Port Issue 30 George the Poet

George the Poet

Orlando Bloom / Anson Boon Toheeb Jimoh / Eyal Weizman / Preti Taneja Mark Ruwedel / Hew Locke / Irene Solà Nuno Mendes / Douglas Kennedy

£8

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Used by permission of the Jack Kerouac Estate and The Wylie Agency, LLC.

Used by permission of the Jack Kerouac Estate and The Wylie Agency, LLC.

Used by permission of the Jack Kerouac Estate and The Wylie Agency, LLC. dior.com

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design design Antonio Antonio Citterio Citterio

MASTHEAD

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Dan Crowe DESIGN DIRECTOR Astrid Stavro FASHION DIRECTOR Mitchell Belk DEPUTY EDITOR Tom Bolger FASHION EDITOR Julie Velut ACCESSORIES EDITOR Lune Kuipers DESIGN Astrid Stavro, Sophie Dutton, Alessandro Molent ART EDITOR Sophie Dutton PHOTOGRAPHIC DIRECTOR Max Ferguson JUNIOR PHOTO EDITOR Jodie Michaelides SENIOR EDITOR Kerry Crowe HOROLOGY EDITOR Alex Doak INTERIORS EDITORS Huw Griffith, Tobias Harvey ASSISTANT SUB-EDITOR Sarah Kathryn Cleaver EU CORRESPONDENT Donald Morrison US CORRESPONDENT Alex Vadukul JAPANESE CORRESPONDENT Ryo Yamazaki WORDS Kalpesh Lathigra, Imogen West-Knights, Alberto Saibene, Nuno Mendes, Stephanie Sy-Quia, Bret Easton Ellis, Rosalind Jana, Tom Bolger, Matthew Turner, Felix Bischof, Hettie Judah, Dylan Holden, Reiss Smith, Dan Crowe, Deyan Sudjic, Ayla Angelos, Alex Doak, Giulio Papi, Simran Hans, Tom Lamont, Kemi Alemoru, George the Poet, Douglas Kennedy, Brian Patrick Eha, Refaat Alareer, Irene Solà, Seán Hewitt PHOTOGRAPHY Delfino Sisto Legnani, Jack Johnstone, Francis Augusto, Fergus Riley, Adrianna Ault, Reece James Morrison, Kalpesh Lathigra, Paul Phung, Amy Gwatkin, Ulrich Ghezzi, Antonia Adomako, Emanuele Camerini, Daniel Castro Garcia, Mark Ruwedel, Ryan James Caruthers, Ian Kenneth Bird, Adama Jalloh, Jessica Madavo, Robin Broadbent, Angèle Moraiz & Paul Mougeot, Rebecca Scheinberg, Leandro Farina, Lars Brønseth, Angus Williams, Hugo Mapelli, Jukka Ovaskainen, Moritz Tibes, Marie Valognes, Joe Lai, Sophie Gladstone, Iringó Demeter ARTWORK Eleanor Taylor HEADLINE TYPEFACE A2 Record Gothic by A2-Type (A2/SW/HK) www.a2-type.co.uk

SENIOR EDITORS Dan May, Fashion Samantha Morton, Film Hans Ulrich Obrist, Art Rick Moody, Literature John-Paul Pryor, Music Brett Steele, Architecture Deyan Sudjic, Design

PUBLISHERS Dan Crowe, Matt Willey

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Kabir Chibber Robert Macfarlane Albert Scardino

ADVERTISING DIRECTOR Andrew Chidgey-Nakazono andrew@port-magazine.com

SPECIAL THANKS The Production Factory Lock Studios Everyone who has ever worked at, or with, Port COVER CREDITS Orlando Bloom, photographed in Los Angeles by Ryan James Caruthers, wears ZEGNA SS22 Anson Boon, photographed in London by Ian Kenneth Bird, wears SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO SS22 Toheeb Jimoh, photographed in London by Adama Jalloh, wears LORO PIANA SS22 George the Poet, photographed in London by Jessica Madavo, wears GIORGIO ARMANI SS22

ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Andrew Chidgey-Nakazono MANAGING DIRECTOR Dan Crowe

ACCOUNTS Charlie Carne & Co. CIRCULATION CONSULTANT Logical Connections Adam Long adam@logicalconnections.co.uk CONTACT info@port-magazine.com SYNDICATION syndication@port-magazine.com SYNDICATED ISSUES Port Spain portmagazine.es Port Turkey port-magazine.com.tr issn 2046-052X Port is published twice a year

by Port Publishing Limited Somerset House Strand London WC2R 1LA port-magazine.com Port is printed by Park Communications Founded by Dan Crowe, Boris Stringer, Kuchar Swara and Matt Willey.

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Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is strictly prohibited.

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“I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.”

– Virginia Woolf

EDITOR’S LETTER

“When you write, you create. Literally, you bring something into existence – something that wouldn’t be here if you didn’t deliver it. What’s even more amazing is that this process is just the beginning. Words on a page can be the start of a plan, a story, a bucket list, a mission statement, a script, a poem – anything. I’m not just talking about artistic writing; I also mean personal, even purpose-free writing. Your words can be as public or as private as you want, the point is they lay out the blueprint for action.” So writes the phenomenon that is George the Poet; I love this sentiment (demystifying the act of writing but also allowing us to perceive its magic), further outlined in his 10-part manifesto as to why everyone ought to write, exclusively for Port’s spring issue. It’s part of our ongoing Giorgio Armani partnership with world-leading writers and poets, illuminating how it is they do what they do, and how we can do it too. (It is also a brilliantly engaging podcast, available in early May.) Reality, however, seems less and less like something we can rely on, and gets weirder too – see our tech essay ‘Extremely Online with Thorstein Veblen: My Descent into NFTs’, by Brian Patrick Eha, (p220), for proof that money does in fact grow on virtual trees – so it’s a solace to be able to take refuge in art, fashion and literature. With this issue – issue 30 no less! – we tried to

bring more wonder to our collective table.

Four immense talents grace our multiple covers: Orlando Bloom, shot in Los Angeles, reflects on remaining grounded after being in some of the biggest film franchises of the 21st century, and two rising stars in the world of film and television also feature: Anson Boon discusses his transformation into Johnny Rotten for Danny Boyle’s upcoming Sex Pistols mini-series, and Toheeb Jimoh, fresh from winning hearts and an ensemble SAG Award for his role in Ted Lasso, talks about navigating disparate worlds. And of course George the Poet, who writes for us on page 202.

Writers and artists are, thankfully, elsewhere in the issue: Irene Solà shares the opening chapter of her fiercely imaginative and lyrical new book When I Sing, Mountains Dance; artist Hew Locke discusses his grand commission for Tate Britain, The Procession, where visitors are invited to ‘reflect on the cycles of history, and the ebb and flow of cultures, people and finance and power.’ (Tate Britain’s founder was art lover and sugar-refining magnate Henry Tate, so this is an interesting commission to say the least, and a great interview.)

Writer and activist Preti Taneja ruminates on her astounding new book Aftermath, a searching and profound attempt to consider the London terrorist attack at Fishmongers’ Hall in 2019, and the founder of globally

acclaimed research agency Forensic Architecture, Eyal Weizman, has an in-depth conversation with Deyan Sudjic about the traces left by trauma, and the future of architecture.

Elsewhere, Guggenheim Fellow Mark Ruwedel shares a selection of photographs from his four-part in-progress epic Los Angeles: Landscapes of Four Ecologies, alongside a TenTen special white paper report on horology innovation at the hands of Rolex, Cartier, Audemars Piguet, and many more. There’s also spring/summer collections shot everywhere from Marseille to Fuerteventura, including a Francis Bacon inspired shoot by photographer Hugo Mapelli styled by our own Mitchell Belk.

Poet Seán Hewitt closes the issue with his lists of likes and dislikes, inspired by Susan Sontag’s lists, which, in a way, are our index of how to live well. (Likes: The quiet clunk of a record needle finding the groove / Migration / Lyricism / The smell of hawthorn blossom / Cheeseboards / Evening light. Dislikes: The smugness of rich men / Privatisation / Having the rules of a card game explained to me / Littering / The celebration of imperialism / Imperialism itself… ) This spring/summer issue of Port will be dedicating all profits to the crisis in Ukraine.

— Dan Crowe

CONTENTS Portfolio Words Kalpesh Lathigra, Imogen West-Knights, Alberto Saibene, Nuno Mendes, Stephanie Sy-Quia, Bret Easton Ellis, Rosalind Jana, Tom Bolger, Matthew Turner, Felix Bischof, Hettie Judah, Dylan Holden, Reiss Smith

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Orlando Bloom Words Tom Lamont Photography Ryan James Caruthers

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113 100 Anson Boon Words Simran Hans Photography Ian Kenneth Bird

Special Watch Innovation Report An innovation-focused edition of TenTen examining incredible horological feats, including sapphire-crystal micro-sculpture, why Cartier’s outré case shapes still have the power of now, how ‘connected’ smartwatches are entering the legitimate luxury lexicon, and the marginal gains that keep Rolex ahead of the game

166 Toheeb Jimoh Words Kemi Alemoru Photography Adama Jalloh

PORT 30 Violence at the Threshold of Detectability: Eyal Weizman Words Deyan Sudjic Photography Daniel Castro Garcia

Inland Guggenheim Fellow Mark Ruwedel talks to Ayla Angelos about a selection of photographs from his four-part in-progress epic Los Angeles: Landscapes of Four Ecologies

Commentary George the Poet, Brian Patrick Eha, Douglas Kennedy, Refaat Alareer, Irene Solà

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304 All Colours Agree in the Dark Photography Hugo Mapelli Styling Mitchell Belk

324 Strong Fortunes Photography Jukka Ovaskainen Styling Mitchell Belk

OUT–TAKE

adorable. Now, as he moves through the world, those who meet him expect him to be saccharine or else he’ll spoil the illusion.

“Sometimes I wish I was in Succession,” he says before beaming. He may protest, but Jimoh cannot hide his warmth.

“The next stage I want us to get to [socio-politically] is being able to play Black characters without a trauma story, without

it needing to be about how tough it is to be Black,” he explains. Jimoh describes his wide variety of multi-dimensional roles as fortuitous, an initial fluke which has quickly evolved into a desire to continue picking out similar work.

Read the profile starting on p166.

TOHEEB JIMOH, PHOTOGRAPHED IN LONDON BY ADAMA JALLOH, WEARS LORO PIANA SS22

Toheeb Jimoh is trying to keep a straight face. “I’m a horrible, horrible, horrible person,” he insists. Of course, the 24-year-old is etched into the public psyche as the exact opposite. He’s mostly known as Sam Obisanya in Apple TV’s multiple-Emmy-winner, Ted Lasso, one of the warmest feel-good comedies currently on offer. His character is a fan favourite and, to his dismay,

CONTRIBUTORS

IRENE SOLÀ

Irene Solà is a Catalan writer and artist, winner of the European Union Prize for Literature, the Documenta de Narrativa Prize for first novels, the Llibres Anagrama Prize and the Amadeu Oller Poetry Prize. Her artwork has been exhibited in the Whitechapel Gallery, and her latest book, When I Sing, Mountains Dance, was published

by Granta in March 2022.

NUNO MENDES

Raised in Lisbon, Portugal, Nuno Mendes is a pioneer in gastronomy, combining first-hand experience on his family’s farm in the Alentejo region with unique ingredients and innovative techniques garnered during his travels. Mendes’ first mark on the London food scene was in 2006, when he opened the critically acclaimed Bacchus in Hoxton. Afterwards he set up The Loft Project, the groundbreaking concept that grew from an underground supper club movement to a ‘gallery for chefs’. In 2010 Mendes opened Viajante in Bethnal Green, swiftly winning a coveted Michelin star. Over the past decade he has worked as executive chef at Chiltern Firehouse, opened the restaurants Taberna do Mercado and Mãos, published a number of cookbooks, and currently acts as creative director of food and beverage at the Bairro Alto Hotel in Lisbon. His latest project, Lisboeta, opened in March 2022.

MARK RUWEDEL

GEORGE THE POET

Born in Pennsylvania, USA, in 1954, photographer Mark Ruwedel lives in Long Beach, California. He received his MFA from Concordia University in Montreal in 1983, taught at the same institution from 1984 to 2001 and is currently Professor Emeritus at California State University. He received major grants from the Canada Council for the Arts in 1999 and 2001. In 2014 he was awarded both a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Scotiabank Photography Award, and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for 2019 and the Prix Pictet in 2021. Ruwedel is represented in museums throughout the world, and his archive is housed at Stanford University Libraries, Special Collections.

George the Poet is a London-born spoken word performer, of Ugandan heritage. His innovative brand of musical poetry has won him critical acclaim both as a recording artist and social commentator and has seen his work broadcast to billions of people worldwide. In the summer of 2018, he opened the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle with his poem ‘The Beauty of Union’, and in 2019, his audio offering ‘Have You Heard George’s Podcast?’ won a prestigious Peabody Award and 5 Gold British Podcast Awards, including the highly coveted Podcast of the Year. The podcast was described by BBC R4 as “a story that could change the world”. George has just launched chapter three of the podcast and is now embarking on a PhD.

CONTRIBUTORS

HETTIE JUDAH

SEÁN HEWITT

Hettie Judah is a writer, senior art critic on the British daily paper the i, and a contributor to Frieze, the Guardian, Vogue, the New York Times, Art Quarterly, Art Monthly, ArtReview and other publications with ‘art’ in the title. Her next book – Lapidarium – is published by John Murray this October and explores how stones have shaped human culture, and vice versa. She is currently working on a touring exhibition and book on art and motherhood.

Seán Hewitt is a writer, poet and literary critic. His debut collection of poems, Tongues of Fire (Jonathan Cape, 2020), won the Laurel Prize in 2021, and was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, and a Dalkey Literary Award. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, is forthcoming in July 2022 from Jonathan Cape and Penguin Press.

He teaches Modern British and Irish Literature at Trinity College Dublin and is a poetry critic for the Irish Times. He lives in Dublin.

BRIAN PATRICK EHA

IRINGÓ DEMETER

Brian Patrick Eha is the author of How Money Got Free and an essayist and journalist whose work has appeared in Fortune, Rolling Stone, City Journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. He lives in Manhattan, where, having turned to fiction – he is currently finishing a novel. His debut story collection is being represented by CAA. You can follow him on Twitter, sort of, at @brianeha.

With an eager curiosity, photographer Iringó Demeter explores beauty – living and still – informed by texture and shape. Intimacy is a pivotal factor in her work; the gaze is kept at a short distance, often abstracting the familiar. Born and raised in the heart of Transylvania, Romania, she has found a second home in London where she continues to work on her personal and commissioned projects.

ALPHATAURI.COM

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PAST IMPERFECT

By Kalpesh Lathigra. The artist and photographer on shooting a Hollywood dame for his passport series

The foundation of my passport photographs came from the Zaatari camp in Jordan, where Syrians were seeking shelter from the civil war unfolding in their homeland.

As part of my wider series, Discarded Fruit, I made a photographic collage of the refugees using UK passport requirements. I began thinking about the ideas around a democratic portrait – the identity photograph. What power did this genre of photography hold? It is the one image we as a society all have in some form or another, denoting what we can and cannot do, the access and restrictions to even sometimes the simplest of things.

Its direct, forward-facing style can be a performance; beyond its boundary-crossing practicality, it is often given as a memento, carried in the wallet or purse of a loved one.

I photograph many people of prominence, be they actors, writers, musicians, politicians or artists, as part of commissions for magazines. With the advent of social media and platforms like Instagram, the controlling of

Joan Collins. Photography Kalpesh Lathigra

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one’s image – such as the ubiquitous ‘selfie’ – and monetisation of it has changed, perhaps forever. If we look back just a decade ago, the paparazzi were all powerful.

Today, it’s a very different world…

As part of my wider practice as an artist I wanted to experiment with some of the ways control can be taken away – in this case, using a basic passport camera where the subject only has to look forward. Everyone photographed the same way. My references would fall to two works – Luc Delahaye’s Portraits/1 and Andy Warhol’s Polaroids. With Delahaye’s series, he let the photo booth take control in its technical mechanisms whilst the sitter posed directly. Warhol captured people of prominence and allowed their performance to be rewarded by the instant tangible polaroid. My questions were, and are, what if you combined these two influences? How will we look back at this time of Instagram and the images made? Do my photographs just add a ‘style’ to the same ecosystem?

In 2013, I was commissioned by the Independent Magazine to take a portrait of the actor Joan Collins. She remains an enigma to me, carrying an aura difficult to define, yet one that draws you in. She wanted to control her image, not in a highfalutin way, but more how she posed, telling me what side of her was preferable.

She was a consummate professional, and it is human nature to want to be seen at our best. During the session, I asked her if she would mind being in the passport series, mentioning Warhol’s work. Joan only asked that I wait so she could change her outfit, fix her hair, and then at the end of the main portrait session she would pose for me.

I made about three or four polaroids, together with Felicity McCabe, who was assisting me that day, and didn’t review them until we got back to the car. After peeling off the film rebate, Joan shone out, at which point Felicity showed me Warhol’s silkscreen portraits of her, on her phone. The crazy thing is, I never knew he had photographed her. Joan obviously got it. So the question remains, who controls whose image?

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GRAIN AND KNOT

By Tom Bolger. Carving a second life out of sustainably sourced timber

Sophie Sellu’s creations suggest branching coral and pangolin scales, undulating hills and drought-cracked earth. Their resemblance to naturally occurring forms, however, belies their laborious craft. Using only wood that would otherwise go to waste, vases, chopping boards, brushes, butter knives, and recently more sculptural pieces, are patiently hand carved in her home studio in south east London. Sellu became enamoured with woodworking following a day-long workshop in 2013, and a year later, started her own solo venture. Today, Grain and Knot’s collections often sell out in minutes.

In conversation with Port, she reflects on tactile learning, arboreal beauty, and channelling the world into her work.

What is it you enjoy about the physical act of making?

I am, as many of us are, obsessed with my phone – so it’s nice to sit still, put a podcast on and create something. I got into woodworking because I wanted to occupy my hands… get away from screens and emails. I get this undivided hyper-focus flitting between half-finished pieces and have realised, particularly during the pandemic, that I am a deeply tactile person. To process objects I need to touch them, so I properly understand their weight and texture. Each piece of wood I come across will have a unique feel or character, a different density and surface.

What is your process?

First, I sketch. I have a real fear of not doing the wood justice, so I always make sure that the template I’ve drawn is right beforehand. That means as little waste as possible.

The paper cut outs are quick, can be changed easily, and allow me to get an idea of scale. I’ll then mark and cut the wood with a bandsaw, the only electric machinery I use. Next, I’ll hand carve, whittling away to enhance its textural element. Knowing when to stop is something I’ve had to learn along the way. It is very easy to get lost in the act – you have to be incredibly careful because it’s a reductive process; you can’t put it back.

Sophie Sellu. Photography Antonia Adomako

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Do you look to the natural world for inspiration?

I get plenty of ideas when I’m out walking and spend a lot of time in the woods with my dog. I’m forever looking at trees and am drawn to their organic patterns.

Spalted timbers, which I often use, have these lovely black lines running through them. Essentially tree fungus, the free-form way it moves is very striking. Sycamore and hornbeam also have this wonderfully subtle yet detailed grain. I’ve never liked things that are too rigid and much prefer natural finishes rather than anything super polished. Some people could probably see my work as unfinished, but I believe there’s a nice quality to be had when you can see the marks of production, get a glimpse of how it’s made. In each cut, you can see that my hand has passed across it.

What tools do you use?

I don’t have a huge arsenal, and that’s one of the reasons I fell in love with it. When I started, all I had was a hand axe, a Swedish carving knife and a couple of gouges. In the craft world, that’s an inexpensive starter package!

There are so many ways to approach woodworking, and part of the joy is figuring out how to make things with or without certain tools. Ninety per cent of my work is done with a single quite basic knife.

Why do you use reclaimed and sustainably sourced timber?

I’ll use whatever I can get my hands on, so if a maple comes down in a storm, I’ll take it. Working with chance materials is how I started out. Back in the day, I’d be dragging bits of broken furniture from the garage, rummaging through skips. I didn’t know any tree surgeons so had to seek out timber wherever I could. My uncle used to renovate period properties, so sometimes I’d get my hands on wonderful mahogany from a house built in 1850, wood that you can’t buy now because it’s endangered. I’d pounce on places like Tate Britain ditching

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old benches, or trawl through eBay for wrecked chairs.

I remember my parents’ neighbour’s house was largely destroyed by a fire and they were ripping things out. I salvaged some timber and made them chopping boards so they could have something to remember their old house.

Typically, traditional green woodworking is done with freshly chopped down trees, but working sustainably just made sense to me. Now, I only use timber from a family-run woodland that has been taken down because it’s damaged, diseased or dangerous. Rather than letting it go to waste we dry it out, which means it’s a lot tougher to work with, but I want to give that wood a second life.

What else informs your work?

My inspiration isn’t stuck to one place; it can come from anywhere. It could be the shadows on a wall, cell structures, old maps, something as mundane as the stitching on a stranger’s jumper. I like registering these shapes, thinking about how they link together and interpreting them, in a way. I’m absorbing images all the time, which can be quite overwhelming, but there is a therapeutic aspect when you channel them into something else: fusing these ideas into a physical object.

What are your hopes for 2022?

I’m working on a book, and some exciting private commissions. At some point, I’d also like to have a pop-up or exhibition for mostly sculptural wall-hanging pieces.

I’ve got so many at home but have never sold them, and I need to unpack why. I’ve got a love-hate relationship with social media because it can hold me back from doing certain things, waiting for feedback, making me doubt myself. The beginning of the year is my time to experiment before the collection drops, so I’ve been working with modelling clay and drawing every day. You learn a great deal by playing and giving yourself permission to create what you like. People respond to that personal joy. It means they can see my fingerprint on each piece.

Photography Antonia Adomako

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FASHIONING MASCULINITIES

By Felix Bischof. The V&A and Gucci celebrate the art of menswear

In 1988, Matthew Bourne brought campaign stills to life.

It was then that the English choreographer debuted Spitfire. A success that predates dances such as his all-male take on Swan Lake, and now part of Bourne’s repertoire, Spitfire was billed as an “advertisement divertissement”.

Divertissement because the choreography is founded in the tradition of the Pas de Quatre dance, which ballet impresario Jules Perrot introduced in 1845 as a sort of high-octane interlude to bigger pieces, with four dancers mastering a series of classical ballet steps, focussing on execution above narrative. Advertisement because for Spitfire, Bourne had looked to men’s underwear campaigns to inspire his choreography. And so, dressed in all white cotton – singlets, Y-fronts and long johns among their get-ups – Bourne’s quartet got into poses more regularly seen in 2D, on the pages of mail order catalogues, or perhaps billboards, rather than on the stage.

A later version of Spitfire now counts among the roughly 100 artworks on display at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, shown alongside a further 100 outfits conceived by both household names and emerging creatives as part of the museum’s blockbuster exhibition ‘Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear’.

Because after all, masculinity is part performance, too.

“It’s really coming out of that moment of Calvin Klein adverts, where everything is sort of super sexualised, super physical, super muscular,” the exhibition’s co-curator Rosalind McKever explains of Spitfire. “It’s a gorgeous piece because it’s funny. It’s not teasing anyone in particular, but it is teasing this idea of rigid masculinity. Which is kind of a beautiful metaphor for what we are trying to do with this show altogether. We are taking menswear seriously but doing so in quite a playful way.”

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With exhibition design by JA Projects, commandeering three galleries of the museum, the V&A show was realised in partnership with Florentine fashion house Gucci.

Instead of a chronological, linear walk-through, co-curators McKever and Claire Wilcox worked to three themes.

Theirs is a collage-like capture of how masculinity has been defined from the Renaissance to the present day.

Bourne’s work can be found in the ‘Undressed’ segment. Here, changing concepts of masculinity are traced in the male physique, in what is often quite literally covered by fashion throughout history. “Our first gallery is really about the body, and begins with the body as something as fashionable as the clothes that are put onto it,” says McKever. Here, the body is explored as “a basis for fashionability”. Nude or partly clothed, the body is seen in photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, Lionel Wendt and Bruce Weber, the latter shooting campaign imagery for Calvin Klein. And in classic sculptures of deities too, such as the Apollo Belvedere in marble, or the Farnese Hermes. Real life physiques are laid bare in a see-through ensemble by Parisian fashion designer Ludovic de Saint Sernin, or helped along to perfection by designers such as Jean Paul Gaultier manipulating fabric to great effect.

Quite the opposite, perhaps, is the exhibition’s second theme; ‘Overdressed’ homes in on the masculine wardrobe of social elites. Here, the body is clothed in prestige fabrics (silks, velvets and embroidered cloths among the offering) to manifest influence, and also affluence. Drawn from the museum’s collection and loaned nationally, portraits show aristocrats of centuries past; these are placed near finery designed and made by the likes of Grace Wales Bonner.

CRAIG GREEN SS21 Photography Amy Gwatkin

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Left: Joshua Reynolds, Portrait of Charles Coote, 1773–1774. Photo © National Gallery of Ireland Right: Robert Longo, Men in the Cities, 1981, graphite on paper. Collection Thaddaeus Ropac. London. Paris.

Salzburg. Seoul © Robert Longo ARS New York, 2021. Photography Ulrich Ghezzi

In a section debating the colour pink, a look by London-based talent Harris Reed – in metallic pink, the two-piece is fitted with ruff-like lace collar – is displayed near a likeness of Charles Coote, 1st Earl of Bellamont, dated to the 1770s and finished by society painter Joshua Reynolds. It’s one of McKever’s favourite juxtapositions within the show, “… as this icon of patriarchy is wearing chivalric robes; but the pigment in the paint has faded from a bright scarlet down to a baby pink. He’s there, draped in pink with feathers on his head and he just becomes so camp. So, these ideas of what masculinity looks like have been shifting constantly over the centuries.”

The exhibition comes to a close with ‘Redressed’, a theme exploring the birth and legacy of the tailored suit. And although here elegance is refusal, creative flourish also enters the masculine wardrobe through, for example, the modern interpretation of traditional frock coats, as masterminded by Miuccia Prada, Alexander McQueen and Raf Simons.

But why look at historic and contemporary definitions of masculinity now? To Alessandro Michele, the show coincides with a gradual freeing from rules and codes. “It seems necessary to suggest a desertion, away from patriarchal plans and uniforms. Deconstructing the idea of masculinity as it has been historically established. Opening a cage,” Gucci’s artistic director writes in a foreword to the exhibition’s catalogue. “It is time to celebrate a man who is free to practice self-determination, without social constraints, without authoritarian sanctions, without suffocating stereotypes.” Clothes or no clothes.

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HYPERION

By Dylan Holden. Hermès’ paean to the sun

In ancient Greece, Helios and his crown of rays illuminated Earth each day, drawn on a golden chariot from east to west by his ‘fire-darting steeds’. The occasional disappearance, or eclipse of the solar deity, was believed to be an ominous omen, a foreboding act of abandonment. Halfway through the 5th century, the natural philosopher Anaxagoras proffered a seismic counter theory: that the moon was responsible for blocking the light, and the sun was in fact a giant incandescent stone. This half-correct explanation earned him the charge of asebeia – desecration and mockery of the gods – and rather than serve his death sentence, he spent his remaining years in exile. Over his grave in Lampsacus were inscribed the words: ‘Here Anaxagoras, who in his quest of truth scaled heaven itself, is laid to rest’.

Our understanding of celestial bodies owes a debt to this early work and has deepened considerably since. We now know that the sun is a writhing mass of plasma about halfway through its life. That it takes eight minutes for its light to reach us; its core is 15 million degrees Celsius and one day, that it will consume the Earth. Until then (a few billion years from now), we can continue to delight in its glory, a task recently realised through Soleil d’Hermès. The 24-piece tableware set from the French house matches white porce-

Soleil d’Hermès. Photography Paul Phung

lain with a radiant yellow, its graphic art-deco motifs – courtesy of French illustrator Arielle de Brichambaut – evoking kaleidoscopic palm trees and summertime.

