dominant America, freedom is something else, something to my mind horrific and disgusting. It is a person’s right to do as they like without reference to anyone else. Do we, in fact, have this right? Is this second version a meaningful definition of freedom? I would propose that freedom is not the above. Freedom is the ability of a person to take up responsibilities to others in a community, responsibilities that are desired by others. It is the freedom to participate as an organism in the larger organism formed by interaction. The responsibilities extend not just to the members of the group, but to all other life forms on the planet. Freedom is the freedom to be a realised person in relationship with the world as a whole. It is not the right to separate yourself from others and behave in a fashion that injures them. You have no right to cause suffering. Having the above definition, we now can see that the use of freedom such as it is in poor America – the right to not be endlessly and unfairly dominated so that your life is flattened into a painful degenerative prostration; the right instead to be permitted to form healthy communities, to treat others gently, to not be looking every moment over your shoulder for the supposed agents of justice – we can see

that this use of freedom is legitimate because it is implied in our definition. It is a precursor to our right as an organism to form healthy relationships, our right to be responsible to others and for others. It is this right that is ignored when a family is broken up on the slave block. It is this right that continues to be ignored in the United States, as a function of the stock market, of the prison system, of the manner of representation in government, of the rules of government, of the military-industrial complex, even of the corporate legal code, wherein a corporation is considered a person, the equivalent of a human being. Lawmakers do not have the right to pretend that an imaginary company has the rights of a sentient being and then use those rights to push people out of their homes. Yet this happens every day. If you object to it you are ignored or, in some cases, jailed. Americans are wrong about many things. They are human, like other humans. But being wrong about this, being wrong about freedom, and feeling somehow that freedom permits America to behave as it likes, without reference to the global situation, leads directly to a scene of eventual universal suffering. It is a juvenile definition. It is a child’s behaviour. We must act together to reject this definition of freedom. Census, published by Granta, is out now.

My Idea of Fun Though drugs are romanticised as a means of liberation from the constraints of day-to-day life, addiction is a form of captivity. For the recovered, freedom can be found in surprisingly prosaic ways will self

he ancient Stoic philosophers believed that the sense we, as humans, have of performing a freely willed act (and indeed, all other possible manifestations of what we term ‘liberty’) is merely that feeling we have when what we wish for coincides with what the cosmos has already determined will happen. Some of you will say this is rather a gloomy view of ‘freedom’, and scarcely worth the ascription at all, others will wonder whether their time might be better served reading something else, rather than indulging in logical cheese-paring. But I feel that’s a liberty I haven’t been afforded since my whole life has been a sort of clusterfuck when it comes to freedom and autonomy. There’s my ridiculous moniker to begin with – given to me, I hasten to add. You don’t have to be a nominative determinist to find it disturbing that the inversion of your own name is the common term for expressing the idea of individual autonomy; surely all that’s necessary is the same sensibility that finds it funny if

someone with bad body odour is called Smelly? Whether my name caused me to study philosophy at university is a question for those ancient Stoics, but what can’t be in doubt is that my youthful appetite for narcotics grew synchronously with my taste for speculative thought. A heady mix. By my early 20s I had a bad smack habit, and felt for most of the time that, far from freely choosing my actions, I was tied to the front of a runaway train, and all the points on the line ahead had been welded in place. Since the cosmos had ordained this fate for me, it hardly mattered whether I stuck a needle in my arm or not – the results would be the same: disease, dereliction, death. Subjectively, that’s what addiction feels like: The addict is a puppet, strung up on the steely wires of desires, which seem to run right through him, like Brighton through rock. Addicts frequently have recourse to forms of magical thought: If I don’t tread on the cracks, the dealer will be there, and he won’t rip me

off… Why? Because feeling themselves the playthings of external and invisible forces, they look to the supernatural for succour. But another way of thinking about addiction is that it’s simply a grotesque intensification of the matrix of compulsions everyone is shackled by in their daily lives – one which we’re able to screen out, because it’s fully integrated with the rest of the workaday world: That’s just the way things are. As a graffito I once saw on the wall of a supermarket car park succinctly put it: ‘Work, Consume, Die.’ So, given the bleakness above, what can it possibly feel like to have freedom from addiction? The phrase is certainly bandied about enough nowadays, and all of the efforts of therapists and recovering addicts would seem directed to such an end, so someone probably needs to say what it’s like. Objectively, the answer seems pretty straightforward: Freedom from addiction is not being trapped in the same old destructive go-round of obsession 149

and compulsion. It’s not repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results. It can entail not taking the drink or drug that, far from alleviating your distress, piles it on top of you and all those around you, or it can be a case of desisting from a myriad of habitual behaviours that buy us short-term relief at the cost of long-term enslavement. Fancy another latte? In the recovery community, the expression applied to those who’ve swapped the compulsion to abstain for the compulsion to drink is

that they’re ‘white-knuckling it’; and I remember a tremulously hysterical scene – reminiscent of the one in 1984 wherein O’Brien, the torturer, interrogates Winston Smith as to how many fingers he’s holding up – when I was in rehab in the mid-1980s. Summoned by the soidisante ‘head of treatment’, I was accused of

white-knuckling it: complying with the rigorous behaviourism of the programme while secretly nurturing my addiction. After this browbeating, almost in tears, I searched inside myself for the evil homunculus who was yanking on my chain, but to no avail. As I realised when I relapsed a few years later, the head of treatment had been right after all: The homunculus hadn’t been inside me – he was me, and remained so. No, the old adages have it: Handsome is as handsome does. In freedom from addiction – whether it be Rupert’s to world media-domination, or my own prosaic ones to pills and potions – the subjective and objective fuse: What does it feel like to be free from addiction? Yes, it does indeed feel as if I’ve been unshackled from the locomotive – and that it doesn’t matter at all if I dance on those moss-filled crannies. But this very local form of freedom, I’m aware, is only maintained within a zone of greater conformity, one which is characterised, if not exactly by the doomy exhortation ‘Work, Consume, Die’, by a similar stricture. If I want to sit in a cool, dark bar, at that magical moment – so beloved by the hard-boiled-in-ryewhiskey writer, Raymond Chandler – when, just

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Phone, published by Viking Press, is out now.

Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

"Objectively, the answer seems pretty straightforward: Freedom from addiction is not being trapped in the same old destructive go-round of obsession and compulsion.”

opened, the barman fixes the first drink, and not hear the serried bottles behind the bar whisper seductively, ‘Just one won’t hurt...’ then I have to be prepared to accept what the cosmos has ordained for me, and believe it to be freely chosen by me. At least on a daily basis. No – I kid you not: The Stoics were right all along – there’s no point in tormenting yourself with whether your feeling of freedom corresponds to true autonomy. Best just crack on and do all those things which do indeed set you at liberty; in my own case that initially meant giving up habitual and pernicious drug and alcohol use, but once that was out of the way I found my capacity to indulge in all sorts of freedoms massively enhanced. Freedoms such as telling the whole wide world full of webheaded idiots to go fuck itself; it’s not a matter of work, consume, die, but relax, fast, and freely entertain the preposterous notion that you may indeed live forever. Especially the latter, because when you stop to think about it, you’ve really very little choice. Oh, and by the way: I’ve changed my name to Smelly – at least for social situations.

