In the realm of contemporary art, where innovation and bravery collide, one name emerges with an irrefutable resonance – Daniel Arsham. An enchanter of temporal dimensions, Arsham has spent the past 20 years transforming cultural objects into eroding artefacts, producing works that could both be plucked from ancient history or from an unfathomable day far, far ahead in a dystopian future.
Much like an alchemist of antiquity, Arsham’s creations sit in what he coins an “archaeological universe” – a civilisation that banishes the clock and is populated by ageless fictional artefacts. Spanning multiple disciplines from sculpture to painting, Arsham’s practice can therefore be likened to an orchestrated symphony that dances on the delicate thread of time. To celebrate Arsham’s momentous career and a two-decade collaboration with gallerist Emmanuel Perrotin, the artist is opening two solo exhibitions taking place simultaneously in Perrotin’s spaces in Paris and New York this September. Debuting multiple series of works inspired by his archive – a project with Star Wars, sketches etched into hotel stationery and updated versions of his antiquity sculptures, for example – all those who set foot into the galleries will be given the chance to observe his evolution over the years. Right now, there’s a deep sense of reflection permeating the air. “A lot of the work that I make today,” he admits, “I don’t think I would have been able to create 20 years ago.”
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, and raised in the sun-stroked streets of Miami, there are a couple of catalytic moments that inspired the practice of the now New York-based artist. In 1992, Hurricane Andrew blitzed its way through Florida and destroyed Arsham’s family home in its path. It’s not an event that he thinks about every day, but certainly one that went on to inform the character and ethos of his work. “A lot of my works have this sense where they appear as if they’re in a state of decay or erosion, or they’re falling apart,” he says. “The idea around destruction and reconstruction is buried in the deep recesses of my subconscious.”
Arsham attended Design and Architecture Senior High School in Miami and was later awarded a scholarship to study a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at The Cooper Union in New York. Here, he was able to dabble in different mediums including painting, sculpture and photography, and ultimately sow the seeds of his distinctive vision. “The school was really an education about concepts and ways of making rather than the medium in which it sits,” he explains. After this, Arsham travelled back and forth between Miami and New York, which led to the meeting with gallerist Emmanuel Perrotin. “I began my career with him,” he says. Since Arsham joined 20 years ago, the gallery itself has expanded from a single space in Paris to multiple branches in Miami, New York, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Tokyo. “As my work has evolved, the gallery has as well,” he reflects. “I think it’s quite rare today for artists to have relationships with galleries like this. I was 23 when I began with the gallery, and it feels like a part of me, my history and my family.”
Just like time itself, Arsham’s interests in varying mediums have ebbed and flowed. In fact, his journey is not too dissimilar to the way a river ceaselessly carves its course, with the first bend marking his journey as a painter, before the gentle stream ships him off to other disciplines. As Arsham is colour blind, however, he’s always found painting to be a little challenging, “especially in the use of colour”, he says. As such, he turned his focus on the tonalities of colour instead, and all his artworks pre-2010 are swashed in monochrome gradients with hints of blue and green.
For the next 10 years, Arsham became interested in sculpture and began manipulating architecture – ‘Falling Clock’, a sculpture that gives the illusion of time melting off the wall, is one of his best-known pieces from this era. When Covid-19 hit and studios were closed, however, a lack of space and available tools meant that Arsham wasn’t able to work on larger-scale pieces. It was a perfect opportunity to return to painting, which he practised “pretty heavily” in the time proceeding. So much so that the exhibitions launched after 2020 saw an influx of new paintings and revamped ideas from the past that he “hadn’t quite concluded 10 years ago” – such as a series of landscapes “that look like they could have been made thousands of years ago, in the present or some potential future”.
Alongside his personal endeavours, Arsham co-founded design studio Snarkitecture in 2008 with Alex Mustonen and has continued to place collaboration as a fundamental part of his practice. To date, he’s conceived projects with multiple brands including Tiffany & Co., Adidas, Dior and Porsche, and has worked with music producer Pharrell Williams, choreographer Merce Cunningham and designer Hedi Slimane. Throughout his far-reaching work, though, there’s a consistent theme of decay and rebirth. His work is not merely a sanctuary for artistic creation; it’s a sanctum where subjects like ancient Greek busts, cars, film characters or emojis go through a metamorphosis. His Future Relics series sums this up best, which sees time-bending objects excavated from the present. “It’s as if you’re looking at an archaeological object that is from your own life,” he says. “There’s a bit of a confusion or dislocation that you feel; you don’t quite know where the objects are from.”
One of Arsham’s latest displays of timeless decay is a new collaboration with Star Wars, a project he’s dreamt of since childhood. Three years in the making and on view at Perrotin, Arsham was granted licence to turn Star Wars characters like R2-D2 and Darth Vader into archaeological relics, effectively creating a Star Wars universe that’s undergone a time-melting makeover in true Arsham style. This project, as with all of his work, is inherently there to confuse you, to make you question when, why and how it was made. But once you peel away the layer of magic, you’ll see that his
pieces are all created with traditional casting techniques, but constructed from a medley of unexpected materials, like crystal, volcanic ash, patina bronze and stainless steel.
To achieve this eroding effect, Arsham mixes wax with sand and applies it to the affected areas – this causes the material to lose its bond and fall away. “It’s a bit of trial and error because the moulds are sealed, so I cannot see inside them when they’re being cast,” he explains. “Some of the works have to be cast multiple times in order to get them to work properly. But over the years, I’ve gotten better at that process.”
When walking into any gallery space in which he’s exhibiting, there’s an odd sense of dislocation that will arise from the experience. On one side, you have decaying faces, almost rotting structures that have disintegrated over time, and familiar objects that appear to be blowing in a constant state of dizzying movement. On the other side, you have soft, textural paintings and architectural sculptures that melt into the walls. This perplexing state, according to Arsham, can open up new ways of thinking.
“It’s like an invitation to rethink your everyday life and how you interpret time,” he says. “So much of our everyday experience is governed by how many hours we have in the day and what we’re doing next week. The work invites you to escape that paradigm. When things are acting in a way that they’re not supposed to, it’s confusing. And that confusion can lead to productive thinking in other areas.”
This article is taken from Port issue 33. To continue reading, buy the issue or subscribe here
Catching up with the renowned actor, writer and director, off the heels of Next Goal Wins, a film following the 2014 American Samoa football team’s attempts to qualify for the FIFA World Cup. Doing a sports film is breaking new ground for Taika Waititi, but that’s never been a problem – it’s often what draws him to projects in the first place. Being nervous leads somewhere cool
Taika Waititi wears ZEGNA WINTER 2023 throughout
Taika Waititi is 17 hours away from me. If I had the money and patience to take a flight from New York to Auckland, then I could have talked to him in person, but since time and budget are both big concerns, I agree to Zoom. And to be honest, talking to somebody on your computer screen isn’t the worst thing imaginable. It beats the phone. You can see the subject’s eyes as they’re contemplating their next words, watch their mouth to make sure they’re done talking so you don’t interrupt them. In the case of my talk with the director, writer, and actor who has spent the last decade carving out a unique spot for himself in film and television, it’s at least sunny where he is on his home island of New Zealand. He’s had enough success over the last few years that he can be there more, and in a place like Hollywood less. It’s almost noon where he is, nearly seven at night my time, and the rain is pouring outside my window. I appreciate seeing the sunshine on the other end. But for Waititi, whose first big hit outside his home country was the 2014 mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, about a group of vampires living as roommates in the island’s suburb of Wellington, being home and not being stuck around the heart of the American movie industry is part of his process.