Having previously worked with Hermès, collaborating with Benoît Pierre Emery, creative director of Hermès tableware, on the brilliantly red Balcons du Guadalquivir and Ming dynasty inspired Bleus d’Ailleurs sets, the collection completes an unofficial primary colour trilogy. Visiting museums and exchanging references of Napoleonic antiques to Italian church floors, the design was initially spurred by the Mediterranean sun and the impact its quality of light had on the palette of painters such as Vincent Van Gogh and Henri Matisse.

“With the sun’s glare, artists take their observations further,” notes Emery. “They study the light’s changes, colours, motions and its synergy with shadows. Geometry is so strong in Arielle’s work and we wanted to play with that duality through the delicate black outlines, adding a daub of orange to warm the yellow. This lends a nice vibration – I like it best when colour is not completely still and there is some life to it. For me, the set’s yellow has an intense and immediate strength, a precious energy, optimism and vitality. It recalls summer holidays in the south and the joy at last of being with family and friends.”

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BREAD ON EARTH

By Imogen West-Knights. Baker and artist Lexie Smith explores bread’s potential as a socio-political, economic and ecological barometer

It’s strangely difficult to think deeply about the things that are most familiar to us. We can encounter something so often that it becomes almost invisible. Take bread. Millions of people all over the world eat it every day without a second thought. But bread has many meanings we don’t usually consider when we’re having a slice of toast. It represents money, the breadwinner, but it also symbolises poverty, the breadline, down-toearth nourishment, as well as the food of the gods and the body of Christ. Its associations encompass socialism, artisan craft, companionship, domesticity and mass consumerism.

These are the meanings that have driven the American baker and artist Lexie Smith’s work. She is the creator of Bread on Earth, an online platform where she exhibits sculptural work made of bread, writes about its socio-political implications, and curates an archive that preserves and celebrates recipes from around the world.

She joins me on Zoom from the farm she both lives on and works at, a non-profit called Sky Farm in upstate New York, where she performs the roles of programmer, communications strategist, fundraiser and seemingly anything else that needs doing. Oh, and she’s contributing to a Marni fashion show on the side. And working on a book proposal. I ask her what ties all these projects together. “A fixation with the natural world, and tending to that, and investigating what that can tell us about ourselves. I definitely have an obnoxious, moral bent. I feel compelled to do things that are utilitarian.”

Even when everything shut down in 2020, Smith felt this drive to keep going, to be doing something useful.

Early in the first lockdown, she realised that through her practice as a baker, she suddenly had something that a lot of people needed: sourdough starter. “In times of instability and isolation, bread has always been something that people reach for,” she tells me.

Smith offered to send her starter to people all over the US, for free. Thousands of people took her up on it. “The messages that I received from folks who were using it were shockingly intimate and emotional. It was a reminder of what this stuff means to us.” She also began to wonder whether kneading dough was offering a simulacrum of human touch that so many people were craving. “There’s this sensory quality to dough that I think is so reminiscent of the human body,” she says.

But for Smith, bread is for life, not just for the pandemic. In her early years she was “obsessed” with baking and writing recipes, which led her to working in restaurants after college. She had dreams of making art, but also had rent to pay, and confesses that she lied her way into kitchens for a number of years, in Texas and then New York. “But I was pretty disillusioned by it before long,” she reflects. “It didn’t allow for the improvisation and creative spurs that I was prone to. And so I quit eventually, and developed Bread on Earth.”

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One of the things Smith posts on Instagram, and to Bread on Earth, is artwork using dough as the medium. One recent piece shows bread with intertwined sections, like a traditional challah, but the sections become fingers at the end. However, she finds it difficult to consider herself an artist. “I do have the compulsion to do something that ‘means’ something, and I don’t actually think it’s the role of the artist to do something that’s meaningful. During the pandemic, people were saying art is more important than ever. I was like, no, it’s not. Growing food is more important than ever, policy change is more important than ever.”

For her, the aesthetically pleasing elements of her work, the strangely shaped objects made from dough, the beautifully burnished crusts, are a way of luring people into thinking seriously about bread by way of a sort of Trojan loaf. “I’m more interested in talking about industrial agriculture and the history of grain; how we think about different kinds of bread and therefore about different kinds of people. So making something that looks good is how I get people to pay attention to those conversations.”

To hear Smith talk about it, there are an almost infinite number of ways to think intellectually about bread. She tells me how the flour we buy in the supermarket is made from a hybrid grain that was developed for high yield volume, but is more difficult to digest and requires intense petrochemical industry, and how this reflects industry prioritisation of profit over human well-being and the natural environment. We discuss bread’s link to the Bible, and then to colonialism. “Why was it that colonists always carried wheat seeds in their pockets when they went to conquer a new land, and made sure to convert everybody to Christianity and become wheat bread eaters? Because wheat bread represented Christ. In order to convert people to Christianity, they made sure that the grain being eaten would make their bodies righteous.”

It’s not all bread all the time for Smith, although she acknowledges that in giving interviews – particularly around the pandemic – to do with bread, she has contributed to a tendency to pigeonhole her. “There was definitely a point where me as ‘the bread lady’ was something that I didn’t relate to,” she notes, and her range is certainly extraordinary, exemplified by her current studio project which is based on experiments with spectrograms. “I’m exploring software output of hundreds of bird sounds and rendering them into calligraphic shapes and sentences,” she tells me. She is trying out the software on human voices too, to visualise a kind of shared language between nature and mankind.

Nevertheless, despite her resistance to being ‘the bread lady’, it’s a staple that still has her in its thrall, and still has the capacity to surprise her. “The point with bread is that it will never behave the same way twice,” she exclaims, her enthusiasm palpable.

Lexie Smith. Photography Adrianna Ault

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SHIFTING SILHOUETTES

By Rosalind Jana. The past, present and future of the suit

Jay Gatsby wore a “gorgeous pink rag of a suit”. James Bond (of the books rather than the films) alternated between “navy serge” and “battered black and white dogtooth”. Philip Marlowe fastidiously matched his “powder-blue” tailoring with a “dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, [and] black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them”. Patrick Bateman was always describing the pleats in his trousers and the designer labels in the backs of his double-breasted jackets.

Suits, if we are to believe the literature, make the man. The uniform of playboys, spies, princes, detectives, mafia members, CEOs, office workers the world over, and the occasional Wall Street serial killer, it’s hard to imagine any other garment more imbued with the mythos of masculinity.

For a long time, the reference points were relatively unchanging. Mentions of classic suiting came with images of Cary Grant and Paul Newman. Later, Jon Hamm as Don Draper. The same film stills and blackand-white pictures were rolled out. Polished or rugged, angular or smooth, they suggested something similar: a certain put-togethered-ness; an understanding not only of dress codes but the precision, the male vigour, the authority embodied in a perfectly tailored garment.

Of course, there were still subtle shifts and transformations to observe. The suit’s history officially begins with Regency dandy Beau Brummell – a man who single-mindedly cut through fashion’s whimsy in search of austere lines and sombre colours – before solidifying in the Victorian era. However, suits as we now picture them are more 20th century in origin. Like hemlines, the silhouettes fluctuated over the decades.

Shoulders widened and narrowed. Ankles tapered and billowed. You could expect a more dramatic shape and

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Top Blazer and trousers SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO Roll neck SUNSPEL Bottom Jacket and trousers META CAMPANIA COLLECTIVE Roll neck SUNSPEL

Blazer and trousers GUCCI

Photography Paul Phung

Styling Lune Kuipers

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fabric choice from a ’30s heartthrob than a ’40s musician beholden to the strictures of war-induced rationing. Counterculture seeped through in the pastel colours of the ’60s and razzmatazz flares of ’70s disco.

Corporate interests too: Picture Bateman and his fellow well-clad yuppies – emblems of ’80s machismo, typifying a moment where ego and the economy were close bedfellows.

In the last few years, the suit has undergone a sea change. Although the idea of classic suiting is still alive and thriving, the parameters have expanded hugely.

Bold stripes, zany patterns, jewelled accessories, draped cuts: When it comes to both the red carpet and the catwalk, it’s no longer one long stuffy array of black, grey and navy. The silhouettes and fabrics have become bolder. When Kim Jones took the helm at Dior Men in 2018, he introduced a new cut. ‘The Tailleur Oblique’ featured soft, fluid lines, the button placed so far over on the waist that it seemed to envelop the wearer. It was a homage, he said, to Christian Dior’s love of asymmetric silhouettes. Other designers have revamped their menswear in similar fashion. At Gucci, there are floral jacquards and purple brocades with sparkling, Liberace-esque touches. At Alexander McQueen, classic suits come covered in zips or crystal embellishments.

At Balenciaga the blazers can get so big that it looks like a child has dressed up in his dad’s wardrobe.

If one were to track the changes in suits over the course of recent memory (in fashion, that memory is always short term), there seem to be two distinct factors at play. Both, in their own way, have something to say about masculinity. Menswear has done some soul-searching of late, and found that it wants to be looser, freer, more, well, feminine. You see it in the rise of co-ed shows and agender collections, in the mainstreaming of accessories like pearl necklaces. You see it in the colours available at all ends of the style spectrum, from designer labels to fast fashion outlets: soft pinks, cool lavenders, minty greens. You see it in a new generation of designers challenging convention, with brands like Harris Reed and SS Daley putting their own subversive spin on tailoring. This sense of irreverence and decorative pleasure is anchored in more recent social shifts.

After all, we’re at a point in which the parameters and expectations of gender are being closely questioned – and perhaps fundamentally altered.

But for every peacock, there’s also a bird who doesn’t want to ruffle too many feathers. The pandemic, we were told, was going to be the end of the suit. No matter how much we might want to take our cues from the red carpet, the most widespread use and application of the suit comes in professional settings. But with

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huge swathes of the workforce confined to their homes, able to sit on Zoom calls in blazers and pyjamas trousers, would the suit disappear forever? The reasonable answer is, of course, no. There are always going to be industries that impose dress codes on their workers, and enough people wedded to the pleasure and power, not to mention the craftsmanship of tailoring, to spell any kind of closure.

That’s not to say it hasn’t had an impact though.

Take the recent vogue for styling blazers over hoodies.

This hybrid approach, melding leisurewear with polish, encapsulates this time perfectly. Established suiting brands like Paul Smith and Zegna have responded cleverly to our uncertain moment too, retaining their traditional tailoring whilst offering manipulated versions of house styles that bridge similar lines between laid-back and formal. Sharp trousers accompany boxy jackets. Sportier, more streamlined silhouettes abound.

Labels like Meta Campania Collective blend tailoring and workwear.

These kinds of changes have been observed in the made-to-measure and bespoke sector too. As Taj Phull, managing director of Huntsman tells me, “We’ve seen a sizable shift in clients looking to diversify their wardrobe with separate jackets and trousers. Either to complement existing suiting, or instead of. Clients are becoming more creative… Versatility is key here, both in design and choice of cloth. We work with mills that offer luxury technical fabrics: perfect for a professional wardrobe, especially since a working day is rarely 9–5.”

He also notes that there’s a changing clientele. “It’s the rise in women’s tailors which is not only refreshing to Huntsman but in part helping to rejuvenate the whole of Savile Row.” Huntsman appointed a dedicated head ladieswear cutter in 2019, while newer ateliers like Kathryn Sargent and Caroline Andrew are ensuring that women’s tailoring is treated with the same care, rigour and technical expertise as men’s suiting always has been.

None of these changes are entirely new. Katharine Hepburn and Marlene Dietrich were getting their tailoring done on Savile Row many decades ago. Flamboyant suits have had plenty of moments in the sun before.

Just think of Cecil Beaton and his Bright Young Thing acolytes in the ’20s with their louche linens and their neckties, or Mick Jagger in the ’70s wearing confectionary-coloured suits from Tommy Nutter. The difference now is that this seems to extend beyond exceptional individuals and those going against the mainstream grain into something wider. A good suit is a wonderful thing; it’s versatile, and ideally, made to last a lifetime.

Now there are just many more ways to wear it.

Grooming Yoshitaka Miyazaki using Bumble and bumble Model Cherif at Premier Casting Marqee

Blazer and trousers CANALI T-shirt SUNSPEL

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ROADS, REVOLT AND AUTOMOBILES

By Matthew Turner. Investigating the Church of the Autostrada

Florence is solid, immovable; its artworks and architecture have been in the same positions for hundreds of years, and will probably rest at those coordinates far into the future. The fixity is suggested by the glacial light, guided by it perhaps. Both in winter and summer a slight haze takes the edge off temporary, superficial details (the utilitarian markers of passing time: lampposts, adverts, bins, tv aerials), while at the same time the constant clarity of the light exaggerates the apparently permanent identity of every object.

Hiding out on the outskirts of Florence, amidst its more temporary landscape of IKEA warehouses and tractor showrooms, there is, beside a motorway service station, Giovanni Michelucci’s San Giovanni Battista. More commonly known as Church of the Autostrada, it was commissioned by the Highways Construction Co and opened in 1964 in memory of the 164 workers who died constructing the Autostrada A1 (or Freeway of the Sun).

A few years ago the building came up in a conversation I was having with Jonathan Hill, a professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture. He explained that Michelucci’s childhood was spent in the family’s metalwork studio in Pistoia and how he had retained the connection to traditional craft throughout his career, mixing eclectically the more radical ideas of his time, such as expressionist and high-tech architecture, with an understanding that buildings can be born from an appreciation of nature and everyday life.

The professor casually mentioned that nobody really writes about Michelucci’s Church of the Autostrada, simply because they don’t know what to say; that, while working on it, the architect went through numerous structural engineers, with one committing suicide from the complexity of the project. Since that conversation, I had often daydreamed about this thing people tried and failed to describe, a complete architectural grotesque, and I became obsessed with the idea of going to visit it for myself. *

Church of San Giovanni Battista sketches by Giovanni Michelucci.

Courtesy Archivio Giovanni Michelucci - Serie disegni

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Under a cliché of Tuscan blue sky, the Fs 5 bus from Florence passed smoothly through leafy suburbs and emerged at the landscape of concrete horizons that I had flown over just a few hours previously. I was dropped off at a truck stop running parallel to a noisy dual carriageway.

Some blurry eyed drivers got out of their cabs and were unimpressed by my questions and gestures referring to churches. Over their shrugging shoulders and mouths loosely holding cigarettes, I saw it in the distance, the

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church’s roof emerging from the flattened landscape like a huge creaking iceberg carved into intersecting arcs by wind.

It looked both out of place and distinctly of the place.

As I walked along the grass verge next to the road with drivers honking their horns and slowing down to offer me lifts, I noticed the building’s green copper outline perhaps looked more like a wave, then as I got closer a ruined tractor or a collapsed cow shed. Or, to use the symbolism of hard shoulders, its jutting, angular volumes appeared like sunlight glinting off an inside-out crisp packet, making it look enormous. It was blurred and shifting, alive in illusiveness form.

I came down from the motorway onto a backroad and progressed alongside speeding police cars and motorbikes. I continued under a bridge that led into the shadow of the motorway from which the church takes its nickname, Autostrada A1, and I was, quicker than I expected, at the foot of the church.

The architect wanted to create a simple tent supported by sticks, suggesting nomadic forms of living, a place of meeting and travel, capturing “the transit of mankind opposed to their definite dwelling upon the Earth”. It is then an intentionally difficult building to pin down, and equally evasive when attempts are made to position it into pre-existing architectural categories.

As I got closer, I could see that the church had the dynamism and impossible angles found in Italian futurist paintings, all set down on a solid bed of Tuscan vernacular architecture. It seemed constantly at breaking point, tethering the upper parts of the building to the ground. Michelucci used stone in many of his buildings, and here he employed stone-dressers from all of the Italian regions, specifying that they cut the stones according to their local traditions. A sense of being pulled into different geographies and places was carved into the stone with which the church was constructed.

While I waited for the weary congregation to finish their Sunday service, I walked the undulating path that wrapped around the peripheries of the building through a grove of olive trees. Without a distinct front or back, or even easily discernible sides, the forms of the church kept shifting as I walked, giving the impression with each step that it was many buildings colliding together in different formations.

Inside, I came to a rectangular box, more serene than what I had seen so far, leading into a small labyrinth that made me turn back on myself, before a narrow dark passage opened out beneath the imposing reversed barrel

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Church of San Giovanni Battista sketches by Giovanni Michelucci.

Courtesy Archivio Giovanni Michelucci - Serie disegni

vault that plunged down into the nave. Thoughts of waves returned and of swimming below them, the struts cutting across the space brought to the mind being under a boat’s hull while it is under construction.

Church ceilings usually direct collective contemplation away from the building itself to a more heavenly plane above the clouds. This one, however, redirected everything back to the interior, back to individual contemplation of the self. The light entering the interior, rather than being high up and placing the congregation in submission to some kind of divine presence, was struggling to push through the dark. The straight aisle leading from darkness at the rear of the church to the light of the altar was missing. In its place seating was spread sporadically through the interior, and a flood of marble floor tiles seemed to push me in unexpected directions.

At the western edge I found a helter skelter ramp up to the baptistery, something that would be more at home in a multi-storey car park.

The Church of the Autostrada is located at a point of transit, but is also in a state of transit itself, a “walking church”, as the architect described it to his brother, Renzo. Rather than adhering to Italian fixity, it is in an apparent state of movement, capturing the limbo of travelling by car. If traditional churches mimic the slow, linear procession of walking pilgrims, then Michelucci’s church is the built equivalent of being on the road: experience cut by speed into windscreen and rear-view mirror fragments. To me it all seemed fraught.

Attempting to find the exit in a gallery of bas-reliefs depicting martyrs, I couldn’t think of any other country that would have a church dedicated to the motorways and the people that travel along them. They built the first one in the world, Autostrada dei Laghi, and are synonymous with Fiat, Alfa Romeo and many other iconic manufacturers. The church’s municipality, Campi Bisenzio, is where one of the very first internal combustion engines was built. There is a reason so many coffee machines look like car parts. * The 1950s saw chronic under-employment in the south of Italy. The soil was of poor quality and after grain markets were deregulated, prices plummeted. For rural populations in the Mezzogiorno, there was no future.

At the same time, the Italian post-war economic ‘miracle’ meant there were jobs in the vast automotive factories of the rapidly industrialising north. Between 1951

and 1971, nine million people migrated from rural to industrial areas in Italy. They often arrived in the big cities with nothing and were forced to live in train station waiting rooms or on relatives’ floors. They worked double shifts in factories that offered treacherous conditions; repetitive tasks that resulted in deformities, serious injury and death.

As Michelucci was designing and realising the church between 1960 and 1964, tensions were building in the automative factories, and by 1969 workers from the south on the assembly lines of the north began revolting in waves of violent strikes. Their revolt was an allout assault on their own exploitation. They wanted everything, as their placard slogan and shop floor chant famously expressed: Vogliamo Tutto!

The church’s fitful atmosphere captures something of their struggle. The Autostrada A1 runs 754 km from Naples to Milan, roughly demarcating their migration from south to north, and the church is on the midpoint of that journey, the point where the Apennine Mountains would have cut off the southern sun for the hopeful workers.

I stood at the side of the road to have one last look before I made the tricky walk back to the truck stop where I had begun my visit. I wondered whether there would even be a bus into town on that Sunday in the midst of a transport workers’ strike. I already knew that if I were to come back to this place it would never look the same again. I wondered what I was looking at.

In her essay ‘Bureaucrats’ (1976), on the California Department of Transportation, Joan Didion describes driving on freeways as secular communion, a state of heightened mystical awareness: “Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway.

The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over. A distortion of time occurs. The same distortion that characterizes the instant before an accident.”

That is what I was looking at. I was surrounded by lines of movements; flight paths, railway tracks, roads of every type, overhead power lines, gliding birds, pollen on the wind. They outlined the church, which was not one singular place, but a succession of places all in the same location – the view through the windscreen.

It was infinite unfurling roads wrapped up in a parcel of heightened mystical awareness. It was distinctly embedded in this world by a pent-up energy that was seemingly in solidarity with the sacrifices that went into creating it.

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THE BRÜTTA CITY

By Alberto Saibene. Modern Milan’s eclectic entrances and post-war reconstruction

“Milano Milano?” That was the question teenagers from Milan would ask when they met other Italian youngsters far from home. It would be heard, for example, during study trips to austere England in the 1970s. The question contained within it a mixture of curiosity and distrust. It meant: are you a true Milanese, or just a pretender, when in fact you come from Monza, Gallarate, Busto Arsizio or some other town?

As for me, I was a bona fide Milanese. Maybe too much! My Milan was very small and essentially meant the streets around the centre where my family lived.

It was a zone that hadn’t yet become what my father, perhaps with some snobbery, would later define as “a dutyfree store”. Though inhabited for the most part by the “upper” classes, the area was a mixture of private residences, monuments, schools and shops that made it a livelier neighbourhood than the commercialised zone it would later become.

Very few of my classmates lived in the type of building pictured opposite – Palazzo in via Paravia 37, by Umberto Riva. Its striking design reminded you of the fact that examples of the modern movement – for which Milan is a veritable outdoor museum – are found not just in the centre of the city, but are scattered around its various neighbourhoods.

Just consider the building by Gio Ponti and Alberto Rosselli on Viale Lunigiana, or the Corbellini-Wassermann house by Piero Portaluppi, a hidden gem on Viale Lombardia. The reason the city doesn’t have a concentrated district of the modern movement – unlike other periods such as eclecticism and art nouveau (known as the Liberty style in Italy) – is clear: We are looking at a story that lasts about 50 years, from the 1920s to the 1970s, interrupted by World War II, during which Milan was bombed by the Allies. This break was followed by disorderly, feverish post-war reconstruction, which mixed up different epochs and styles, often on the same street.

We can be certain about the starting date of modern architecture in Milan. The Ca’ Brutta (literally “the ugly house”), begun in 1919 and completed in 1922, is a work by the architect Giovanni Muzio – still in his twenties at the time – who lived on the top floor of the building until his death in 1982. Why the term “ugly” (or brütta, in the Milanese spelling)? Because the people of Milan, accustomed to the gentle lines and ornament of eclecticism and art nouveau, didn’t like it. Even Muzio himself, perhaps as a result, softened his approach a little in subsequent projects. But Milan was already known as an ugly city. It was described as such by the greatest Milanese writer of the 20th century, Carlo Emilio Gadda, who called it “ugly and uncoordinated”. Actually, Milan was

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the only large Italian city suited to welcoming modernity: Rome, Venice and Naples were full of palaces; in Florence the Renaissance still vied with the Middle Ages; in Bologna and Turin the porticoes concealed the facades.

Furthermore, Milan was the first city in Italy to witness the rise of the business and professional bourgeoisie, overturning the age-old social order. The residents of Palazzo in via Paravia 37 came from that milieu – and it reflected the status of this new class.

Buildings such as these were defined by their entrances, which were eclectic in their construction materials, details (doors, floors, accessories, lighting), and decoration. Ignoring the rules of the Bauhaus, many artists adorned these entrance halls with a distinctive use of ‘humble’ ceramics. The most illustrious names are Fausto Melotti and Lucio Fontana, in the wake of the great master Adolfo Wildt. His ‘winged victory’ sculpture greets visitors to the Berri-Meregalli house on Via Cappuccini. Plants and greenery, in addition, often lent halls the feeling of impeccable morgues.

What is missing from this photograph is the everyday life of these spaces that people briefly pass through.

The sovereign, of course, is (or was) the concierge, who was more often male than female, and usually a native of Milan – until after World War II when most of them came from the depopulating countryside around the city. During my childhood, many custodians came from Southern Italy and Sardinia, but more recently they too have been replaced by immigrants from outside the EU, mostly South Americans and Sri Lankans. The concierge generally reflects the class attitudes of the building’s residents: respectfully obsequious with the owners, impatient and aloof with delivery men and messengers.

Many buildings have given up their doormen, though the finest examples of these aforementioned structures probably still have one. The next time you are visiting Milan, poke your nose inside their entrances and observe how many architects – some of them famous, most of them remembered today only by specialists in the field – gave rise to a ‘Milanese’ version of the modern movement that is so highly acclaimed today but, alas, no longer practised. The end of this epoch is symbolised by the Gallaratese housing complex of Aldo Rossi and Carlo Aymonino. It closes an era in which Milan was truly great and architecturally civilised.

This essay is taken from Alberto Saibene’s book Milano fine Novecento, published by Casagrande, 2021, the translation of which was originally published in Interwoven magazine

Palazzo in via Paravia 37 by Umberto Riva, 1965 (pendant lamps and enameled metal door handles 374 by Umberto Riva). Photography Delfino Sisto Legnani

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PROCESSION

By Hettie Judah. Hew Locke discusses his grand commission for Tate Britain, a poetic work of sculpture examining colonial legacy, global finance and the human bodies at the end of the paper trail

It’s countdown time on the largest commission of Hew Locke’s career and biosecurity at his studio has gone near-laboratory grade. As the new etiquette demands, we exchange cute snapshots of our matching negative Covid tests before we meet. On arrival I have to disinfect my shoes. Locke apologises: under other circumstances we might have had an informal chat over a cup of tea, but so much hangs in the balance that the virus invading his studio at this point would be catastrophic.

The British artist has received the annual commission to fill Tate Britain’s grand, neo-classical Duveen Galleries. “I’ve often said, half joking, half serious, that Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall is easy because you can do what you like,” says Locke, against the clatter of busy assistants. “But the Duveen is really tricky, because it’s in the museum. You’re in this highly charged space. All this history – Charles I, Charles II, Elizabeth, the Tudor portraits – are just two steps away from you.”

This is not idle chat: In 2014, Locke staged a performance in the Turbine Hall. Inspired by the impact of gentrification on the Notting Hill Carnival, it featured a Brazilian bateria band, and placards of the neighbourhood’s grand properties being used like police riot shields.

Locke is no stranger to substantial sculpture commissions either. In 2015 ‘The Jurors’ was installed in a field at Runnymede – 12 chairs, cast in bronze, each referencing struggles for justice and equality over the 800 years since the Magna Carta was signed. The centrepiece of his 2019 solo at Ikon in Birmingham was an entire flotilla of model boats suspended from the ceiling in a chapel-sized gallery.

Hew Locke. Photography Fergus Riley

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Few commissions match the scale of the Duveen Galleries, however, which stretch the length of a city block.

Locke had to borrow a larger studio in south London from the sculptor Bill Woodrow. After a year of work, the entire front section is now packed with life-sized sculptures of humans and animals, fragments of their highly decorated surfaces just visible through layers of protective packaging.

All are waiting to take their place in Locke’s ‘The Procession’: “It’s many things: It’s people occupying a space; at times it can be celebratory, and at times a bit more edgy – light and dark.” Procession is a term rippling with possibilities. It could indicate a military cavalcade, a show of power; it could be a religious parade, a devotional event with saints carried aloft; it might be a political protest, or a vigil; it can be the opportunity for a display of finery, a passeggiata in which the overlooked can make themselves visible. It could be a long line of refugees. “All those streams of movement are things I’m thinking about,” says Locke. “The refugees of today are the citizens of somewhere else tomorrow.

One year you’re ‘boat people’, next, you’re a Vietnamese American.”

Among all these other associations, Locke’s ‘The Procession’ is also a display of wealth, tracing tangled connections from the geopolitical machinations of governments and multinationals to individuals in Britain, Guyana, China, Ethiopia, France or the ancient Kingdom of Benin. Locke’s characters are draped with textiles printed from a paper trail of bonds and certificates dating back centuries. This paperwork includes the Greek ‘Refugee Loan’ issued in 1924 after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, documents relating to French railway construction in Ethiopia, gold loans drawn on the HSBC bank by Imperial China and confederate government share certificates.

An antique shop aficionado, I imagine Locke’s home to be stuffed with historical curios all awaiting the right project. There is, I tell him, something comic about an artist collecting financial paperwork in the way a banker might paintings. Locke was in New York installing a show in September 2008. Two days into the trip “I woke up and turned on the news. Lehman Brothers – gone.

I came back to London, not knowing what on earth to do with myself, because the art world was finished.”

His response was to start investing in dead companies.