Writing, Liberally Political upheaval and oppression have been known to stimulate outpourings of creative brilliance. So, which freedoms are ultimately essential for great writing, and what can we do to protect them? lisa halliday

'Hall for the Department of Communications’ by Arnaldo dell’Ira, 1932

or seven years I have lived in a country with a legacy of fascism. Vivid evidence of this history remains everywhere, most conspicuously in its architecture: the central train station; the stock exchange; the palace of justice; a pair of towers that overlook the Duomo, 500 metres from my 400-year-old apartment. These, and many other buildings that I see regularly, all have the same faintly menacing immensity and austerity that pervade the mind: My journal describes a dessert I once ate in a restaurant as “a large, rectangular cube of layered pastry looking a bit like a fascist-era low-rise apartment block”. The evidence is not only aesthetic, nor does it consign the movement to ancient history: A little over a year ago the US Consulate (itself housed in a fascist-era building) sent an email to Americans living in the city, warning that the following afternoon there would be “two political demonstrations, one by the group Forza Nuova at Arco della Pace in Piazza Sempione and a counter demonstration by anti-fascists at Piazza Fontana...” Forza Nuova is a neo-fascist group. So is CasaPound, which recently claimed a seat on a municipal council. Sixteen months ago, when I saw Ettore Scola’s Una Giornata Particolare for the first time – a film that is set on the day in 1938 when Mussolini hosted Hitler in Rome before rapturous crowds – I was already thinking about how, eight decades on, fascism had yet to be extinguished. Three days later, America elected Trump. I live in Milan because my husband works for an Italian publishing house, one with its own history of risky political expression. The original publisher of Doctor Zhivago, which had to be smuggled out of the Soviet Union and printed in Italian rather than the Russian in which it was written, Feltrinelli Editore was founded by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who later died in an explosion that was either his own botched act of terrorism or, as many Italians believe, retribution for his intensifying left-wing ideologies and influence. Feltrinelli Editore is also the publisher of Antonio Tabucchi, author of Sostiene Pereira (Pereira Maintains), a novel set in Lisbon during the Salazar dictatorship. An aging culture-page editor for the newspaper Lisboa, Pereira has lived a mostly apolitical life, but then meets the young leftist Monteiro Rossi, whom he hires to write writers’ obituaries. The first text Rossi files is an impassioned article describing the death of the poet Federico García Lorca: “He was assassinated,” the piece concludes, “and suspicion rests on his political opponents. The whole world is still 151

wondering how such an act of barbarism could have been perpetrated.” Pereira informs Rossi that the article is “unpublishable, completely unpublishable. I cannot publish it, no newspaper in Portugal could publish it, and no Italian paper either, seeing as how Italy is the land of your ancestors, so there are two possibilities: you are either irresponsible or a troublemaker, and journalism nowadays in Portugal has no place for either irresponsibility or troublemaking, and that’s that.” By the end of the novel, however, a violent event has converted Pereira and he is moved to publish a condemnation of Salazar’s regime. Pereira Maintains came out in Italy in 1994, when shades of fascism had reemerged in Italian politics and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party came to power while Berlusconi continued to amass outsize control of the country’s media. The novel was a bestseller. The same year, an ocean away, I graduated from the small public high school in the small town in liberal Massachusetts where I grew up and attended a liberal arts college in what is often referred to as one of the most liberal cities in America. Well into my 20s, with all this liberalism cushioning my youth, I remained under the impression that antisemitism, racism and the oppression of women were erstwhile historical errors that society had unanimously agreed should never be allowed to happen again. In primary school, where we pledged daily allegiance to the flag, I had also learned about the American inviolability of free speech, which in the same innocent spirit I thought invulnerable to any serious attack. At

the same time, no subject occurred to me – I did not even search for one – that I felt any pressing need to speak freely about. Maybe this is because I considered myself belonging to no category of victims that needed urgent or controversial defending; nor did I know any victims whose cause might be helped by my young and unpracticed voice. Or so I thought. It might seem paradoxical, then, that it’s been in a country with a more obviously problematic reputation regarding free speech that I have felt a greater sense of freedom, of unselfconsciousness, while writing. Or maybe it doesn’t seem odd, in that the ubiquity of fascism’s spectre serves as a frequent reminder that one must make the most of the freedom

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“Writing freely may also require something of a psychological trick: writing as though in secret, as though no one will ever read what you’ve written.” conferred by one’s historical and geographical coordinates. And yet this reminder, this goading, accounts for only so much. A sense of authorial freedom is essential to writing well (if not to writing), but apparently it isn’t guaranteed by merely residing in a country where freedom of expression is constitutionally protected. Nor is it ensured by a heightened awareness of the exclusivity and tenuousness of that freedom. The deeper sense of freedom that enables writing well must be nurtured and defended on

the personal level, as well as the political. There are practical measures one can take to do this, including limiting how much time one spends online, taking heed of what can seem a vast multitude of voices eager to tell you that everything you think is wrong. The company one keeps is also relevant: It takes courage to seek out generative relationships while minimising the overbearing and even paralysing ones. And then of course there’s the simple act of getting older, of growing up and becoming ever less tentative and afraid. But writing freely may also require something of a psychological trick: writing as though in secret, as though no one will ever read what you’ve written. (This is advice another writer gave me, and to avoid impenetrability it is best taken in tandem with something else I once heard: write the book you would like to read.) And as I have learned from living abroad, writing in secret is a mode handily abetted by self-exile – in my case, away from Massachusetts, away from America, away from the cacophony, the imagined judgments, the immutability and encumbrances of one’s past. “It’s a kindness that the mind can go where it wishes,” Ovid wrote in The Poems of Exile. On the other hand: “Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan,” wrote Hemingway in A Moveable Feast. It may be a kindness that the mind can go where it wishes, but sometimes it needs a little help from the body. Asymmetry, published by Granta, is out now.

THREE DIALOGUES WITH GEORGES DUTHUIT

BY SAMUEL BECKETT

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First published in the Parisian English-language magazine transition in December 1949, Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit is the record of months of intimate discussion, in conversation and letters, between the Irish avant-garde writer Samuel Beckett and his friend, the editor and art critic Georges Duthuit. Structured around three contemporaneous artists – Pierre Tal Coat, one of the founders of tachisme, a French style of abstract painting; the surrealist André Masson; and Bram van Velde, the Dutch painter known for his colourful, semi-representational style – Three Dialogues is a rare window on to Beckett’s views on art and artistic expression. Pessimistic but good humoured, cynical but self-deprecating, and moderated throughout by Duthuit’s patient, intellectual challenges, the dialogues confirm Beckett both as the 20th century’s seminal man of letters and as a master of tragicomedy.