“Basically, I’m a tradesman,” he says. His mother is a teacher, his father was a farmer, and Waititi approaches what he does in a similar way as his parents. The difference of course, is he gets to make movies that millions of people see, put on Armani and Prada suits to walk red carpets all over the world, and let’s face it, he likely makes much more money than a teacher and farmer combined. But still, he sees it as “the same fucking thing. I just do versions of that where it’s…” He pauses a moment to think. It seems as if he’s going to maybe go a different route, but Waititi seems to follow through on all the thoughts he has and doesn’t really hold back. The word he was going to use was “glamorous”, but then he says that the life of a filmmaker isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
“Eighty per cent of the meals I eat while I’m working in this industry are lukewarm food out of a cardboard box that’s been delivered from somewhere and it’s fucking shit. And it’s not glamorous. And it’s like every time I eat, [it] makes me sadder. I’m like, where’s this Bob Evans lifestyle I wanted where I’m fucking eating out at the fucking fancy places all the time.” Then he gets to the rub: “Then you do eat out at fancy places and you’re sick of that food and you’re sick of the people and I dunno, there’s no answers other than just like, you need to chill out and come live in New Zealand.”
Early on, New Zealand played a big part in Waititi’s work. It was where he set stories, worked with his friends, and shot his first four films. By movie number five, Hollywood came calling, the way the city has always been interested in “international” filmmakers. It’s not always the easiest transition for directors, and the history of cinema has more than a few big names from Italy, Korea, or France who did one or two films in sunny Southern California before taking the first plane home. Waititi’s first task was to take his vision and sensibility and not just direct a film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe – the type of film that is almost always at the centre of any conversation about The Death of Cinema, as well as an all-but-guaranteed box-office hit – but revamp a franchise focused on one of the company’s most famous superheroes, Thor. It was no small task, but not only did Waititi make a successful film that cleared over $800 million at box offices worldwide, critics actually likedThor: Ragnarok. It was undeniably a Marvel film, but it was fun and more importantly, funny. It was noticeable that the director was able to do something on set that freed Chris Hemsworth up, making the fact that he was playing a very handsome Norse god something that the audience could laugh at. Somebody in the industry might call it the director’s “magic formula”, and if Waititi wanted, he likely could have coasted off the success for the rest of his career, getting somebody to drive him from his house in the Hollywood Hills down to the movie studio to make one big, easy money maker after another. But that’s not how he likes to do things. “It doesn’t matter what it is. It doesn’t matter if you think it’s going to be a home run from the beginning,” he says of his thought process behind any project he’s involved in. “Inevitably, you’re going to question why you made the film. Will anyone relate? Will anybody care or like it?”
That sounds like typical artist worry. No matter how successful you are, there’s always going to be a fear that people just don’t appreciate what you do. Yet the difference between somebody else worrying if people will like or appreciate their work and Waititi doing it is the fact that hardly anything he does makes sense when you first hear about it. His credits include writing, directing, and producing the What We Do in the Shadows vampires, a Marvel character, the pirates of the hilarious cult TV show Our Flag Means Death, and managing to carve some space between Mel Brooks’ The Producers and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds for a movie about Nazis that’s actually funny: 2019’s Jojo Rabbit, which went up for multiple Oscar categories, and netted Waititi the award for Best Adapted Screenplay. There’s no easy answer to how Waititi should follow up on any of his projects, and that’s part of the fun of following along with his career; you’re almost always surprised by what’s next. Following a return to the MCU with 2022’s Thor: Love and Thunder, Waititi did the most Waititi thing he could and went in the last direction anybody saw him going in by making a family-friendly sports movie, Next Goal Wins.
The reason was pretty simple: “I like sports films,” he says. He mentions classics like The Bad News Bears from 1976 or Cool Runnings, the 1993 feel-good Disney comedy about the Jamaican bobsled team at the 1988 Winter Olympics. The thing is that sports films – funny sports films that you can take the kids to – aren’t exactly going to get you compared to Hitchcock or Kubrick, but the movies Waititi mentions as his influences going into Next Goal Wins are the type that become cultural cornerstones for people who see them when they’re younger. You might have a ranking of your favorite Tarkovsky films, but if you were a kid in the 1990s, it’s almost certain a film like Cool Runnings or The Sandlot secretly means more to you. And besides, Waititi is his own director with his own sensibilities and interests. The one problem with that, however, is that the sport Next Goal Wins is centered around, football, isn’t actually a big interest of his. “I don’t really know anything about soccer,” he says. He’s a rugby fan. But watching the film this feature is based on, a 2014 documentary of the same name, something clicked. “This seems to be a weird move for me, doing a sports film. So that makes me nervous. And whenever I feel nervous about approaching something, I know that at least it’ll be interesting, and I’ll probably come up with something cool.”
The sports film can be tough to pull off. For every Rocky or Friday Night Lights, there are three schmaltzy stinkers full of dogs that can play basketball, kids inheriting then managing professional baseball teams, racist and sexist tropes, and the inevitable David vs Goliath storyline of the rag-tag bunch of misfits making it to the promised land against all odds and expectations. Waititi came up with a smart formula for Next Goal Wins: he embraces some of the fun and silly things you’d expect from a movie about a team sport from a film aimed at kids in the 1990s – maybe knowing full well those former kids, now adults, will form part of his audience – and, as he puts it, “there’s barely any sports” in the movie. More than a few directors, from William Friedkin to Hal Ashby, have learned first-hand how difficult it can be to shoot actors actually playing a sport their characters are supposed to excel at.
Beyond the way the film looks, or the brand of humour laced throughout, there is another huge, telling thing that lets the viewer know they’re watching a Waititi film. Next Goal Wins tracks the true story of the American Samoa national football team, considered the worst in the world after a decade of consecutive losses, starting with a 31-0 drubbing by Australia in 2001. The Samoan team doesn’t have big aspirations when Dutch-American coach Thomas Rongen (played by Michael Fassbender) arrives, and far from dreaming of winning the 2014 World Cup they train to qualify for, they just want to score a goal. That’s it. One goal would be great. It’s fun and heartwarming, and the reason Waititi makes it work where other directors might fail is because one of the big themes of his career has been telling stories about and with Indigenous people, both from the part of the globe he comes from in the South Pacific, and beyond. When I talk to him, the show he co-created with American filmmaker Sterlin Harjo, Reservation Dogs, is winding towards its series finale. The show has been lauded by critics as one of the best things on television, and a very moving, often funny portrayal of the lives of a group of Indigenous teenagers in a broken Oklahoma town. “My hope is we get to at least keep making stuff so that we can start surprising people,” he says.
It can be difficult to take stock of what Waititi is doing in real time. A director’s legacy-in-progress isn’t usually discussed while they’re still building an oeuvre, especially a director who has shown a knack for making big box office movies meant to please the masses like Waititi. But his work helping to get stories of and by Indigenous people and communities out into the world is something that’s long overdue, and his parallel place as a big-name filmmaker makes him the public face of a small, growing movement. He’s quick to point out how culture still sees native peoples worldwide, the very wrong assumptions and stereotypes that he’s trying to break down. “Everybody assumes the Pacific, it’s all tiki bars, but those are a made-up white thing. It’s all completely bastardised designs, people saying, I made it Polynesian-themed. But we hate tiki bars. Whenever somebody sees that stuff and says, it’s from your home, I’m like, I want to burn this thing down,” he says before adding, “So don’t invite me to your tiki party.” But it’s not just his part of the world that Waititi – who is Māori on his father’s side, and Ashkenazi Jewish on his mother’s – sees it in. “There are still places where this kind of shit is happening,” he says, before noting the almost annual news of some fashion house or attendees at a music festival in North America appropriating the dress of tribes that once lived on the same land. “In Spain and Ibiza – I mean, Europe is always 400 years behind everybody else – you go to these shops and they’re just full of Native American headdresses for white people,” he shakes his head in disbelief before mimicking a white person trying to justify their decision to don a feathered war bonnet as a style choice. “My grandmother is a Comanche princess!”