“The day before Bear Stearns went bust, old bonds from them would be $10 or $15. The day after, that had gone up to about $400. It’s a finite item. They’re little pieces of history.”

Locke’s share certificate collection is part of what he terms his “interest in the unfashionable”. He is drawn to the overlooked structures of everyday life – the things so familiar that we no longer see them, or stop to question the power dynamic behind them. Twenty years ago this tendency got him thinking about public monuments. He started paying attention to the plinths and bronzes dotting Britain’s public spaces: “Who’s that guy; why is it that he’s there? A ‘hero of the Punjab’? How can you be a hero of the Punjab? He’s not a hero to me.” As Locke started to connect the figures on the statues to slaving and colonial expansion, he proposed ‘redressing’ them, drawing up custom outfits and adornments, bringing the statues to public attention in a provocative new context.

Among the monuments in Locke’s sights was the bronze of Edward Colston in Bristol that has since been toppled off its plinth and into the Avon. “I was phoned up one morning, July 2020, and asked ‘Have you anything to say about the Colston statue?’ ‘What do you mean,

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have I anything to say?’ I was completely stunned,” Locke recalls. “Because I’ve been going on about these statues for a very long time, since about 2002.” Two things tipped the balance for Colston, thinks Locke, “George Floyd’s murder and Covid. Together they just set something off.”

Locke won’t go so far as to call ‘The Procession’ an anti-monumental work, but the politics of size, material and presentation have informed his approach to the Duveen. This is a work of human scale, in everyday materials, to be walked around at ground level. It also evades simplistic binaries – this is good, this is bad – that come from elevating one thing over others. The word Locke keeps returning to is ‘complex’: He wants to leave space for nuance. “In the past I would have felt I needed to explain this, to be completely crystal clear to my audience,” he says, describing it instead as “a poem”.

Decoration, finery, sparkle – these are the lures with which Locke draws you in, close enough to think twice about what you’re looking at. His work is concurrently in Life Between Islands, a Tate Britain show of Caribbean-British art. He’s showing a series based on ‘Parian ware’ busts – mass-produced 19th-century faux-marble sculptures (distinctly unfashionable, naturally) of Queen Victoria, her son Albert Edward and other royals. Rather than breaking or brutalising the sculptures, Locke has lavished treasures on them. Each is adorned with trappings – beads, masks, cowrie shells, filigree work, military medals – as though jewelled deities on a shrine.

The flamboyant additions undermine the regal authority and bland tastefulness of the milky white sculptures, and the objects embellishing them evoke the inglorious connections these figures had to colonial campaigns and extractive practices.

Locke is the child of artists, the British painter Leila Locke, and Guyanese sculptor Donald Locke. In something of a family takeover, powerful sculptures by Donald Locke are also on show at Tate. “I wish he was here, that’s for sure,” muses Locke, who was born in Edinburgh while his father was studying at art school, and moved back to Guyana “a young, odd, mixed-race Scottish kid, with an obsession with bagpipe music and wanting to have a kilt,” at the age of five.

‘The Procession’ is at once a work about global finance, and deeply personal: a reminder that labouring human bodies hide at the end of the paper trail, behind all those flimsy paper share certificates. In working with ‘complexity’ Locke wants to complicate the British idea of the Caribbean. “I grew up in Guyana. And two-thirds of the population of Guyana comes from India, some of them Indian indentured servants. And when discussing the Caribbean, that never comes up: The narrative doesn’t allow for an Indo-Guyanese experience.”

Locke describes the figures in ‘The Procession’ as though characters in a play: He now finds himself in the role of director, waiting to infuse his creations with drama. The final element will be Tate itself, with all the associations (wealth, sugar, connoisseurship, taste and display) that the institution carries. Until he gets into the Duveen Galleries, Locke is not sure how ‘The Procession’ will play out in the space. After over a year spent on physical construction, and many more in the planning, “the work is going to continue until six o’clock the day before the show opens,” he says. “Then I’ll literally have to look at the floor, and walk out.”

Hew Locke’s ‘The Procession’ will be displayed at the Duveen Galleries as part of the annual Tate Britain Commission, 22nd March – 23rd October, 2022

Photography Fergus Riley

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Brioni models on the catwalk at the Sala Bianca in the Palazzo Pitti, late 1960s.

Courtesy of Brioni

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LETTERS FROM LA

By Bret Easton Ellis. A personal ode to the effortlessly chic Brioni suit

I bought my first Brioni suit when I moved back to Los Angeles after living in New York for 20 years, to begin production on a number of Hollywood projects that I had written and was going to produce. The connection between Brioni and its lustrous link to a cinematic past wasn’t exactly on my mind when a salesperson at Barney’s on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills suggested Brioni after I described what kind of suit I was looking for now as a recently transplanted denizen of the West Coast: One of my first concerns was that the suit would be light enough to wear comfortably in this altitude that was so different from the one I had experienced for two decades on the East Coast. I was at a time in my life where I thought I was finally settled – there was a big new film, there was a brand-new relationship. I was in my early 40s and I wanted to look my age – or, at most, good for my age. I didn’t want anything trendy, something I might not have minded or would have even preferred in my 20s and 30s, but not any longer. In the 1980s and ’90s, when I came of age, I lived in a society that expected its young men to be interested in fashion – and to a degree I was, but only in a glancing way – and I wore my fair share of suits in a world where there was a youthful formality that doesn’t really exist today except during awards season and the increasingly rare black-tie affair.

The suit the salesperson brought out was surprisingly very simple: two-button, navy blue. I tried it on, not expecting the suit to make much of an impression, since it seemed so basic, and yet after I put the suit on, I looked at myself in the mirror and realized it embodied exactly the kind of style that I responded to: You knew it was chic, but it was invisible, it didn’t loudly announce itself. The Brioni suit came the closest of any suit I ever wore that had this particular mix of classicism and comfort, of being both fashionable and timeless. It accentuated my build – it fit me, it was tapered – and yet it felt loose and flowing. The suit was, I thought, the most beautiful and comfortable I’d ever worn: So simple, so streamlined, it felt like it was hanging off me, my movements were never constricted, and the suit didn’t swallow me up as some of the boxier suits that were fashionable in the early 1990s did – it was effortlessly flattering.

What made it so versatile was that it was light enough to wear in an increasingly casual Los Angeles, and dressy enough to wear to an event in New York if you added the

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right shirt and tie and shoes. But it wasn’t necessarily a formal suit, and in LA I liked wearing the suit with a powder blue button-up V-neck cashmere sweater, black loafers and tortoiseshell sunglasses, if the event was outside in the pre-dusk of an early evening during the summer months. Many LA gatherings take place outdoors when the sun is setting and yet the light is still hard.

Two years later I distinctly remember a cocktail party on the patio of the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel during the years when I wore the suit, and the compliments I usually received. LA had started out with so much promise when I had bought the suit, but the usual disappointments had announced themselves. And what was going on in my life was somehow connected to my feelings about the suit: That night I realized the movie was falling apart, and the affair had broken up, and though both of these things left me unmoored, I also began to feel as if I was free from the pose that every man thinks is required of him, until they realise it isn’t required at all. Something happens in a man’s life at a certain point, where the rules of society he has always bought into unquestioningly seem fake and stop making sense to him; it’s a charade, you realise, and you start moving past disappointment and regret, heading to a new kind of freedom – because you’ve simply, unapologetically, become your real self. There was something about the Brioni suit that emphasised this freedom I was experiencing, embodied it. It was a signifier, and that’s why it always made me feel better – it aided in the newfound confidence I was experiencing despite life’s setbacks, setbacks that were easier to deal with because of age.

This moment in my life will always be defined partly by that suit, because this was the point where I didn’t want to wear anything else when I went out. In fact, as Los Angeles shifted into an even more casual mode, I kept the Brioni suit – one of the only ones I have from that period. And on certain days, in certain moments, it’s ultimately a reminder of not what went wrong during that period, but what went effortlessly and ineffably right. I became the man I never knew I ultimately wanted to be.

This text was taken from Brioni: Tailoring Legends, published by Assouline, February 2022

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LISBOETA

By Nuno Mendes. With the opening of his new restaurant, the chef tells of his love of Lisbon

Lisboa is a city of organised chaos. Bohemian, bustling, eclectic – the layers of competing buildings, one on top of the other, suggest a laissez-faire approach to architecture. If you were to excavate its cobbled ground, I’m sure you’d find a whole metropolis buried beneath. Yet strangely, it works. The endless views and vantages from alleyways and hills are gifted by a particular quality of light, pastel pink. Things are happening, moving; there is an energy that welcomes you. The city is in bloom: but it wasn’t always so.

As a youth my hometown was hurting. Beautiful structures left derelict, no money, no work, people hooked on heroin – it was bleak. You know the refrain in ‘God Save the Queen’ by the Sex Pistols, “no future”? Too many people were living like that. I was fortunate because my grandmother instilled her passion for food in my dad.

He encouraged me to be curious. Back in the ’70s and ’80s, the culinary scene was nowhere near as vibrant; you needed to know where to go. My father would take me to experience real Portuguese cooking, seafood on the waterfront, as well as Goan, Greek and Japanese restaurants – it was life-changing learning about these cuisines at such an early age. He passed on his cooking bug, and I left to train in San Francisco, New York and Spain, amongst others. Despite it being a short visit, I was enlightened by my experiences in Japan, and eventually settled in east London.

I’ve often felt like an outsider looking in, someone who’s from Portugal but not living there, shouting words of encouragement from the sideline. For the past decade I have been researching and championing Portuguese food, a subject we have been nationally shy about. We remain defined by early modern history, our mercantile exploration and ‘age of discovery’ leaving traces of

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Africa, Brazil, India, China, Japan (among many others) on our cooking, and vice versa. For a long time, I believe we were trying to appease visitors with what we thought they wanted, hiding our global roots, our regional – and delicious – ‘peasant food’, our wonderful indigenous ingredients. Culinary tradition was not being passed on, that artisanal knowledge was dying out. I wanted to be part of a movement that celebrates our heritage and am proud to have opened a number of projects in the capital since. Now, I am able to realise another dream with Lisboeta, in London.

Its premise is to showcase the spirit of the city. To capture its daily rhythm, its hospitality, whether that’s through a casual pastéis de nata with a morning coffee, or petiscos (small plates) in the evening. Items will come and go, but you can expect bacalhau, goose barnacles, sea urchins, red mullets, chouriço, alheira, clams and red prawns, as well as local ingredients through a Lisbon lens. Reflecting our melting pot, there will be a little bit of Macau, dashes of Brazil, Mozambique, light touches of Japan. And, while honouring tradition, we will offer our personal interpretation of dishes, producing a singular identity not solely defined by what has gone before.

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder. Every time I’ve moved country, I have stopped by Lisbon to see whether I could make a proper home there again.

For one reason or another, it was never the right time.

I am turning 50 soon and my native city is calling me; in all my life this is the closest I’ve been to returning.

Until then, my slice of Lisboa in Fitzrovia will have to do.

As told to Tom Bolger

Brill with Caldo Verde Caldo verde is one of Portugal’s most special, heart-warming dishes. The quality of the chouriço and the potatoes makes a big difference, so get the best you can. I have added extra kale, as it enhances the beautiful jade colour. Traditionally, caldo verde is made with water, but I prefer to use fish stock for a denser flavour – my countrymen will kill me, but I am prepared to stand my ground.

Serves 4 Ingredients 1 Brill 3 tablespoons olive oil 150g chouriço, skin removed and diced, plus a few thin slices to garnish 2 medium onions, finely chopped 2 garlic cloves, crushed 1 fresh bay leaf 4 medium potatoes, such as Maris Piper or similar, diced into small pieces 1.5 litres fish stock 200g kale, finely chopped Extra virgin olive oil, to serve White wine vinegar, to serve Sea salt flakes and ground white pepper Heat the olive oil in a pan on a medium heat. Add the chouriço and cook for a couple of minutes, then add the onions, garlic and bay leaf, season with salt and pepper, and cook until the onions are soft. Add the potatoes and sweat for a few minutes, stirring so they don’t stick. Pour in the stock and simmer gently over a low heat until the potatoes are soft. Remove a few tablespoons of the potatoes and set aside.

Add half the kale to the soup and simmer for a few minutes. Remove the bay leaf, take the soup off the heat and blend until smooth with a stick blender. (Traditionally the soup is not blended, but I like to blend, adding some more fresh kale at the end.) Return the pan to the heat and taste for seasoning.

Fillet the fish and make 200g portions. Place it in a tray skin-side up inside the fridge, so it can dry nicely.

Remove from the fridge just 10 minutes before you cook it, so it can gain some temperature.

Make sure you have nice and hot embers on the grill.

Cook the skin-side down first, so you can get a nice and crispy skin, for around five minutes. After this, turn it and give a nice sear for three minutes more. Take out of the heat and let it rest. Garnish with diced chouriço and fried kale.

Pour the caldo verde on the plate and add the fish on top. Finish with extra virgin olive oil, white wine vinegar and sea salt.

Nuno Mendes. Photography Francis Augusto

Photography assistant Gabriela Velasco

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NEVER THE SAME CLOUD TWICE

By Dylan Holden. AlphaTauri keeps the rain out

“There’s no such thing as bad weather,” wrote Alfred Wainwright, “only unsuitable clothing.” The zealous walker and illustrator was well accustomed to the elements, and would have been deeply familiar with that quintessential British brand of rain; miserably oblique, grey, never-ending. It is a shame, therefore, that he never encountered something made from TAUROBRAN®, the ingenious waterproof technology developed by AlphaTauri.

Founded in 2016 by Red Bull, the fashion brand takes its name from the brightest star in the Taurus constellation. Its patented textile is created using an electric charge that teases nano-sized threads out of a polymer solution, which then fuse into a unique, interconnected structure. Comprised of three membranes, its ultra-light microscopic fibres form a barrier against particles as small as 20nm, while allowing perspiration to escape through a matrix of channels too miniscule for water to get in. In layman’s terms: you’re staying dry whatever the weather.

AlphaTauri’s minimalistic, urban SS22 collection – inspired by the clean lines of Finnish architect Alvar Aalto – utilises the material across jerseys, summer jackets and sweatpants, upgrading its navy, off-white and daffodil-yellow parkas with a cotton-touch fabric. 3D knitwear, seamlessly manufactured using Shima Seiki machines to ensure zero waste, has also been expanded with a selection of different yarns, including cashmere.

So, the next time you are threatened with damp conditions on the morning commute, you could do worse than throw something on from the collection and warm yourself with a lesser-known Wainwright quote: “Clouds are the most transient of nature’s creations… Every moment of its brief existence brings a change of form or tint or texture; but its beauty remains constant to the end. The beauty of the clouds is there for us to see every day, if we are not too busy to look up.”

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ALL CLOTHING ALPHATAURI SS22

Photography Jack Johnstone Set design Imogen Frost

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AFTERMATH

By Stephanie Sy-Quia. Preti Taneja reflects on her astounding new book

Preti Taneja taught creative writing in HMP Whitemoor for three years. Usman Khan, perpetrator of the Fishmongers’ Hall attack on November 29, 2019, was one of her students, and Jack Merritt, one of his victims, was her colleague. Aftermath is not a work of a fiction, but a book of fictions: of those we hold about ourselves and each other, the society we live in, who to trust and how safe we are. The book relinquishes linearity, instead favouring an elliptical movement through the inquests, ‘with asides, insertions, questions and other patterns repeating’ to ask how Khan came to be; through griefs racial, intergenerational and personal; through the works of African American abolitionists and feminists, to insist again and again on the disastrous knowledge gaps at work in Britain today. Taneja’s novel We That Are Young won the Desmond Elliott Prize for best literary debut of 2018. She is professor of world literature and creative writing at Newcastle University.

Which texts and writers did you look to in writing this book?

The terrorist event is placed so much outside of context and history, a distancing which denies pattern and cause. I tried to look for solace in poetry and resistance.

I turned to writers and texts who have given me maps all my writing life for ways of looking at racial grief and generational trauma: June Jordan, Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine, Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Tongo Eisen-Martin, or Wendy Trevino – people who know violence in systemic forms, how it pushes some individuals to deeper violence; who know prison in different ways, and know how it sits in society as the endpoint manifestation of the racialised disgrace that humans mete upon ourselves.

But these works are so clearly not for the specific violence and knot of grief that I was reckoning with, and I felt I had lost the right to go to Black women abolitionists talking about civil rights in the US with this event.

Ultimately, I’m not a lawyer, journalist or criminologist; I’m a fiction writer. And I taught fiction to this person whose fictions about himself and what he believed,

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and what others wanted to believe about him and themselves – as doing something good – were all fundamentally important in what was enabled.

From there it became a question of moving in circles through different texts and ways of thinking, including poetry, law, philosophy and politics, testing out where solace, answers and responsibility could be held, to find context for what happened. I was searching for an opening to grieve and understand how it came to be. The first piece of writing that did this for me was Adrienne Rich’s seminal poem on trauma, ‘Diving into the Wreck’. The resulting book is deeply intertextual, which is the political and aesthetic bedrock of my writing; this is the way I choose to voice the nuances and multiplicities of identity: a form of solidarity and resistance to tokenism, or a ‘solitary hero’ narrative, if you like.

You have a term, of your own coinage, which you use throughout the book, of the “atro-city”. What can you tell me about it?

The word ‘atrocity’ was being used a lot to talk about the exclusivity of this event, as if it came from nothing.

Because I’m multilingual, aural rhymes have a real significance to me. ‘Atrocity’ calls to mind the word’s etymology: It was brought into English from Greek via the Latin and French for “extreme cruelty”. So the idea of breaking an atrocity down into the atro-city, this coded social place in which atrocities cannot but occur, appealed.

It’s a really simple way of saying that the atrocity and the city – ‘civilisation’ – are intimately linked, without having to write a whole book about just that. The broken-down term is a way of showing a place and a system that articulates our collective responsibility. The atrocity is a place that holds ivory towers and high-security prisons in a binary as if they don’t have anything to do with each other. But events like the attack of Fishmongers’ Hall will come from our societies and our cities, which are so very cruel. We need different psychological, social and economic spaces to survive and thrive in, to nurture us all at the roots, before prison is even thought of. That’s what abolitionism is to me, and the

Preti Taneja in her studio, Newcastle

Photography Reece James Morrison

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book comes up from this kind of rubble of what we think of as a civilised city. This conversation is so much more advanced in the United States, and I’m very grateful for that – in the UK, our way of talking about racism has long been to just say ‘It’s worse over there.’

You delineate the reading room, contained in the citadel at the heart of the atro-city, ‘produced by the culture it protects’. What is your book’s relationship to this space and how it works through and against its ideas of craft?

There’s a polite way of answering that question and then there’s the way I feel about my work and my positionality with it. One can call a woman a deviant or one can celebrate her freedom. I think my book’s relationship to this reading room is a manifestation of that freedom, of that joy – to know it’s possible to look at the world and articulate it absolutely in my own way.

Of course, I’m just as much a product of the English canon I had at school as I am of all the Urdu poetry, the Hindi stories, the oral tradition that I come from at home.

That intertextuality is fundamentally who I am. I have absolutely no confusion about which side I’m on, there is no side for me to take. It’s a whole third thing. But this idea of being split somehow is of continual fascination, and is forced on me by the market, which wants me to feel that confusion, to repeatedly explain it – for it to be traumatically written through again and again for consumption by white readers... and I’m tired of it.

Historically, it’s not recognised for Black or brown British women and mixed race women to be experimental writers. We’re instead considered mad or bad writers, because otherwise we are too threatening. But we are ourselves experiments. We’re born experiments.

We live as experiments. If you’re born and live as an experiment, then you’re going to write experimentally.

There’s a disgust about our work, and its relationship to the canon, which is a basically a fear of miscegenation. I think that fear is hilarious. Because our hybridity is here, and it was begun by them. The writing that I do is in service to an identity which, no matter how much pushback I get, refuses to be confused about itself.

And I’d had enough of this attitude that some people can be locked away, that they can be socially deprived, or that these people can be illegible so that our lives are ungrievable, and other lives, white lives, can have better prominence.

I want to talk about the value placed on creative writing and the humanities. In the book, they seem to be held in quite high esteem by probation officers, and various other bodies of authority and agents of the carceral state, when they assess these very high-risk individuals. What do you make of that, and the class culture which surrounds the humanities at present in the UK? The humanities aren’t a ‘them’. They’re subject categories, and they’re necessarily only as functional as those people who are doing the categorising. A category is harmful by dint of what it excludes in order to exist in a definition. Instead, we have to ask, ‘What do you mean by human who is included in this category of thinking, who gets to be considered worthy as an artist, as a maker, not just as somebody who spends nine pounds to have to go to the cinema?’ The humanities are completely centred around whiteness, so they are harmful.

There are courses in this country where not one single book by a British writer of colour is taught in literature.

That’s harmful to all students, including white students.

It impoverishes generations with the same silences and ignorance, which forces a few of us to keep repeating

Photography Reece James Morrison

the same struggle. We can never move on. That is not the revolution I want, and that suits power just fine. Do we really have time for this trauma loop?

There is an idea that creativity is a privilege and not just a fundamental human imperative that can’t be subjugated to any system. But if it’s stymied, as it has been in structural ways, then of course we begin to believe that it’s a privilege to make art. That some people are more deserving of it than others.

At one particularly powerful point you ask yourself, “Am I the non-violent offender, writing about the aftermath of the offence?” You went into a very delicate space, Whitemoor, with two vulnerable groups: those who came in from the outside with you and those who were already on the inside. What were your guiding principles in writing about those two sets of people?

I was thinking about that question of being the non-violent offender in June 2020, which was very soon after the actual event. I was really inside this traumatic reckoning of how to write about someone I knew and taught fiction to, and how he was understood by those whose responsibility it was to keep him safe from his own worst harms, and to keep others safe as well. This very damaged and violent man was released from high security straight into the community. He didn’t just get on a train one day and do this unsurveilled. He was totally surveilled; they just didn’t prohibit this from happening.

At the same time, being in that writing room with those Cambridge University students and the men who are inside Whitemoor was an extraordinarily positive experience for many of them who took part. Some of them found their vocation through that work and, having now graduated, are working in criminal justice. After the attack at Fishmongers’ Hall, I wanted to keep safe the truth that the writers in that room had worked hard while they were there. All of them did. What I saw was a group of people that worked incredibly hard to make each other feel comfortable, to share stories, to share vulnerabilities, to take the risk to write and to use craft to claim authority on the page. They produced writing; they had camaraderie. That mattered.

My own boundaries for writing about that experience were not to appropriate their stories, or present any of them or the prison for voyeuristic purposes. In the book I work with pronouns and tenses to try to respect everyone who was a victim of harm. I could, in the end, only write from my own perspective about this. Lockdown meant there was no way to reach prisoners to ask them about their experiences; and my Cambridge students were still processing what happened. That will take time; they have the right to their own stories.

Finally, I didn’t go into prison as ‘a writer’. I went in there to be a teacher. That means helping them to write. Does it mean that I could use my platform to help them be published? That opens up a whole other set of questions, because of the way society perceives prison, the rights of people who commit violence and get sent there, the criminal ‘justice’ system as a whole.

These are questions we need to think about urgently…

What it means to have a voice that is heard. Not all violent people are incarcerated. Some are published writers, award-winning. Making art doesn’t predicate moral goodness. Writing from prison has a place in our society, an important one. Until we don’t have prison any more.

Aftermath by Preti Taneja was published by And Other Stories, April 2022

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METAMORPHOSIS

By Reiss Smith. BOSS’ SS22 signals a new beginning

With any milestone comes a certain amount of soul-searching. The relentless passage of time and the ever-unpredictable future necessitate a pause, a taking of stock.

A question that often emerges is one of continued relevance: How do you channel a lifetime’s work into something fit for the future?

It’s clear that HUGO BOSS has been having exactly this conversation as it approaches its centenary. Though it may have branched out over the years into casual wear and athleisure, its name has always been synonymous with impeccable tailoring. And while the suit is far from dead, any strict rules of dressing that may have survived the turn of the millennium suddenly feel cold to the touch.

This is why BOSS has metamorphosed, just in time for spring/summer. The brand has undergone a thorough refresh: It feels sportier, worn with a deliberate insouciance. Its modern new uniform has stuck largely to a palette of camel, black and white with bolts of BOSS’ signature orange. A new house stripe runs neatly down the sides of wide-legged men’s trousers and divides the back of a sweeping women’s cape neatly in two. The same tricolore becomes the panels of a gently oversized polo shirt, turning up again in oversized parkas and across the hem of a car coat. Cleverly cementing the brand’s refreshed identity is a recurring ‘B’ monogram, emblazoned on jumpers and bomber jackets, and transforming into a repeating pattern across lightweight outerwear and jacquard sweaters.

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This is BOSS, so of course there’s tailoring – cutting has been employed to devastating effect with a double-breasted white men’s suit. But even this is ready for action, with generous proportions and sloping shoulders. It feels regressive to try to define what it’s created using conventional labels of formal and casual, day- and evening-wear, with tailoring cut from technical fabrics, while leathers, wools and silks are reserved for more athletic wares – boxy hoodies, drawstring trousers. It’s a tacit acknowledgement of the drift away from binary thinking and towards a world where rigid rules are in short supply.

Rather than pain itself to articulate this new direction, the fashion house is turning to a troop of artists, athletes and creatives with similar ideals to do the talking. Models Kendall Jenner, Hailey Bieber and Joan Smalls, the American rapper Future, Korean multi-hyphenate Lee Min-Ho, and athletes Anthony Joshua, Alica Schmidt and Matteo Berrettini all appear in the striking #BeYourOwnBoss campaign you’ve likely seen play out across social media. To launch the collection, BOSS travelled to the Dubai desert, premiering a film which starred the likes of Senegalese creative Khaby Lame, American singer Teyana Taylor and British actor Lucien Laviscount. As it played to the gathered crowd, who stood shoulder-to-shoulder, smartphones in hand, it was evident that this wasn’t the BOSS of yesteryear, but rather one ready to make a brand new mark.

ALL CLOTHING BOSS SPRING SUMMER 2022 COLLECTION Photography Paul Phung Styling Georgia Thompson

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Models Aramish Mangi and Ingrid Fernandes at Viva

Hairstyling Yoshitaka Miyazaki Make-up artist Rebecca Davenport

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MORE THAN THE EYE CAN SEE

By Dylan Holden. ANEST COLLECTIVE’s contributing creative director expounds the beauty of cross-cultural exchange

Brendan Mullane working at home, Rome

Pierre Soulages had been painting for hours and regarded his work with devastation; it was bad. But he persevered, and each new stroke brought with it the realisation he was no longer working with his favoured hue – black – but its very material; that with enough patience, its surfaces created a secret light. This seminal piece was the first in his lifelong series Outrenoir, the rough translation of which is ‘beyond black’. Daubed in thick calligraphy-like layers using improvised spades, spoons, brushes and rakes, his now infamous canvases carry a black pigment that is at once total and “reflects, transforms and transmutes the light it collects”. It is these abstract paintings from the French centenarian, along with the encouraged ‘errors’ of double exposure photography, that act as the conceptual springboards of ANEST COLLECTIVE’s illusory SS22.

“The idea for the collection was to look further than what is directly in front of you, beyond what the eye can see,” notes Brendan Mullane, contributing creative director. “There is so much texture and feeling in Soulages’ work, a depth that some might miss because of the striking black on black.” Trompe l’oeil and bold noble fabric pairing abound across men’s and women’s ready-to-wear: What appear to be traditional revers on a coat have in fact been severed and then re-appliqued in satin, mohair silk sits alongside nylon, while a poplin shirt is overlaid with the appliqued trace of a zippered jacket in superfine twill. These wily interpreted tailoring codes play out across (among others) ivory, blonde camel, taupe and bone, steel, powder blue, chocolate and, of course, black.

Established in Shanghai, 2017, the label also counts Milan as home. Mullane – whose storied résumé includes Alexander McQueen, Burberry, Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Givenchy and Brioni – joined just as the pandemic began imposing lockdowns, in 2020. Balancing out the Zoom calls across vastly different time zones was the opportunity to physically connect with the UK textile mills

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and family-owned Italian manufacturers it selectively works with, some of whom the creative director has known for over two decades. “One of the best parts of my job is meeting with the artisans who translate and breathe life into our work,” he says. “As a designer, that is incredibly enriching.”