I – TAL COAT B.—Total object, complete with missing parts, instead of partial object. Question of degree.

deplore in the Matisse of a certain period and in the Tal Coat of to-day.

D.—More. The tyranny of the discreet overthrown. The world a flux of movements partaking of living time, that of effort, creation, liberation, the painting, the painter. The fleeting instant of sensation given back, given forth, with context of the continuum it nourished.

B.—I do not deplore. I agree that the Matisse in question, as well as the Franciscan orgies of Tal Coat, have prodigious value, but a value cognate with those already accumulated. What we have to consider in the case of Italian painters is not that they surveyed the world with the eyes of buildingcontractors, a mere means like any other, but that they never stirred from the field of the possible, however much they may have enlarged it. The only thing disturbed by the revolutionaries Matisse and Tal Coat is a certain order on the plane of the feasible.

B.—In any case a thrusting towards a more adequate expression of natural experience, as revealed to the vigilant coenaesthesia. Whether achieved through submission or through mastery, the result is a gain in nature. D.—But that which this painter discovers, orders, transmits, is not in nature. What relation between one of these paintings and a landscape seen at a certain age, a certain season, a certain hour? Are we not on a quite different plane? B.—By nature I mean here, like the naïvest realist, a composite of perceiver and perceived, not a datum, an experience. All I wish to suggest is that the tendency and accomplishment of this painting are fundamentally those of previous painting, straining to enlarge the statement of a compromise. D.—You neglect the immense difference between the significance of perception for Tal Coat and its significance for the great majority of his predecessors, apprehending as artists with the same utilitarian servility as in a traffic-jam and improving the result with a lick of Euclidian geometry. The global perception of Tal Coat is disinterested, committed neither to truth nor to beauty, twin tyrannies of nature. I can see the compromise of past painting, but not that which you 154

D.—What other plane can there be for the maker? B.—Logically none. Yet I speak of an art turning from it in disgust, weary of puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road. D.—And preferring what? B.—The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express. D.—But that is a violently extreme and personal point of view, of no help to us in the matter of Tal Coat. B.— D.—Perhaps that is enough for to-day.

II – MASSON B.—In search of the difficulty rather than in its clutch. The disquiet of him who lacks an adversary. D.—That is perhaps why he speaks so often nowadays of painting the void, ‘in fear and trembling’. His concern was at one time with the creation of a mythology; then with man, not simply in the universe, but in society; and now ... ‘inner emptiness, the prime condition, according to Chinese esthetics, of the act of painting’. It would seem, in effect, that Masson suffers more keenly than any living painter from the need to come to rest, i.e. to establish the data of the problem to be solved, the Problem at last. B.—Though little familiar with the problems he has set himself in the past and which, by the mere fact of their solubility or for any other reason, have lost for him their legitimacy, I feel their presence not far behind these canvases veiled in consternation, and the scars of a competence that must be most painful to him. Two old maladies that should no doubt be considered separately: the malady of wanting to know what to do and the malady of wanting to be able to do it. D.—But Masson’s declared purpose is now to reduce these maladies, as you call them, to nothing. He aspires to be rid of the servitude of space, that his eye may ‘frolic among the focusless fields, tumultuous with incessant creation’. At the same time he demands the re-habilitation of the ‘vaporous’. This may seem strange in one more fitted by temperament for fire than for damp. You of course will reply that it is the same thing as before, the same reaching towards succour from without. Opaque or transparent, the object remains sovereign. But how can Masson be expected to paint the void?

circulations, communications, unknown penetrations’ – where he may frolic at his ease, in freedom. Without renouncing the objects, loathsome or delicious, that are our daily bread and wine and poison, he seeks to break through their partitions to that continuity of being which is absent from the ordinary experience of living. In this he approaches Matisse (of the first period needless to say) and Tal Coat, but with this notable difference, that Masson has to contend with his own technical gifts, which have the richness, the precision, the density and balance of the high classical manner. Or perhaps I should say rather its spirit, for he has shown himself capable, as occasion required, of great technical variety. B.—What you say certainly throws light on the dramatic predicament of this artist. Allow me to note his concern with the amenities of ease and freedom. The stars are undoubtedly superb, as Freud remarked on reading Kant’s cosmological proof of the existence of God. With such preoccupations it seems to me impossible that he should ever do anything different from that which the best, including himself, have done already. It is perhaps an impertinence to suggest that he wishes to. His so extremely intelligent remarks on space breathe the same possessiveness as the notebooks of Leonardo who, when he speaks of disfazione, knows that for him not one fragment will be lost. So forgive me if I relapse, as when we spoke of the so different Tal Coat, into my dream of an art unresentful of its insuperable indigence and too proud for the farce of giving and receiving.

B.—He is not. What is the good of passing from one untenable position to another, of seeking justification always on the same plane? Here is an artist who seems literally skewered on the ferocious dilemma of expression. Yet he continues to wriggle. The void he speaks of is perhaps simply the obliteration of an unbearable presence, unbearable because neither to be wooed nor to be stormed. If this anguish of helplessness is never stated as such, on its own merits and for its own sake, though perhaps very occasionally admitted as spice to the ‘exploit’ it jeopardised, the reason is doubtless, among others, that it seems to contain in itself the impossibility of statement. Again an exquisitely logical attitude. In any case, it is hardly to be confused with the void.

D.—Masson himself, having remarked that western perspective is no more than a series of traps for the capture of objects, declares that their possession does not interest him. He congratulates Bonnard for having, in his last works, ‘gone beyond possessive space in every shape and form, far from surveys and bounds, to the point where all possession is dissolved’. I agree that there is a long cry from Bonnard to that impoverished painting, ‘authentically fruitless, incapable of any image whatsoever’, to which you aspire, and towards which too, who knows, unconsciously perhaps, Masson tends. But must we really deplore the painting that admits ‘the things and creatures of spring, resplendent with desire and affirmation, ephemeral no doubt, but immortally reiterant’, not in order to benefit by them, not in order to enjoy them, but in order that what is tolerable and radiant in the world may continue? Are we really to deplore the painting that is a rallying, among the things of time that pass and hurry us away, towards a time that endures and gives increase?

D.—Masson speaks much of transparency – ‘openings,

B.—(Exit weeping.) 155

III – BRAM VAN VELDE B.—Frenchman, fire first. D.—Speaking of Tal Coat and Masson you invoked an art of a different order, not only from theirs, but from any achieved up to date. Am I right in thinking that you had van Velde in mind when making this sweeping distinction? B.—Yes. I think he is the first to accept a certain situation and to consent to a certain act. D.—Would it be too much to ask you to state again, as simply as possible, the situation and act that you conceive to be his? B.—The situation is that of him who is helpless, cannot act, in the event cannot paint, since he is obliged to paint. The act is of him who, helpless, unable to act, acts, in the event paints, since he is obliged to paint.

known as painting, since for obscure reasons we are obliged to speak of painting, has had to wait for van Velde to be rid of the misapprehension under which it has laboured so long and so bravely, namely, that its function was to express, by means of paint. B.—Others have felt that art is not necessarily expression. But the numerous attempts made to make painting independent of its occasion have only succeeded in enlarging its repertory. I suggest that van Velde is the first whose painting is bereft, rid if you prefer, of occasion in every shape and form, ideal as well as material, and the first whose hands have not been tied by the certitude that expression is an impossible act. D.—But might it not be suggested, even by one tolerant of this fantastic theory, that the occasion of his painting is his predicament, and that it is expressive of the impossibility to express?