Waititi can joke about it because that’s what he does; his first aim is to make people laugh, and laughter is a sneaky way to make people understand and accept things better. The big, unifying figure in his work – whether it’s vampires going about their unlives in the suburbs, Indigenous people living in a colonised world, or even the Norse God of Thunder trying to navigate the human world – is ultimately the outsider. It’s a theme he can identify with, in part just because of where he’s from. New Zealand is “an island of four-million people and we’re so far away from anything. If you want to escape, the nearest place is Australia, which is an absolute shithole,” he says. The two countries have long had a rivalry with one another, but growing up, it was always New Zealand that was last to get everything, including shows and movies from the US and UK that made Waititi and his friends work especially hard to develop their own culture: the movies, shows, and jokes that have come to define Kiwi humour over the last few decades. “We never really fit in with anywhere. But coming from places like New Zealand and Australia and the colonies, smaller places that have often been forgotten about, our cringe meter is very sensitive. We’ve spent our entire lives laughing at the cheesiness of Hollywood films and there’s always that scene between two best friends when one of them is about to die and they’re like, Yeah! We’re best friends. We’re going to open that bar together like we always dreamed. And you know in the next scene, that fucking dude’s dead.”
But Waititi also gets it on a personal level. “Also, coming from my mother’s side – what we call pākehā, or white – and my father being Māori, there’s a real clash of worlds. Growing up, I knew I was accepted in both worlds, but also, there’s a question you ask yourself: Am I dark enough to be Māori? Am I white enough? Am I European enough on the Jewish side? And I think I just gave up trying to be either of them, and just sort of traversed that little middle ground where I could dip in and out according to what social group I wanted to be accepted by.”
That awareness of the middle ground means Waititi understands the absurdity that comes with not being like everybody else, and how difficult it can make things, but also sees the beauty in it, that he translates into movies that people want to see. There’s an openness in his work, his films are for everybody. “We’re all clumsy,” he says. It’s a mission statement of sorts. It isn’t so much about good or bad as it is just trying to navigate our way through the world. “When we’re pretending we don’t want to fit in, we’re still trying to be noticed. People are like, oh, I didn’t care about that mainstream shit. You’re still trying to be noticed. The sooner we all realise that and just admit it and accept we’re all fucking fake-ass animals pretending our way through life, it just takes the pressure off. Just stop trying to be cool; be happy.”
Discussing his work and himself after the release of Passages, Franz Rogowski talks about the traps of selves both real and performed
Franz Rogowski wears PAUL SMITH AW23 throughout
At the end of Ira Sachs’ 2023 film Passages, the protagonist, Tomas, played by the German actor Franz Rogowski, endures two brutal, entirely deserved rejections by both his soon-to-be-ex-husband, Martin, and his estranged lover, Agathe. Bereft, on his knees, wearing a ridiculous outfit, he is hunched and suffering in the hallway of the grade school where Agathe works — he has interrupted her class to make his doomed entreaty – when a brusque employee shoos him away. His response is to get on his beat-up vintage racing bike and go. The final shots of the film show Tomas riding, skillfully but recklessly, with the energetic physical control Rogowski brings to pretty much every part he plays, through the streets and sidewalks of Paris. Maybe there are tears glistening in his eyes, but he is also free.
This was how, more or less, Rogowski would show up to meetings with Sachs during the making of the film. “He would always arrive out of breath on a bike, like, jumping a curb,” Sachs told me. “It inspired me to rewrite the end of the film with Franz as the kamikaze bike rider that he is.”
It’s a recognisable Berlin type, the beautiful man speeding past on a lithe French bike, and indeed I’d felt lucky when I saw Rogowski in that role once a few years ago, darting around a corner in Kreuzberg. So I was surprised when he rolled up to our breakfast on one of those weird little folding bikes, in startup blue, and a helmet. “German engineering,” he said. He was wearing a black T-shirt and jeans cuffed for the bike. “I’m getting old, and I have a bit of a back problem, and this has suspension in the back. I’m experimenting a bit with different kinds of exercises – some are dangerous, some are necessary.”
“It’s interesting,” he continued, “even sex can cause pain. Like, you need to find the right position. And to a certain extent, it feels ridiculous to be saying those things when you’re 37. But I guess that’s when it starts.”
The other dangerous exercise is rock climbing, but even without it, it’s not hard to imagine how Rogowski developed a back problem. A former dancer and theatre actor who was kicked out of Swiss clown school after leaving traditional school at 16, he has become, over the last several years, both a beloved star of European arthouse cinema and, according to the New York Times, an “unlikely sex symbol” for the sickening combination of his shy, sensitive face and thrilling physical intelligence. He is also, simply, one of the best actors working today, and so not to be trusted. But this is why we love actors: most people are not to be trusted, but actors are explicit about it. After an hour together I determined the random comment about sex made within the first five minutes of our interview was less an indication of put-on naughtiness and more a misguided attempt at acknowledging this uncomfortable situation. His background as a dancer is obvious in the graceful movements of his thick forearms and bouldered hands, but he is otherwise tentative and tense. He slumps, his shoulders rounded; he is so compact that he seems small, though he is not. When we met, he spoke with his head tilted to one side, bad for the back again, and focused his gaze almost exclusively at some point to my right.
He is often cast as a man complicatedly in love, thwarted by identity and circumstance. In Christian Petzold’s Transit (2018), he plays a refugee in a contemporary version of occupied France who begins posing as a dead writer in the hopes of getting passage on a ship to flee the Continent; when he meets the dead writer’s wife, who has come to Marseille to search for her husband, unaware that he has died, he falls in love with her, and struggles to tell her that the missed connections she believes she’d had with her husband have been with him – he’s been using the dead writer’s documents at the consulates where she’s been searching for him. In Thomas Stuber’s In the Aisles (2018), he is a forklift operator at a supermarket who falls for the married woman in charge of confectionery; he has a dark past, and she a dark present. In Petzold’s Undine (2020), his lover is a water nymph who can only live on land if she is in love with a mortal man, but if that man ever betrays her, she must kill him; Rogowski’s character, Christoph, shows up when this fate has already been set in motion, and he becomes caught up in the myth. In Sebastian Meise’s Great Freedom (2021), he is a gay man repeatedly imprisoned under Germany’s Paragraph 175, which criminalised sex between men in the country until an age of consent was established in 1969; the story spans more than 20 years, and twice his lovers end up in prison with him, though the most moving of the film’s several crushing narrative arcs is his romantic friendship with a convicted murderer and drug addict.
What unites these star turns with Rogowski’s smaller roles is a sense of complete openness; he is always going for it, emotionally and physically, as if he has considered no alternative. Sachs says he first knew he wanted to work with Rogowski when he saw Michael Haneke’s 2017 film Happy End, in which Rogowski plays a supporting role as Pierre, the moody, alcoholic son of a wealthy family. At one point in the middle of the film, Pierre appears on a karaoke stage, with the neon lyrics to Sia’s ‘Chandelier’ projected onto his torso. He follows them theatrically, and then he begins to vogue, and kick, and fling his arms into the air. His amateur singing voice transforms into grunts as his effort intensifies. He cartwheels one-handed, still holding the microphone. He does a handstand, balances his feet on the low ceiling, and sings a few bars upside down. He does several more cartwheels, pushes himself up from the ground into another handstand position, does pushups in the handstand, and rolls around on the floor. The audience, seen in the reflection of the mirror at the back of the stage, offers restrained encouragement; they can’t believe him. And then, suddenly, he stops. He’s hurt himself, or he’s going to be sick, or he’s realised he’s too drunk to be doing this. His entire body becomes tense with some kind of pain, and the audience grows quiet and concerned before he slowly crawls to the wall and pulls himself up.