Sartorial craftspeople are not the only components of its refined point of view, its wider world also complemented by collaborations with artists and idiosyncratic shoots from acclaimed photographers such as Jack Davison, as well as younger talent like Osma Harvilahti. It should come as no surprise that its Shanghai boutique, located in Xintiandi, is informed by ‘suprematist’ painter Kazimir Malevich’s concept of ‘a space without limits’. For Mullane, the cooperative potential of ANEST COLLECTIVE, in which different domains are brought in, is only getting started: “When we invite a creative to work with us, it is to celebrate their vision, not enforce ours. It is a wonderful thing to watch an artist come into their element on set, bringing their expression of the brand. In a way, we are acting as a gallery for these different perspectives. The future will involve bringing more people into the fold – we want to show the beauty that cross-cultural exchange creates.”

That future, insofar as the autumn/winter collection later this year, is a reflection of its work to date, and our collective emotional state after a generation-defining health emergency. Titled Fragmentation, the garments are currently embargoed, but Mullane confirms they are aptly built around the notion of pulling things apart and putting them back together. “I both loved and hated the lockdowns. It was tough, but they also gave us the ability to reset… to grow in difficult circumstances.

The upcoming pieces are some of our strongest statements yet, told in a quietly confident voice. Boundaries are there to be challenged. After everything we have been through, it is a chance to ask: How are we rebuilding ourselves?”

Brendan Mullane. Photography Emanuele Camerini

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How do you remain grounded after being in some of the biggest film franchises of the 21st century? For the industry veteran, the answer is simple: keeping faith, and family, close WORDS TOM LAMONT PHOTOGRAPHY RYAN JAMES CARUTHERS STYLING JULIE VELUT

Potentially the next decade could be really interesting for me.

Far more interesting than my 20s, if I get the right opportunities

Orlando Bloom has a study in his Santa Barbara home that is separated from the rest of the ground floor by drawn curtains. He takes video meetings and phone calls in this study, which also has shelves that are filled with model cars and a carved Gohonzon scroll before which Bloom, a practising Buddhist, offers daily prayers. Aptly, for an actor who made his name playing an expert archer in five The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies between 2001 and 2014, he also has a bow and an arrangement of arrows on top of one of the filing cabinets.

But it’s the drawn curtains that give this room its character, constantly letting in the wafted sounds of dogs yapping and children playing from elsewhere in the house.

His 18-month-old daughter is obsessed with this curtain, Bloom explains, as he’s chatting to Port over Zoom one day in early spring. One of her favourite things is to push her face through the hangings and surprise her dad while he’s working (maybe reading scripts for his Amazon show, Carnival Row, which has just filmed a second series, or planning field trips with

Unicef, with whom he has collaborated since 2007). Here she comes now, his little girl, distracting Bloom mid-sentence, so that he abandons what he’s saying, grins, and speaks in the exaggerated and unselfconscious way of besotted dads everywhere: “Oh-h-h-h… What are you doing? Oh-h-h-h.”

“What were we just talking about?” he asks, turning back to our conversation.

How parenthood changes a person?

“Oh yeah!” says Bloom. He’s wearing a white t-shirt today; his dark hair is oiled and messy. A rapid and enthusiast talker, “a glasshalf-full guy”, he’s maybe a little extra upbeat today thanks to a flask of strong coffee that he sips from at intervals. “I think having kids has a massive impact on your processes as an adult. Certainly has on mine. You’re not the most important person in the room anymore.

You’re not even the most important person in your own head.”

Bloom had his daughter with his partner of several years, the American popstar Katy Perry. He also co-parents an 11-year-old son

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ORLANDO BLOOM WEARS ZEGNA SS22 THROUGHOUT

from a previous marriage, to the Australian model Miranda Kerr. How has he found these dual-track experiences of fatherhood, a decade apart?

“Even though I was 30 when I had my son, I feel like I was very young,” he says. “I remember I wanted to be there for every ‘first’: first this, first that, first time he went down a slide. If I missed a first I was livid.” He can see with some experience that those firsts are no more important than seconds, thirds, hundredths. The whole journey is to be appreciated. Now, “there’s less anxiety attached to the parenting process,” he finds. “More joy. More appreciation.”

Something similar has been at work when it comes to how Bloom approaches show business in his 40s, he says. “I’m 25 years deep in this industry, now. I can see that it’s all ebbs and flows. I had such a white-hot start that I could look at it [now] and say, ‘What am I doing?’ But I’ve learned that it’s ebbs and flows. And I give myself props, sometimes, just for having stamina. Just for still being in the game.”

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That was nearly lights-out for me.

I was told I was never gonna walk again. Everything felt like a blessing after that

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I’m 25 years deep in this industry, now. I can see that it’s all ebbs and flows

He grew up in Canterbury in south-east England, his childhood defined by academic struggles at school (Bloom is dyslexic), a pronounced creative streak (interests in drama, sculpture and photography) and a topsy-turvy grounding in religion. “I was confirmed by the Archbishop of Canterbury,” he says, adding that there was also a countering Jewish influence in his life, which came from his mother Sonia’s husband.

At 16, when Bloom moved to London to enrol in a drama programme, eventually ending up as a student at the National Youth Theatre, he came across Buddhism. He hasn’t looked back since.

“There were years when I hardly practised it,” he says, “but the philosophy and the thinking never left me. It’s pretty basic: You do good; you get good.” He’s also found in Buddhism useful lessons about dealing with praise and also dealing with censure. “Both of which you get a lot of, when you work in the public eye…

I make tons of mistakes,” Bloom says, shrugging, “all the time. And the practice has helped me to grow from those mistakes. Rather than shaming or guilting myself, I try to tell myself: ‘Well, that happened; it’s done.’ Or, ‘Well done for that!’”

He’s an extreme sports type, anything fast (motorbikes on raceways), anywhere dangerous (paddle boarding with sharks). In a way it’s a surprise he should be so casual with his body: Aged 20, and still at drama school, he fell out of a third-storey window by accident and broke his back. “That was nearly lights-out for me. I was told I was never gonna walk again. Everything felt like a blessing after that.”

For several years, indeed, everything was a blessing, at least in acting terms. Just before he graduated he was cast as the warrior elf Legolas in the original The Lord of the Rings trilogy. He spent months filming in the blissful surrounds

of rural New Zealand, still an anonymous figure, and when the movies were drip-released to great acclaim between 2001 and 2003, Bloom became a star. Scattered between these films, he was in two Pirates of the Caribbean movies, enormous money-makers in their own right.

“Forget the successes, though, man,” Bloom grins. “Nobody remembers the successes: not really. I do! I want to. But I don’t think other people want to.”

He says this jokily, without bitterness, but the fact remains: Press attention on Bloom has been intense and sometimes harsh. Two blockbusters (Troy, Kingdom of Heaven) followed shortly after The Lord of the Rings, as well as comedy The Calcium Kid and Cameron Crowe’s drama Elizabethtown. “I’m grateful for the path,” Bloom says, looking back over it all. “But there were aspects of it that were unexpected. And unclear.” For years, after a third Pirates movie

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Grooming Lori Guidroz Styling assistant Eliza Karpel Photo assistant Andrew Friendly Production Arzu Kocman at Productionising Production assistant Alan Krohn Location Topanga Creative Acres Location Ranch

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When you have kids in your life, when you see the joy of them experiencing the world for the first time, it’s a reminder that all the other things get in the way of that

in 2007, Bloom was seen infrequently. He did some theatre in New York and London. He became a dad. He teamed with Unicef, advocating for children’s rights in Nepal, Sarajevo, Jordan and Niger.

Asked whether his involvement with that charity was a rejection of what came before, or an effort to plot a new course, Bloom says: “Probably a bit of both. I’d been on this crazy train... But there’s a stigma around everything, right?” He means, a derisive reaction to actors who involve themselves with aid work. “It’s like, ‘Who are you to help?’ And that question has repeated in my own mind. ‘Who am I to help?’”

In the end, he decided there were a million ways to talk yourself out of doing something helpful.

Better to do the helpful thing, he reasoned, and keep doing it. Outlast the sceptics. The day we spoke he was planning a trip to Warsaw with Unicef, then on to Ukraine.

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In the early 2010s, Bloom reunited with Peter Jackson to appear in the latter two The Hobbit movies, reprising his role as Legolas in The Desolation of Smaug and The Battle of the Five Armies.

(Recently, curious, he took those bow and arrows from his study and set up an impromptu archery session with his son in the back garden.

“Still got it,” Bloom reports, with relief.) Since 2019, he has headed up the cast of the Amazon TV show, Carnival Row, a parable about refugees set in a world that humans and fairies coinhabit. “I love my job,” he posted on social media, after filming on the show’s second series finished in September.

Does he still love his job, at an age and stage when complacency in any line of work begins its normal creep? “There’s nowhere I’d rather be than on set. And I haven’t become complacent, no,” he says. At the same time, he explains, “I definitely don’t think that I’ve quite landed…

Potentially the next decade could be really interesting for me. Far more interesting than my 20s, if I get the right opportunities. I’m a safe bet, I think, because I do everything in my power to make good on an opportunity.”

He glances off at the curtains that separate his study from the rest of the home. The family dogs are making a racket out there. And from some other room there comes the sound of his daughter, shrieking with glee. “I mostly wake up every day with a sense of optimism,” he says.

“I think I’m a positive dude. And when you have kids in your life, when you see the joy of them experiencing the world for the first time, it’s a reminder that all the other things get in the way of that.”

Better to come at life with the pleasure of a child, pushing their face through Dad’s big curtains? Bloom smiles. “That’s it,” he says, “that’s it.”

The up-and-coming actor is set to make waves as Johnny Rotten in Danny Boyle’s Sex Pistols mini-series. Having fully immersed himself in a world of anarchy, he ruminates on his physical transformation and the joy of celebrating underdogs WORDS SIMRAN HANS PHOTOGRAPHY IAN KENNETH BIRD STYLING MITCHELL BELK

To become John Lydon, Anson Boon took a field trip to London’s King’s Road. The 22-year-old actor made his way to Worlds End, Vivienne Westwood’s boutique in Chelsea, and searched for something that would make him feel like a Sex Pistol. “I remember going in there and buying a bright pink pair of trousers with underwear on the outside,” he says with a smirk. “Just to know what it was like to buy something super unique, and then go out and wear it. To see if people would stare. They do, by the way.”

Boon would be wise to get used to people staring at him. He is about to get recognised a lot more now he’s starring in Pistol, Craig Pearce and Danny Boyle’s new limited series for FX. Set in London in 1975, the six-part show is based on Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol, Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones’ 2016 memoir. Boon plays lead singer John Lydon, the punk prophet better known as Johnny Rotten.

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ANSON BOON WEARS SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO SS22 THROUGHOUT

Growing up wanting to be an actor in a place where people aren’t actors can make you feel like an outsider

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I’m so romantic about that period of 1975–1978… What they did was so profound and so special, I think we allow that to be timeless

Speaking over Zoom, from the rooftop of a hotel in Los Angeles, Boon squints a little in the sunlight. Wearing a lime green Comme des Garçons t-shirt (a Christmas present from his mum), a pair of AirPods and a gleaming Hollywood smile, his sunny demeanour doesn’t exactly scream anarchy.

“I’ve got this distinct memory of my mum driving me and my brother to our local cinema, which she used to do most weekends,” he says, of growing up in Peterborough, about an hour north of Cambridge. Next to the cinema, he remembers, there was a water tower. “It’s funny, because when I got to LA, I realised that all the studios had water towers, and water towers are part of this real Hollywood image.” Living in “the middle of nowhere” and watching movies with his younger brother, Boon began to dream of being on the other side of the screen.

He’s since worked with Kate Winslet and

Susan Sarandon, on the late Roger Michell’s tear-jerking family drama Blackbird, played a young Logan Marshall-Green in the Netflix series The Defeated, set in post-WWII Berlin, and starred in Sam Mendes’ Oscar-winning war epic 1917, shot by the legendary British cinematographer Roger Deakins to appear as a single, unbroken take.

Boon went to what he describes as “the most normal, average secondary school you could possibly imagine”, attending drama clubs after class. At 16, he went on to his local technical college. “All of my best friends were going to do carpentry and brickwork and plumbing, and I went to do theatre studies, which they all thought was hilarious,” he says. “I stayed there for about six months, and I realised this wasn’t getting me to where I wanted to be.”

He dropped out, even though in the UK, fulltime education is compulsory until age 18. “The

council used to ring up my mum like ‘Why is Anson not in education?’, and I just kept saying to her, ‘Tell them, he’s working as an actor!’” he says. Soon, he was googling “London acting agent” and cold emailing the people he hoped would get him into open auditions and commercials. “I must’ve sent out over 100 emails. I think I got two responses,” he recalls. One became his first agent.

“Growing up wanting to be an actor in a place where people aren’t actors can make you feel like an outsider,” he says. That feeling was something that helped him to connect with the character of John Lydon, a working class misfit who was kicked out of school at the age of 15. “He had this determination to do something that was so out of the box for him.”

Boon put himself forward for a part in the series during the first lockdown of the pandemic. He had originally submitted a self-tape

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You want to chase authenticity, but it’s not a documentary.

It’s a piece of drama, written by a screenwriter

audition for “general Pistol”, but was asked to come in and read for the role of Lydon.

“I distinctly remember the casting brief was: ‘Intense, witty, lacerating, a natural born provocateur, classical cheekbones with a tortured, angular frame, utterly compelling’. It blew my mind,” says Boon, becoming animated. Lydon auditioned for the Sex Pistols too, delivering an out-of-tune rendition of Alice Cooper’s ‘I’m Eighteen’ in front of manager-to-be Malcolm McLaren, in Vivienne Westwood’s clothing store, SEX. Boon recreated Lydon’s outlandish audition for his own.

He and Boyle hit it off, bonding over a cup of tea overlooking the River Thames. “Our offices were the old ITV offices, right on the Southbank, so we had a view from Parliament to St Paul’s.” Both landmarks were the backdrop to the Pistols’ playful cruise down the Thames in June 1977, intended as a middle finger to

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the Queen’s silver jubilee. “I was immediately plunged into that kind of world. I was like, wow, we are in London, and we are about to take on a proper London story, about a proper London band.” He’s not convinced there is an obvious punk equivalent today. “I’m so romantic about that period of 1975–1978,” he says. “What they did was so profound and so special, I think we allow that to be timeless.”

In Pistol, the debonair McLaren, who is played by Thomas Brodie-Sangster of The Queen’s Gambit, describes Lydon as “an untutored genius” who stinks of “rancid brilliance”.

Neither Boon nor Lydon had any kind of formal training. Both took a bracing approach to learning on the job. Still, there’s one person who he didn’t get to talk to when preparing for the role.

Lydon has not endorsed the project, filing (and ultimately losing) a lawsuit against his

former bandmates over the use of the Sex Pistols’ music in the show. “The Sex Pistols have become the property of Mickey fucking Mouse,” he told the Telegraph, citing Disney’s ownership of the show’s network, FX. “In an ideal world, yeah, I would love to meet with and speak to John,” says Boon. “I felt a huge responsibility to respect this artist that I so admire, and that I genuinely think is a genius.” That said, he’s keen to point out that as an actor, the task is to tell a dramatic story. “You want to chase authenticity,” he says, “but it’s not a documentary. It’s a piece of drama, written by a screenwriter.”

Boon felt it was important, however, to approach portraying a real person with the utmost care. He threw himself into the research process, and now considers himself a Sex Pistols expert. “I should probably work in a museum about them,” he says, grinning.

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Grooming Liz Taw Production Lock Studios

“I wouldn’t even need a script for the tour, because I’d know it all.” He read Jones’ memoir, and all three of Lydon’s books, before creating, in his words, “this shrine, to all things Rotten”.

He compiled scraps of clothing, and printouts of the graffiti Lydon sprayed all over the band’s original rehearsal space on Denmark Street, in Soho. He describes his dressing room on set as “covered in photos of him, photos of the band, photos of his family, timelines, bits of material”. He decorated his trailer, to the point where he couldn’t see the walls.

In the audition scene, Boon channels Lydon’s staccato physicality, contorting his body and blowing his nose, shoving the used tissue in his would-be bandmates’ faces. Lydon had meningitis growing up, Boon says, an illness that took him out of school. “He had long lasting health effects from that, like sinus issues, but also issues with his posture and his back,”

he says, explaining how those issues informed the singer’s physical presence on stage.

“I injured myself a lot,” says Boon. “My jaw popped out of place from singing in such a high pitch with such intensity. I sprained everything.

I nearly broke my coccyx.” In the Sex Pistols’ debut TV performance, Lydon performs a dramatic drop, arching into a backbend. “In the first take, I miscalculated,” says Boon. He ended up smashing into the drum kit.

Learning to look like a rock star involved an intensive, three-month-long band camp. Boon, who had never sung before, worked with a vocal coach who helped him raise his naturally sonorous voice by two entire octaves. He would dress for band practice in tight leather trousers and brothel creepers. “They’re super tight on your foot,” he says of the chunky, high-soled shoes.

“They’re quite restrictive, in the way the bondage trousers are as well; you can’t move your

legs wide. As soon as you put them on, it completely affects your physicality.” The wardrobe gave him the confidence to become someone who never retreated in front of the microphone.

Boon describes Lydon as “a voice of the people” who was “angry at his situation”. Lydon’s 2014 memoir is titled Anger Is an Energy. “He was 18 years old when he wrote lyrics for ‘God Save the Queen’,” says Boon. “‘Anarchy in the UK’ is some of the best poetry of that generation. I think he was channelling his rage in the form of creativity.” It’s Lydon’s will to transform his own life, Boon thinks, that is worth celebrating today.

“The boys in the Sex Pistols, they had no prospects, no easy route into success. You’re looking at five working class boys that revolutionised music, fashion and culture. To me that is always a story that will be relevant and worth telling – the underdog powering through and succeeding.”

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SPECIAL WATCH INNOVATION REPORT

120 Editor’s Letter 122 We Turned Things Upside Down

124 Movement in Focus 126 What’s Ticking 130 Just in Time 138 Wrapper’s Delight 154 Time Warp 162 Mould Injection CARTIER, TANK AMERICAINE CHRONO REFLEX, 1996 Photography Rebecca Scheinberg Set design Carrie Louise

ALL WORDS ALEX DOAK UNLESS SPECIFIED

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Editor’s Letter

A few weeks before this special issue of Port’s TenTen horological supplement went to press, I had the privilege of touring the gleaming new additions to Ulysse Nardin and Girard-Perregaux’s shared factory floors, deep in Swiss horology’s Jura mountains heartland. While gawping slack-jawed at a battery of multi-million-franc CNC machines, milling bars of steel to tolerances of around a twentieth of the width of a human hair, despite seeming more suited to the set of Aliens, my guide reminded me: The basic mechanical principles of a finely tuned mechanical watch may not have changed much in 200 years, but the way you make it definitely has.

Just as Switzerland’s genius Giulio Papi did so presciently in the early ’80s (his foreword, overleaf, makes for a compelling read), today’s watchmakers are harnessing the very latest in computerised tech to make something seemingly anachronistic, but in fact more multifaceted than ever. Since quartz technology wiped the floor accuracy-wise back in the ’70s, Switzerland’s finest have been free to showcase everything other than the time that goes into that 40mm-wide disc on your wrist.

This innovation-focused edition of TenTen reports on the incredible feats of sapphire-crystal microsculpture making chiming watches louder than ever; why Cartier’s outré case shapes still have the power of now; how ‘connected’ smartwatches are entering the legitimate luxury lexicon and the marginal gains that keep Rolex ahead of the entire game… Things never properly considered before we all relied on our mobile phones to check the time.

Time waits for no man, they say, and the horologists are hardly resting on their laurels.

– Alex Doak

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SPECIAL WATCH INNOVATION REPORT

Photography Harry Edmonds

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“We turned things upside down”

WORDS GIULIO PAPI

Giulio Papi and Dominique Renaud were Audemars Piguet’s most precocious watchmakers in the early ’80s – maverick artisans engaged in constant one-upmanship. By hand, they could perfectly openwork, polish and chamfer a movement’s bridge in one minute and 50, 40, even 30 seconds, while their benchfellows took 20 minutes at least.

Nevertheless, when the two friends broke away to pioneer something as paradoxical as the innovative mechanical wristwatch, it was considered laughable. It was a time when exponentially cheaper, ultimately disposable electronic timekeeping was laying waste to the Swiss industry. But, relieved of its quotidian time-telling duty, Renaud et Papi SA soon proved that the spring-powered timepiece could be elevated as kinetic artform, capitalising on wealthy collectors seeking something with soul and eternity.

Ever since, wilfully elaborate haute horlogerie has known no bounds. Monsieur Papi himself – born in Swiss horology’s own high-altitude cradle of La Chauxde-Fonds to Italian parents – remains no less passionate about his craft, nor the enduring interest in micro-mechanics for the sheer sake of it.

Dominique and I met while working at Audemars Piguet in Le Brassus, up in the Jura Mountains’ Vallée de Joux – the Silicon Valley of the 19th century, and still the heartland of complicated

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Giulio Papi working on geometries for Audemars Piguet’s revolutionary RD#2 concept of 2018: a perpetual calendar almost 1.5mm thinner than the previous record holder

SPECIAL WATCH INNOVATION REPORT

mechanical watchmaking. We left the company together in 1986 to found our own workshop.

Imagine: two complete strangers starting their own company, Renaud et Papi, armed with nothing less than a dream to build complications and sell them to various makers – when hardly anyone was interested in Swiss mechanicals!

We went to see IWC, because we liked what they were doing, and told them: “Your Da Vinci chronograph with perpetual calendar is only missing a minute repeater to qualify as a Grande Complication.” A gap, to our disbelief, we were invited to fill immediately, by developing a retro-fitted, ‘modular’ chiming mechanism.

Our original plan had been to develop calibres with complications, financing these projects by selling openworked watches. We were good and super-fast when it came to openworked movements. But things worked out in a way no one could have planned for. Nobody wanted our movements, but IWC’s visionary, tragically late CEO, Günter Blümlein, had seen something else in us. (Just as he’d predicted the revival of our craft overall, rebuilding Jaeger-LeCoultre and Germany’s A Lange & Söhne in parallel.)

With this first commission, we realised we were onto something you might call ‘revolu-

tionary’. And with legs. The musical module we developed for IWC is still in their Portugieser collection, over 30 years on. Our original employer then hired us back for striking mechanisms, as well as tourbillons – rewarding us with a majority stake in the business and a battery of cutting-edge machinery. From 1992, the sign outside our new Le Locle workshops read ‘Audemars Piguet (Renaud et Papi) SA’.

We harnessed the newfound calculating power of computers, becoming the first in Switzerland to design movements by CAD in three coherent dimensions, rather than separate two-dimensional layers. We were also nimble in prototyping parts, thanks to the flexibility and speed afforded by our computer-programmed electro-erosion machines.

By 1999, it could only be us to realise Richard Mille’s groundbreaking ‘F1’ concept of a stripped-back, futuristic ‘racing machine for the wrist’, with an engine in seamless concert with the chassis.

Again, APRP had a revolutionary notion of coherent watchmaking. People buy a Swiss watch because it appeals to them: It’s beautiful, has class, is functional, is pleasant to handle and wear. So we start with the design, to make incredible wristwatches first and foremost. Once you

Giulio Papi, photography courtesy of Audemars Piguet

have the design, you construct the movement, tailoring those mechanics in perfect coherence.

With this 20th-century mindset, we turned things upside down. Quite literally, as the view through the back of a fine watch has become as valuable as the logo on the front.

Do smartwatches pose a new threat to our craft, as East Asian quartz technology did in the early ’70s? I hope not, though I cannot predict the future. But there will always be a demand for well-made things, may this be cars or bespoke clothes and shoes. Our watches enter this same category of craft. If we keep doing a good job, if we remain relevant, pushing the limits of what’s possible, there is no threat.

Other than us? Right now, Rolex are doing an incredible job. Their ratio of quality versus investment is very hard to top. Their range is less broad than what, say, Audemars Piguet has to offer, but they do it so well. Another example is Bulgari: Just look at what they have done with their extra-thin constructions. IWC, you will say I am biased because I owe them a lot.

Nevertheless, technical innovation, small complications, coherence, value for money… there is something there. Some of Günter Blümlein’s soul remains present, too. The man who saw it all – and believed in us – first.

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PHOTOGRAPHY LEANDRO FARINA AT EAST PHOTOGRAPHIC SET DESIGN ALICE WHITTICK PRODUCTION ASSISTANT HERMIONE RUSSELL AT ARTPRODUCTION

CALIBRE

Movement in Focus

WATCHMAKER

Patek Philippe

YEAR OF ORIGIN

1977

VITAL STATISTICS

161 parts 48-hour self-wound power 3Hz balance oscillation

HOUSING

Calatrava 4997/200G-001

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Created when electronic quartz technology was slimming down wristwatches to diaphanous extents, Patek Philippe’s micromechanical engineers proved it could be done with moving parts too, ‘embedding’ the self-winding gold rotor into the height of the base movement where it would normally spin on top. So perfect, the calibre geometry has barely changed since.

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What’s Ticking

New manoeuvres at the cutting edge of horology Crystal-clear son et lumière

Twenty-five years is a short time in the venerable (aka glacial) culture of Swiss watchmaking, but nevertheless Chopard’s elite ‘LUC’ division has described a dazzling arc of mechanical innovation and industrial diversification in its quarter century. Back in 1996 (the pandemic lets them off a year, OK?), a youthful co-president Karl-Friedrich Scheufele took the reins from his father, who’d in turn bought said reins wholesale from the Chopard dynasty in the ’60s.

While his sister Caroline was establishing the Riviera’s go-to haute joaillerie side of things, K-F set about re-establishing a modern manufacture d’horlogerie in the spirit of LUC’s eponym and founder, Louis-Ulysse Chopard (1836– 1915). This year’s Full Strike Sapphire, in just five examples, is a fitting culmination and celebration of accrued know-how: an outrageous evolution of the chiming ‘minute repeater’, switching from hammers that chime the hours (‘ding’), quarters (‘ding dong’) and remaining minutes (‘dong’) on two steel-alloy wire gongs encircling

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the movement to two sapphire-crystal gongs, machined intricately from the same block of crystal as the dome covering the dial. Oh, and tuned perfectly to C-sharp and F respectively.

Reviewing comparative sound-wave graphs, the volume and sonority over steel is obvious.

For 2022 though, not only is the entire case now rendered in clear sapphire (with tolerances that assume a jaw-gritting rejection rate), but Monsieur Scheufele has recruited the expertise of Gautier and Renaud Capuçon – virtuoso cellist and violinist respectively – as well as the boffins of Geneva’s HEPIA acoustics laboratory to finetune the sapphire gongs for emotional quality.

Something that, once dialled in, can be reproduced perfectly every time, given sapphire’s absolute physicality, over alloy wires. Happy silver anniversary, LUC.

The stars aligned

Ulysse Nardin was the chronometer-maker of the early 20th century. Long before GPS or electronic quartz technology, the merchant navy’s naviga-

Chopard L.U.C Full Strike Sapphire

tors still relied on steadfast, gimbal-mounted mechanical watches as a means of determining longitude – a system proved, famously, by Yorkshire’s John Harrison in the 18th century, over stargazing.

However, the stars are still our ultimate clock face. No matter the accuracy of today’s satellites or atomic clocks, the rotation of the Earth relative to the heavens is still the absolute baseline.

It occasionally wobbles with our planet’s erratic magma core and necessitates the odd leap second being added to 31 December. Thus, when Rolf Schnyder (1935–2011) bought Ulysse Nardin lock, stock and winding barrel, his first move was bringing aboard a rising star of whom the young Monsieur Nardin would surely have approved: scientist, astronomer, horologist and all-round brainbox Ludwig Oechslin, discovered by Schnyder restoring an astrolabe clock in the back of a Lucerne boutique.