D.—Why is he obliged to paint? B.—I don’t know. D.—Why is he helpless to paint? B.—Because there is nothing to paint and nothing to paint with. D.—And the result, you say, is art of a new order?

B.—No more ingenious method could be devised for restoring him, safe and sound, to the bosom of Saint Luke. But let us, for once, be foolish enough not to turn tail. All have turned wisely tail, before the ultimate penury, back to the mere misery where destitute virtuous mothers may steal bread for their starving brats. There is more than a difference of degree between being short, short of the world, short of self, and being without these esteemed commodities. The one is a predicament, the other not.

B.—Among those whom we call great artists, I can think of none whose concern was not pre-dominantly with his expressive possibilities, those of his vehicle, those of humanity. The assumption underlying all painting is that the domain of the maker is the domain of the feasible. The much to express, the little to express, the ability to express much, the ability to express little, merge in the common anxiety to express as much as possible, or as truly as possible, or as finely as possible, to the best of one’s ability. What –

D.—But you have already spoken of the predicament of van Velde.

D.—One moment. Are you suggesting that the painting of van Velde is inexpressive?

B.—Would it not be enough if I simply went away?

B.—(A fortnight later) Yes. D.—You realise the absurdity of what you advance?

B.—I should not have done so. D.—You prefer the purer view that here at last is a painter who does not paint, does not pretend to paint. Come, come, my dear fellow, make some kind of connected statement and then go away.

D.—No. You have begun. Finish. Begin again and go on until you have finished. Then go away. Try and bear in mind that the subject under discussion is not yourself, nor the Sufist Al-Haqq, but a particular Dutchman by name van Velde, hitherto erroneously referred to as an artiste peintre.

B.—I hope I do. D.—What you say amounts to this: the form of expression 156

B.—How would it be if I first said what I am pleased to fancy he is, fancy he does, and then that it is more than likely that

he is and does quite otherwise? Would not that be an excellent issue out of all our afflictions? He happy, you happy, I happy, all three bubbling over with happiness.

D.—Do as you please. But get it over. B.—There are many ways in which the thing I am trying in vain to say may be tried in vain to be said. I have experimented, as you know, both in public and in private, under duress, through faintness of heart, through weakness of mind, with two or three hundred. The pathetic antithesis possession-poverty was perhaps not the most tedious. But we begin to weary of it, do we not? The realisation that art has always been bourgeois, though it may dull our pain before the achievements of the socially progressive, is finally of scant interest. The analysis of the relation between the artist and his occasion, a relation always regarded as indispensable, does not seem to have been very productive either, the reason being perhaps that it lost its way in disquisitions on the nature of occasion. It is obvious that for the artist obsessed with his expressive vocation, anything and everything is doomed to become occasion, including, as is apparently to some extent the case with Masson, the pursuit of occasion, and the every man his own wife experiments of the spiritual Kandinsky. No painting is more replete than Mondrian’s. But if the occasion appears as an unstable term of relation, the artist, who is the other term, is hardly less so, thanks to his warren of modes and attitudes. The objections to this dualist view of the creative process are unconvincing. Two things are established, however precariously: the aliment, from fruits on plates to low mathematics and self-commiseration, and its manner of dispatch. All that should concern us is the acute and increasing anxiety of the relation itself, as though shadowed more and more darkly by a sense of invalidity, of inadequacy, of existence at the expense of all that it excludes, all that it blinds to. The history of painting, here we go again, is the history of its attempts to escape from this sense of failure, by means of more authentic, more ample, less exclusive relations between representer and representee, in a kind of tropism towards a light as to the nature of which the best opinions continue to vary, and with a kind of Pythagorean terror, as though the irrationality of pi were an offence against the deity, not to mention his creature. My case, since I am in the dock, is that van Velde is the first to desist from this estheticised automatism, the first to submit wholly to the incoercible absence of relation, in the absence of terms or, if you like, in the presence of unavailable terms, the first to admit that to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living. No, no, allow me to expire. I know that all that is required now, in order to bring even this horrible matter to an acceptable conclusion, is to make of this submission, this admission, this fidelity to failure, a

new occasion, a new term of relation, and of the act which, unable to act, obliged to act, he makes, an expressive act, even if only of itself, of its impossibility, of its obligation. I know that my inability to do so places myself, and perhaps an innocent, in what I think is still called an unenviable situation, familiar to psychiatrists. For what is this coloured plane, that was not there before. I don’t know what it is, having never seen anything like it before. It seems to have nothing to do with art, in any case, if my memories are correct. (Prepares to go). D.—Are you not forgetting something? B.—Surely that is enough? D.—I understood your number was to have two parts. The first was to consist in your saying what you – er – thought. This I am prepared to believe you have done. The second – B.—(Remembering, warmly) Yes, yes, I am mistaken, I am mistaken.

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Hair and makeup Ditte Lund Lassen using Oribe Hair Care, Eau Thermale AvĂ¨ne and Fenty Beauty by Rihanna

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Held in the hand, a flag is a fairly simple piece of fabric, but flying in the wind it represents a nation’s sovereignty, identity and its most noble ambitions. Founded in 1847 and family owned for six generations, Annin is the premier flag maker in the United States. Their flags have accompanied expeditions to the North and South Poles, were raised by marines at Iwo Jima in 1945, and flew to the moon with the Apollo astronauts. In addition to the US, Annin produces flags for many other countries, states, towns, institutions, companies, families and even custom designs for those popping the question, “Will you marry me?”

Previous spread: The embroidery machines employed by Annin produce hundreds of star fields simultaneously, using automatic specifications that match the star size to the flag size. The plant uses 250,000 cones of yarn to produce over 1 million embroidered star fields every year.

Opposite: A skilled seamstress hems a large flag with six rows of high-strength lock-stitching on the flag’s fly end, the side that flies in the wind. This stitching reduces fraying due to weather wear and extends the flag’s life. Below: Annin’s sizing ranges from hand-held 10cm by 15cm flags, up to nine metres by 18 metres. Here the largest size, in spun polyester, is laid out for folding and finishing. It takes six people to fold it and weighs 33kg. The time-tested open-weave material is engineered to let wind pass through, making it ideal for gales and flags that are flown daily.

The scale of Annin’s operation is astounding: the variety of flags being produced, the multitude of sizes and colours – the challenge of photographing such a vast and busy workplace is in finding moments of clarity in the visual chaos. — Christopher Payne

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Below: Hundreds of rolls of digitally printed international flags are prepared for finishing outside the sewing room.