In Passages, the obstacle to his character’s romantic prosperity is not society, or fate, but his own attention span. A mercurial director dissatisfied in his marriage to Martin (Ben Whishaw), Tomas meets Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos) at the wrap party for his new film and self-consciously dances, with that shy, sensitive face, into bed with her. The rest of the film observes Tomas following his conflicting desires, back and forth between them. He appears alternately strong and bird-chested, ripped and exposed, depending on whom he is trying to convince to stay with him despite their better judgment; his timing is often very funny. Reviewers have called the character “toxic”, manipulative, and a narcissist, even as they acknowledge how compelling he is. We agreed these terms are reductive. “He desperately wants to build and to relate,” Rogowski said, “but he’s very unstable, especially when it comes to relating to himself and knowing who he is. He’s highly dependent on feedback – emotional feedback, also cultural feedback, as an artist. So that’s why I think to a certain extent, he’s innocent.”
If the film’s final scene, on the bike, is inspired by Sachs’ actual relationship with Rogowski, the rest of the film is inspired by an imagined version of the actor. Sachs wrote the role of Tomas with Rogowski in mind, which means Sachs used an idea of Rogowski he’d gotten from his other roles to make a new character out of him. Rogowski was intimidated. “When you hear this line, you know, okay, I will disappoint that person,” he said. “I can’t possibly be who he thinks I am. And that’s something that happens more and more. The more people know you or think to know you, the more scary it can become to meet people in real life.” In this case, divergence from the character might not be so disappointing. Still, Rogowski says he puts “a lot of effort” into answering the question of who he is; he has developed a Profilneurose, a colloquial term for “when you’re kind of neurotic about your social profile”, seeking constant validation. “I don’t feel good about myself unless I create some kind of relationship with something other than me,” he said. “If I just exist, I feel like I shouldn’t.”
Surely this is true, to greater or lesser degrees, of everyone; we all want, as Rogowski does, to “be free”, but we need other people as much as they get in our way. From that perspective, starring in a film like Passages must have been especially tantalising, or disorienting. The film allows Tomas to seek the feedback he wants whimsically, without apparent fear of consequence, as if Sachs has translated the unbridled performances Rogowski delivers as an actor into a mode of relating to others.
The film also avoids the constrained approach to questions of identity that its marketing suggested it might represent. “I slept with a woman last night,” Tomas says in the trailer, implying the film will feature conflict around Tomas’s sexuality; it does not, which creates a sense of momentum and possibility uncommon in contemporary anglophone cinema, even as many discussions of the film can’t help but touch on this untapped drama. “Cinema often tries to create a simplified version of life,” Rogowski said, “and maybe, therefore, we expect a queer movie to somehow also come up with some answers to all those nowadays quite complicated boxes and labels that were created around sexuality. I’m happy that the movie doesn’t really answer those questions.”
Because I’m not really a journalist, I am not bound to ask the prurient questions many other journalists have asked, or implied, about Rogowski’s love life and sexuality, to which he tends to respond with some expression of the evolved and conveniently evasive position that gender and sexuality are fluid, and categories like “man” and “woman” and “gay” and “straight” are limiting. An issue of theory versus practice. “The real division is not, you know, are you gay? Are you queer?” he told me. “The real division is, are you working class? Are you upper class? Where do you belong? I think more and more, there’s this little bubble of people that belong to the big capitals of the world, and they can move, and they’re free. And the rest have been pushed to the outskirts.” What journalists really want to ask, I suspect, is: would he sleep with me?
If we ask too much of actors – if we overstep with them, project onto them, want too badly to try our hand with them – it is because the actor can be what others cannot: someone else. He represents the fantasy that the roles we play in our public lives might not have to reflect, or affect, who we “really” are; in playing constant characters, the actor supports the comforting illusion that character is fixed, that there is a stable relationship between one’s public persona and private life. Off-screen, this responsibility is probably a burden; they are not who they play onscreen, but they also kind of are, if not before the role, then after.
Rogowski mentioned a hypothetical situation in which he might direct something, and I asked if he wanted to direct. “Every actor wants to be something else,” he said. “There’s a lack of authorship and a lot of pretending. And it kind of makes sense – the emptier you are, the more somebody else can fill you with something. And you’ll just be very, you know, happily pulling the plow because you’ve been standing around screaming, ‘I’m a horse! I’m a horse! Give me work!’” (He joke-screamed this part.) “But it’s not really yours – you’re an interpreter, you’re a vase to be filled with water or whatever. And I do feel this tension. I think I’m where I belong for now. But I hope I will grow into something that is not so dependent on others, to make circumstances to create.”
He was holding, motionless, a piece of bread for the duration of this monologue. “Do you feel empty?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m very much ADHD. My inner melody is like” – here he shook his head very fast and made a cartoonish noise to indicate craziness – “a terrible noise. Somewhere in between euphoria and depression.”
In Passages, Tomas’s wardrobe consists of flamboyantly androgynous and somehow sexily ill-fitting clothes that look borrowed from a girlfriend or found on the street: the famous mesh crop top becomes a sight gag; the loose-knit sweaters under which he wears nothing; the snakeskin jacket that’s a little too tight; the ratty brown teddy coat a little too big; the leopard-print pants that have lost their shape, and might have been designed for someone a bit taller. A person who dresses like this just puts on whatever he feels like wearing that day – with no forethought and little worry about appropriateness or convention. “He’s defying social norms, in a way that is both wonderful and uncomfortable,” Sachs said of Tomas. The character has a childish impulsivity and lack of concern for others that is the dark side of his dazzling outfits. Even when he dresses less obtrusively, his immaturity shows; at a holiday party, his belt, pulled too tight, is revealed to have ridden up, creating a small gap above his waistband.
Rogowski’s soulfulness invites tenderness, maybe even patronising, but his body is made for these confrontational clothes. He was allowed to keep some of his wardrobe after production was completed, and indeed both the character and his outfits seem to belong in Berlin, where everyone is trying out new identities at the bars and clubs, for better or worse, even past Rogowski’s age. In his 20s, Rogowski said, he did something similar – went to bars, to Berghain, trying “to find my chances – someone that would somehow take my hand.” Now, though, he says he has five or 10 friends and rarely goes out – not to bars, or parties, or concerts, or even to the cinema. When I asked where he wears the fabulous outfits from Passages, about which he’d expressed excitement in other interviews, he told me he just wears them at home.
“I’ve chosen to be in front of the camera, but the real me is actually somebody who loves to observe,” he said. “And a part of me also just wants to dissolve, you know, in a cloud of ketamine on an orgy and have it all at once.” (Ketamine has a dissociative effect that sometimes allows a person to imagine they can see themselves from the outside, among other things.) “But they’re different voices in your soul,” he continued, “and I guess one of the voices in me tells me that I don’t deserve to celebrate and to wear extroverted stuff. I have to earn it. And I haven’t earned it yet. Which I know is a silly and stupid, very German way of thinking, but I can only do it in a movie, or on a certain occasion that creates the circumstances. But when I’m out here in real life, I… I don’t know. I try to hide. I try to be on the bike as fast as I can, so I’m already gone before you see me.” This doesn’t sound like freedom. But that’s why I trusted it.