Oechslin’s 1985 trio of astronomical wristborne masterpieces ushered in the late-’80s revolt against electronic quartz, this year celebrated by

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Ulysse Nardin’s spectacular Blast Moonstruck in sci-fi black ceramic. Putting aside the Copernican representation of our solar system in favour of an easier geocentric approach, it accentuates the idea of being at the heart of the universe. The northern hemisphere’s pole is sapphire-domed, while the moon phase in a round aperture is governed by an elaborate gear train that makes one circle of the dial in a lunar-correct 29 days, 12 hours, 41 minutes and 9.3 seconds.

Meanwhile, the true, orbital position of the sun is represented by a glowing disc in bronzite, and the time in any of the world’s 24 principal time zones can be ascertained at the push of a button.

Speed, distance, time

French-designed, Swiss-made Bell & Ross might seem to be going large on the ‘circle within a square’ format of cockpit instrumentation that it coined back in 2005, only with added pop-art pizzazz. But, this time, the watchmaker is making a deliberate bid for anything that moves that

Top Ulysse Nardin Blast Moonstruck Bottom Bell & Ross BR03-94 Multimeter

isn’t an aeroplane. And it isn’t as complex as it might first seem.

All it takes is a glance to the small user manual, printed on the left-hand side of the dial rather than buried in an actual booklet. It sets out, in colour-coded fashion, how the stopwatch, or ‘chronograph’, function’s central seconds hand can be used with the five concentric scales to calculate five separate activities on the fly, according to three fundamental data: the base unit (base), the function (function) and the unit of measurement (unit), calibrated logarithmically, but only requiring the ability to multiply in factors of 10.

To wit, the pulsometer counting the heart beats per minute on a 15-beat basis; the asthmometer monitoring breaths on a five-breath basis; and then three tachometers measuring speed, in km/h. Breaking from the supersonic world of jet-powered flight, their measurement is based on three different units: 100m, 250m or 1km – the runner, the cyclist, the sports driver.

Even if your fitness doesn’t improve, your arithmetic surely will.

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Audemars Piguet

YEAR OF ORIGIN

2022

VITAL STATISTICS

268 parts 55-hour self-wound power 4Hz balance oscillation

HOUSING

Royal Oak ‘Jumbo’ Extra-Thin 50th Anniversary

7121

For the first time in 50 years, since AP’s iconic steel sports watch took the Riviera jet set by storm with its octagonal boldness, the mechanics inside – traditionally based on JaegerLeCoultre’s 2120 of 1967 – have been upgraded for this golden anniversary with the all-new, in-house 7121. Its energy reserves are up, among many things, charged by a rotor stencilled out all too appropriately.

The humble rectangular date window might seem an obvious adornment, but it took serial pioneer Rolex and its immortal ‘Datejust’ to bring it mainstream, less than 80 years ago

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PHOTOGRAPHY ROBIN BROADBENT

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IN TIME Rolex Oyster Perpetual Datejust

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Collectors are a passionate, borderline dogmatic lot in the rarefied world of watches. If they’re not taking to social media to triumphantly celebrate their steel GMT-Master II in period-correct ‘Pepsi’ colourway (for the uninitiated, this is code for a 24-hour bezel in blue and red), then self-confessed watch nerds will be bemoaning the very same Rolex for its waiting list (if you can convince your friendly neighbourhood authorised dealer to chalk you up in the first place).

So it says everything that such a seemingly innocuous feature as a date window could inspire enough debate to warrant over 50,000 Instagram posts – and they’re just the ones that have been tagged #nodate.

Yes, no date. The popular-unpopular feeling towards that tiny metallic frame at either three, four or six o’clock is that it has no place on a vintage dial design, or squeezed awkwardly between chronograph counters. Occasionally, the vapours are indeed justified, if we’re being pedantic (which we are). The past decade’s craze for archive raiding and rose-tinted throwbacks – arguably fuelled by the nostalgia that always brews following a financial crash – has brought back some gorgeous mid-century designs, which haven’t always been 100 per cent faithful. What’s

that date doing on a 1967 reissue?

But hang on… Why wouldn’t wristwatches from 60 or 70 years ago feature something as commonplace as a date window? The truth is, the feature wasn’t invented until 1945, by Rolex.

You’re looking at the most recent iteration of its pioneering ‘Datejust’ right now, a model that might be almost 80 years old, but that’s a blip in Swiss watchmaking.

This particular Datejust is also most definitely not a vintage revival, dressed as crisply as iceberg lettuce and embodying all of Rolex’s up-to-theminute mechanical bells and whistles – just as 1945’s Datejust did, in fact. As well as its newfangled ‘roulette’ date, whose numbers alternated between red and black, it consolidated all the major innovations that the brand had contributed to the modern wristwatch up until then: chronometric precision (first chronometer certificates granted to a Rolex wristwatch as of 1910), waterproofness (creation of the screwed, rubber-gasket ‘Oyster’ case in 1926) and self-winding (via its ‘Perpetual’ rotor patented in 1931).

What took its titular date system – a number ring circling the top of the movement, toothed on the inside and nudged every 24 hours by a small cog – so long? Perhaps watchmakers would

have been inclined to include a basic date indication sooner if our calendar months were more consistent, or if we could be surer of ourselves beyond simply remembering to wind the damn thing. Many more would rely on their watch rather than reaching for the diary if they definitely hadn’t forgotten to adjust it on the 1st of March, May, July or December. A situation you can blame on the vanity of Emperor Augustus in 8 BCE. Julius Caesar’s son is broadly seen as the architect of our 48-month leap-year calendar. In honour of his overthrowing Antony and Cleopatra in the sixth month of 31 BCE, so-called Sextilis was renamed Augustus. But unlike Caesar’s own July, Sextilis only had 30 days, so he one-upped August to 31, which meant that February, September and October had to be clipped.

To adjust for the solar year’s extra quarter-day, the 365-day civil year of course needed to ‘leap’ every fourth. The longest run of calendar-correct confidence we can therefore enjoy is 92 days, from 1 July to 30 September.

The relative novelty of the lone date indication comes as an even greater surprise when you consider horological history’s many examples of the perpetual calendar, which perfectly accounted for all the above foibles of the Julian

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calendar. Day, month and year always correct, even on leap years, thanks to a fiendishly complicated mechanism just behind the dial, governed at heart by a 48-toothed cam that completes a single turn once every 48 months – first seen in a Thomas Mudge pocket watch in 1764.

Another full 181 years to pare things back to a single window? Apart from the fact Hans Wilsdorf didn’t set up shop in London until 1905, before upping sticks for Geneva, you can bet your bottom Swiss franc he simply wanted to get it right. That’s what Rolex does best, and why, though progress may seem glacial, progress is always in motion, as substantial as a glacier.

If you’re lucky enough to get your wrist under a Rolex, you can be sure the most finely tuned mechanics are by your side, for life.

Girard-Perregaux’s sibling MIMO Watch had coined the window format in 1930, but the Datejust’s was the first to jump every midnight, so always discretely legible rather than halfway between two chopped-off numbers. Powered by the new Calibre 740, the window was located at three o’clock because most wear theirs on the left arm, so the date can peek easily from your cuff – an arrangement that almost universally persists.

The ‘just’ suffix stood for ‘just in time’, as the date clicked over at midnight… but not quite as precisely as billed. Its switchover started a couple of hours before, only completely disengaging the switch tooth from the date wheel around 2 am.

This made adjusting the date anywhere around the late evening or early morning mechanically precarious and warranty-invalidating – a fourhour no fly zone that brands using basic Sellita or ETA movements still have to flag up in their user manuals.

It was Rolex again who innovated the workaround, adapting the date-change mechanism in 1955 to jump instantly. A spring is slowly compressed by a cam attached to the core geartrain, released come the midnight hour with blink-andmiss-it speed. The same breakthrough Datejust also featured the new Cyclops magnifying lens, released two years prior on the recommendation of Hans Wilsdorf ’s long-sighted (and farsighted, for that matter) wife.

By the time the ‘1680’ Submariner came to market in the late-’60s – the first of Rolex’s pioneering diving family to be equipped with a date – the completion of the sub-aqua watch’s transition from specialist SCUBA tool to fashion acces-

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Post production Seth Personett

sory was deemed complete, so ubiquitous had the date window become, so quickly.

As for the current ‘41’ iteration you see here, it says everything of 1955’s evolution that Datejust’s eponymous gadgetry remains largely untweaked – just serving a larger 41mm beast. Being Rolex though, the rest is as cutting-edge as a mechanical timekeeper can be in 2022. Its ‘3235’ movement’s balance wheel ticks at a rate regulated extremely precisely via gold Microstella nuts dotting its circumference. The coiled hairspring it oscillates about is buffered by high-performance Paraflex shock absorbers, again designed and patented by Rolex and made entirely in-house at one of the giant’s state-of-the-art facilities dotting the Jura region. The hairspring itself is made of optimised blue ‘Parachrom’, resistant to all our digital devices’ magnetic pollution and 10 times more precise than a traditional hairspring in case of shocks: to be exact, −2/+2 seconds-per-day precise, above and beyond the −4/+6 envelope dictated by Switzerland’s chronometer certification body, COSC (who certify every Rolex, nonetheless).

Regardless of rheumy-eyed nostalgia, it’s a firm yes date in this camp.

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PHOTOGRAPHY LEANDRO FARINA AT EAST PHOTOGRAPHIC SET DESIGN ALICE WHITTICK PRODUCTION ASSISTANT HERMIONE RUSSELL AT ARTPRODUCTION

CALIBRE

Movement in Focus

WATCHMAKER

Bulgari

YEAR OF ORIGIN

2019

VITAL STATISTICS

433 parts 55-hour self-wound power 4Hz balance oscillation

HOUSING

Octo Finissimo Chronograph

BVL 318

Intricate ‘integration’ of the stopwatch mechanism into the already-wafer-thin base movement, along with a platinum weight rotating about its circumference, Bulgari scored its fifth slimmestever record in 2019, cementing Octo as so much more than a sculptural design classic.

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Even when shrouded by nostalgic dial designs, powered by seemingly archaic concoctions of springs, levers and cogs, the Swiss wristwatch has always been future forward and Alpine fresh; it manages that impossible task of preserving its past in aspic, while embracing new mechanical inventions, manufacturing processes and lightweight materials – in doing so, keeping itself as the ultimate sustainable investment

PHOTOGRAPHY ANGÈLE MORAIZ & PAUL MOUGEOT, AM+PM STUDIO

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Omega Speedmaster Chronoscope

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Blancpain Fifty Fathoms Bathyscaphe

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Blancpain’s Fifty Fathoms really did match up to its name back in 1953, fit for plumbing a full 91.14 metres. Predating even the Rolex Submariner, it was the first-ever commercial diving watch, pioneering not only a rubber-gasket case construct but also the circumferential rotating bezel on top, at the behest of the French navy’s covert frogmen – a means of instantly timing your oxygen reserves, by aligning a zero marker with your minutes hand. Now good down to a

full 300 metres, the steel design feels reminiscent, fit for purpose and yet properly luxe. £8,700

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Girard-Perregaux Free Bridge

Constant Girard-Perregaux slackened jaws at the 1889 Paris expo with his Tourbillon Sous Troi Ponts d’Or: swankily aligning and displaying three exquisitely polished arrow-head bridges, each suspending winding barrel, hour and minute hands and carousing tourbillon carriage respectively. Now, La Chaux-de-Fonds’ quiet man of haute horlogerie is taking these ‘bridges’ and running with them – most significantly, and affordably no less, with this UFO for the

wrist. ‘Free’ because the ticking escapement appears to hover hypnotically at six o’clock; it is intricately laser-etched from silicon wafer in a red-lit lab belonging to sibling brand Ulysse Nardin – a far cry from Constant’s 19th-century wood-panelled workshop, but entirely befitting his pioneering spirit. £15,600

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Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso Tribute Duoface Small Seconds The very fact J-LC’s iconic, art-deco Reverso case has barely changed in 91 years is testimony to how clever the ‘watchmaker’s watchmaker’ of Switzerland was from the outset, in terms of both design and engineering. Following a plea from boisterous British officer polo players, out on the fields of Jaipur in the days of the Raj, Jacques-David LeCoultre’s solution of flipping the glass of their wristwatches away from the path of flailing mallets, via a 51-part cradle mechanism, was ingenious and remains untrumped. £9,650

Cartier Pasha de Cartier Chronograph

Criminally forgotten between its blinging ’80s heyday and 2020, the Pasha was originally a Cartier classic resulting from a technical challenge presented in the ’30s by a North African VIP client: a watertight watch he could wear in the swimming pool – at the time, a long way off from the mainstream. A screw-down cap with a big rubber gasket was designed for protection, attached to the case via a tiny chain so that it wouldn’t be lost. This year, decked out with Cartier’s own, crisply operated stopwatch functionality. £8,350

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TAG Heuer Connected Calibre E4

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Do not adjust your set: This really is a smartwatch. And don’t get us wrong, we could have picked from a panoply of cutting-edge tech populating TAG Heuer’s current shop window, ticking to a more mechanical tune. But what’s significant about this year’s slimmed-down sartorial evolution of the watchmaker’s high-end ‘connected’ offering is that instead of seeming like a desperate bid to mitigate an encroaching threat, as with quartz tech in the ’70s, the

smartwatch has settled into the mid-range of luxury watchmaking as another catalogue category. Given the E4’s uprated Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity, sapphire-crystal dial, animated fitness coach, full-day charge… Well, Switzerland, let alone TAG Heuer, certainly seems to have no reason to be looking over its shoulder. £1,650

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Tudor Pelagos FXD

A decade ago, Rolex’s not-so-little brother Tudor launched its Black Bay diving watch in all its cult, vintage finery. The resulting fanboy fanfare drowned out (in a manner of speaking) Tudor’s more contemporary Pelagos diver, launched in parallel. But its super-utilitarian cocktail of titanium, chronometer rating, laser-crisp bezel, etc would never go unnoticed for long. Enter Tudor’s original military client, the French navy. The frogmen of Marine Nationale have, under appro-

priately deep cover for the past few years, worked with Tudor to hone their ideal evolution, and its ‘FXD’ suffix is a big hint. Reinsert two vowels and you have ‘fixed’ – i.e. strap bars at 12 and six o’clock, engineered as rigidly as possible from the case’s own block of metal. £3,000

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Chanel Monsieur Superleggera Back in 2016, Chanel’s Monsieur watch was the talk of the Basel trade fair, hands down – and it really was down on hands, having a ‘jumping’ digital hours, framed by a Place Vendômeshaped window, in tribute to Coco’s Parisian stomping ground. It’s the first to be driven by an entirely in-house-manufactured movement, created from scratch by indie virtuoso, Romain Gauthier, and in Superleggera guise. Petrolheads will find that name familiar, from the swirly badge adorning the bonnet of every DB4, 5 and 6 Aston Martin: The Italian coachbuilder whose lightweight spaceframes of the ’60s revolutionised sports cars inspired this handsome devil’s racy ceramic case. £30,500

Breitling Premier B15 Duograph 42 Unrecognised until its revival in 2019 at the hands of CEO Georges Kern – widely regarded as the architect of Breitling’s phenomenal recent reboot – the Premier was a sartorial diversion alongside the Swiss maker’s duties kitting-out WWII fighter cockpits. Don’t be fooled by the Duograph’s unapologetic retroness though: ticking inside are in-house-made mechanics that somehow feature a rattrapante function for just £7,700. From the French rattraper, meaning to ‘catch up’, the doubled-up sweep-seconds hand can split to time two successive moments. £7,700

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Vacheron Constantin Traditionnelle Complete Calendar

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It’s a big ask, embodying over 260 years of heritage while signposting the future of Geneva’s most venerable maison. But Vacheron Constantin’s Traditionnelle collection somehow manages that balance with quiet cool. If you know, you know, and that’s certainly the case with its triple calendar – right down to the near-imperceptible complexity underlying those date, day and month windows, oh, with a moonphase diorama too. Outwardly, imbued with the watch-

making pragmatism of the 1920s: aesthetics in full service to function. Inwardly, ticking every inherently decorative demand of the Poinçon de Genève, from mirror-sheen 45-degree-angled edges to polished ‘sinks’ on every toothed powertrain wheel. £35,100

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Omega Speedmaster Chronoscope

There are bells and whistles, and then there are bells, whistles, horns and out-and-out klaxons of horological ingenuity. Omega – that storied stalwart of James Bond, Olympic timing and NASA lunar modules – has made it its business over the past two decades to perfect the mechanical watch, compounding its real-world viability. It started with buying the rights to George Daniels’ friction-free Co-Axial mechanism, extending service intervals to 10 years rather than three.

Post Production Lise Grancher

Then its Master system of antimagnetic alloys was introduced to protect your watch from our battery-laden environment. Not that you’d know from this Bronze Gold beauty’s sepia hue – positively HG Wells in watch form. £12,580

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PHOTOGRAPHY LEANDRO FARINA AT EAST PHOTOGRAPHIC SET DESIGN ALICE WHITTICK PRODUCTION ASSISTANT HERMIONE RUSSELL AT ARTPRODUCTION

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Movement in Focus

WATCHMAKER

Nomos Glashütte

YEAR OF ORIGIN

2013

VITAL STATISTICS

84-hour manually wound power 3Hz balance oscillation

HOUSING

Lux Zikade

DUW 2002

Since reviving interest in East Germany’s former Mecca of watchmaking, the village of Glashütte, Nomos has spent the last 30 years building a Bauhaus-designed horological tribe, with concomitant Bauhaus accessibility. Just occasionally though, its watchmakers like to dabble in the higher end, celebrating their indigenous Saxon traditions in the process: three-quarter baseplate (with glorious sunray polish), engraved balance cock and blued steel screws.

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PHOTOGRAPHY LEANDRO FARINA AT EAST PHOTOGRAPHIC SET DESIGN ALICE WHITTICK PRODUCTION ASSISTANT HERMIONE RUSSELL AT ARTPRODUCTION

CALIBRE

Movement in Focus

WATCHMAKER

Grand Seiko

YEAR OF ORIGIN

2019

VITAL STATISTICS

72-hour manually wound power 32,768Hz quartz-crystal oscillation

HOUSING

Spring Drive Omiwatari

9R31

A concept doggedly pursued from 1977 by Seiko’s ambitious young engineer Yoshikazu Akahane: an ‘everlasting’ watch powered by a traditional mainspring, yet delivering the onesecond-a-day quartz precision that had made the Japanese giant’s name, with hands gliding smoothly via an electronic brake system. A mere 28 years and 600 prototypes later, Spring Drive was born.

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Cartier’s watch cases’ restlessly futuristic flex has always been groundbreaking, but now it’s eternal, thanks to the Vintage initiative PHOTOGRAPHY REBECCA SCHEINBERG SET DESIGN CARRIE LOUISE

TANK AMERICAINE CHRONO REFLEX 1996 A ’90s stroke of brilliance, regardless of its quartz innards, that represents Cartier and its bold-as-brass approach to streamlined case styling.

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At a 1973 auction in Geneva city centre, a besuited man from Cartier successfully bid for a piece made half a century earlier: a Portique ‘mystery clock’ shaped as a Shinto shrine with hands seemingly floating amidst a kaleidoscope of gold, platinum, rock crystal, diamonds, onyx, coral and enamel.

This was the first of a fabulous accrual of jewels, timepieces and precious accessories, all signed ‘Cartier’ and all representing the grande maison’s quintessential, Parisian panache. The oldest pieces date back to 1860 and, at last count, the Cartier Collection numbered over 3,000 pieces, a retro-fitted archive that is as informative to the boys and girls in R&D as it is poignant.

The Portique clock was also the start of a three-pronged advance in preserving and perpetuating that classical newness that shoots through every departement of Cartier. For a start, there is the core catalogue of new watches: a museum of undying classics in its own right – from the rectangular Tank (unaltered since 1917, rightly so) to the bimetal bling of Santos (even older, still square, just as hip) – but, much like Rolex, constantly fine-tuned to remain at the fore, technically.

There’s Cartier Privé too, which rather than nurture a core of evergreen favourites, sporadically revives vintage oddities. Often framing cutting-edge mechanical complications, the collection embraces the brand’s formative experimentalism (just try and google a normal round Cartier) and, needless to say, its hen’stooth exclusivity.

Which brings us to the third prong of Cartier’s self-curation: ‘Vintage’. If you think Privé sounds too limited for comfort look away now, for barely 20 historic pieces have passed muster since 2019, let alone found deserving homes.

Focusing only on mechanical watches made from the early 1970s to early 2010s, Cartier Vintage showcases the brand’s horological heritage through rigorous sourcing, authentication, restoration and ultimately sale of its most symbolic classics.

The early-’70s lower bracket doesn’t seem terribly ‘vintage’, but there’s pleasingly anarchic reasoning. Back then, amidst the onslaught of cheap East Asian electronics, a counterculture was brewing: collectors seeking something wilfully ornate, united in defiance of what English watchmaker Dr George Daniels dubbed, “those damned electricians”.

When batteries and circuit boards started swaggering about, Cartier responded commercially and bullishly with Collection Louis Cartier – watches with solid-gold cases and mechanical movements, at a time when vermeil gold-coating and quartz were order of the day. And it could only be Cartier. Since the days of Louis himself, around the turn of the century, his family firm’s wristwatches had always been the classiest expression of ‘timekeeping as jewellery’: simple two-handers, elevated to the sublime through innovative case, dial and inner mechanics, ticking and whirring in perfect harmony.

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Buying back old pieces, refurbishing them and offering them for sale at its own boutiques isn’t new to Cartier. In fact, it pre-empted the need for ‘authenticated pre-owned’ by a matter of decades, as the market has become more awash with legit yet un-legitimised vintage. But what Cartier Vintage offers today continues to push things forward.

Their salespeople-cum-curators consider ‘significantly historic’ pieces from clients in Paris, New York and London, with their authenticity then confirmed first and foremost by the archivists in Paris. Then they are given to Cartier’s watchmakers in Switzerland’s horology heartland, La Chaux-de-Fonds, where Paris has seen fit to establish a cutting-edge facility staffed by the local, expert tweezer-wielders, surrounded by docile cows and their clanking bells.

Although refurbishment includes an exhaustive servicing of each element, it never systematically erases inevitable signs of use – collectors cherish so-called ‘patina’. Which circles back to Cartier’s original intent of 1973 nicely.

Like the Japanese Shinto temple architecture and its inherent philosophy represented by that 1923 clock, there is no absolute right and wrong, and nobody is perfect. Shinto is an optimistic faith, just as a Swiss timepiece will always continue to keep ticking.

TORTUE DUAL TIME ZONE WATCH 2008 A perfectly restored example of Cartier’s Tortue, or ‘tortoise’-shaped watch, fitted, ironically enough, with on-the-move dual-time functionality.

DRIVER INCURVÉE 1997 Produced in a series of 150 examples to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Louis-Francois Cartier starting his company, a primitive reimagining of what might be handy for the keen motorist.

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CALIBRE

Movement in Focus

WATCHMAKER

Vacheron Constantin

YEAR OF ORIGIN

2015

VITAL STATISTICS

292 parts 65-hour manually wound power 2.5Hz balance oscillation

HOUSING

Traditionnelle Tourbillon Chronograph

3200

The apogee of modern haute horlogerie, steeped in brand heritage stretching back an unbroken 260-plus years, yet benefitting from all of today’s computer-facilitated CAD design and CNC machining. Note the 360-degrees-per-minute tourbillon, or ‘whirlwind’ cage, shaped as a Maltese cross, the emblem of Geneva’s oldest maison.

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While Renaud et Papi were about to rip up the hautemechanical rulebook (see TenTen’s foreword on page 122), another Swiss revolution was preparing for lift-off – only this time in plastic

The original cross-section sketch of Elmar Mock’s “Vulgaris” concept, later renamed “Swatch”

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Mould Injection It took a devastating toll of 60,000 jobs and 1,300 companies for Switzerland to finally capitulate in 1980. Electronic quartz technology was prioritised over spring-powered cogs, instantly precipitating a peculiar arms race between the Japanese and Swiss: the record for thinnest-ever wristwatch.

Movement-making giant ETA threw down the gauntlet with its Flatline calibre of 3.7mm.

After a tit for tat between Citizen, Seiko then Omega, the Japanese finally threw in the towel with ETA’s impossible mic drop: Delirium 4, at just 0.98mm case and all.

How? Diaphanous sapphire hands – but cleverer still, the caseback merged with the movement, replacing the inner mainplate on which all parts are mounted.

Only… it cost $60,000.

ETA knew the ‘caseback as mainplate’ could be key to developing a cheap fashion watch, to prop up the beleaguered Swiss industry. But it had another problem: a callow recruit by the name of Elmar Mock. In charge of his newly created plastics department during a year when ETA had laid off 4,000 people, he had just spent

500,000 Swiss francs on an injection-moulding machine.

“Without any authority,” Mock famously recalls, “I just put in the order. Then, at 11am on the 27th of March, 1980, I got a call from the general manager, telling me to be in his office at 1pm. I knew I was close to being fired.”

In that desperate two-hour window, the Swatch watch was born.

By lunchtime, he and his friend Jacques Müller had conceived and sketched the use of ultrasonic welding to build the mechanism straight into the case using the same plastic as Lego. Unrepairable but watertight, and halving the parts to just 51: a watch three-times cheaper than anything else produceable in Switzerland.

Duly convinced, Elmar Mock’s boss nonetheless gave him just six months to prototype, as punishment. Two painful years later and the plastic-fantastic icon had begun clocking up hundreds of millions of sales.

Did it make Elmar Mock rich? “Well,” the founder of the Creaholic inventions agency quips, “a year after the product went on sale, I got 700 Swiss francs as a thank you bonus.”

Time does not respect machines, or the desire to be quick.

It exists to measure the margin of victory in a sport where precision is paramount.

The Bremont WR-22 is the first official timepiece designed in collaboration with Williams Racing, drawing on a shared British heritage and dedication to engineering expertise.

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Fresh from winning hearts and an ensemble SAG Award for his role in Ted Lasso, the actor is continuing to seek out roles that portray nuanced narratives. Talking to Port, he reflects on growing up navigating disparate worlds, theatrical ambitions and belonging in a changing Brixton WORDS KEMI ALEMORU PHOTOGRAPHY ADAMA JALLOH STYLING REUBEN ESSER

The next stage I want us to get to [socio-politically] is being able to play Black characters without a trauma story, without it needing to be about how tough it is to be Black

Toheeb Jimoh is trying to keep a straight face.

“I’m a horrible, horrible, horrible person,” he insists. Of course, the 24-year-old is etched into the public psyche as the exact opposite. He’s mostly known as Sam Obisanya in Apple TV’s multiple-Emmy-winner, Ted Lasso, one of the warmest feel-good comedies currently on offer.

His character is a fan favourite and, to his dismay, adorable. Now, as he moves through the world, those who meet him expect him to be saccharine or else he’ll spoil the illusion. Even if someone approaches him for a picture on a packed-out sweaty tube journey, when we’re all at our grumpiest, he has to mimic his on-screen elation. “Sometimes I wish I was in Succession,” he says before beaming. He may protest, but Jimoh cannot hide his warmth.

When we speak, he’s at his parent’s home in Brixton where he was born and still resides, enjoying “free food”. In this “two-up, twodown council house” he unwinds after filming projects for streaming giants like Apple and Amazon, or collecting Critic’s Choice awards and other accolades for his acting. He’s wearing a youthful white sweater dotted with green

cartoon motifs, and behind him is a giant clock fashioned out of wall stickers. At times his brother pops into the room in a blue hoodie to wave and be nosy. There’s a humility to Jimoh as he chats about his career in the same way someone might talk about having a lowkey side hustle, and despite him being a rising star in the entertainment industry, at home he’s still the baby of the family.