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Opposite: Kenyan flags moving throughÂ a machine that uses heat to remove creases and wrinkles in preparation for cutting.

Opposite: Polycotton US flags, 90cm by 150cm, being printed on a highquality mass-production screenprinting machine. In addition to the more expensive embroidered US version, 50,000 smaller polycotton flags are produced each week to support sales. The highest volumes ship to customers between March and June ahead of the US flag season: Memorial Day, July 4th, and Labor Day. Here, the screen-printing machine runs at high speed under the watchful eye of skilled operators who are on hand to adjust as needed.

Below: Digitally printed custom flags are inspected on light tables before being cut and prepared for hemming, grommets, cording and other specialty finishes.

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Print screens created for state, international and high-volume flags up to 1.5 metres by 2.4 metres inÂ size are stored alphabetically in racks. Here, two workers stand with the POW/MIA (Prisoner of War/Missing in Action) flag that Annin was commissioned to design and has been producing since 1971. By federal law, the US and POW-MIA flags must fly together at military installations and most federal buildings.

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The State of Ohio flag utilises two separate screens, one for each colour. The stars are printed over the blue background.

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An operator inspects the ink laydown for the United Kingdom flag. The flat-bed screenprinting machine manufactures large-volume runs and provides high-quality ink penetration on textile fabrics, which is ideal for geometrical designs.

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SPRINGWATCH BULGARI OCTO ORIGINALE AUTOMATIC IN TITANIUM £6,100, bulgari.com It’s fair to say that every classic wristwatch of the modern era has been defined by its shape. Audemars Piguet’s octagonal Royal Oak, Cartier’s square Santos, Jaeger-LeCoultre’s oblong Reverso, Patek’s purist Calatrava… So what no one expects is the arrival of a new shape on the block, let alone a shape that’s instantly bestowed iconic status. Bulgari’s Octo is a rare example, and it’s doubly satisfying that its case could only exist today, being a high-tech symphony of 110 overlapping and tessellating facets, all cut, milled and polished from a single chunk of metal – titanium in this case: 40 per cent lighter than steel but at least 40 per cent weightier by class.

PHOTOGRAPHY REBECCA SCHEINB ERG ROLEX OYSTER COSMOGRAPH DAYTONA IN YELLOW GOLD £20,200, rolex.com The lore, legend and reference numbers of the Rolex Daytona encroach on trainspotting levels of fanaticism, but even the most casual watchspotter can’t deny its mystique – helped in no small part by the jaw-dropping sale last October of Paul Newman’s own example for a record-smashing $17.8 million. But despite the crazy hammer prices and waiting lists, Rolex continues to assert its cool approach to watchmaking where other brands would pander to nostalgia. Today’s Daytona is precisely the sort of watch it should be in 2018: kitted out with cutting-edge automatic mechanics, crowned by a hardwearing ceramic bezel, mounted on an elastomer-coated bracelet that’ll outlive your actual wrist. Now available in a yellow-gold case straight out of Miami Vice.

PANERAI LUMINOR DUE 3 DAYS ACCIAIO £6,900, panerai.com It’s Panerai, Giovanni, but not as you know it. The steroidal diving-watch brand from Florence, so beloved of Sly Stallone and Arnie, has been on a strict diet, dropping to 42mm across and, critically, just over a centimetre proud of the wrist. This hardly puts the city-boy and Rivieragadabout favourite into ultra-slim territory, but, married with Panerai’s iconic cushion shape, it adds up to a super-smooth operator that (finally!) fits effortlessly beneath a French cuff. The sunburst satin dial is almost enough to warrant a tuxedo.

NOMOS GLASHÜTTE NEOMATIK 39 IN MIDNIGHT BLUE £2,960, nomos-glashuette.com East Germany’s most established watchmaker (a brick had barely fallen from the Wall when Nomos registered its company name in 1990) seems to have forged a new reputation as horology’s Farrow & Ball. Apart from the fine, innovative manufacturing that continues in Saxony’s watchmaking heartland of Glashütte, Nomos’s Bauhaus aesthetic receives constant TLC at the hands of east Berlin’s finest graphic designers, three hours up the road. When they’re not agonising over the length of a serif on the 2, the design team are playing with sumptuous colours like this – Midnight Blue by name, or Drawing Room Blue if you’re co-ordinating your watch with the door of your Islington terrace.

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PATEK PHILIPPE PERPETUAL CALENDAR REF 5327J-001 IN YELLOW GOLD £65,110, patek.com To understand a perpetual calendar there are three things to know: 1. It displays the correct date every day, even during 30-day months and leap years, without adjustment (until February 28th in 2100, after which you’re good for another century). 2. There is a wheel in every perpetual calendar that completes a precise 360-degree turn every four years under the power of a tiny spring (think about that). 3. Patek Philippe makes the finest – the finest looking and the finest engineered. So much so, it hasn’t felt the need to significantly evolve its 240 Q movement in over three decades, so perfect is its rotor-driven constellation of gleaming micromechanics. Though this model’s scalloped lugs are a welcome facelift.

Florist Still Life Flowers Retoucher Jacob Zinzan Photo assistant Leonie McQuillan Digi Op Daniel Grossman

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efore I went into space for the first time in August 2009, I read what the early Apollo astronauts – some of the first people to see the Earth as a whole – had said about the experience. Many mentioned a feeling of insignificance. I hope they meant they had a sense of awe, that they were humbled. For me, whether I was looking down towards Earth or out into deep space, it always made me think of our significance. We have explored beyond our planet physically for over half a century, and from the ground for much longer. As far as we know, we are alone – there’s no evidence of beings like us, or a habitat like ours, anywhere else. I don’t think that diminishes our place here. Nothing can really prepare you for the view from the International Space Station: It is immersive, almost transcendent – inspiring such a total, consuming sense of wonder that if I went to the window during the day, an hour would feel like minutes. I had to set a timer on my watch to remind me to go back to work. It really gets you thinking about who we are, about our tiny home in the vastness of the cosmos and how we fit into it all. I think that’s quite a human instinct, to try to work it all out; I don’t think we ever will completely. There’s much that will forever be a mystery, but we will always be curious, always look deeper, and always try to understand our place in this immeasurable, infinite universe. Astronaut Nicole Stott spent a total of 104 days in space, on board the International Space Station and Space Shuttle, between 2009 and 2011.

An 890-light-year wide and 640-lightyear tall false-colour image of part of the Milky Way, captured by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope using infrared imaging. Of the hundreds of thousands of stars seen here swirling around the supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy – the white spot in the middle of the image – old stars are seen as blue while the dust illuminated by the hottest stars is red.

