Issuu

Little Simz

10th Anniversary Issue Willem Dafoe / Brian Eno / Wole Soyinka AJ Tracey / Shon Faye / Tacita Dean George MacKay / Elif Shafak / Gavin Turk Sumayya Vally / George Sowden

£8

C O N T ENTS

The Porter Words Stephanie Sy-Quia, Dylan Holden, Nim Ralph, Felix Bischof, Billie Muraben, Kerry Crowe, Reiss Smith, Robin Choudhury, Jane Hall, Tom Bolger

37 The Hundred Faces of Willem Dafoe Words Rick Moody Photography Andy Massaccesi 76 86 94

Little Simz The musician reveals the creative and intimate forces that shaped her recent album Memoires di Panna Montata Designer George Sowden reflects on the importance of retaining human fallibility Design Profile: Sumayya Vally The acclaimed architect shares non-static ways of creating space

AJ Tracey Words Jesse Bernard Photography Silvana Trevale

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Words Natty Kasambala Photography Liz Johnson Artur Words Deyan Sudjic Photography Alice Fiorilli Words George Kafka Photography Maite de Orbe

150 Art section guest edited by Gavin Turk 122 George MacKay Discussing acting as animal instinct with the magnetic British star 132 Tacita Dean The artist shares her design work for Wayne McGregor’s interpretation of The Divine Comedy

Words Claire Marie Healy Photography Jeff Boudreau Words Thea Hawlin Photography Muhammad Salah

Brian Eno: Another Green World Words Jeff VanderMeer Photography Cecily Eno

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181 Part-Time Persona Photography Laurence Ellis Styling Stuart Williamson

Commentary Words Elif Shafak, Shon Faye, Hatty Nestor, Sequoia Nagamatsu, Raymond Antrobus

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The Porter

Photography Lydia Wilks

Hair Louis Byrne

Make up Billie McKenzie

THE TRANSGENDER ISSUE By Nim Ralph. Shon Faye discusses her vital new book, an urgent argument for justice

“I mean, I didn’t really want to write the book,” Shon Faye leans back and chuckles, while playing with her hair. Over the last decade in Britain, Faye is one of the few trans women with a public platform writing about trans issues. She has an enviable knack for being both ferociously smart and bitingly funny, in 280 characters, but her sharp wit and analysis extend far beyond Twitter. Faye’s writing moves with ease between topics ranging from Drag Race UK to Opus Dei. No matter the content, her subjectivity as trans and as a woman are often centred in an approach that’s both unguarded and refreshing. So, I ask across a glitchy Zoom screen, what changed her mind? Faye has a restless energy, shifting often; it feels like her mouth is trying to keep up with the speed of her brain: “There was never enough space in a column to actually talk about the things I want to talk about, the core issues of what is wrong for trans people. I want this to be a corrective.” Since Faye started writing in 2014, the UK political and social landscape has transformed. We now live in the long shadow of the ghastly Brexit referendum, itself a footnote in the modern global rise of farright populism. Anybody paying attention will know that trans people have become pawns in the broader ‘culture wars’. In the UK, this has seen rise to a particularly unholy alliance between far-right forces and a small but loud subsect of second-wave feminists, both intent on forcing trans people from public life. The British press have reduced the complexity of the assault on trans lives to what Faye summarises as “a Twitter flame war between us and TERFs” [trans-exclusionary radical feminists]. It is this that she hopes to correct. She cites Reni Eddo-Lodge, author of Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, as an inspiration for taking the plunge, who as a Black woman frustrated with only being asked to speak on white feminism’s terms, wrote her own book. It wasn’t only taking back her power which inspired Faye, but also how she held that power once successful: “She just wrote a book, but she doesn’t go on Good Morning Britain when they need a Black woman – she didn’t become the ‘go-to Black woman’. I found it quite chic.” This reflects a key contention of The Transgender Issue: that representation and visibility won’t liberate trans people – addressing structural oppression and material conditions will. Though in publishing a book on the topic, demands to represent will surely increase? While Faye is careful not to disparage the urge for representation, she doesn’t want to position herself as the spokesperson for her community: “I’m not representative of trans women writ large; in fact, I’m quite unrepresentative in many ways.” Originally from Bristol, Faye gained a scholarship to public school, followed by Oxford, and spent her first years of graduate life as a lawyer. This, she says, is indicative of why we can’t correct the media with representation: “It’s the case across all minority groups in the media and publishing that it’s often the most structurally privileged ones who end up representing.” But, I wonder, in an internet age which doesn’t allow much space for public fallibility, if there’s some self-preservation there too. She trails off, “Eventually I would disappoint people anyway…” For those of us who are structurally and culturally disempowered, social media provides a blunt tool with which to speak with a wider reach than our material life provides. Being perceived as a representative can mean being attacked by those who don’t like your kind. It can also mean carrying the burden of a collective’s desire to be seen, heard, and understood perfectly. In the social media era, there is an idea that any kind of visibility as a trans person is “resistance”. Faye is critical of such exposure. “This kind of hashtag influencer style activism, which makes it very easy for allies, with ‘Trans women are women’ as a rallying slogan, has very much nar-