There are bridges between his on-screen roles and his home life. Starring in Ted Lasso alongside Jason Sudeikis, who plays the titular role, the actor has garnered attention for his optimistic performance as a Nigerian rightback for the fictional AFC Richmond. Sam was initially written as Ghanaian, but he requested they change the role to his own background so he could interpolate his parent’s accent, and demonstrate the experiences of a Nigerian boy living in the UK. So far the newcomer has avoided oppression-oriented narratives – something that plagues Black British creatives. While Ted Lasso contains some allegories for its viewers on identity and masculinity, Jimoh is a fan because it

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TOHEEB JIMOH WEARS LORO PIANA SS22 THROUGHOUT

doesn’t “bang you over the head with it”. Similarly in his breakout role in BBC One’s Anthony, even though he plays Anthony Walker – who was killed in a real-life racist attack in 2005 – the show opted to reimagine his life as if that terrible crime never happened. The scale of loss is instead inferred by seeing what it would have looked like if he had the chance to live. When playing an aspirational cadet, in Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, who is fixated on his and his comrade’s goals for the future, he stands in contrast to another cadet who dies by suicide moments later.

He’s palpably excited about his major new role in Amazon’s supernatural drama, The Power, where he plays a character that “just happens to be a Muslim Nigerian journalist, and that’s it”. In other words, his identity isn’t a major plot point; it’s simply a fact that adds to the rich tapestry of the character. Based on the book by Naomi Alderman, it’s a surreal exploration of what happens to society when young females become the dominant sex after developing the ability to electrocute people at will.

“It’s gonna trip you the fuck out, but it’s going

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Photography assistant Genoveva Arteaga-Rynn Styling assistant Daniel Tyson Grooming Francesca Daniella Production Lock Studios

to be so interesting to watch,” he says. He plays a formerly confident character, Tunde, and the allegory of the show afforded him the space to explore what true strength looks like.

Jimoh continues: “Once he knows he could get rushed by a group of women at any moment, he changes. There’s a moment where Tunde is in a foreign country and gets on a bus at night to see there are only women riding it, and so he gets off. He genuinely is scared and has the same fear women have as they move through the world. He then sets about writing a book on the shift in the times.” The project still has an unspecified 2022 release date.

“The next stage I want us to get to [socio-politically] is being able to play Black characters without a trauma story, without it needing to be about how tough it is to be Black,” he explains.

Jimoh describes this wide variety of multi-dimensional roles as fortuitous, an initial fluke which has quickly evolved into a desire to continue picking out similar work.

For now, he’s still choosing roles based on what he thinks his 15-year-old self would need to see. In his youth he briefly toyed with the idea

of being a politician, having ascertained it was a role that wielded influence, however he realised it was entertainers who left a lasting impression on him and his friends. He’d get home from school and watch BBC Two’s dinnertime line-up of My Wife and Kids or The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. The latter made him a huge fan of Will Smith, whose performance in The Pursuit of Happyness would move him so much he’d watch it “four or five times in a row”. Although, acting wasn’t his first choice. He reveals that he first had a “failed rap career” around the age of 16.

Somewhere in a cobwebbed corner on YouTube exist clips of Jimoh’s first foray into performance as a lyricist, before he decided to become a thespian. Even when heavily pressed, he’s cagey with the key details: his stage name, lyrics that could be googled, or a hyperlink. But he does let me know that rap was his first line of defence while trying to navigate several cultures at once. Although Jimoh was born in Brixton he moved to Nigeria as a toddler, before returning to the UK when he was seven years old. When he returned he was picked on for his accent, and for being different from other Black

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Say what you want about Brixton but it still has that soul to it; you can still walk down the road and grab a patty somewhere, vibe. It feels like home

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children. He remembers feeling “culturally African”, turning up to school with “dry knees and dry ankles”. One day he came to class in socks and sandals and his teacher took him to another class to show a colleague what he was wearing.

“I didn’t know it was a faux pas,” he laughs. “No wonder I started rapping; I had angst.”

In the same way many comedians developed their knack for making people laugh as a tool for survival, his drive to entertain served to distract other children from being cruel. Performance unlocked Jimoh’s ability to code-switch.

He spoke in assembly, joined the debating society and tried to shed his accent to sound more like a “Brixton kid”. During his late teens, knife and gang crimes were omnipresent, and then one of his friends took his own life. These tales became the narrative for his tracks. He claims his initial works were a similar flavour to Kendrick Lamar’s acclaimed good kid, m.A.A.d city.

“I’m not gonna lie; I feel like I was the first conscious rapper in the UK,” he says, wryly.

Later he attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where one of his teachers introduced him to spoken word artists such as

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George the Poet and Inua Ellams. He’s proud of the success of the likes of Dave and Stormzy, who are carving out distinct Black and British identities in music. Soaking up all his disparate surroundings, writing verses also helps him make sense of the experience of being a third-culture kid who grew up in south London when it was rapidly changing, and then had to find a way to fit into the prestigious world of stage coaching. ​​Even now, Jimoh still jots down his thoughts in a tatty broken notebook, which he flicks through as we talk. He hopes to transform them into a spoken word play at the Nigerian-owned Brixton House theatre next year. “That’s the closest the world will get to me spitting bars.” He gives me an exclusive preview performance. He rattles off lines about the “demons” of Loughborough Junction, being “in the middle of knives”, and how “you don’t get counselling in council flats”. It has the grit of rap paired with touching introspection.

Despite its hardships, Jimoh is still incredibly proud of his area which has “its own culture”, saying that even north London “feels like a different land”. While studying he moved to

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It’s funny that I’m getting paid to put on the same accent I was bullied for as a kid

Crouch End to live out his “middle class fantasies”, but after a while he admitted the area was “dry”. When he returned after two years away, he found the rapid shift in Brixton bizarre. On the one hand the streets were a lot “less crazy”, but he asks, at what cost? The man who used to fix his phone for five pounds has had to close his shop due to rising rents; the man who his mum bought peppers from has disappeared. The constantly changing façade has made him more sure that he’s going to stay in the area when he moves out on his own. He adds: “Say what you want about Brixton but it still has that soul to it; you can still walk down the road and grab a patty somewhere, vibe. It feels like home.”

Always keen to rep his roots, it’s notable that a lot of his roles require him to perform in a Nigerian dialect. While he cannot speak Yoruba, his parent’s native tongue (which he describes as “a real primal deep hurt”), he manages to find roles that help him embrace his culture. “It’s funny that I’m getting paid to put on the same accent I was bullied for as a kid,” he says. He’s consciously weaving in narratives that

show the everyday regularities of his people, like the famous scene in the Ted Lasso episode entitled ‘Biscuits’. Jimoh suggested that Sam should be gifted Chin Chin, a delicious Nigerian biscuit that “bites back” and sometimes sounds like “walking on gravel”. Jimoh has subsequently received many messages from white Americans finding places to buy the snack. “Do you know how lit that is? Some auntie in the States who has a little shop selling Nigerian food now has a customer buying Chin Chin because they watched Ted Lasso and this little Nigerian kid is on it eating it, grinning.”

The calibre of roles Jimoh has played so far is impressive when you stop to consider he has only been acting for four years. In that time, he’s managed to carve out a niche of portraying nuanced and thoughtful Black narratives. For now, his fears of an “Ellen DeGeneres effect” – his notoriously pleasant reputation setting the wheels in motion for a villain character arc due to an ill-navigated public fan encounter – appear to be unfounded. It is a joy to watch him tentatively step into his star power.

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Eyal Weizman is the founder of Forensic Architecture, a research agency investigating human rights violations and violence perpetrated by states, police forces, militaries and corporations.

Using the latest in spatial and architectural analysis, digital modelling and immersive technologies, as well as documentary research and academic collaboration, its findings have been presented in international courtrooms and cultural institutions worldwide. Here, he reflects on moral paradoxes, making evidence operative and the traces left by trauma

VIOLENCE AT THE THRESHOLD OF DETECTABILITY

WORDS DEYAN SUDJIC PHOTOGRAPHY DANIEL CASTRO GARCIA

Prevous spread and above: Eyal Weizman at home in east London

Since establishing Forensic Architecture 12 years ago, Eyal Weizman hasn’t built anything at all. The international group of architects, artists, journalists and programmers are more interested in how and why buildings are destroyed, rather than in constructing new ones. But knowing how to build structures, it turns out, is a useful skill in understanding how buildings die.

He has, however, made the Turner Prize shortlist, seen his research on drone strikes on the Pakistan border with Afghanistan presented to the United Nations general assembly in New York, and written half a dozen books. For all that, he still sees himself as an architect rather than a technician or criminologist.

Weizman had been a student at the Architectural Association (AA) in London in the early 1990s, when it was a hotbed of phenomenology. In those days fashionable architects dressed like New Romantics and designed night clubs in Tokyo. Weizman did neither. He was making sense of post-structuralism, and reading the works of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his psychiatrist collaborator Félix Guattari. He believed in building things, which for AA students at that time was not necessarily a given. For his year out, he went to work

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Forensic Architecture’s The Bombing of Rafah. Multiple images and reconstructed bomb clouds are arranged within a 3D model of Rafah, Gaza

with Zvi Hecker, a Polish-born Israeli architect, whose deeply felt and boldly sculptural work is not currently fashionable but has made a distinctive contribution to architecture. Hecker credits Weizman, along with the distinguished sculptor Micha Ullman, as his collaborators in the design of a haunting memorial to a lost Jewish community in Berlin’s inner city Kreuzberg district.

“Our work,” they wrote about the commission, “is a page of a book telling a 1,000-year history of a piece of land, once a synagogue, today a courtyard on Lindenstrasse. We have added nothing to the site that had not been there before. The memorial site is made of rows of concrete benches in the old synagogue – testifying to the loss of the building and the community. As in the Talmudic text, the benches, trees and fire road are different layers of time.

What remained of the old synagogue buildings are the benches (placed precisely where their wooden predecessors had been). The destruction is represented by the trees and bushes that have grown over its ruins. The present is marked by the fire road, a requirement of Berlin’s contemporary building regulations. These elements come together to form the layout of a holy script. The trees and bushes which grow

between the lines of benches create pauses and punctuation in the text. Walking the narrow passage between the lines becomes an act of reading. This is a story of loss. Benches become graveyard. Lines of graves – lines of text.”

After Berlin, Weizman started his own studio designing sets for the theatre and opera, and carried out a museum conversion in Tel Aviv.

“I like to think that one day I might go back to that kind of architecture,” he says now. But in the last decade, Weizman has done something that very few architects have accomplished: He has used his architectural skills to play a part in shifting the political landscape in countries all around the world. It was research, carried out in part by Forensic Architecture, that gave the Greek government the evidence it needed to dissolve the Golden Dawn party for its complicity in the murder of Pavlos Fyssas, the antifascist activist and hip-hop artist who died in 2013. It was Forensic Architecture’s work that forced, in 2020, former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to apologise for the killing of an innocent Bedouin civilian whom he had previously called a terrorist. Forensic Architecture’s graphic reconstructions demonstrated how chemical attacks on Syrian civilians by their own government had inflicted mass casualties.

Assorted artwork, mantlepiece

In Bosnia, it traced the operations of the Omarska death camp, and in Colombia, has recently begun work for the country’s truth and reconciliation commission. With the latter, it is attempting to address the traumas of decades of civil strife and the notorious siege of the supreme court in Bogota in 1985, which saw 12 judges killed in a murky stand-off that involved government special forces, Pablo Escobar’s drug cartel and leftist M-19 guerrillas. They have worked in Burundi and Cameroon, Guatemala and Argentina, Myanmar and Ukraine.

These are projects that have made governments across the political spectrum view Weizman and his organisation with suspicion. He was placed on the US immigration no fly list in the Trump era. The American embassy in London told him that he had been identified as a security threat by an oversensitive algorithm as he was about to travel to Miami for an opening of a retrospective of his work. To resolve this no doubt anomalous situation speedily, he was invited to volunteer any contacts that he might have had that could have provoked the algorithm’s interest, a suggestion that he had no difficulty in rejecting. He has been advised not to travel to Russia or Turkey. At Forensis, the office he recently set up in Berlin to investi-

gate the mass shootings in a Hanau cafe, there is a room that he calls ‘the fridge’, in which all forms of digital equipment are excluded for fear of digital eavesdropping and NSO’s Pegasus spyware. Funded by a mix of research money, grants from human rights organisations and consultancy fees from media outlets such as the BBC, the New York Times and Al Jazeera, Weizman’s team has expanded to include software developers, film makers, scientists and lawyers. It has an audio investigator, a team applying similar approaches to forensic oceanography and simulation technologists.

To present its work as effectively as possible, Forensic Architecture has developed a recognisable tone of voice: calmly authoritative, with a graphic style based on a sans serif font, and a restrained colour palette. It is an academic research institution, dedicated to the dissemination of knowledge, so all its material is made available open source and free of charge. But it is also research that, as Weizman puts it, “produces evidence that is made operative”. It’s applied research, in fact.

Beyond that, it is research with an infusion of the literary sensibility demonstrated in his work for the memorial for a vanished synagogue in Berlin. He describes his presentation

to the United Nations on drone strikes in Pakistan, the result of a commission from the British barrister Ben Emmerson, the UN rapporteur on terrorism and human rights, in language that makes that clear. “We went into ruined buildings, where you sometimes saw traces of shrapnel on the walls of a room, and in some places, you could see the contours of a body, where shrapnel had been absorbed, by human tissue, leaving a mark like the shadow of a human figure.” He calls his work “an archaeology of the present”, and is fully conscious of the political uses of archaeology which has been exploited by so many regimes attempting to define who belongs, and who does not. “Like all archaeology, it has so many possible readings,” he notes.

In the case of his work in Pakistan’s border provinces, where George W. Bush had denied any drone strikes had taken place, Forensic Architecture demonstrated they had in fact caused at least 2,000 deaths, 400 of them civilians.

Weizman had been drawn to a life as a writer as well as to architecture before he first came to London. But he describes the turning point in his career as the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing Israeli fanatic in November 1995. On the day of the killing, Weizman had taken part in the demonstrations in Tel Aviv in

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We are mining the delta between what architects do with these techniques, and what they could do

support of Rabin and the signing of the Oslo Accords. His response to this onslaught on the first genuine prospect of a settlement between Israel and Palestine was to volunteer to work at the Palestine Liberation Organization’s civic administration’s planning office. He joined a team staffed mainly by well-meaning Scandinavians with little local knowledge and Palestinians denied access to the maps of their settlements. Weizman was able to use his privileges as an Israeli citizen to bring in the most basic of planning tools, without which planning was a practical impossibility.

His experience with the Palestinians was the start of the process that eventually led to Weizman setting up Forensic Architecture. It also transformed Weizman himself, from the teenager who embarked on pilot training when he was called up for military service in the Israeli Defence Forces, to a refusenik, whom the Netanyahu government seemingly decided was not worth prosecuting for fear of the publicity the case would attract.

Weizman’s work first gained international attention at the Venice architecture biennale of 2002. To the anger of the government, the Israeli pavilion display Borderline Disorder

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included Weizman’s maps documenting the full extent of the contested West Bank settlements.

They seemed to reveal a deliberate geopolitical strategy for the permanent subjugation of any emerging Palestinian state. According to Weizman, even though the settlements occupied just two per cent of the territory, their political boundaries formed almost 42 per cent of the land.

After completing his PhD, and a spell teaching, Weizman went on to set up Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths University in London in 2010. The concept was based on an idea that came to him when he was writing his book The Least of All Possible Evils. He read the work of Marc Garlasco, a former American intelligence analyst who had been involved with targeting Saddam Hussein’s leadership cadres.

Garlasco’s job during the 2003 invasion of Iraq was to design ways of killing no more than 29 people at a time. “If you’re going to kill up to 29 people in a strike against Saddam Hussein, that’s not a problem,” Garlasco claimed. “But once you hit that number 30, we actually had to go to either President Bush, or Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.” Since most of the Ba’ath Party hierarchy were known to be in hiding in

high-rise civilian buildings rather than in underground bunkers, Garlasco’s task was to target them with enough precision not to make a complete building collapse, or bring down neighbouring structures.

Garlasco had left the Defence Intelligence Agency in a dramatic change of heart, to work for Human Rights Watch. He became an analyser of, rather than, in Weizman’s words, “a designer of ruins”, to determine who and what had caused them. Or as Weizman puts it, “Only a criminal can solve certain crimes, and I like those moral paradoxes. I referred to him as a ‘forensic architect’, as forensics are a repressive tool. I wanted to see if there could be such things as counter forensics, turning logic from the system into a tool in the hands of people who are oppressed, to find verifiable, independent knowledge.”

What made Forensic Architecture’s approach different from other investigators was its adoption of architectural modelling techniques to explore the traces left by violence. These are sometimes physical. A building that collapses in on itself, leaving a pyramidal ruin, may suggest a missile attack rather than a truck bomb.

If there are pocket holes around the windows,

Eyal Weizman

there may have been a firefight, and it could have been a legitimate target. Traces of tank exhausts on the walls tell another story.

Other traces are in the digital record; satellite pictures, geo-positioning data from mobile phones, and above all, the records embodied in social media. “We started in 2011, the year of the social media revolution, and that is what defined us. Images from conflict zones suddenly went from a trickle to a flood. In one of our cases in Gaza, we worked with 7,000 different videos,” says Weizman.

“Architectural models can be the most useful means for understanding multiple media, often taken from different directions. We use the model as a navigational tool. We never cut films; we use every film in its entirety, not splicing or cutting.” He is quick to point out that his techniques are not new and have their roots in such architectural ideas as Zaha Hadid’s parametrics, and the urban analysis of Rem Koolhaas. “We are mining the delta between what architects do with these techniques, and what they could do,” he says. Forensic Architecture uses multiple viewpoints to reconstruct a fleeting moment in time, such as the instant of an explosion, or the decision of a policeman to

Authored works

shoot at an unarmed man. Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ did something not that far removed, and for a similar purpose. Weizman agrees that “Cubism is an analogy.”

Forensic Architecture’s visibility has given it more possibilities than it can possibly deal with. “We have 20 proposals for every one that we can take on. We ask ourselves, can we add something? We don’t take on cases that we know how to do already. We would pass that on to somebody with local knowledge, and brief them. We like to develop new techniques. We also ask ourselves, is it a case we could make a greater point with? Is there a social movement that can analyse the outcomes? Otherwise, we are simply technicians.”

Publicity for Forensic Architecture has made Weizman face an unexpected dilemma. How much is what he does a scientific method, and how much is it a cultural expression? When he was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2018, he tweeted: “Very surprised and a little overwhelmed. Will it help promote FA’s cause and investigations (what matters) or get us subsumed within the arts-financial-complex?”

He thought hard about whether to accept the nomination, and run the risk of being seen

as somehow frivolous by some of the clients and collaborators for whom the prime objective was to achieve justice, rather than to make a cultural statement. “We decided to go ahead, because we could use the money from the Tate and the platform it provided to explore something that we could not otherwise have done.

Some people think that we have been captured by the machine, but you make use of opportunities. We can mine avant-garde tradition. The art world is what it is, commercialised, not always serious, but it can also be amazing, a profound reflection of what you are doing, rather than a corrupting influence.”

Weizman wryly notes how every succeeding Turner Prize shortlist has featured at least one individual or group previously associated with Forensic Architecture: most recently Cooking Sections, which uses its techniques to explore the impact of industrial food production.

“Regimes are realising that these methods exist. Our work is a long game, dependent on continuous growing pressure from different directions. In Israel they try to find different ways to cover up evidence, but there has never been a case yet in which we have lost on evidence versus evidence.”

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Project 1: The Killing of Mark Duggan

Client: Lawyers for the Duggan family

Location: Tottenham, North London

Year: 2020

Client: Amnesty International

Location: Rafah, Gaza, Occupied Palestinian Territories

Year: 2015

In 2011, Mark Duggan was shot dead by an undercover police officer in Tottenham, who claimed Duggan held a gun, and felt his life to be in danger.

The mishandling of the case eventually led to the London riots, the most widespread social unrest seen in the UK in a generation. FA was commissioned by the Duggan family’s lawyers to reconstruct the scene as a navigable digital environment to illustrate and interrogate the testimonies of the officers involved. Examining videos and images, witness testimony, hand-drawn plans, a biomechanical report and material commissioned by the IPCC, reconstruction could be experienced in an animated virtual reality environment. The investigation concluded that it would have been physically impossible for Duggan to have thrown the gun onto a patch of grass seven metres away, as police claim, directly challenging the inquest jury’s conclusion that it constituted a ‘lawful killing’.

Project 2: The Bombing of Rafah

The kidnapping of an Israeli soldier by Hamas during the 2014 Gaza conflict resulted in four days of bombardment, in which over two thousand homes were destroyed. Amnesty International and FA’s investigation relied on thousands of images and videos shared online, or sent directly by citizens and journalists. Through locating cameras and incidents within a digital 3D model, and subsequent analysis of satellite and ground-level images, smoke clouds, shadows and impact craters, hundreds of air-to-surface and artillery strikes were mapped. The research amounted to overwhelming evidence that Israeli forces committed disproportionate or otherwise indiscriminate attacks which killed and injured scores of civilians.

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Project 3: The Enforced Disappearance of the Ayotzinapa Students

Client: Centro Prodh, Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense, EAAF

Location: Iguala, Mexico

Year: 2017

Client: Amnesty International

Location: Saydnaya, Syria

Year: 2016

In 2014, a group of students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College were attacked by local police, in collusion with criminal organisations and other branches of the security forces. Forty-three of them were forcibly disappeared and their whereabouts remains unknown, with the Mexican state providing a fraudulent narrative of that night’s events. Working with their families and local NGOs, FA developed an interactive cartographic platform to explore the state narrative’s conflicts and inconsistencies, examining thousands of pieces of testimony, interviews, videos and phone records. This information was turned into data points that expose the government’s explanation as fiction, and the investigation is now part of the permanent collection at the University Museum of Contemporary Arts, Mexico City.

Project 4: Saydnaya: Inside a Syrian Torture Prison

Aiming to show conditions inside Saydnaya, a detention centre for political prisoners opposed to the Bashar al-Assad government regime, FA produced an interactive digital model. Since access to the Syrian prison is severely restricted, it was built using the testimonies of survivors.

Lack of natural light within, and the blindfolding of detainees, meant that many of the architectural details were based on sound. Hosted on Amnesty International’s site, users can enter the building and witness some of the events that took place inside, shown through 360-degree renderings, short videos, audio and written descriptions.

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Los Angeles-based photographer Mark Ruwedel talks to Ayla Angelos about a selection of photographs from his four-part in-progress epic Los Angeles: Landscapes of Four Ecologies

Inland

The landscape has been an enduring muse of yours; why so?

When I was a graduate student, I moved from Pennsylvania to Montreal. My subject up until that point had been the people I knew. I started photographing the edges of Montreal as an island, and gradually I became more interested in the urban landscapes – what some people would call wastelands, the edges. They’re the buffer zones between the wild and the urban.

This is what drives my current work.

Twenty years ago, I moved to Southern California. Then, in 2014, I started concocting this landscape project of Los Angeles, a location which – at least in North America – has the largest wild urban interface of any city. I devised this one-year project in preparation to apply for a Guggenheim Fellowship, and I received the fellowship in 2015. When I started working, I realised it was going to be more like 10 years.

So, I devised this four-part epic.

It’s interesting that you’ve described it as an “in-progress epic” – you’re setting yourself up for a long photographic journey; will it ever finish?

There’s been a lot of terrific photography made about Los Angeles over the decades, but there’s been very little that’s tried to be comprehensive.

I’m modestly attempting to do that. I’m just trying to cast a really wide net and see what I can pull in.

Los Angeles is widely depicted in the media, so you’d think that the world has a fairly good understanding of it as a city. But through your imagery, you present a different – a deserted, intricate and fragile – side of it. Is this intentional?

Part one focuses on the Los Angeles River and its major tributaries. You think about what

the Los Angeles River looks like from movies, and it has this concrete channel with a trickle of water in the middle. There’s car chases and the Terminator goes down there, and so on.

But in my photographs, the Los Angeles River is made to look more natural. You think you know what the real Los Angeles River looks like, but you would never associate it with what I’m showing you.

When I plotted the project, I was thinking about these epic places that would define the relationship of Los Angeles to the natural world. I found that, over time, more of my pictures were about these little secret places, so that’s really interesting to me. Los Angeles includes, for lack of a better word, nature.

The land has been abused, as you’ll find with the orchards; they’re disappearing faster than I can make pictures. They’re being bulldozed for housing developments and warehouses.

Climate change goes hand in hand with the natural world; is that something you try to address in your work?

I’m not deliberately trying to make a statement about that. There’s a fairly large group of pictures that I’m not quite sure which part of the epic they fit into, because they fit all of them – it’s the burned landscapes. There’s an interesting set of contradictions, because fire is a natural part of the ecosystem here. There’s always been fires. But now, of course, they’re hotter, they’re bigger, and they last longer. They’re both expected, and at the same time, they’re a prophecy of future horror. I’m not trying to say, ‘Look at these pictures and stop driving.’ The works are not didactic in any manner; people can look at this work and make certain assumptions or draw certain conclusions, and I’m fine with that. I don’t want to tell them what to think about it.

How important is the sequencing and structure to your work?

People have asked why I don’t make really big prints, like a lot of my colleagues. It’s because of the way I think about photography and the way I work; I would rather have 12 or 15 small pictures together that are talking to each other, rather than one big one that tries to sum up something. It’s not that I’m a traditionalist, but I think there’s something unique about photography that allows for that voice. I’m not against other people doing things differently, of course, but that’s my position for my own work now. In my epic, especially by contemporary standards, the pictures are really, really small.

What can we learn from these photographs? Is it the changing landscape in LA, the ecology, the nature? Or are your pictures made purely for aesthetics?

I don’t have a main goal, but everything you just said is okay with me. Obviously I’m interested in aesthetic issues – I’m interested in the histories of art, in terms of how this place is pictured. I’m interested in pop culture and the way that Los Angeles is portrayed through various media, especially film and television. I think what I’m trying to do is add to that history or complicate the reading of that history, or probably both. But I’m not trying to tell somebody something – that’s not of interest to me. What I’m trying to do is make some sort of contribution to the history of pictures about this place and, by extension, the history of the place itself.

Works courtesy of Large Glass, London, and Gallery Luisotti, Santa Monica

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Giorgio Armani x George the Poet Continuing our partnership with Giorgio Armani, we have teamed up for a four-issue Commentary special. Working with leading contemporary writers to bring you incredible original work, we present here, for the third instalment, a new piece of writing from award-winning spoken word performer George the Poet.

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Words Become Things George the Poet

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Palestinian Dreams Refaat Alareer

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Extremely Online with Thorstein Veblen: My Descent into NFTs Brian Patrick Eha

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When I Sing, Mountains Dance Irene Solà

Writing in a Time of Distraction Douglas Kennedy

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GEORGE PHOTOGRAPHY JESSICA MADAVO

STYLING CAROLINA AUGUSTIN

THE POET WORDS BECOME THINGS

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George the Poet is a London-born spoken word performer of Ugandan heritage whose unique work has won him critical acclaim both as a recording artist and social commentator. His audio offering, ‘Have You Heard George’s Podcast?’ – a brilliant mix of memoir, music and storytelling exploring inner city life – won a prestigious Peabody Award in 2020. Specially commissioned for Port, the following piece offers 10 reasons why everyone should write, celebrating how the act of articulation brings clarity, closure and coordination of intent, touching something deep within ourselves as well as those around us.

GEORGE THE POET WEARS GIORGIO ARMANI SS22 THROUGHOUT

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I’ll be honest, I’m not that articulate – especially for a poet. I’m alright when I find my rhythm, but in real conversation I spend a lot of time struggling for the next word while my sentence hangs in the balance. It’s because I’m obsessed with getting everything right. And if you’re anything like me, you’ll know how much this obsession can slow a person down. So, I’m going to share with you 10 reasons why you should just write what’s on your mind.

1 You Matter

Hopefully this is obvious, but you do matter. You affect the world every day, and even if you completely avoid everything around you, your thoughts and actions still have an impact on one very important person: you. Honestly, you couldn’t lose this power if you tried. By writing what’s on your mind, you acknowledge yourself in a safe and intimate way. No one even has to know.