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Previous spread: A star shedding its atmosphere as it travels through space at around 328,300 kilometres per hour, or roughly 265 times the speed of sound on Earth. Its speed is so great that it has formed a semicircular bow shock of superheated gas (seen in the centre of the image) that flows around the star to swirl in its wake. The size of the bubble – 2.7 light-years across or 2,100 times the size of Pluto’s orbit – has allowed astronomers to estimate that it has been shedding its atmosphere for around 70,000 years.

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The Tadpole Nebula, a star-forming hub in the Auriga constellation about 12,000 light-years from Earth. The image is a mosaic of 25 frames captured by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, taken at all four wavelengths detected by the telescope, and depicts many infant stars – as young as a million years old – as well as the eponymous tadpoleshaped pillars of gas, formed by ultraviolet radiation, that appear near the centre of the image.

Opposite: The Orion Nebula, the closest region of star formation to Earth, where molecular clouds of gas, plasma and cosmic dust collapse to create stars. Visible in the night’s sky as the fuzzy star in the sword of the Orion constellation, the nebula contains about 1,000 young stars – illuminating the dust cloud – as well as four massive stars that are up to 100,000 times as luminous as our sun.

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A region of the Perseus-Pisces supercluster of galaxies, located 250 million light-years from Earth. Normally galaxies beyond our Milky Way are hidden from view as a result of foreground dust, but, as part of a mission to create a 360-degree panorama of the Milky Way, Spitzer is being pointed away from the galactic centre and can capture otherwise hidden objects.

Opposite: Glowing blue at the centre of this image is Zeta Ophiuchi â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a star 20 times larger and 65,000 times more luminous than our sun. Halfway through its short and intense 8-million-year lifespan (in comparison, the sun is roughly halfway through its 10-billion-year lifespan), the mass and power of this star are such that the extreme amount of ultraviolet radiation it emits causes the interstellar gas and dust surrounding the star to glow bright red.

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Unremarkable in visible light, when viewed in infrared this area of the sky â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the claw of the Scorpius constellation â&#x20AC;&#x201C; reveals a reflection nebula, a cloud of gas and dust illuminated by bright stars nearby.

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The remnants of the Kepler supernova, which occurred in the constellation Ophiuchus â&#x20AC;&#x201C; named after the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, who observed it in 1604 when it was the brightest object in the night sky. It is the most recent supernova (the explosion at the end of a starâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life) in our own galaxy to have been unquestionably observed from Earth, just 20,000 lightyears away, though this image was captured with X-ray detection by the Hubble Space Telescope.

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A region of the Carina Nebula showing yellow and white star embryos that are normally hidden within pillars of thick pink dust, but here are revealed using Spitzerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s infrared imaging technology. Although the nebula's largest star, Eta Carinae, is too bright to be observed by infrared telescopes, its presence is suggested by the shredding of the cloud by the starâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds, leaving a mess of tendrils and pillars, in turn triggering the birth of the new stars uncovered by Spitzer in this image.

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A vast section of the Milky Way – including the constellations Cassiopeia and Cepheus – captured by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. Though Cassiopeia is easily identifiable in the night sky as five bright stars in the shape of a ‘W’, in infrared light the constellations fade into obscurity among the millions of other stars, clouds of cool dust, starforming nebulae and the remnants of a supernova explosion that was witnessed by the astronomer Tycho Brahe in 1572. Images courtesy of NASA/JPLCaltech

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Mudbound, the most recent offering from film director Dee Rees, follows two young men – one white, one African-American – as they return from fighting in World War II. Rejoining his sharecropping family at a whiteowned farm in the Mississippi Delta at the height of Jim Crow laws, Ronsel discovers that the equality he enjoyed in Europe as a liberator has not followed him across the Atlantic; he has changed – as has fellow soldier Jamie, whose brother owns the farm – but Mississippi has not. Ronsel’s experiences back home are far more dangerous than those he witnessed abroad. Despite rave reviews and standing ovations at Sundance Film Festival, no studio bid on Mudbound in the days following its first screening, baffling Rees and her producers. At the last minute, Netflix offered $12.5 million for the film – the biggest sale at the festival that year. Mudbound premiered on the streaming service and in select cinemas in November, winning and being nominated for many awards. Now with Oscars recognition – as the first black woman to be nominated for best adapted screenplay – Rees discusses her work, her experiences as a filmmaker and the optics of domination. Port: Mudbound was a huge success at Sundance: standing ovations, critical acclaim, but no studio bid on it. What were those days immediately following the premiere like? DR: They were tense. There is a moment when the festival starts to close down, the booths and tents get packed away, and we were still there, waiting. The filmmakers’ lounge was closed, the lights turned off, and I’m thinking: What just happened? I wanted the film to pay off for everybody: for the cast who had taken the risk, for the crew, and the producers too. Port: How did you make sense of it? DR: People were trying to think through it, but it was illogical. If you ran all the numbers, like, ‘Which film has been this reviewed at the festival? Which film has gotten this many positive reviews at the festival? What film has audiences talking about it this way?’ How could it be that a film that was that well received was not bought immediately?

Going into the festival, we had all these requests from studios to see it in advance, but we wanted everybody to see it at the same time, to create urgency. We went from studios begging to see it before the festival to… crickets afterwards. Then we started wondering, ‘Maybe it’s too long?’ That was being said. Or, ‘It’s hard to watch.’ But no, it’s not hard to watch. People watch much harder things. People watch 20-minute gun sequences in John Wick. Port: Are you referring, specifically, to the scene with the Ku Klux Klan at the end? DR: Yes. I think people had an emotional response to this film, and you have to let it be that. Port: What happened with Netflix? DR: Toward the very end, Ted Sarandos [chief content officer at Netflix] came forward because Adam Sandler told him he had to watch it. Adam Sandler was the saviour of the film. And Ted was like, “Holy shit!” And bought it for $12.5 million. He could have lowballed us. It was a really noble thing. He made a point to make it the biggest sale of Sundance. Port: What do you think made others so hesitant? DR: I have no idea. One of the things I’ve heard since the film came out – from those who have not seen it – is, “Oh no, not another slave movie.” And it’s like, “What are you talking about? No, it’s not a slave movie, but even if it was, would that be a problem? Have there been too many of them?”

“I am proud of the art of each film I make, in and of itself. If I die tomorrow, I’ll have made work that lives on. That’s what keeps me going.”