rowed the terms of what trans liberation actually looks like. You know, no one talks about housing or poverty as a trans issue.” This is the substance of the book: shifting the focus of trans lives from Twitter sound bites and reactive media to the real-life issues that shape trans people’s lives in the UK – healthcare; housing; work; sex work; prisons; immigration; LGBTQ+ and feminist spaces. Faye talks about all these areas with eloquence and ease, weaving them through our conversation. From the obsession with trans women in sports – “Everyone’s talking about trans women at the Olympics but no one’s talking about sex and sex workers. Well, globally, most trans women have done some kind of sex work, and very few trans women will ever qualify for the Olympics” – to poverty: “Universal Credit is a scummy austerity policy, and it affects trans people terribly.” To write about these things as a trans woman means that she’s often labelled an “activist”. I ask her about this: “I hate being called a trans activist especially because it’s got this pejorative use, it’s designed to reduce what I do. Yeah, I’m a writer, and my subjectivity is I can’t not be trans; we’re in the middle of this worldwide backlash, so of course I’m writing about it.” It’s a familiar trap, as a trans writer you’re expected to write about trans issues. But as a trans writer your subjectivity is used against you to undermine both your skills and what you say. Experienced in navigating this, Faye is clear The Transgender Issue is not a memoir, and she refuses to write one. Women writers are asked to write memoirs more than they are asked for analysis. It’s a perverse system of extracting vulnerability for pay-per-view consumption, a vulnerability trap many minoritised groups are familiar with. Vulnerability is demanded to legitimise your humanity, but the pieces of you shared are scrutinised at best, weaponised against you and people like you at worst. For trans women this is added to by the salacious interest in transition stories, while there’s very little space in public life for trans women’s real vulnerabilities. “I don’t define being a woman by suffering,” Faye states matter-offactly. “Sometimes the quickest way women bond is to talk about how men have screwed you over; it’s a classic thing that from a very young age girls and women learn to do. There’s almost a drive [for trans women] to share traumatic experiences because you feel pressure to prove that you have had these experiences because you’re a woman, and then ultimately, the way that transphobia responds to that, it’s just to be like, well no, I don’t believe you.” This can feel particularly acute when trans people talk about experiences of domestic violence (DV) and the needs of survivors. In 2018, 7.5 per cent of all women in the UK experienced DV, and 16 per cent of trans women had, but anti-trans feminists often divert the conversation to theoretical abstractions about men in women’s spaces. We well know the threat of being denied your own reality is one that keeps many survivors silent; movements have been built around the mantra ‘I believe her’. To be trans is also not defined by suffering. The book’s epigraph is a quote from performance artist Travis Alabanza: “When I say trans, I also mean escape. I mean choice. I mean wanting something greater than what you told me. Wanting more possibilities than the one you forced on me.” So, what would freedom and autonomy mean to Faye? “To be able to move on from trying to explain myself, or the community I belong to, or this political experience we call trans. Or at least, to talk about it in much richer ways, like things that bring me joy. I would want to give expression to that and to be able to rejoice in my writing.” And what would it be to be liberated? “It’s not just about trans people being liberated; we’d basically have undone binary gender and its bordering structuring principle of power and violence. In a truly liberated future I might not even call myself trans, that word would cease to have any meaning, nor would woman. It’s quite hard to admit that, but I think that trans liberation is actually abolishing ourselves because we wouldn’t need to exist in such a category.” Neatly, that is reflected in the first line of Faye’s book: “The liberation of trans people would improve the lives of everyone in our society.” What a great place to start. The Transgender Issue by Shon Faye is published by Allen Lane, Penguin, September 2021