The process of writing can often remind us of school or work – something functional, with rules. Because of this it’s easy to second-guess yourself. Is that the right wording? Am I interesting enough? Do my thoughts make sense? The truth is you can’t go wrong. Just write.

2 Writing Brings Clarity

Have you ever tried to picture a moment that hasn’t arrived yet?

Something you’ve anticipated for a long time. Do you remember when that moment finally came, and you could see it up close for what it was, not what you thought it would be? That’s the same closure I get when I write. Before my words touch the page, I can only hear them internally – often half-formed and uncertain. My mind flicks through images faster than I can put words together, and a lot of these images are maybes and what ifs, but when I write, they become real. Writing allows me to turn the pages of my thought process slowly, backwards and forwards.

I can really see my thoughts, and I’m thankfully reminded that they’re just moments: snapshots of my life that are as big or as small as I want them to be.

3 Nothing Lasts Forever

It can be hard to appreciate how temporary everything is, especially when you feel stuck, or rooted in something. But in reality, life is a process of constant change. Waves of emotion rise and fall. Seasons run their course. Ideas come and go. As intelligent beings, we are blessed with awareness and communica-

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tion. That means we can feel this temporary world and capture the sensations it takes us through. Some people paint, others make music. Personally, I write. That’s the only way I can do justice to this life – I’ll never be able to make it mine forever, so I express my infatuation by writing love letters to the world called poems. Imagine a book of existence, containing everything that has ever happened. We’re in that book, and anything we write is a direct quote. Your lines immortalise the moments you couldn’t capture; your writing is the closest thing to your momentary truth.

4 You Know More Than You Know

There is knowledge in your body that your mind can’t explain.

Think about it: You don’t make your heart beat; you can’t even make yourself sneeze. From the minute you were born you started breathing, despite never having done that before, and to this day you haven’t missed a breath – even when you’re sleeping. Your body carries intuition that you don’t have to think about… so how far does this go? What else is coded inside you that your conscious mind can’t reveal? By writing, you are embarking on that journey of discovery. You might think you know what’s on your mind, and how to get it across, but the process of writing will often reveal things that you couldn’t have foreseen. Just consider that your dreams are formed by your sleeping mind sorting through your memories – long term and short term – finding random connections. It’s amazing: A whole movie occurs in your head using only your experiences, without you trying. That’s how much potential you tap into every time you write.

5 Writing Is a Way of Trusting Yourself

You’ve got this. But every time you shun your own ideas, or put off the urge to express what’s on your mind, you deny yourself.

Stop it. Give yourself permission to release. Personally, I need this reminder every now and then, because, as I mentioned earlier, I always want everything to be perfect. Sometimes I have an idea for months and I basically hide from it out of fear that I’ll get it wrong. My number one way of doing this is by distracting myself with other media; TV, books and music give me a window into someone else’s world, and I stay there for as long as I can, immersing myself in other people’s thoughts to avoid my own. I usually tell myself that I’m looking for inspiration, and to an extent that’s true, but there’s a time to listen and a time to speak; a time to watch and a time to act; a time to read and a time to write. Don’t be passive; make that time by trusting yourself.

6 Words Become Things

When you write, you create. Literally, you bring something into existence – something that wouldn’t be here if you didn’t deliver it. What’s even more amazing is that this process is just the beginning. Words on a page can be the start of a plan, a story, a bucket list, a mission statement, a script, a poem – anything. I’m not just talking about artistic writing; I also mean personal, even purpose-free writing. Your words can be as public or as private as you want, the point is they lay out the blueprint for action. They coordinate your intentions by directing your thoughts down a particular path. Before you know it, you’ll notice things within you and around you that align with your writing. It could be as simple as a change in behaviour following an insight you stumbled upon while penning a diary entry. Or it could be as elaborate as an imaginary world springing up around a character you thought up. I’ve seen all this and more in my own life, so I recommend the habit of writing, because you never know where it can take you.

7 It’s Good to Let Go

We all carry things that no one else can see. Sometimes we’re aware of these things, but often we’re not. The heaviest loads usually come from events, relationships or feelings that we’re struggling with. But there’s also the stuff that builds up over time, simply because we haven’t found the right outlet for it. Writing can help with it all. By expressing yourself on paper, you start the process of laying down your baggage. It might not bring instant relief – you might need more time and additional support – but it is a self-empowering way of letting go, slowly, at your own pace. Also, for the creative within you, writing can allow you to ‘let go’ of an idea. Keeping it bottled up inside isn’t good for you or the idea; you need headspace, and your idea needs to breathe. Release it into the world and see what happens.

8 You’re Human for a Reason

Right now, we are as alive as the trees, but we live nothing like them. It’s not just the trees, though; we share this time with all sorts of life forms. They each play their part in our ecosystem – we can’t pollinate flowers like bees, or regulate the fly population like spiders. But what we can do is envision things that don’t exist yet, and bring them to life through sheer creativity.

This is how humanity has grown beyond the limits imposed on our ancestors by the natural world. If we as humans didn’t lean

into that instinct – that urge to chase our own imagination – then we wouldn’t have survived this long. The horseshoe crab has been around for 445 million years, and in all that time its lifestyle hasn’t changed much. Yet in just 200,000 years, humanity has transformed its prospects so drastically that we are now the only thing standing in our way. How will you contribute to this journey? You didn’t end up as a tree or a horseshoe crab… you were born into the most creative species on the planet. Feel that power and do something good with it: Write.

9 It Will All Make Sense Later

The purpose of your writing isn’t always apparent, and that’s OK. Don’t feel any pressure to make it epic every time, just have fun with it. Eventually, when you revisit your words later down the line, you’ll see something that wasn’t clear to you before. It’s an inevitable consequence of time passing: We grow and discover new parts of ourselves that reveal things about our past – things that can only be seen from a distance. This happens to me regularly; I go through old notebooks and find the seeds of thoughts, ideas and character traits that went on to shape my life. On that note, here’s a tip: Always date your writing – it helps you keep track of your evolution.

10 You Never Know What Your Words Mean to Someone Else

Let’s say you don’t share a single thing you’ve written with anyone else for as long as you live. OK. But what about after? You won’t be here forever, and you’ll leave behind people that care about you. Sorry to get dark for a second, but this is one of my deepest motivations. When your loved ones can’t speak to you anymore, they’ll want anything that connects them to your memory. I strongly believe that your (preferably handwritten) thoughts are some of the greatest gifts you can leave behind. You might even reach a generation that you’ll never meet. Personally, every time I write, I think about my unborn audience. Future eyes that will pass over these words, maybe amidst a frustrating search for answers, or maybe just out of pure curiosity. At the same time, there’s also the chance that you’ll join me on my journey.

You could decide to share your writing with the world while you’re still here. This can be a beautiful thing, but the magnitude of it may not hit you until your words reach a stranger. People often ask me what my greatest achievement is, and honestly, it’s the constant connection I feel with those who reach out to tell me that my words have improved their lives. That’s my highest contribution to the world, and I wish that feeling of completion on everyone.

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Assistants Ed Philips, Adam Lin and Sakura Belkin Special thanks to Sarah Dawes

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Grooming Tyler Johnston Special thanks to The Production Factory

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Palestinian Dreams

By Refaat Alareer Refaat Alareer is a lecturer at the Islamic University of Gaza and has edited two books, Gaza Unsilenced and Gaza Writes Back. To live in Gaza is to experience brutality and deprivation every day.

Meanwhile, a meaningful peace process grows increasingly distant. After years of oppression, Alareer, who has lived the crisis, considers what it means to speak of a “realistic” outcome

It was the third night of Israel’s May 2021 campaign of terror against Palestinians in Gaza. We barely slept. At 3 a.m., I appeared on the BBC to tell the world what Israel was doing to us. The news anchor asked me what I thought the best answer to the conflict was.

Unflinchingly, I replied, “An end to the Israeli occupation.”

It’s that simple. We want to live free. We want an end to the massacres committed against us. Palestinians do not want their blood shed, their loved ones murdered, their homes destroyed, their trees uprooted.

I have already witnessed how callous mainstream media outlets are to the Palestinian plight, as they whitewash Israeli crimes.

Even so, I was taken aback by the anchor’s response: “Realistically?” she asked, as the bombs continued to fall around me.

Whether suffocating Gaza or swallowing more and more of the West Bank and Jerusalem to expand the illegal, Jewish-only settlements, Israel has long created a de facto reality in the occupied territories. It imposes a system where one people, the Jewish settlers, have the privilege, protection and infrastructure, while native Palestinians remain battered, deprived and gasping for life. Since 1979, the UN’s Security Council has repeatedly and unambiguously stated that these settlements are a “flagrant violation under international law” and have “no legal validity”. The world, however, continues to turn a blind eye to this overt transgression of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

To exist in an occupied territory is to live in fear and uncertainty.

To be Palestinian in the West Bank is to be constantly anxious about being attacked by armed gangs, or forcibly evicted from

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your house, which may be torched or destroyed by Israeli war machines. Making the wrong turn or movement in Jerusalem can easily mean an early death at the hands of the IDF (Israel Defense Forces). In Gaza, Palestinians are at the mercy of cruel, arbitrary borders that prevent access to basic education and medical treatment. In brief, it is to be brutally under siege, every single day.

After Israel’s 2014 war that destroyed my family home and killed my brother, Hamada, his little daughter Raneem told us after his death that her father was a liar. She said this because the last time she saw him, he had promised that he would come back.

But he never came back.

During Israel’s bombardment campaign of May 2021, my daughter, Linah, enquired if Israeli warplanes could still bomb the Al-Jawhara building after the power went out. And my little Amal, five years old, who was supposed to celebrate her birthday on 12 May that year, keeps telling her friends that she did not have a birthday “because of the war”.

And so it goes on. A way of life. Stories like this have been experienced by countless Palestinian children, along with their parents and grandparents who also have had to endure atrocities.

After the May 2021 attacks, EuroMed Rights (the human rights organisation) reported that more than 90 per cent of children in Gaza suffer from PTSD. This is how damaging and destructive Israel’s attacks are. Israel is not only targeting freedom fighters, but also attempting to sow terror in the hearts of everyone – especially the young.

As children growing up in Gaza during the First Palestinian Intifada (1987–1993), we learned a painful lesson: Israel beats children even when they’re not caught throwing stones over the border.

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Arrests them, to teach them a lesson. Shoots them. Israel wanted to teach us all a lesson: that you just cannot simply resist, or be related to someone who resists, without suffering the repercussions. It resulted in thousands of Palestinians being killed, usually summarily executed.

One of my earliest memories is walking to school in 1992. An Israeli settler shot dead my friend Lewa, who was 13 years old.

Lewa never threw a stone and posed no threat. 30 years later, there have been thousands like Lewa, murdered by Israel with impunity and with total disregard for human life or international law.

Many countries and states, such as the US and Europe, not only supply the arms for this slaughter – and give it political protection against persecution – but on many occasions directly pay for the subsequent war crime penalties.

So far, I have survived Israel’s wanton destruction. Many of my relatives, friends and neighbours have not. If you survive Israeli fire, your life, who you marry, where you live, what you do for a living, and every other aspect of your life will be impacted by Israel and its intolerant system. Settlements – some of which are funded by North American charities and tax-exempt organisations – have snaked their way into the heart of Palestinian lands, creating roads for Jewish people only, as well as water that cannot be accessed by Palestinians or farmlands, which themselves are under threat from settlers’ bulldozers, fire and chainsaws. Mainly due to policies, an estimated 90 to 95 per cent of water supply is contaminated and unfit for human consumption, and more than 180 Palestinian communities in rural areas in the occupied West Bank have no access to running water.

In the past 20 years, Israel has murdered scores of my friends and extended family members, as well as a dozen more of my

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wife’s family. In 2014 alone, Israel killed my brother Hamada, my wife’s brother, his sister, her three children, grandfather and cousin. Israel destroyed my parents’ four-storey building, where I was raised.

We always wonder what Israel has in store for us. But one thing is certain: nothing it uses against us has ever worked to silence us, to uproot us, or to end our resistance. What has Israel not attempted against us? Massacres? Check. Pogroms? Check. Ethnic cleansing? Check. Mass destruction? Check. Uprooting over a million trees? Check.

These efforts aim to make it impossible for native Palestinians to resist their oppression and erasure. Israel wants us all to kneel and to submit to its rule of racism. The liberation of Palestine, however, might be hindered or delayed, but we are certain it will eventually come.

The world needs to support Palestinians’ armed struggle and their right to self-defence. It needs to bring Israel to justice. End the occupation. Treat Palestinians as human beings with basic human rights. Is that too much to ask?

No amount of Israeli atrocities will ever silence Palestinians or prevent us from fighting back. After all, we realise that Israel is not only trying to wipe out Palestinian resistance, but our very existence.

This, to many, is considered a long shot. But was not every people’s struggle for freedom and justice considered so? And no matter what Israel does to delay and hinder this day, we will continue the struggle by, to quote Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X, “any means necessary”.

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Extremely Online with Thorstein Veblen: My Descent into NFTs

By Brian Patrick Eha Brian Patrick Eha is a New York-based journalist, fiction writer and author who spent nearly five years following the rise of Bitcoin, leading to his book How Money Got Free. Over the past year, he has been investing in and researching the meteoric rise of non-fungible tokens, examining their impact on our physical and digital realms. Part reportage, part personal essay, the following text charts the feverish highs and lows of buying the riskiest, most volatile asset class in the world

Cartoon faces with animal eyes stared back at me: bear noses, bared fangs, skin in unreal shades of green and red, some wearing masks or goggles, others flanked by flies or carrying spears. This was the new frontier of art and identity; these were the faces of my peers and compatriots, a motley crew of collectors, flippers, influencers, opportunists and superfans. It was December 2021 and I was browsing the online marketplace Objkt.com, looking at Ziggurats, the new non-fungible token collection from Linkin Park frontman Mike Shinoda. I had sorted the collection by price and was scanning the first page of results – a small cross-section of a horde 5,000 strong. Designed for mass appeal with an edge of transgression, like the music for which their platinum-selling creator is famous, the Ziggurats were JPEGs, digital avatars, each one a tokenised and tradeable asset backed by the Tezos blockchain. The common ones were going for a couple of hundred dollars apiece, the rarest for thousands. The collection had sold out in just half an hour, earlier that day, and was on its way to racking up, in the first 24 hours, more than $500,000 in sales on the secondary market. I’d managed to grab six Ziggurats in the initial drop. Almost immediately I resold three of them, covering the costs of all six and making an instant $120 profit. In the three months I had spent living and breathing NFTs, it was a rare easy win.

bers’ clubs. The latter aspect was occasionally explicit in the name, as with Bored Ape Yacht Club – a collection of 10,000 cartoon apes, launched in April 2021, which now sell for over $300,000 apiece. Among collectors and creators alike, the universal motto was WAGMI: we’re all gonna make it.

A “non-fungible token”, if you don’t know – and millions of people do know, today, who didn’t know a year ago – is a digital item that is provably unique and the ownership of which can be verified on a public blockchain. The acronym, NFT, has come to stand for a whole fertile realm of cutting-edge creative expression, shysterism, and speculative finance. Or, as Bloomberg Businessweek put it, “a bottomless rabbit hole of innovation and intellectual intrigue”.

The optimistic gloss on NFTs is that they represent a paradigm shift for the art world on at least three fronts: First, by undergirding digital art with permissionless, open-source software and offering it to a global marketplace, they democratise art collecting; second, by allowing artists to bake a royalty percentage into each piece they sell, NFTs enrich artists with passive income from secondary sales, obviating the need for Patreon; third, and most crucially, NFTs represent real and verifiable ownership of unique assets online.

I bought my first NFTs in February 2021 but didn’t really dive in until August, at the tail end of a bull market. Lured by stories of overnight fortunes, and with years of crypto knowledge to draw on – I had published a narrative history of Bitcoin in 2017 – I was nonetheless unprepared for the heady brew of art and optimism I found. Independent artists who might otherwise have been siloed or silenced in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey and Cuba had found a global market for their work. Large NFT collections boasted roadmaps, community managers, business partnerships and marketing – ostensibly art projects, they operated like a cross between technology startups and private mem-

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Among those riches, in my first weeks, I was Augustus Gloop in Wonka’s factory, grabbing fat handfuls of whatever looked delectable. NFTs give you permission to be a kid again – an appeal so seductive that within three months, having created a new, pseudonymous Twitter account to take part in it all, I had gained 1,000 followers, joined the board of curators for an organization which invests in NFTs and brainstormed a major piece of the roadmap for one of the hottest projects of the day. In a small way, I had become a tastemaker. No one was more surprised than me.

I had also made – and lost – tens of thousands of dollars. My life had become an endless round of Discord channels and drop announcements; the chronic stress of keeping up with it all was eating me alive. My wife struggled to understand my new obsession. I had raided my savings and destroyed my peace of mind, and for what? For JPEGs?

*

Ecoutez. Whereas dollars, pounds and cryptocurrencies are fungible – one pound note is as good as any other – art isn’t: Only ‘Starry Night’ by Vincent van Gogh is ‘Starry Night’, and god help the curator who tries to swap it out for another painted canvas. By marrying art images to digital tokens – binding them together on a blockchain which tracks their provenance – NFTs make it possible for art to be both digital (thus nonphysical, easily shareable and transportable, with near-zero storage or maintenance costs) and rare.

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Understandably, this is a head trip for most. The sceptic’s argument is that most NFTs today take the form of JPEGs – image files that can be endlessly right-click saved or screenshotted – and that anyone buying or, god forbid, “investing” in them is a complete fool, a charlatan or both. But here is where the Luddites and sceptics get it wrong. Copying a JPEG conveys no true ownership, hence no intellectual property, no membership rights, no street cred – just as having a perfect digital copy of the new Thom Yorke album on your hard drive doesn’t fool anyone into thinking you produced the music or that you deserve a dime in royalties. Screenshot all you want, say the NFT culturati: Only one digital wallet will ever hold the real version, the original, like a vault holding a set of master tapes.

NFTs run the gamut from low-effort artwork that sells for a few bucks – the digital equivalent of a street artist’s doodle – to iconic pieces that go for millions. To understand the craze for high-end NFTs, especially collectibles, it helps to think of them as luxury goods. Or more accurately, Veblen goods. Named for economist Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term “conspicuous consumption” in his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen goods are status symbols, their distinguishing feature being that demand for them rises as their price rises, and falls as their price falls: exactly the opposite of how pricing works for normal goods. The more desired they are, the more desirable they become. Whatever their quality of workmanship – and it’s often superb – when you buy a Veblen good, what you’re buying, first and foremost, is exclusivity, determined partly by price and partly by scarcity.

It would have been unthinkable without the pandemic, that lust for rare digital goods. The feverish hunt for what was new and next at the intersection of art and commerce, the sudden certainty that a JPEG, backed by public proof of its rarity and rightful ownership, could serve as the ultimate 21st-century flex, a cross between a Picasso and a Patek Philippe. Oh, the movement was there in its infancy before the global spread of Covid, the germ of an idea with its own viral payload, but without mass lockdowns and the extremely online habits they spawned, the idea of NFTs might never have gone mainstream. At least not in this decade.

But the pandemic did happen. And so, instead of a slow maturation, NFTs got a massive hit of growth serum. For an untold number of digital natives, NFTs, not sports cars or fancy watches, are now the favoured form of status display. Young men – and

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they are mostly men, though their pseudonyms and silly avatars make it impossible to know for sure – congregate in chat rooms and Twitter threads, peacocking, showing off their scores. Every serious collector knew the numbers: $100,000 for an iconic video clip of LeBron James, more than $1 million for a Bored Ape and the intellectual property rights to the same, $100 million in total NFT sales surpassed by Christie’s in September 2021. At a high enough altitude, rare digital art satisfies the age-old human desire to be, and be seen as, special: We want what others have, and we want what others can’t have. At home in our sweatpants, all of us were looking for the internet equivalent of a statement piece.

A fortunate few had already found theirs. On Twitter and the chat platform Discord they hugged their luck, amassing followers, flaunting profile pictures worth tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. For a while, the braggy Twitter bio of one influencer, known as Artchick, read (as I recall): “Already made it. Now just having fun.”

* The fun was a major draw. Amid the grey grind of what was still, unaccountably, the Covid era, the experience of joyriding through a digital wonderland where everything was for sale offered a megadose of excitement, just as a wild weekend in Vegas can liven up a working stiff ’s dull routine. In a zero-interest-rate environment, savings accounts – as banks persist in calling them – are a sick joke, which means young people today are perpetually primed to YOLO their cash reserves into the next 10X investment opportunity as their best, or only, means of building wealth. One Twitter user, a self-identified father and former Black Hawk helicopter crew chief, claimed that despite owning a Bored Ape collection worth nearly $1 million, he had less than $3,000 in his bank account.

In 2021, according to crypto-focused venture fund 1confirmation, $19.6 billion worth of NFTs were traded worldwide. Like high-stakes gamblers, we soon became inured to the amounts of money being thrown around. Coveted NFTs could sell out in seconds, so speed was prized. Second-guessing, cool calculation were liabilities. “You are preternaturally fast,” a compatriot said after one drop. It was the best compliment I had gotten in weeks.

On September 19, I scored an incredible flip: Having minted an NFT from the hot new collection PRJKTNEON for $169, I resold it a few hours later for more than $5,000.

A week earlier, however, I had lost out on an even bigger score due to a website glitch. There was no consumer protection, and no way to rectify the error: Hardly anybody even felt sorry for me.

“If you’re in this NFT game long enough,” said collector Jesse Altman, “it’s just impossible not to have moves and missed opportunities so bad that they make you physically sick to your stomach.”

And so hedge fund guys wrote investment analyses to buttress their JPEG purchases, while pseudonymous Aristotles ginned up a philosophical framework for the risky business of speculating on digital art. “Everything is a speculation now, even living,” crypto influencer 0xAllen claimed. “There’s no separation between existence (and what you need for that) and speculation.”

It should be said that some NFT collectors really do love art, and for them the marketplace offers everything from digital paintings to strobing GIFs, comics-inflected illustrations to AI-generated abstractions. The new technologies have divided the old guard of artists and critics. “Someday there will be a Francis Bacon of NFTs,” wrote New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz, arguing that “all the people who say NFTs can’t be art, that every one of them is bad […] are like those nostalgic old-school people who want to return to the gold standard.” Yet no less an elder statesman than Brian Eno lodged a withering critique, saying that NFTs seemed like “just a way for artists to get a little piece of the action from global capitalism, our own cute little version of financialization.” Shortly after reading Eno’s comment, however, I came across a tweet that seemed like a retort. “Why financialize art,” a user named SHL0MS asked, “when you can artify finance?”

They had a point. Through the fog of manic greed, a large unknown country hove into view. This was the “metaverse”, a digital realm the borders of which extend from “NFTwitter” to virtual worlds with names like Decentraland and The Sandbox, where plots of land are bought and sold and clubhouses designed and erected. At a time when humanity dreams of colonising Mars, here is another escapist frontier – the perfect playground for NFT early adopters, who tend to fit a certain type. Online, I was taking part in what Steve Silberman in NeuroTribes, his Samuel Johnson Prize-winning history of autism, calls a “convivial society of loners”. In lengthy Twitter threads, the deep thinkers in my new cohort plotted how to enlarge and preserve the burgeoning culture of this new domain. Even Mark Zuckerberg was bullish, changing the name of Facebook’s parent company to Meta and declaring that it had “a new North Star: to help bring the metaverse to life”. In the

meantime, we had Twitter Spaces to chat in, NFT-based games to play, virtual art galleries in which to exhibit our personal collections. Every man a Tate Modern! And why not?

Immoderation, it’s worth remembering, is not exclusive to digital art. In October 2021, a Banksy painting which infamously half-shredded itself following its sale at auction was resold for $25.4 million, more than 20 times the price which the unmutilated artwork had fetched just three years before. Swiss freeports are choked with masterpieces serving as capital assets, world-class works of art which for tax reasons change hands without changing location, without officially entering the country, tokens in some billionaire’s great game. The difference, of course, is that teenagers aren’t rushing out to buy Old Masters with their spending money. Like a movie star’s good-luck story of being discovered, the quick profits some NFT buyers have made are deceptive and, in fact, have tended to obscure the reality that NFTs are the riskiest, least mature, most volatile asset class in the world.

* Imagine owning a warehouse full of corn in a country where nobody uses ethanol, where the tortilla has yet to be invented, and even this picture of a worthless commodity doesn’t convey the sheer leaden dead weight that unwanted NFTs can, in a tumbleweed-blown wallet, become. An air of dogshit undesirability attends certain collections. When spirits are high and all is glittering promise, the JPEGs flow like water, but they can ice over at a moment’s notice. And there are “rug pulls”, when the artist or developers behind a project abruptly call it quits and make off with their profits, leaving collectors holding the bag. (One project “rugged” me to the tune of $2,200.) Because they are so illiquid, NFTs “should be treated as a delicacy for excess capital”, said crypto personality DonnieBigBags, who nonetheless claimed to have dropped more than $1 million on non-fungibles himself.

As fall deepened, it gradually dawned on me just how badly my NFT portfolio was doing. My digital wallet was a graveyard of failed and failing projects into which I had sunk over $40,000. I had made thousands in profit, but had reinvested it all in my growing collection. I was in afterburner mode, addicted to the adrenaline rush of drops. But now every decision seemed to be wrong.

It was a mistake to sell; it was a mistake not to sell. Floors which had seemed rock-solid dropped out from under me like lifts with cut cables. The jolt was sickening. In one instance, an $8,000 asset

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became worthless practically overnight. What had started as a moon mission was turning out more like Journey to the Center of the Earth.

In short, the bubble popped. If before I’d been enjoying a monthslong bender, juiced to the gills with dopamine, this was the merciless morning after, soaked in cortisol. “Shit got bad fast, and we are still feeling the effects,” wrote Jonathan Long, the founder of Alpha Access, a private members’ club for collectors. “Entirely fucking worthless use of my time and energy” was his verdict on a clutch of NFT projects he’d incubated, after a disastrous late-November launch. “It’s made me fucking hate NFTs, and it was self-inflicted.” Worse than doom and gloom was the attitude – prevalent among those who had already made it – that I came to think of as toxic positivity. The WAGMI ethos masked the reality that some people were losing their shirts, just as the talk of inclusion papered over the fact that some NFTs maintained skyhigh prices by virtue of just how exclusive they were.

It was a rigged game. Before the Ziggurats sale, a software developer confided to me that he planned to grab 70 of them by coordinating dozens of wallets “programmatically” – using black magic to reap ill-gotten gains. This, when most buyers would each be limited to three. “Welcome to crypto,” another coder told me.

“Engineers are gods and most of them are out for themselves.” By mid-November the talk was all of tax-loss harvesting and scams.

Every day, spam bots and cyberthieves slid into my DMs, promoting garbage or trying to con me into giving up sensitive information so they could rob me blind. “There are two types of people holding NFTs,” said Bored Ape holder Barely Accredited, “those who have been hacked [and] those who haven’t been hacked YET.” Being extremely online – “Never cash out, never log off,” I joked – took another kind of toll: headaches, neck and back pain, eye strain, worsening myopia from a steady diet of screens. I was averaging more than 10 hours a day on my phone, plus laptop time. “Early Information is King. Live on Discord & Twitter,” blared the subhead of a document purporting to explain how one influencer had turned $4,000 into nearly $20,000 by flipping NFTs. Somehow the desire to support independent artists, the profit motive and the craving for an ersatz social life had gotten all mashed up together. NFTs infiltrated my dreams. There was a beating pain behind my eyes.

But even as I began to dial back my involvement, innovation was

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marching forward, with big business leading it by the hand. In December, Ubisoft became the first major company to debut game-playable NFTs; that same month, Nike acquired RTFKT Studios, an NFT fashion startup known for its digital footwear, and Adidas netted $23 million with an NFT drop. The real bull run, according to Artchick and others, was still to come.