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Port: In the US, people are anxious about race – do you feel like you are seen as a director or as a ‘black woman director’? DR: When you’re sitting with Steven Spielberg, you’re not thinking about his whiteness or his maleness, you’re thinking about his Steven-ness. Why can’t we say, “This is a really good film,” without making it “the best by a woman”? Or “the best by a black person”? Why are we pitted against each other? How come there can’t be many so-called women films, or many so-called race films? Let the white guys duke it out for their spot too. Why is it that [women or people of colour] always end up competing against each other? Make it about excellence. Make it about the work. That bias influences what people see as excellent. Port: How does that impact you as a filmmaker? DR: I’ve learned that it’s not a meritocracy. If it was just about the work, you could send out screeners [industry advance copies] in white envelopes and people would look at the craft of your film. For me as an artist, it has to be what’s on the screen. Port: There does seem to be an opening-up that’s happening now, where different points of view and perspectives are finally getting their play. DR: My girlfriend and I talk about the optics of domination. If a straight white guy makes a good film, it’s allowed to dominate – not only as the best film, but the best cinematography, editing, writing and acting. But if

a woman makes a film, people will say, “Oh, you’re the best woman director.” And if a black person makes a film, then it’s, “You’re the best black director.” We’re not allowed to be the best director; we’re not allowed to dominate. Typically, it is white men – so if you never see a woman or a black person dominating, it tells you these people can’t dominate. Port: Or there’s no place for you. DR: Exactly. Port: How was Mudbound received in London? DR: People talked about it in a different way. There’s more distance. You don’t have this burden of guilt, so they’re more objective. There’s not the challenge of, ‘Could this really happen?’ They’re already there. No one asked, ‘How does this relate to now?’, which American journalists ask me every time. I’m like, “Well, do I have to answer that?” In the UK, there was not this touchy defensiveness about race. Port: Your second film, following Pariah, also centred on race. Bessie Smith was a famous blues singer in the 1920s and ’30s. How did Bessie happen? DR: Bessie came about because I was writing all these scripts after Pariah, including one about Nashville, which I pitched to HBO and Showtime. HBO asked if I would ever be interested in Bessie Smith. I said, “Hell yeah.” I was hired to rewrite a script that had been around for 20 years. I wanted to get into Bessie’s queerness and the legacy of these blues 211

women, like Ma Rainey, and their sexual freedom. So I put that into the script, and that led to being asked if I wanted to direct it. Port: Was Queen Latifah already signed up at that point? DR: Yes, but I had to pitch her, which was intimidating. I had to explain why I was the best director to do this film, and it was a big sell, because Bessie was a $20 million film, versus Pariah, which was $400,000. They were nervous. But, Bessie re-launched me as a director. Port: Pariah debuted in 2011, Bessie in 2015 and Mudbound in 2017. How did Bessie prepare you for Mudbound? DR: Bessie gave me confidence with actors. I love working with them – that’s where I get my energy. The writing part is really lonely, but on set with the actors, in the moment, that’s where I hit my groove. Port: You guys had a pretty short period of time to film. Was that dictated by budget? DR: It was dictated by the budget, which is dictated by the cast. I wanted actors who were right for the parts. I had certain diehards, like Rob Morgan as Hap and Jason Mitchell as Ronsel. They are brilliant actors, but not megastars that sell overseas – not yet. For me it’s about the face, the feelings. When you make those kind of choices, and you have a smaller budget, you’re not going for the huge international star. Port: Who were the first people you cast? DR: Rob Morgan. Then Mary J Blige said yes. But in order for the film to get green-lit, I needed a big white actor to say yes. Carey Mulligan is an amazing actor as well, and had a big enough name that when she said yes, the film was a go. Port: Mulligan is British and Jason Clarke is Australian. Did their not being American make it easier for them to say yes? DR: Carey Mulligan and Jason Clarke are phenomenal actors first and foremost, but I do think that being non-American gives them a critical distance. There was not a defensiveness or instinct to protect the characters or to sugar-coat and soften it. Same in terms of saying yes to a young black director – whereas white American actors weren’t there yet. Garrett Hedlund is American and an extraordinary actor as well. He took a chance on me. And then Jonathan Banks came on towards the end when the rest of the cast was set. But I do think that Carey Mulligan spent her currency on me. She took a risk, she said yes. Port: Was there a filmmaker that you came across early on in your career that you really admired?

DR: I liked the Coen brothers early on, because the dialogue was snappy and the characters were such characters. I liked Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums because it was so formal and structured. I used to like Tarantino. Growing up, Spike Lee was one of the first directors I was aware of – I saw School Daze and Malcolm X in high school. In film school, I discovered Cassavetes and liked that you couldn’t hear the script or see the blocking. It all felt like it was happening. Port: Did any one person give you the idea that you could become a director? DR: There was no filmmaker that I modelled myself after necessarily. All the artists I saw myself in worked in literature. Those are the women who travelled the world and had control over their sexuality. They were wild women to me. Port: Such as...? DR: It’s going to sound clichéd but Alice Walker and Maya Angelou – specifically her memoir Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas, where she’s talking about travelling with Porgy and Bess. She’s singing and loving who she wants to love. She’s just free. I loved Toni Cade

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Bambara’s short stories. I saw myself in those women. And in Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place. There is a lesbian couple and I remember thinking, ‘That’s me. Now I understand.’ Port: You used your grandmother’s journals to flesh out the characters in Mudbound. Why was it important for you to do that? DR: It was an opportunity to show the intelligence of these people. It was not for lack of capability that they weren’t able to have what they should have had. I wanted to inject that, in a land when illiteracy was the law for black people, these people were literate. They were striving and interested in capitalism and participating in the system. I wanted to show the opposite of meek and humble. My grandma grew up in Louisiana – owning land was a thing. We still own land down there. That connection to the land, having a deed, having a title, was something always drilled into me – to the extent that my parents didn’t understand why I bought a co-op in Brooklyn. They’re like, “Where’s your land?” And I said, “It’s an apartment.” And they said, “No, no, but you don’t have any land.” Port: What else did you inject into the story? DR: My grandmother wanted to be a stenographer – I worked that ambition into the youngest daughter in the black family because this was unheard of. She wanted to be those things she couldn’t see. I wanted to show the imaginations of these people. They weren’t just content, they weren’t just oppressed, they weren’t just accepting of their conditions; they were having these everyday rebellions, even if the rebellions were only in thought – rebellions of ideas and how to make it. They would talk about things other than the white people. They were the centre of their own story. White people weren’t the centre of their lives, despite the conditions which placed them at the behest of others. I wanted to show that

“The writing part is really lonely but on set with the actors – in the moment – that’s where I hit my groove.” they’re their own centre, even though they might be orbiting somebody, by force, they’re still the centre of their own world. Port: There’s also a feeling that no one else could tell this story but you. If a white director had made this movie, it would obviously have been very different. DR: Yeah, I don’t think the Jackson family would have the kind of gravity that they do. I made Hap militant and added these small moments like the little black kids playing soldier and the girl shooting at a white character with the stick and saying, “Bang, you’re dead.” I brought the poor white sharecroppers forward in the story so it’s not just black sharecroppers. The Jacksons are not isolated in this poverty. I also wanted to show racism as interruptive. Henry [the white land owner] is always banging on the door, interrupting the black family at home. At its most benign, racism is unimaginative. At its medium, it’s interruptive. It interrupts your life. You could be having dinner… Again, it’s like your own world and you fall into somebody else’s orbit. It’s this interruptive force. Port: You are already working on your next film, An Uncivil War, about the Equal Rights Act [ERA] in 1972.