THE BLITZ KID By Stephen Jones. The serendipitous ties between music and millinery

When I was at boarding school in 1972, I remember buying the first Roxy Music LP. It was the first time I realised clothes could be an expression of self; something more than a ‘civilian’ or school uniform. I soon learned that everything, be it a white T-shirt or a hat, is a communication, a message. Moving from Liverpool to London to study was thrilling. It was where fashion was being reborn – it was the centre of the world. On my second day at Saint Martins, I met a girl called Shanne; she wore a black tuxedo and often had a tampon, coloured red, poking through her lapel. She invited me for lunch in Soho market with her boyfriend, and sure enough it was Shane MacGowan, who would go on to start The Pogues. My next-door neighbour in halls was a drummer called Kenny Morris, and I’d tag along to his first gigs (the band was Siouxsie and the Banshees). I was scouted at one of them to help style some bands, got to know the people at Stiff Records, and was even singing harmonies in a band called Pink Parts. Most importantly though, I’d fall in with Steve Strange, (who was behind the Blitz Club), as well as Boy George and Spandau Ballet. I was a club kid first and a fashion student second: It was the perfect environment to test out my designs. One of my earliest and most important creations was in fact for George: a Britannia helmet in silver lamé with white feathers. There was a vacuum left by punk, and the generation under me wanted something new. Bizarrely enough, something new was something old. Since WWII, society had been relentlessly focused on the future, the white heat of new technology, constantly moving forward. The crowd I was a part of, the new romantics, were concerned with an idealised, romantic vision of the past. At the time, having emerged out of events like the miners’ strike, the idea of a perfumed, dandified past might as well have been from outer space. That was somehow more shocking, more punk than punk. Music has often been serendipitous. Steve had a day job at PX Boutique, where there was a tiny disused basement. He persuaded the owners to let me use it, and within a year of leaving college, I had my own millinery salon. It was a quick jump for which I was wholly unprepared, but I had a steady string of clients from the Blitz. A couple of years later I was paid the handsome sum of £25 to star in Culture Club’s ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me’ music video, which was a fortune then. I was decked out in a powder-blue suit and fez; blink and you’ll miss me. Jean Paul Gaultier asked