Bull run? The first five days of 2022 came on like the festival of San Fermín: As though shaking off the last vestiges of the old year were all it took to change our fortunes, in less than a week OpenSea alone processed more than $1 billion of NFT sales. Suddenly the mood was festive again. Bored Apes and other top collections printed record highs. Even some of my own holdings took off. Toward the end of this bacchanal, OpenSea announced that it had closed a new, $300-million funding round, valuing the company at $13.3 billion – nearly nine times the valuation it had received just six months earlier. Other startups – such as RMRK, on the Kusama blockchain – were already working on the next generation of non-fungibles: NFTs that could own and wear other NFTs, could be nested inside each other like Russian dolls, could share revenue, could be broken into pieces and sold like fractional shares. This is a picture of the future as a huge pile of “art Legos”, a thrilling amalgam of open-source code and artistic creation. These are the building blocks of the next da Vinci’s workshop. The raw materials to furnish a global art gallery. The speculative assets of a worldwide casino.

Normies will fight these developments – some gamers deplore Ubisoft’s NFT experiment – and they will likely lose, as people always lose to an idea whose time has come. To NFT creators, the opposition’s motive is obvious. “It’s fear,” said the artist deArtifact. “Fear that they don’t understand where the world is going.

And they don’t.” Others will convert, as the actress Reese Witherspoon has, telling her followers that in the near future, “every person will have a parallel digital identity. Avatars, crypto wallets, digital goods will be the norm.”

It is all happening faster than anyone expected. Well, almost anyone. One of the biggest NFT artists, XCOPY, initially tried to give away his newly minted creations for free to long-time supporters. There were few takers. “Wake me up in 2 years when it’s mainstream af,” he wrote on his blog. Roughly two years later, on December 8, 2021, the XCOPY NFT ‘Right-Click and Save As Guy’ was resold for $7.06 million.

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When I Sing, Mountains Dance

By Irene Solà Irene Solà is a Catalan writer and artist, winner of the European Union Prize for Literature, and the Documenta Prize for first novels, among others. Translated into English by Mara Faye Lethem, her latest book – When I Sing, Mountains Dance – has recently been published by Granta. Set in the Pyrenees, against the backdrop of Francisco Franco’s repressive rule, it is a wild and lyrical ode to the terrible beauty of the natural world and its inhabitants. In the following extract, we present the opening chapter of this fiercely imaginative work

Lightning We arrived with full bellies. Painfully full. Black bellies, burdened with cold, dark water, lightning bolts, and thunderclaps. We came from the sea and from other mountains, and from unthinkable places, and we’d seen unthinkable things. We scratched at the rock atop the peaks, as if we bore salt, to ensure not even weeds would sprout there. We chose the color of the hills and the fields, and the gleams in rivers, and the glints in upward-glancing eyes.

When the wild beasts caught sight of us, they cowered deep in their caves and crimped their necks, lifting their snouts to catch the scent of damp earth approaching. We covered them all like a blanket. The oak and the boxwood and the birch and the fir.

Shhhhhhh. And they all went silent, because we were a stern roof and it was up to us to decide who would have the tranquility and joy of a dry soul.

After our arrival all was stillness and pressure, and we forced the thin air down to bedrock, then let loose the first thunderclap. Bang! A reprieve. And the coiled snails shuddered in their secluded homes, godless and without a prayer, knowing that if they didn’t drown, they would emerge redeemed to breathe the dampness in. And then we poured water out in colossal drops like coins onto the earth and the grass and the stones, and the mighty thunderclap resounded inside the chest cavity of every beast. And that was when the man said damn and blast. He said it aloud, because when a man is alone there’s no need to think in silence. Damn and blast, you had to get yourself stuck in a storm. And we laughed, huh, huh, huh, huh, as we dampened his head, and our water slunk into his collar, and slid down his shoulder and the small of his back. Our droplets were cold and made him cross.

The man came from a house not far off, halfway up to the crest, by a river that must have been cold because it hid beneath the trees. There he’d left behind two cows, a bunch of pigs and hens, a dog and two roving cats, an old man, and a wife and two kids.

Domènec was the man’s name. And he had a lush midmountain

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garden patch and some poorly plowed fields beside the river.

The patch was tended by the old man – his father, whose back was flat as a board – and Domènec plowed the fields. Domènec had come to reel off his verses over on this side of the mountain. To see what flavor and what sound they had, because when a man is alone there’s no need to whisper. That evening when he checked on the herd he found a fistful of early black chanterelles, and he carried the mushrooms wrapped in the belly of his shirt. The baby cried when he left the house, and his wife said “Domènec” as if protesting, as if pleading, and Domènec went out anyway. It’s hard to come up with verses and contemplate the virtue hidden inside all things when the kids are crying with the shrillness of a flayed piglet, making your heart race despite your best efforts to keep calm. And he wanted to go out and look at the cows. He had to go out and look at the cows. What did Sió know about cows? Nothing. The calf went maaaaaaaaaaa, maaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Desperately. Sió knew nothing about cows.

And again he cried out, damn and blast!, because we’d snuck up quickly, hell yes, capricious and stealthy, and we’d trapped him.

Damn and blast!, because the calf ’s tail was stuck in a jumble of wires. The wires had gotten lodged between two trees, and what with all its straining the calf ’s legs were shredded and gleamed bloody, ragged and dirty. It went maaaaaaaaaaa, maaaaaaaaaaa, trapped by its tail between the two trees, and its mother guarded it restlessly. Through the downpour Domènec climbed over to the animal. His legs were good and strong from barreling up the mountain to get some air when the kids were yelling too much, or when they weighed too heavy on him, and the plowing weighed too heavy on him, and the old man’s silence, and all the words, one after the other, from his wife, who was called Sió, and who was from Camprodon, and who’d gotten herself into a fine fix, agreeing to go up there to that mountaintop with a man who slipped away and an old man who never spoke. And of course, sometimes Domènec loved her, loved her fiercely, still. But what a weight, for the everlasting love of God and Satan, how heavy that house could be! Folks should have more time to get to know each other before they marry. More time to live before making children. Sometimes he grabbed her by the waist and spun her

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around, round and round, like when they were courting, because Sió, oh Sió, lord have mercy, what a pair of legs! He dropped the chanterelles. The calf lowed. Domènec approached the animal, leading with his hands. Slowly, step by step. Saying things in a deep, quieting voice. Ssssh, ssshh, he said. Its mother watched him warily. Domènec’s hair was streaming wet. When he got home he’d have Sió heat up some water to wash off the cold and the rain. He looked at the wire that cut into the calf ’s legs every time it moved. He grabbed its tail firmly, pulled out his knife, and deftly cut the knot. And then we let loose the second bolt. Quick as a snake. Angry. Wide like a spiderweb. Lightning goes where it wants to, like water and landslides and little insects and magpies, transfixed by all things pretty and shiny. The knife was out of Domènec’s pocket and it gleamed like a treasure, like a precious stone, like a fistful of coins. The metal blade, polished mirror, reflected us back. Like open arms, luring us closer. Lightning goes where it will, and the second bolt went into Domènec’s head. Deep, deep down, down to his heart. And everything he saw inside his eyes was black from the burn. The man collapsed onto the grass, and the meadow pressed its cheek to his, and all our giddy, happy waters moved into him through his shirtsleeves, beneath his belt, into his underwear and socks, searching for still-dry skin. He died. And the cow took off in a frenzy, and the calf followed after.

The four women who’d witnessed it approached him. By degrees.

Because they weren’t used to taking any interest in how people die. Or in attractive men. Or in ugly men, for that matter. But the scene had been captivating. The light so bright and so dazzling that it sated all need for seeing. The knife had called to the lightning, the lightning had hit the man’s head, bull’s-eye, it had parted his hair right down the middle, and the cows had fled in a frenzy, like in some slapstick comedy. Someone should write a song about the man’s hair and the lightning comb. Putting pearls in his hair, in the song, white like the gleam off the knife. And include something about his body, and his open lips, and his light eyes like cups filling up with rain. About his face, so lovely on the outside and so burned on the inside. And about

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the torrential water that fell onto his chest and rushed beneath his back, as if it wanted to carry him off. And about his hands, the song would tell, stumpy and thick and calloused, one open like a flower expecting a bee, the other gripping the knife like tree roots swallowing a rock.

One of the women, the one named Margarida, touched his hand, partly to find out if the man was burning with the lightning bolt inside him, and partly just for the caress. Then the women left him be and gathered up the soaking wet black chanterelles he’d dropped, and abandoned the scene, because they had many other things to do, and many other things to think about. Then, as if their satisfaction were contagious, we stopped raining. Sated. Dispersed. And when it was clear we were done, the birds hopped out onto the branches and sang the song of the survivors, their little stomachs filled with mosquitoes, yet bristling and furious with us. They had little to complain about, as we hadn’t even hailed, we’d rained just enough to kill a man and a handful of snails. We’d barely knocked down any nests and hadn’t flooded a single field.

We retreated. Dog-tired. And we looked upon our work. Leaves and branches dripped, and we headed off, vacant and slack, for elsewhere.

One time we rained frogs and another time we rained fish. But best of all is hail. Precious stones pummel towns and skulls and tomatoes. Round and frozen. Covering terraced walls and paths with icy treasure. The frogs fell like a plague. The men and women ran, and the frogs, who were teensy-weensy, hid. Alas. The fish fell like a blessing on the men and women’s heads, like slaps, and the people laughed and lifted the fish up in the air as if they wanted to give them back to us, but they didn’t want to and we wouldn’t have wanted them back anyway. The frogs croaked inside our bellies. The fish stopped moving but didn’t die. But whatever. Best of all are the hailstorms.

When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà is published by Granta, out now

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Writing in a Time of Distraction

By Douglas Kennedy Douglas Kennedy is the author of 15 novels, including international bestsellers The Big Picture and The Pursuit of Happiness. Splitting his time between Maine, Paris, Berlin and London, his work has been translated into 22 languages and earned him l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In the following essay he explores the myths, art and graft of writing, looking at the myriad ways writers through the ages have put pen to paper

A morning coffee with a fellow writer in Paris. She’s a cigarette junkie. She has chewed fingernails. Her intimate life makes twice-divorced me look like a paragon of domestic stability. She also happens to be one of the smartest, most original people I know. On the morning in question, we’re meeting in a café near my apartment in the 10th arrondissement. She looks like sleep has been sidestepping her. When I ask her how the work is faring, she puts up her hand, like police stopping oncoming traffic.

“You know me” she says. “I write my way through all crises. But since the second pandemic confinement, my concentration has been shot. I find myself thinking: what’s the point of telling stories at a moment when the world as we know it is coming unhinged, when this pandemic and all its shitty ramifications have completely broken everyone’s concentration? Living constantly in the ongoing stupidity of being ‘online’. It’s become an addiction, a way to avoid the novel that my publishers think is being delivered next month.”

Lighting up another cigarette off the embers of the last one she asks me, “Any thoughts how I get out of this creative cul-de-sac?”

I think about this for a moment, knowing that my friend hates American-style pep talks or words of encouragement, as it runs counter to her preferred ongoing existential gloom. I just say: “Well, there is a button on the iPhone called ‘off ’; just as you can disconnect the WiFi on your laptop. But that means making a conscious choice to detach from the exterior world and concentrate on getting words down on a page.”

“So what you’re telling me is: ‘Just fucking write.’”

Trying to write when the last thing you want to do is write… that is something that every professional scribe I know has grappled with over the years. I speak as someone who has been living by his pen for 39 years – and is currently finishing his 24th book. Given all that, I still wouldn’t hold myself up as an example of writerly rigor and discipline. Because I damn well know just how befuddling quotidian life can be; how the temptation to dodge the daily quota of words is ceaseless. Especially in such distracted times – where the pandemic and the ascent of the totalitarian impulse in many once-stable democracies has given rise to a general feeling

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of impending calamity. As such, it’s not surprising that so many of my writing friends talk about an inability to focus during this moment of ongoing exigency.

Writing may be an art, but it’s also a metier. And one for which there is no fixed set of guidelines or instruction manual to follow. My preferred comment on the craft of fiction comes from the ever-great Somerset Maugham: “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are.”

Some people, however, think they have an idea. At a dinner with a vainglorious (ergo: insecure) French journalist who’d just published a turgid seven-hundred-page fictional tome, he asked me how long my then-recent novel, The Woman in the Fifth, had taken to write. I told him that, as I’d been in the middle of an insomniac period (fuelled by a failing marriage), I’d managed to turn out a first draft in about four months. He laughed derisively.

“I needed eight years!” he said. “Eight years is necessary for a masterpiece.”

I strongly disagreed. “Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment in three months to pay off some serious gambling debts. And that novel remains one of the cornerstones of Western literature. So why does eight years’ work immediately imply that you’ve written a masterpiece?”

The journalist – a thin-skinned fellow – got up from the café table where this conversation was taking place in front of several other people and told me to essentially go screw myself. As soon as he was out of hearing range, another writer at the same table noted: “… and Simenon could write a masterpiece in 15 days.” This is true.

Indeed, when it comes to the business of turning out words, everyone’s methodology is profoundly different. Gustav Flaubert – who had a small family fortune, no wife, no children – wrote on average just 100 words per day. Which meant it took him almost five years to write Madame Bovary. The aforementioned Georges Simenon was at the opposite end of the productivity spectrum, turning out an average of 40 manuscript pages a day (and André Gide got it right when he called him one of the most important Francophone writers of the 20th century). And then there is the phe-

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nomenon that is the still-active, ever-prolific Joyce Carol Oates – who has published over 58 novels and 30 collections of short stories and, though now in her early 80s, shows no inclination to decrease her insane productivity. It should also be noted she is a deeply serious writer who is often spoken about as a future Nobel laureate.

Personally, I wish I could be as effortlessly prolific. Instead, I use the same method that Hemingway and Graham Greene both adopted: a minimum of 500 words per day, six days a week. That’s about 12 manuscript pages per week. Six hundred pages per annum.

And though I have desks in the places I call home (Maine, Paris, Berlin, London), I rarely use them, preferring a sofa with a leg extension or that great triumph of mid-century American design, an Eames chair, on which to write. I know novelists who need soundproof circumstances – a veritable monk’s cell, insulated against outside distraction – to work. Just as there are those who must write at the same time every day for the proverbial magic to happen. But I can write anywhere. In a café. On the metro. I prefer the fact that my output of words is punched out in disparate locations. It’s a way of mitigating the lonely, vertiginous nature of my craft – but the fact that I am doing it in perpetual motion (and am, in fact, finishing this essay on a train from northern Sweden to Stockholm) also feeds the narrative. Writing affords me the possibility of changing the work décor constantly – and, as such, absorbing the new on a regular basis. Which, for me, keeps my world-view fresh. Being on the constant move also helps mitigate the deep sense of ongoing doubt – which, truth be told, is part of the creative equation for all authors.

Doubt is that appallingly noisy neighbour who knocks on your subconscious in the middle of the night and whispers: ‘Do you really think you can keep doing this and keep it good? Truth be told, it’s merde’… and yet whom you will never be able to evict from that space between your ears.

As such, doubt is just one of the many distractions that you will face every time you face the blank page. How you negotiate with your doubt determines so much. Not to mention the need to keep going when everything in you tells you to throw up your hands and stop… which I’ve never done – because, like most working nov-

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elists, I have the obsessive need to keep writing, not to mention the understanding that, whereas I cannot control many things in life, I can control the narrative I’m working on. Writing, as such, has become a form of equilibrium… especially when everything else in my life has been in freefall.

As I often tell younger writers, a key to maintaining momentum is to establish an entente cordiale with doubt – to accept that it is always part of the creative frisson that is behind putting words on a page, day after day, year after year. One of the many ways I deal with those moments when I think I can’t go on is to remind myself: It can all be fixed in the next draft. Just get the words down.

Even if it’s just a few sentences. Because if there’s one thing that I’ve learned over nearly four decades of living via words it’s this: Writing is always going to be a confidence trick I play on myself.

On which note…

My 25-year-old daughter Amelia spent much of the lockdown working on her first novel. Sometime in the autumn of 2021 she called me from her apartment in Brooklyn and told me she didn’t think she could carry on; that she wanted to give up. My response: “Now you know how much I love you, Amelia – but the truth is: Though you will be upset about not finishing the novel, and I will be upset for you as well, no one else is going to care. Other people, meanwhile, will finish their books and some of them will actually see them published. The world is filled with people who started a novel and couldn’t see it through.”

I also told her that I’ve loathed each of the 15 novels I’ve published at some point during its writing. It’s part of the process.

After our phone call, Amelia went quiet about her novel. Though we continued to speak several times a week, I heard no more from her on the subject (and though I wanted to ask about it, I stayed silent – knowing that ‘are you back into it?’ questions can cause a writer to freeze up even further). Then, around the end of October, she rang me up and informed me that the first draft was finished. I had a burst of paternal pride at her achievement.

I didn’t ask her how she got it done. Because I knew the answer to that question: She just fucking wrote it.

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Jacket DUNHILL Shirt DUNHILL Shorts AMI PARIS

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Grooming and illustration Kathy Le Sant Model Charles De Linière Casting Emilie Åström

316

Suit BOSS Top CELINE HOMME BY HEDI SLIMANE Boots SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO

ALEXANDER MCQUEEN

317

DANCING CLOSE

Set design Lune Kuipers

Photography Iringó Demeter

ALL JEWELLERY COCO CRUSH BY CHANEL FINE JEWELLERY THROUGHOUT 319

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Manicurist Saffron Goddard at CLM Agency using Chanel le Vernis in New Dawn and Chanel La Crème Main Hand model Oluwaseyi Ogunyemi Photography assistant Barney Couch Ceramic pillows by Completedworks

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Styling Mitchell Belk

STRONG FORTUNES

Photography Jukka Ovaskainen

ALL CLOTHING PARAJUMPERS SS22 THROUGHOUT

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Grooming Paul Donovan Models Jo at Present Model Management, Piero at IMG Models Casting Troy Westwood Production Shoot Canarias, The Production Factory Sandals stylist’s own throughout

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VANTAGE POINT

Photography Jack Johnstone

Styling Grace Joel

336

ALL CLOTHING FENDI SS22 MEN’S COLLECTION

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Photography assistant Aaron Crossman Set design Imogen Frost Grooming Laila Zakaria Models Liren Shih at Chapter Management Casting George Raymond Stead

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BURN AFTER READING

Photography Sophie Gladstone

342

Set design Tara Holmes

ALL CLOTHING TOD’S NO_CODE THROUGHOUT

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Shot at Soho Works 180 The Strand

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STOCKISTS

ABCD ACNE STUDIOS / acnestudios.com ALEXANDER MCQUEEN / alexandermcqueen.com ALPHATAURI / alphatauri.com AMI PARIS / amiparis.com AUDEMARS PIGUET / audemarspiguet.com BERLUTI / berluti.com BLANCPAIN / blancpain.com BORSALINO / borsalino.com BOSS / hugoboss.com BOTTEGA VENETA / bottegaveneta.com BREITLING / breitling.com BRIONI / brioni.com BROWNS / brownsfashion.com BULGARI / bulgari.com BURBERRY / burberry.com CANALI / canali.com CARTIER / cartier.com CELINE HOMME BY HEDI SLIMANE / celine.com CHANEL / chanel.com CLAN / c-l-a-n.co DIOR / dior.com DUNHILL / dunhill.com

FGHIJ FENDI / fendi.com GENEVIEVE DEVINE / genevievedevine.com GIORGIO ARMANI / armani.com GIRARD-PERREGAUX / girard-perregaux.com GRAND SEIKO / grand-seiko.com GUCCI / gucci.com HANRO / hanro.co.uk HERMÈS / hermes.com HUBLOT / hublot.com IZABELLA BILINSKA / izabellabilinska.format.com JAEGER-LECOULTRE / jaeger-lecoultre.com JIL SANDER BY LUCIE & LUKE MEIER / jilsander.com JOHN LOBB / johnlobb.com

KLMNO PRSTVZ KIKO KOSTADINOV / kikokostadinov.com LN-CC / ln-cc.com LORO PIANA / loropiana.com LOUIS VUITTON / louisvuitton.com MARA PARIS / mara.paris MARGARET HOWELL / margarethowell.co.uk MARNI / marni.com MARTINE ROSE / martine-rose.com META CAMPANIA COLLECTIVE / meta-campania-collective.com MICHAEL KORS / michaelkors.com NANUSHKA / nanushka.com NOMOS GLASHÜTTE / nomos-glashuette.com OMEGA / omegawatches.com

PATEK PHILIPPE / patek.com PARAJUMPERS / parajumpers.it PER GOTESSON / pergotesson.com POLO RALPH LAUREN / ralphlauren.co.uk PRADA / prada.com PRONOUNCE / @_pronounce RIMOWA / rimowa.com ROLEX / rolex.com SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO / ysl.com SALVATORE FERRAGAMO / ferragamo.com STEFAN COOKE / stefancooke.co.uk TAG HEUER / tagheuer.com TOD’S / tods.com TUDOR / tudorwatch.com UGO PAULON / ugopaulon.com VACHERON / vacheron-constantin.com VALENTINO / valentino.com ZEGNA / zegna.com

IN ADDITION TO GLOBAL KIOSKS, TRAVEL HUBS, AND NEWS STANDS, PORT CAN BE FOUND HERE

Also available on the entire VistaJet fleet, vistajet.com

HOTELS CLUBS ANDAZ LIVERPOOL STREET BELMOND CADOGAN THE BENTLEY THE BERKELEY THE CHELSEA HARBOUR CLARIDGE’S THE CONNAUGHT CORINTHIA LONDON DEAN STREET TOWN HOUSE THE DORCHESTER FOUR SEASONS, PARK LANE THE GORE HILTON, PARK LANE JUMEIRAH CARLTON TOWER THE LANDMARK THE LANESBOROUGH THE LANGHAM LOWNDES MANDARIN ORIENTAL LONDON MARRIOTT, MARBLE ARCH LONDON MARRIOTT, PARK LANE THE MAY FAIR NUMBER SIXTEEN, SUMNER PLACE PELHAM THE RITZ ROYAL GARDEN SANCTUM SOHO THE SOHO ST PANCRAS RENAISSANCE W HOTEL, LEICESTER SQUARE THE ZETTER TOWNHOUSE

67 PALL MALL ALBERT'S AT BEAUFORT HOUSE THE ALLBRIGHT, MAYFAIR THE ARTS CLUB, DOVER STREET THE BLUEBIRD BOODLE'S BROOK'S THE CALEDONIAN THE CENTURY CLUB CHELSEA ARTS CITY OF LONDON THE COLONY THE CONDUIT THE CUCKOO THE CURTAIN EAST INDIA THE EIGHT THE GARRICK THE GOODENOUGH THE GROUCHO HOME HOUSE THE HOSPITAL THE IVY MORTIMER HOUSE THE ORIENTAL THE PORTLAND QUO VADIS REFORM SHOREDITCH HOUSE THE SLOANE SLOANE GARDENS SOHO HOUSE, DEAN STREET SOHO HOUSE, 40 GREEK STREET SOUTH KENSINGTON TEN TRINITY SQUARE THE TURF UNIVERSITY WOMEN'S WHITE'S

THINGS I LIKE / THINGS I DISLIKE

Susan Sontag’s diaries reveal a witty fondness for the humble list as a way of conferring value and exploring the realms of her knowledge. Her lists of likes and dislikes have become justly notorious. Here, acclaimed writer, critic and poet Seán Hewitt picks up that baton.

LIKE

DISLIKE

Night-scented stock / Going for a run in the rain / A badinage of insults / Embroidered clothing / Dipping into the cool shade of an old church on a hot day / Wildflowers / Superstitions / Medieval architecture / Rewilding / Idealists / Gargoyles / Snowfall / Inappropriate jokes / The way Bessie Smith delivers an innuendo / A cutting remark / Grandfather clocks / Excessive swearing / The fiendishness of magpies, the way they hop / The sound of my own voice (my boyfriend told me to write that) / My boyfriend (my boyfriend told me to write that) / Hearing birdsong on the way home from a nightclub / The scent of barley that comes from the Guinness brewery / Millie Jackson / Singers so bad you can pick them out in the choir / A Manhattan / Iced vermouth with a slice of orange / Weeds / Unexpected reminders of the dead / Pets who are given forenames and surnames, e.g. a cat named Josiah Wedgwood / People who have unprofitable hobbies / Whistling in an empty house / Echoes / Fresh bedsheets / The harmonies of The Watersons / The gorgeous misery of a late Thomas Hardy novel / Allotments / A high-waisted trouser / Prosody / Art heists / The smell of peat / A run-down pub / Aquariums / Frozen spiderwebs / Ruins / Effeminacy / Sarcasm / Scousers / Drunkenly telling women they are beautiful in the smoking area / Everyone being beautiful when you’re drunk / Shirley Collins / The saying ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ / Trade unions / ‘An Endless Sky of Honey’ / The quiet clunk of a record needle finding the groove / Being left to my own devices / Dissent / Graveyards / A pair of heavy boots / The Victorian sensation novel / The sound of my grandmother singing / Suddenly recalling a line from a book / A good autumn / Freckled shoulders / Mythologies / When a child first remembers your face / Pointedly saying ‘You’re welcome’ to people when they don’t say thank you to me / Greenhouses / Cheeseboards / Hearing an owl / The smell of your hair after a bonfire / A perfect row of houses / Sash windows / When old people lose all sense of propriety / When people recite Middle English poetry with the ‘authentic’ accent / Double denim / Growing plants from seed / Ambient rain / Rehearsing arguments in the shower / The beautiful dissonance of an orchestra tuning up / The sound of spoken Irish / The steamy exhalation of an iron when you stand it upright / The Phoenix Park / Changing my mind / The variety of English accents / Peshwari naans / Writing a strongly worded letter / The ‘ll’ sound in Welsh / Internal rhymes / Good thighs / The sound of the word ‘thigh’ / Likewise, its spelling / Boyishness / Migration / Lyricism / A well-structured speech / The smell of hawthorn blossom / Evening light

Artificial flowers / Authority / The idea of work as a virtue / Targeted advertising / Siri / Electronic devices that speak to you / Piety / Pesticides / The Conservative Party / Likewise, Fine Gael / Homelessness / Greed / The smugness of rich men / Stigma / Overhead lighting / The difficulty of remembering a loved one’s face / Likewise, their voice / Dust / Hayfever / Images of medical procedures / Being made aware of the fact that I have internal organs / Seats with no leg room / Disrespect / Classism / Institutional power hierarchies / Standardised grammar mistaken for intelligence / Likewise, RP / The private school system / WhatsApp / Carbon emissions / Complacency / Bad buskers / Borders / Straight couples who take up the whole of the pavement / When people announce their charitable donations / Cowardice / Privatisation / People who fetishise the rules / Jobsworths / The words ‘relevant’ and ‘relatable’ used as praise / Cliques / The extinction of species / Blood sports / Trespass laws / Inherited wealth passed off as talent / Nationalism / Legalese / Pub quizzes that don’t specifically cater to my own limited area of expertise / Socialists whose friendship groups consist entirely of rich, privately schooled people / Nepotism / London-centrism / The smell of hospitals / The overuse of the word ‘problematic’ / Likewise, ‘radical’ / The guilt that comes with grieving / The word ‘gift’ used as a verb / Pervasive transphobia / Americanisms used by nonAmericans / Clothing with brand names on / Likewise, being used as an advertisement / Small dressing rooms / Having to take off my shoes to try on a new pair of trousers / Hangnails / That I rarely enjoy going to the theatre as much as I enjoy the idea of going to the theatre / Books printed with new covers to tie in with the film version / Pizza (sue me) / Spinelessness / The combination of sweet and savoury in one dish, i.e. bacon and maple syrup / Art used as a display of wealth / Self-righteousness / Exploitation / ‘Creative’ used as a noun, as in ‘a team of creatives’ / Hold music / My own tendency towards apathy / The celebration of imperialism / Imperialism itself / Tight socks / Shrinking clothes in the wash / Accidentally grating a portion of my finger and/or fingernail when cooking / The idea of producing ‘content’ / That I hardly ever cry anymore / When people ask what my writing is about / Paraphrasing literature / Also, how pompous that sounds /Ignorance deployed as humour / Servility / Competition / Having the rules of a card game explained to me / Littering / Lawnmowers / The institution of the five-day working week / Alarms