Do more frames per second help or hinder the true meaning of what you’re watching? From Issue 9, The Film Issue
How real should a movie be? How far should it reproduce the world in which we live and breathe and go about our business? Ever since the first 3D feature in 1922, filmmakers have tried to push as far in the direction of total realism as possible – to make the audience feel they are “in the picture”. Essential to making a film seem “real” is its speed, or the number of frames projected per second to create an acceptable illusion of movement.
Traditionally, economics was the deciding factor. After the chaos of frame rates in silent cinema, 24fps was settled on as the lowest number that could produce a smooth illusion of movement- more would increase the amount of film stock and the expense of production. Thomas Edison reputedly said that anything less than 46fps would be too hard on the eye.
At last Edison has an ally. In 2012, the director Peter Jackson filmed The Hobbit at the HFR (high frame rate) of 48fps – it was shot digitally and in 3D for an even more immersive sense of reality. HR introduces a new problem however: the illusion of real space, and the clarity of detail, may well seduce the eye but they leave the mind unsatisfied. A century of “normal” movies has accustomed us to the aesthetic pleasures of comparing fantastic vs realistic. Perhaps we don’t want to “live” cinema so much as enjoy a cinematic experience.
Some film experts would have welcomed HFR, seeing it not as a violation of cinema but as a true expansion of it. The Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, enamoured with the “American mountains” (the Russian term for the fairground rollercoaster ride), thought cinema should be a vehicle for terrifying thrills – a revolutionary shock to our cosy submersion in old-fashioned dramatic illusion.
Given the historical perspective, Peter Jackson was right when he said there is nothing magic about 24fps. The contradiction that keeps coming up is that while cinema continues to transform itself technologically, we’re still looking for something essentially cin-ematic. “The cinema is truth 24 times a second,” Jean-Luc Godard once said. But is 48 times a second simply the truth taken too far?
Complaints about The Hobbit range from it seeming like a video game to the illusion-destroying way it exposes the reality of makeup and special effects. Perhaps total immersion in a film is not the same as being able to assess its real artistic value, or perhaps there’s another truth about HR we haven’t discovered yet. In nearly a century, the argument for and against 3D still remains unset tled and it looks like HR may become partof a similar long-running debate.
An out-take from issue 17, featuring cover star Benicio Del Toro
“No one smokes a cigar like him. and no one wears a trucker cap like him… He really takes ownership for who he is and is not apologetic about it. For such a nice, quiet, shy and… kind person, he’s blessed with a face that is inclined toward mysterious bad guys or bad boys.” explains actress Emily Blunt to Port regarding her friend, Benicio Del Toro.
Known for his dark intensity, few actors bridge complex creative integrity and superstar box office appeal like Del Toro. Plaving an array of characters, from revolutionaries to werewolves and drug lords. his breakthrough performance came with the neo-noir thriller The Usual Suspects, playing a mumbling, doomed professional thief.
Yet we find there is a gentler side to the man, especially when we hear him talk about building a house for his pet tortoises (more on this later), and perhaps nurtured by his recent foray into fatherhood. “What I find really strange is that the people I love, they’ve been with me for a long time. Then suddenly this creature comes in,” he says, “and one week in this world and she’s number one.”
In a new show at Serpentine, four artists reveal a three-year collaboration with social workers, carers, organisers and communities to share impactful stories of labour and care
Rory Pilgrim, _RAFTS_, Barking and Dagenham Youth Dance, Production Still, 2021. Photo: Matthew Ritson.
“What keeps us connected? What do we need to repair? How do we listen and how do we hold each other?” This questions are posed by Amal Khalaf, curator and artist who’s currently director of programmes at Cubitt and civic curator at the Serpentine Galleries. Exploring stories about labour and care – plus the important act of how we care – Amal alongside the wider gallery team have embedded these questions into a new exhibition named Radio Ballads, currently on show at Serpentine and running until 29 May 2022. The show is also simultaneously running across the London boroughs of Barking and Dagenham from 2-17 April, headed by the council’s New Town Culture programme.
Over three years, artists Sonia Boyce, Helen Cammock, Rory Pilgrim and Ilona Sagar were asked to collaborate with social workers, carers, communities and organisers. Radio Ballads is the culmination of this and features long-term projects spanning film, drawing, mixed-media, song and music. It’s an impactful exhibition that shares experiences with mental health, domestic abuse, terminal illness, grief and end of life care. It’s also created in response to 12 years of austerity and the demise of the UK care sector – from privatisation and immigration policies to racism and lack of access to services. All of which is conceived through the voices of social care workers and those giving or receiving care.
Radio Ballads, Installation view, 31 March – 29 May 2022, Serpentine North Sonia Boyce, Yes, I Hear You, 2022 Photo: George Darrell.
Even the title, Radio Ballads, is rich in personal meaning. It takes its name from the original Radio Ballads broadcast on the BBC from 1957-64; it also looks at the form of a ballad – the poems and narratives set to a song or assortment of sounds – and how the framework centres the voices of people. Artists and musicians spend time “listening to people who were rarely represented in the media and often violently erased form history – centring their voices and words on their own term was a revelation to me,” explains Amal.
Interested in using art to “build political power, create life-sustaining relationships, and enact community and systems change”, says Amal, Radio Ballads is provoking, resilient and brave through its documentation of how social care services and artists can work together. Helen Cammock – former social worker and long-term artist – is deeply aware of the responsibilities that social workers bare for others, and the impact this can have on their lives. In her work with Bass Notes and SiteLines, Helen explores the connection between text, voice and body in order to present resistance and strength. Through sessions with people receiving care and those offering it through an organisation called Pause, Helen’s contribution – spanning film, meditation exercises, group drawings and a live performance – sees a series of artistic workshops come to life, all in all reflecting on the connections made through music and lyric writing to express anger, pain, joy and care. Below, Helen tells me more about her prodigious work at Radio Ballads.
Helen Cammock, ‘Bass Notes and SiteLines The Voice as a Site of Resistance and The Body as a Site of Resilience.’ Production Still, 2022.
Tell me about your work involved in the show, what stories are you hoping to share?
There are a number of different elements to the show. These elements somehow give a ‘way in’ to the project process, and discuss in different forms the ideas that we were talking about in the project. This included a discussion in its widest sense about careusing different activities to find ways for the conversation. We looked at how the body can be a site for resilience and the voice a site for resistance.
The show includes a film (which weaves together refections from social workers and women who access care that take sung and spoken form, and also texts from people who have written about both voice and care). There is a large fabric banner, a triptych of screen-prints, a series of small line drawings and three larger line drawings made by contributors in the workshop process, a research table full of books that somehow speak about the idea of care and its relationship to body and sound, and a booklet that includes text I’ve written, drawings, images and a project playlist. Most of the works are made by me but some (the line drawings) come from activities on the project. There will also be two performances of a song Listening In Your Silence that I’ve written made up of words, phrases and stories that have come out of the workshop discussions. This will be a group performance of the song that we have been rehearsing together for eight weeks. We will be joined by a small choir from Brighton and Hove who have also been rehearsing the song for the past month.
Helen Cammock, ‘Bass Notes and SiteLines The Voice as a Site of Resistance and The Body as a Site of Resilience.’ Production Still, 2022.
You worked with social workers, carers and communities for three years. What was this like for you, and what did you learn from them? Can you tell me more about your findings and the conversations you had?
It was a period that involved the lockdown so it included ‘in person’ and online workshops/conversations. This meant changes in participants/collaborators and the way that we could be together. This felt a little de-stabilising and was hard work in a way – when we were trying to be together. We worked with different social work practitioners (from different areas of care services) and with one project where both practitioners and the women who received support came together. A range of different activities were used in order to develop the space for discussion and trust to be built. We used drawing, led meditation to music, creative writing, photography, discursive activities and singing – all as ways to have conversations about care and self care and the relationship between voice and body, and resistance and resilience. We tested some of this out through what we ‘did’ together. We discussed what music means to us, what it feels like to speak and be heard, we used our voices to sing and our bodies to form shapes and gestures to articulate different emotions and states to further these conversations. This forms a foundation of the material in the film.