DR: With Carey Mulligan as Gloria Steinem. I said, “God dammit, Carey Mulligan’s going to lead it.” She believed in me and did this thing and she’s going to lead my next film. LW: Did that come immediately on the heels of Mudbound? DR: It came in between Sundance and the Toronto Film Festival, where Mudbound premiered next. It was another rewrite thing; so, the original story was just about Gloria Steinem and Phyllis Schlafly, who opposed the ERA. The script was about how Gloria battled to get the ERA passed. But I wanted to talk about the messiness of the feminist movement then. Betty Friedan, one of the faces of feminism, was problematic. I want to go hardcore and get into how Gloria was like the bridge between the oldschool, lily-white feminism, and the new school, lead by Flo Kennedy, like, “Oh it’s got to be black and brown people too.” Port: Where do you see yourself, and these films, in the history of filmmaking? DR: Pariah wasn’t really understood at the time, but it’s understood now. I think the same will be true of Mudbound. I am proud of the art of each film I make, in and of itself. If I die tomorrow, I’ll have made work that lives on. That’s what keeps me going. 213

Tuhir, on the platform at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, wearing shirt, jumper and trousers DIOR HOMME

CIT Y

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SEA

PHOTOGRAPHY CREATIVE

DIRECTION

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KALPESH LATHIGRA ST Y LING

DAN MAY

At Juhu Beach: Rabanne wears jacket, shirt and trousers SAINT LAURENT Divya wears blouse, jacket and shorts SAINT LAURENT Both wear sunglasses OLIVER PEOPLES

Tuhir on Marine Drive with school kids attending a cricket match. He wears top, cardigan and trousers PRADAClub Cabinet ARMANI CASA

Nage, an auto rikshaw driver, wears top BOTTEGA VENETA

Acquin, at Carter Road, wearing top by CORNELIANI trousers GIORGIO ARMANI and sandals CHURCHâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S

Santosh, a photographer, wears top NEIL BARRETT

Tuhir, at the Citizen Hotel, in jumper and shorts CANALI shoes DIOR HOMME and cap BALENCIAGA

PK, at Team Motor Works, wears top and trousers STONE ISLAND

Simran and Neelaksh wear MARGARET HOWELL

Versova fishing village

Tuhir at Juhu Beach wearing jumper CANALI and shorts DEREK ROSE

Neelaksh at an ice gola stall in shirt and trousers FENDI sunglasses OLIVER PEOPLES and sandals CHURCHâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S

Nikhil (at rear) in Versova fishing village among commuters travelling from Madh Island. He wears sunglasses OLIVER PEOPLES shirt and trousers RICHARD JAMES and sandals HERMÃ&#x2C6;S

Ashraf, hotel manager, in suit GIORGIO ARMANI and sandals HERMÃ&#x2C6;S

Saris in Versova

Tanker in the Arabian Sea

Suraj, of Team Motor Works, wearing top LOUIS VUITTON

Santosh wears shirtARMANI PRESIDENTâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S Club Cabinet CASA

PK wears top and trousers LOUIS VUITTON and sunglasses OLIVER PEOPLES

PK in Santacruz wearing vest, top and trousers HERMÃ&#x2C6;S

Neelaksh, in Juhu Village, wearing suit PRESIDENTâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S

Club Cabinet ARMANI CASA

Car restoration in Mahim

Acquin wears trousers, shirt and jacket DUNHILL and sandals CHURCHâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S

Nikhil at home wearing top DEREK ROSE and trousers FENDI

Rabanne, on horse, wears shirt, T-shirt and trousers DSQUARED2 with Rajkumar and his horse Suraj, pictured near Union Park Road

Neelaksh, near Union Park Road, in jacket and trousers GIORGIO ARMANI and shirt FENDI

Fashion assistant Ellie May Brown Special thanks Gautam Rajani

On Carter Road, left to right: Divya wears dress and shirt DSQUARED2 Simran wears dress BOTTEGA VENETA cardigan FENDI Both wear shoes stylistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own

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10,000 Hours

Few stuntpeople have as much experience as Jim Dowdall. From falling down stairs as a stormtrooper in Star Wars, to driving a tank through St Petersburg in Goldeneye and rolling Ralph Fiennes to the bottom of a sand dune in The English Patient, Dowdall and his collection of World War II vehicles have been behind much of the exciting film action of the last 50 years. Here, he tells Port about one of the most eventful and prolific careers in the business.

I fell into stunt work, really. I left school with only one O-level, having had the dubious benefits of a private education (I shared a desk with Prince Charles but clumped him during a football match, so never got the invitation to the palace). Following a brief stint in the circus, I found myself at an apprenticeship for a film armourer. One of my first jobs was on Where Eagles Dare – where I got an extra 10 pounds, the equivalent to a week’s wages – to be shot by Clint Eastwood. I remember thinking that film might be the way to go. I started doing extra work to get my Equity card and took on some stunt roles. At the time, stuntmen had a reputation for being cauliflower-eared ex-boxers who’d say “I’ll have a go at that guv’nor,” to anything. There wasn’t the kind of skillset and expertise we have now. You’d just sign what we called a ‘blood chit’, which absolved the filmmakers of responsibility, and get some extra cash. In 1973, all the guys who worked in stunts got together and formed a register, effectively creating the profession as it is now. Being a young lad I didn’t get a lot 256

of work straight away, but after a few jobs for television I got a part as one of Michael Caine’s paratroopers in The Eagle Has Landed. It was a wonderful summer: I was playing a part; the film was renting my World War II-era jeep, and I was on set from the beginning till the end. It was the beginning of the heyday for me. I went straight from that to riding a brand-new Harley-Davidson out to Holland to see the parachute jumps they were doing on A Bridge Too Far. I got a job and lived for two weeks in the shirt, socks and two pairs of knickers that I had on the back of my bike. It’s quite an intense, nomadic life we lead as stuntmen, going from film to film: Even now I keep an overnight bag by the door, ready for when I get the call at short notice – although, I no longer work on feature films. The last one I did, Fury, I had a great time on and was in charge of all the military vehicles, but it was six days a week, up at four or five in the morning, and I thought, ‘I’m too old for this shit.’ There’s a romantic preconception of stuntmen as people who are reckless or adrenaline junkies. We do have people on

the register that BASE jump, for example, but they have to have extraordinary skills and experience to be able to do that, and it’s the same with performing stunts. There’s no such thing as a safe stunt. You’re only in control until the point of impact, after which it’s pretty impromptu – but you can eliminate as much of the risk as possible. The further down the road you go as a stuntman, the more you learn what your capabilities are and what elements are available to assist you and keep you alive. My job is to give a director or a producer their vision, but I have to do that within the restrictions of the budget and location, and the reality of what we can do safely. Of course, nowadays there are computers, which have brought a whole new element into stunt work. You can be exaggerated, elongated, slowed down or sped up, all in post-production; and then there’s motion capture, which is incredible, but still we have to do it for real. People still need to jump through the air or fall down stairs, and as long as films are being made, they always will. As told to George Upton Photography Gabby Laurent

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