The Porter

me to be in his first-ever menswear show off the back of it, which was inspired by the Gran Café de Paris, in Tangier, circa 1940. I had twisted my ankle so was unable to do it, but months later, in Paris, I was invited to his studio and given an hour to sketch some hats. All I had was a Basildon Bond notepad, small, blue and one lined: something you’d write a thank-you note to your aunt on. We went through them together and he concluded by saying, “My assistant will be in touch about quantities.” After that, Paris knew my work. A hat is for the person you want to be, rather than the person you are. Whether you’re an established artist or a spotty teenager just starting out, you need a look. What you wear is a shorthand sign for the persona you are portraying. When Mick Jagger – who I have worked with over the years – puts on his brightly coloured satin shirt, he becomes Mick Jagger. Sometimes, you’re trapped by fans’ expectations from that projection, which is often disassociated from the real you. I have, however, been fortunate to truly get to know some of the artists I’ve collaborated with. I’ve known Kylie [Minogue] since she first came to England. I did a wonderful hat for her Aphrodite tour, all metalwork and showgirl plumes. When Rihanna was starting out, we bumped into each other at a Dior show and she was wearing one of my hats; she had bought it at Dover Street Market. It was a true romance from the off. I’ve made her everything from a durag to a bishop’s mitre. It’s been wonderful watching her grow up, though I’m not sure she’d be able to go shopping by herself now. Musicians often surprise you. I recently worked on a collection with Dior and the rapper Travis Scott. You wouldn’t imagine we would have much to say to each other – I’m 64, British, and gay. When his 6ft 8in entourage arrived, I felt like a subspecies. The funny thing is, we got on like a house on fire. He called me up afterwards and said, “Yo, the way you dress is cool. You’re the drip-meister.” Kim Jones said I should put that on my gravestone. As much as I love music, I have to sketch in complete silence. If I’m listening to anything with a guitar, it all goes Spanish and within 30 seconds I’m drawing red carnations. I can make exceptions for Felix Mendelssohn’s collected piano works, Songs Without Words, or perhaps Brian Eno’s Music for Airports; with them I get balance, and the work can sing. As told to Tom Bolger

Stephen Linard and Stephen Jones (R ) St Moritz Club, 1980. Photography Graham Smith

Willem Dafoe

WORDS RICK MOODY PHOTOGRAPHY ANDY MASSACCESI STYLING ALESSIA VANINI

Willem Dafoe’s filmography exceeds a hundred films now. It’s the kind of résumé any working actor would aspire to. It includes work with iconic directors, movies for huge tent-pole franchises, but also the indiest of the indies, high art projects in which he plays the likes of both Vincent van Gogh and Jesus of Nazareth. And then there’s the stage work, which includes the innovative theatre productions and classics like Eugene O’Neill. Dafoe seems to have been everywhere, and worked with almost everyone. He is, at this point, the kind of stalwart actor’s actor who is universally admired, and who prefers work to basking in outsized celebrity. Talking with Dafoe, one is immediately aware of the voice: raspy, full of colour, indelibly recognisable, and vividly alive. Offscreen there’s an easy smile, a serenity and gentleness one doesn’t associate with an actor who has frequently brought deranged villains to life. I met Dafoe once before, many years ago, when we shared a cab home from a dinner with mutual acquaintances. We talked about T S Eliot, whose work he’d been reading in preparation for a role. This time around, in the maw of the pandemic, he seemed even more philosophical, but with the same sudden capacity for energetic laughter, enthusiasm, and generosity. We talked over Zoom, just before he was heading out to do what he has done so well, a hundred times before...

Rick Moody: How has your pandemic been? Willem Dafoe: I can’t say it was good. It afforded me a time to calm down for a little while. I was in lockdown in Italy. It was nice to be with my wife alone in quiet Rome, hearing only bird sounds in a deserted city with my days not so structured. Usually if I’m not working on something, I’m preparing for something. I got an opportunity to start thinking about, you know, what do you do with a day? I found a pretty good rhythm. Once things loosened up I started working again under Covid protocols, which aren’t ideal, but you adjust. I’ve been fortunate because in this time I’ve been able to work, and I’ve been with my family. Was it strange being far away from the US during the pandemic? Well, a lot of the time, I tend to shoot outside of the country. And, previously, with the Wooster Group, I was abroad a lot; so I’ve always had a little distance. Also, being a New Yorker, you normally have a distance. I admired the Italians for how they were dealing with the Covid situation, initially, as opposed to when I was in New York, where things were very confused. Later, there was a period where I was shooting Nightmare Alley in Toronto, and that was closer to the election. I got sucked into watching the news obsessively, and that was hard.