Helen Cammock, ‘Bass Notes and SiteLines The Voice as a Site of Resistance and The Body as a Site of Resilience.’ Production Still, 2022.
Can you share any stories or anecdotes from working with them?
There is no one story – it was a process of exchange. Each person has many stories and experiences. A process of trust building was key. In order for us to discuss what it means to use your voice (metaphorically or physically) it was important to create structures for those conversations. We had moments of sadness and moments of laughter, moments of connection and situations where conversations were difficult. There was negotiation and deal-making sometimes when asking people to try something new – or something that felt unfamiliar. There were women who felt uncomfortable singing in a group and for others; singing in a choir represented something difficult from their past. This sharing was important and informed how we approached each activity. Some social workers spoke about the power of being vulnerable in certain ways alongside the women they work with in the sessions and how this brought particular benefit to their working relationship.
What response do you hope you’ll receive from this work?
I often say that I want people to respond both emotionally and intellectually to the work, and that this is about being able to connect to others and their stories but also to one’s own. We all have moments where we feel our voices and our bodies enable us to survive, to resist, to care… the process of this project is ‘the work’, if you like. The exhibition is made up of glimpses of this process. It is a way to touch or be touched by the process, but the process was where the work took its form; the site of the work.
Helen Cammock, ‘Bass Notes and SiteLines The Voice as a Site of Resistance and The Body as a Site of Resilience.’ Production Still, 2022.
In what ways can art improve social care and community? How is your work contributing to that?
I am an artist; I am interested in dialogue and in the transformative nature of art to transform the form, shape or sound of stories and ideas. I want to create something new – ideas, sensation and thought through the work. This has a social function, a political function and an artistic function. It isn’t social work. This isn’t my aim here. But any relationships we form with people – individually or collectively – can have a role that supports, invigorates, validates, challenges and this can be seen as a form of labour, in contributing to a way of seeing, changing or interrogating the social fabric.
I believe all situations in life can benefit from art and social work, and work within and between communities is absolutely one of them. It is a way to express and communicate on different levels and through different forms. It is a way to create channels for communication – say difficult things – and process difficult experiences. Not outside of therapeutic approaches or other structures of care, but alongside or in dialogue with.
Radio Ballads, Installation view, 31 March – 29 May 2022, Serpentine North Ilona Sagar, The Body Blow, 2022 Photo: George Darrell. Rory Pilgrim, RAFTS, Green Shoes Arts, Production Still. Photo: Jessica Emovon. Rory Pilgrim, Sketch Book. Courtesy of andriesse-eyck galerie. Radio Ballads, Installation view, 31 March – 29 May 2022, Serpentine North Helen Cammock, Bass Notes and SiteLines: The Voice as a Site of Resistance and The Body as a Site of Resilience, 2022 Photo: George Darrell. Radio Ballads, Installation view, 31 March – 29 May 2022, Serpentine North Rory Pilgrim, RAFTS, 2022 Photo: George Darrell. Ilona Sagar, The Body Blow, Film Still, 2022. Ilona Sagar, The Body Blow, Film Still, 2022.
The photography duo explore the tranquility and romanticism of winter sports
Cinque Torri, Cortina d’Ampezzo
If there’s anything the last two years have taught us is to enjoy life’s simple pleasures: getting outside, taking a walk in the park, sipping a coffee and sitting amongst nature. For photography duo Arturo + Bamboo – the alias of partners Arthur Groeneveld and Bamboo van Kampen – they turned towards the European villages of St. Moritz, Zermatt, Gstaad and Cortina D’Ampezzo. Finding refuge in the tranquil and romantic landscapes of the snowy mountain tops, the duo have spent six years documenting the “timeless pleasures” of winter spots. The result of which is a self-published book, aptly named Snow.
Evoking a dual sense of comfort and adventure, the works are effortlessly luminous as they depict the activities that take place in these locations. From sledding, playing hockey, polo, riding in a cable car to the warmer moments spent in a cabin, there’s a welcomed sense of nostalgia evoked from the almost vintage-looking photographs. Not only is it calming, the both bright and pared back colour palettes depict a sense of wonder; almost too pristine, clear and crisp to be realistic. I chat to the founders below to gain some more insight into the new book.
Blue, Yellow and Red, Cortina d’Ampezzo
How did you both meet?
10 years ago we met each other on a very cold night in Amsterdam. Ever since then, we’ve lived and worked together as Arturo + Bamboo.
What’s your ethos as image-makers, what excites you?
Our subjects revolve around different themes such as intense intimacy, faraway places and the female and male forms. We try capture a certain lifestyle that seems almost forgotten.
Tell me more about Snow and your reasons for making it.
After six winters and visiting different Alpine places, we knew it was time to bundle our images and create our latest publication Snow. The book brings together a dynamic and intimate collection of images of the startling beauty of the Alps, and the timeless pleasure of winter sports.
Coffee and cigarettes at the Hotel de la Poste, Cortina d’Ampezzo
What stories are you hoping to share?
With Snow we are hoping to share the beauty of what winter sports are truly about. The romantic, cosmopolitan nature of European mountain villages like St. Moritz, Zermatt, Gstaad and Cortina D’Ampezzo evoke a nostalgic, timeless feeling where not much has changed since things took off over more than a century ago.
The work has a hazy, analogue feel about it – like it’s been devised from a dream. Is this intentional?
As we only shoot on film, these colours and dream-like imperfections are a thread throughout our work. We are proud to share that we don’t touch the original images in post-production.
Ice kockey, Cortina d’Ampezzo
Do you have a favourite image that you can discuss?
Let’s talk about the cover, as this image embodies everything our publication stands for: spectacular scenery, a feeling of nostalgia but, most of all, the joy of the great outdoors!
Is there a particular goal or message with this work?
With our visual journey, we hope to bring our audience closer to the beauty of nature and their place within it.
What’s next for you?
We are planning for an exhibition in Paris and are working on several exciting projects – both personal and commercial.
On the slopes, St. Moritz Hotel de la Poste, Cortina d’Ampezzo Cresta Run, St. Moritz Findlerhof, Zermatt Polo Match, St Moritz Snow and ice, Courmayeur Skiiers, Zermatt
What’s it really like working with your other half? A photographer and video artist discuss
Andrea 2020
Some could say that working with your other half is as polarising as Marmite; it can either break or make you, with half thriving on its divisive flavour while the other forever steering clear. For two creatives Caleb Stein and Andrea Orejarena (aka Orejarena & Stein), their partnership is like spreading it on toast; it’s a logical pairing and natural mediation between communication, flexibility and a shared vision (to name a few benefits). Caleb, on the one hand, is a photographer who was born in London. He lived in New York for a decade before moving to Poughkeepsie in 2013 to study at Vassar College, which is where he met Andrea. He’s gone on to explore many wondrous and timely topics such as memory, mythology and narrative in relation to the United States. Meanwhile, Andrea is a Colombian-born American video artist who looks at play, fantasy and the American dream. Combined, they’re a powerhouse. And their ongoing project Andrea is pinnacle of that.
Ever since their first meeting in university, Caleb has continued to take Andrea’s portrait. And what first started out as a documentation of their time together – not to mention the early stages of their relationship – soon evolved into a long-term collaboration between them both, aptly named Andrea. Below, I chat to Caleb and Andrea to find out more about the series and, more importantly, what working with each other is really like.
Andrea 2018
I’d love to begin by hearing about how you both met.