As an actor, I like it best when I’m the creature of someone who’s making a world… They’re whispering in my ear, and I’m trying to make it manifest

WILLEM DAFOE WEARS ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA AW21 THROUGHOUT

I feel very comfortable on the fringes… Home is always the place where I feel loose

Among your recent projects (Siberia, a horror story; The Card Counter, a thriller; Nightmare Alley, a psychological drama based on a classic pulp novel), you worked with Abel Ferrara again, and you also worked with Paul Schrader. You’ve worked on multiple projects with both these directors, and I wanted to ask about how that is meaningful for you, to work with certain film directors repeatedly. How does that long relationship create an impact with respect to your craft? You develop a shorthand; you develop a trust. As an actor, I like it best when I’m the creature of someone who’s making a world. They want to see something, and I’m a guy who gets fed into this world. They’re whispering in my ear, and I’m trying to make it manifest. You feel like you’re doing a service, and you get away from yourself. It’s someone else’s agenda. So that’s a nice way to work. Mostly, when you start a project there’s so much sniffing around and figuring, identifying what the project is and what the sensibilities are. If you don’t have that, if you have, instead, some basis, some history, there’s a lot more love. And there’s a lot more curiosity. And I think you can go deeper. I guess that’s all pretty practical, you know. I know Abel pretty well because we’re neighbours, and we have similar interests. Paul, on the other hand, outside of work, I barely ever see him. We’re close, but it’s always in the context of work. So it’s not just about working with friends; it’s working in a situation where you don’t waste a lot of time defining terms.

Both of these directors represent a particular idea of contemporary cinema, a kind of outside-the-studio model that is recalled in movies like Bad Lieutenant and Mishima. They are very different from the sort of spectacle-oriented model. I note that you have been a Marvel character and DC character (and will be in a Spider-Man film shortly), in various films, but these recent projects are far from that. Does that mean that you’re continuing to try to carve out projects that are outside of a sort of conventional mainstream movie making? I feel very comfortable on the fringes. I mean, there are pleasures to making big studio movies, but I don’t get to collaborate on the same level. They’re movies made with different intentions, different resources, and different people. I like to mix it up. Home is always the place where I feel loose. What are some examples of those past indie projects that resonate most strongly for you now? Recent films that come to mind would be The Florida Project or Tommaso. They are dear to me because they were shot in unconventional ways and with colleagues who aren’t always professional actors. It’s an interesting challenge to drop your professional performer mindset and come to a reality that is shaped by people that are in their element and not used to performing or making fiction from their experiences. Rather than you teaching them how to perform, they teach you how to be human.

I believe you know John Lurie, the musician (Lounge Lizards), actor (Down by Law), and painter (Painting with John, now on HBO), an incredible polymath who has a great new memoir out right now, which includes a photo of you and John in its pages. I always wanted to ask you, or John, what was it like ice-fishing together in that episode of John’s first TV show, Fishing with John. It looks so fun on-screen, if, uh, cold. Do you have recollections of that time? I remember. John and I have lost touch a bit, in his desire to sequester. But we had some very close periods. I’ve known him for a long time. Fishing with John was fantastic. John said he had some money, asked if I wanted to do it, and then he and Jim Jarmusch, myself, and I think Jamie Nares, went out fishing in Montauk to kind of play around with the idea, just to see what it would be. We didn’t use that trip for the series; it was part of the development process. He said, look, where do you want to go? We’ve got enough money that we can go anywhere. We go fishing, we shoot for three days; it is totally improvised, totally invented. I was super busy and I couldn’t do it right away. All the other guys chose tropical locations where it was very comfortable. Finally I was the last one to choose, and I thought, I’m not going to go to Thailand. I’m not going go to the Yucatán, Gulf of Mexico. It’s kind of a drag if, you know, it’s all one tone. So I said, how about Maine? I had a place there for many years. And so we went in the middle of the winter and filmed in the Allagash. It was

Defying categories with agile lyricism, the north London rapper’s latest work is her most personal and accomplished to date. From generational trauma to womanhood, Nina Simone to knife crime, she reveals the intimate and creative forces that shaped it