Andrea: It was great. We met on our first day of our freshman year at Vassar College. Caleb’s mother was dropping him off at the dorms. She flagged me down and asked if I could show them the dining hall. I happened to know where it was and I walked them over. When we arrived she said, “good I’ll stay here, and now can you show my son to his dorm?” It was hilarious.
Caleb: She’s a yenta.
What’s the process like while working together? What roles do you take on, and how is it split?
A: We move fluidly between roles, without rigidity. We are working towards a shared vision, making something emergent that neither person could make on their own, something that could only be made between those two people. In terms of the physical act of photographing or filming, we are both involved in all of the decisions. The conceptual framework for the work stems from long term, in deep exchanges with each other. People often ask us who clicks the shutter (we both do). We pass the camera between each other and we never have two cameras on site.
C: That fluidity is very important, it allows us to remain open. In many ways, working as an artist duo is an exercise in questioning conservative (but still widespread) conceptions of authorship, and it’s an effort to move away from an individualistic, ego-driven practice towards something more collaborative and meditative.
Andrea 2021
Tell me about your ongoing series, Andrea. What’s it about, and what stories are you hoping to share?
A: Andrea is a selection of portraits made as an artist duo. When we first met, Caleb began photographing me in passing and I wouldn’t mind or give it much attention. I grew up with my father recording every moment—we have hours and hours of Wiseman-style footage— so I am comfortable with the camera and I forget it is there quite easily. Eventually, for some reason, I started getting interested in the photos Caleb was taking of me. Then I started having opinions about them, and then, when he continued to ask for feedback, started directing him with the photography in the same way I directed him as the cinematographer for my videos. He’d take his photo, then we’d give it my take, then we bounce off each other’s ideas until it snowballed into a photo we both loved. The collaboration started quite smoothly and it took us a second to realise it was happening. There was a moment where it began to blur between Caleb asking me for advice, and me becoming invested in the formal aspects of the photograph from an auteur perspective. That crossing of the blurred line was what interested us. Blurring these lines is a way of challenging and subverting the male gaze and the long history of men photographing their partners.
C: Yes, that’s an important aspect of the project – pushing back against a one-sided, only-male perspective. The photographs are made as a collaboration with a realtime, live monitor facing Andrea so that we can both contribute in equal parts to the final image. In other words, all of the creative decisions about the image, including the post-production process, are made as an artist duo.
A & C: We are interested in questioning the traditional idea of who has a say in how their image is made. This work is also a personal archive intended to function as a set of lyrical, personal documents of our creative and romantic partnership.
Andrea 2018
What’s it like switching from photographer to model?
A I get to skip the step where I have to articulate a creative concept because I am directing myself. Caleb and I basically read each other’s minds so that doesn’t count either. In some ways, this work is a self-portrait, but made as an artist duo. I feel comfortable moving between the roles and blending the two. Apart from anything else, it’s a fun way to make work as an extension of our relationship. It’s also a natural extension of our life; we’re always photographing and filming, so this work comes about, just by living and embracing life.
Can you share any stories or anecdotes from working on this series?
A: The curtain?
C: That’s a good one.
A: Ok, so, probably one of the first photos that I asked Caleb to make with my ‘take’ was of me behind a curtain. He was photographing me with my hand sticking out and then I asked him to take one for me, where I totally hid behind the curtain and then called it a self-portrait. We thought it was hilarious and had a lot of fun with this and then this opened up to us collaborating in making the photo of me behind the curtain with my face showing and looking directly at the camera.
C: We were on the floor laughing about this. It was just a photo of a curtain, no one in sight. Very “conceptual”.
Is it ever difficult working with your partner?
C: No!
A: Not at all. There’s no thin ice.
What are the benefits?
A: We trust each other very much. Living life and making art get mixed together in a way I’m drawn to.
C: As am I. We talk about this often, and it feels like our love for each other finds a way into the work.
A: Making work can take many forms, but we’re both interested in working from a place of love. That’s what it’s all about.
Andrea 2020
What advice would you give someone who’s looking to work with their partner?
C: Listen to each other and let go of your ego as much as possible, it will open up into something rewarding and surprising.
A: Have fun with it, don’t compromise – keep talking and debating until you both have a shared epiphany, then move forward with this decisively and with energy.
What’s next for you both?
A: We are working on our next project American Glitch, which is a look at the slippage between fact and fiction and how this manifests in the American landscape. We are traveling to every state in the U.S. and living out of our car for the next year. We’ll also continue to work on Andrea throughout the year.
Andrea 2020Andrea 2021Andrea 2020Andrea 2020Andrea 2021
Yelena Yemchuk’s mixed-media project delves into the identities of three make-believe characters
In a time not too long ago, Yelena Yemchuk had found herself at a flee market, marvelling at a collaged photograph she picked up of two girls sitting on a sofa. Their heads had been replaced by starlets from the 1950s, think Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe; the famed and beautiful symbols of golden era Hollywood. It was in this very moment that Yelena, a visual artist from Ukraine who immigrated to the US at the age of 11, started to think deeply about the context of identity. “Who are we? And how much of it is based on the society that we live in, and how thin is the line between dream and reality?”
To answer these questions, Yelena began working on Mabel, Betty & Bette, a mixed media project that delves into the lives and identities of three make-believe characters. Played by a cast of models dubbed after popular names in America during the 1950s, the subjects – who are adorned in wigs and garb from this era – are composed from Yelena’s childhood memories of these “otherworldly women” she saw in postcards while living in the Soviet Union. It’s a marriage of fiction and hyperreality, and a commentary on what defines us beings in a certain time or place. Below, I chat to Yelena to hear more about the project.
What inspired you to start Mabel, Betty & Bette; why tell this story?
Mabel, Betty & Bette began quite by chance. I wanted to start a new project that was more fictional and had a narrative. I’ve always been fascinated by the mystery of time – the meeting of the dream world and reality – as well as disguise, a different appearance in order to conceal one’s identity or become someone else. I wanted to capture the psychology or the dream states of a person who is at loss with their identity. I wasn’t sure how to go about starting this adventure and, by chance, I found a photograph at a flee market; it was a collage where two girls were sitting on a couch and their heads had been replaced by 1950’s starlets.
It set off a bunch of ideas about identity, about the complexity of self and the projections of self and society. I wanted to explore this vulnerability and this confused state of identity: who are we and who do we try to imitate in our daily life? Who are idols and why have we chosen these particular stereotypes? I started to question the loss of self and what being vulnerable means. Thats how it began.
Who are Mabel, Betty and Bette, what do they represent?
I created three fictional characters. I looked up popular names from the Americana era of the 50s. I wanted to create these characters from my memory as a child, of these otherworldly women that I saw in postcards as a kid in the Soviet Union – those Western ideals mixed in with the Italian and French actresses like Sophia Lauren, Brigit Bardot and Elizabeth Taylor. It was this mix of fantasy as well as a certain kind of sadness and strength that I remembered as a kid in their faces, so different than the images of the ideal Soviet women.
Also, my immigration to the United States at such a fragile age of 11 played a big part in the project. When one is changing so quickly as a pre-teen, and then to all of a sudden be in a completely different world in every way, I think that has triggered a lot of these questions at an early age. And once I started making art, those questions became part of my work. Who are we? And how much of it is based in the society that we live in, and how thin is the line between dream and reality?
You’ve cast over 50 women for this project, where did you find them and who did you want to photograph specifically?
Each photograph portrays one of the three fictional women – Mabel, Betty, or Bette – as conveyed by a cast member in one of three corresponding wigs, playing out three different storylines written by me. I casted mostly recognisable fashion models (which was also the first time I worked with models for a personal project). Rarely seen as themselves, these women are a template upon which ideas are formed. Their inclusion in this project was a knowing gesture towards the continued malleable nature of female identity in the 21st century.
I contacted a lot of models that I have worked with though various projects, but the process had to be changed when the shoot was taking place. Destabilising their own working process to intentionally disrupt them from their known actions and poses, I worked quickly (no more then 20 minutes per shoot, sometimes only five minutes) and in scenarios that were often unknown to the model. For the moving image part of the project, the short film that was shot in Odessa, Ukraine, and I worked with one women, an artist Anna Domashyna, who played all three characters
Can you talk me through a couple of favourite images from the project?
I am going to pick three different medias: a photograph, a collage and a film still, since all three makeup the project. This image of Hannelore was taken in a playground around the corner from my house, and Hannelore is someone I’ve worked with a lot and I’ve always admired her as a person, and as a model. She was one of the first women I asked to be in the project. I knew she would trust me to put her in this strange disguise and understand this feeling that I was trying to portray for each of the women: this moment of change, crisis or loss of self; this intersection between dreaming and waking, and the alarm and confusion that accompanies the void.
The film for the project was shot in Odessa, Ukraine. I met Anna while photographing her for a book that I am doing on Odessa, and I was immediately blown away by her. It was like she embodied all the three women in one – her being so otherworldly in every way. I asked her if I could take her picture for the project and showed her some images I already took. She looked at them and said ‘yes I get it, I am the girl’, and I said ‘yes you are!’ Six months later and I was back in Odessa to make the film with her. This is a still from the film I love, you can’t see her face but you can feel the story unfolding from her gaze in what she is seeing. There is a sense of mystery and nostalgia.
The collages came as the last part of the project. Bauhaus, surrealism and Dada deeply influenced me as an artist, and those were my original inspirations when I started making art. In my working process, chance encounters and subconscious influence are always present – while details from my dreams as well as a large cultural anthology of images come into my practice. Working from my archive of old media as well as new materials, I found Soviet Life as well as Hollywood Factory magazine. These collages came to life by splicing Brigit Bardot in half, and I placed her with an image of Elizabeth Taylor. The two women appear as one and as a collage from the cover of Mabel, Betty & Bette. Symbolically their shared features speak to a form of representation that I am interested in analysing.
Brunel Johnson’s four-part series provides a necessary platform for Black and minority ethnic groups
Many of Brunel Johnson’s ideas tend to formulate in the shower – it’s where he devises some of his best work. In the past, there’s been Dream, a project documenting the Pembury Estate in Hackney, photographing and videoing young women playing estate football. There’s also the countless sports, commercial, lifestyle and documentary photography projects, that each depict his notably candid style of image-making and, more importantly, his view of the world. It’s my Hair is another fine example,an ongoing project that aims to show the time, effort and skill that goes into maintaining Afro hair.
Whether it’s a still or moving image, Brunel’s shower-formed concoctions are deeply powerful just as much as they are empathetic. And Brunel’s most recent endeavour is a fine paragon of his goals as a self-taught, documentary photographer-turned-filmmaker. Titled Can you see me now?, the project is a four-part series produced and directed by Brunel himself, that aims to provide a space for Black and minority ethnic groups to tell their stories. For him, creativity is an apt tool for telling these narratives and to ultimately steer change. So by working with a solid team – including Milo Van Giap as the DOP, plus charities Rise.365 and Re:Sole and United Borders – Brunel has cast an array of real-life people with lived experiences to share, heightened by his artful use of mixed-media and 1:1 format. The result of which is a compilation of four films, Young Black Man, The Beauty Of The Hijab, Black Girl Magic and CHiNK. Below, I chat to Brunel to hear more about his impactful series.
First, tell me about your ethos as a photographer.
I strive to capture the mundane moments of daily life in an authentic and raw way. If I’m working on a project, I’ll always try to draw out the moments that tell the story I want the audience to see best. My goal as a photographer is to change the narrative that surrounds Black and minority ethic communities. I want to change how we’re shown in the media and how our stories are told. So I strive to bring out the stories that I believe the world needs to hear and see without tainting it from a biased gaze.
When did the idea arise for Can you see me now? Why tell this story?
It actually came about while I was in the shower (a lot of my ideas happen there). Being a Black creative in this industry can be frustrating, as not only do you have to deal with basic day-to-day struggles of life, you also have to deal with the stereotypes, your work being deemed irrelevant, being labelled unprofessional for stating your mind and making a stand for what you believe in, being randomly stopped and searched because of a vague police description as you walk out your front door.
All these things and many more make you realise that you’re in a constant upward struggle to achieve a basic human right – to just live. And this can really take a toll on you mentally. Simply screaming, complaining and protesting gets you easily labelled and tossed aside. So how do you tell your pain, struggles and experiences while making those who wouldn’t normally listen, listen? It has to be done creatively. In my opinion, anyway. I believe these stories are important and need to be told, especially with how the world is right now. The mic isn’t being given to those who are truly affected and that needs to change. How will people understand what is happening in these communities if it’s always the white gaze of the media telling us what they think we feel?
What are your reasons for incorporating mixed-media, and what does this add to the narrative?
While planning this project, I wanted the message to be delivered in a way that hits the viewer from multiple angles. I’ve seen this format done many times before, but I wanted to do it differently. Sometimes the visuals are dope but the poem is a bit meh, other times it’s the visuals that are meh but the poem is dope; I wanted to create something that was both visually and audibly dope yet still digestible.
As a documentary photographer, I know the face and eyes tell a story and are probably the most captivating part of the human body. I saw the face as a blank canvas that I could use to tell the story with words, and would visually have the viewer spending more time staring at the photo. I didn’t want the viewer to come up with their own interruptions. The monochrome palette and 1:1 format were important for me. I acknowledged that, for some reason, whenever we talk about race, despite its complexities, it always somehow boils down to Black and White, so why not have visuals like that too. The 1:1 format was to create a box, symbolising the stereotypical box many of us have had to live our lives in, but now we were taking control of this box and using it to our benefit, to tell our stories. I made the subjects stare directly into the lens to prevent the viewer from looking elsewhere. The subject is in front of them and there’s no escape; it’s time to listen, read and see what they have to say.
How did you land on the subject matter, and what do these topics mean to you?
I decided that I wanted each piece to be direct and unapologetic of how these communities really feel. For the young Black man part of the series, I drew upon my personal experiences and had a friend who is a poet write it out as a spoken word. With the other parts of the series, I spent time speaking to people from those communities to educate me on their experiences, their feelings and what they’d like to say if given the platform to.
I really enjoyed this process because, for example, with Black Girl Magic I was going down the lines of Maya Angelou and the strong Black woman narrative. However, after speaking with Black women, many said that the era of the strong Black woman had passed and that they wanted the world to know that they experience other feelings too; that they cried, laughed, felt anxious, scared, fatigue and more. So making this a reality was incredible. It was the same situation with CHiNK and The Beauty of The Hijab. One thing I made sure of was that each poem was written by someone from their respective community. This is why I decided to call the series Can You See Me Now? I do what I do so I can learn more about humanity. Each topic for me is an opportunity to learn, to find common ground and build bridges.
What’s the main message with this powerful series, what can the audience learn?
Can you see me now? Am I visible now? Can you feel and understand my pain, struggles and experiences? It’s to be visible. I hope the audience can relate to the series and feel a sense of relief that maybe how they’ve felt is finally being put across, and those who haven’t experienced the things said in the series become more understanding and accepting to the fact that they do exist and are happening.
Brunel Johnson is represented by Studio PI, an award-winning agency with a diverse roster of talent from the most under-represented sections of society