Little Simz

WORDS NATTY KASAMBALA PHOTOGRAPHY LIZ JOHNSON ARTUR STYLING JULIE VELUT

I know what I’m on, and I know where I’m trying to get to

Little Simz is a veteran. Though her cheeky downturned smile and sentences punctuated with the language of millennial London give a glimpse of her true youth (the rapper is still firmly in her 20s), everything else about the north Londoner’s demeanour suggests she’s not new to this music game at all. Her energy is calm, her answers careful and considered, and her ambitions firmly unbothered by external pressure, in that way that only comes with time and maturity. Releasing her first mixtape in 2010, Simz has been a name on lips for over a decade and in that time has had her fair share of hype and praise. Co-signed by everyone from Kendrick Lamar to Lauryn Hill, Damon Albarn to Stormzy, to call her your favourite rapper’s favourite rapper feels inadequate. Her intellectually agile lyricism, genre-dismantling versatility, and refreshingly individual approach to art has separated her from the pack since her inception. In the same breath however, her name is often brought up as one of the most underrated within the rap community, with some feeling her immense talent goes underappreciated by the wider industry. While it’s well-meaning, one of the best things about Simz is how little she concerns herself with such topics, instead choosing to carve her own untrodden path, and redefining what success can look like for a woman, or anyone, trying to make it in the genre. “I know what I’m on, and I know where I’m trying to get to,” Simz states simply. “I’m kind of done with focusing on who’s not picking up on me or talking about me or nominating me for this. There’s so much love and support out there for

me, and that’s where I like to focus my attention… And I think my face is bait man, whether you fuck with it or not, you know my name.” That quiet confidence hasn’t always been there, she admits, having fallen into the trap of being frustrated with how others perceived her. “But,” she adds with a laugh, “a part of me thinks, was I really that bothered? Because I still never conformed!” And that stubbornness eventually paid off. Now decorated with an NME Award and an Ivor Novello Award for best album, as well as Mercury Prize and MOBO nominations for her previous project GREY Area, the world is watching closely to see what Little Simz might do next. Despite her position as a UK rap mainstay, there’s always been a degree of mystery surrounding the person behind the music. Under Simz’ ‘personal life’ section on Wikipedia sit three short, distinct sentences (including one saying that she lives in London and another that she’s an Arsenal FC fan, which are pretty much truisms for any Islington-based individuals). But her latest project delves the deepest yet into the rich and textured tapestry of one of the UK’s most brilliant musical brains. Titled Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, shortened to the acronym S.I.M.B.I, a version of her real name Simbiatu, the album’s opener poses the question at the heart of the 19-track odyssey: “Simz the artist or Simbi the person?” Through the intimate voyage into subjects of knife crime, generational trauma, and womanhood, unveiling new aspects of Simz as she navigates through personal heartbreak and growth – alongside some of the most sonically ambitious music she’s ever released – the answer is emphatically both.

Up until now, the two sides of the Nigerian-British artist have remained distinct on purpose. “As much as I’m aware of who I am and where I sit in the world, I also just want to be able to have some things for myself,” Simz says of protecting her privacy. She’s also talked in the past about her reluctance to become a presumptuous spokesperson for the communities she’s deemed to represent: “I don’t claim to know everything at all; I’m still learning, so I have to be careful of what I say and what messages I put out there.” On S.I.M.B.I however, Simz’ personal and her political are endlessly entangled. The urgent and declarative single ‘Introvert’ lays bare all that’s wrong in Simz’ own world, with an accompanying visual that blends emotive choreography, protest footage and brutality within renaissance art, as she raps, “I’m not into politics / but I know it’s dark times / parts of the world still living in apartheid.” “I just want to encourage people to think for themselves, make their own decisions and – not in a patronising way – ask the right questions,” Simz explains. ‘Little Q, Pt 2’ is another breakthrough point in the project, written from the perspective of her own cousin, who Simz grew up with. “There was a period in life where we didn’t speak, you know, when you just get older and get your own friends and you just do your own thing. I didn’t see him for ages, and then we reconnected,” she says. “He was telling me all this mad stuff I had no idea that he’d experienced about his life and how he almost lost it. It’s just crazy; to anyone else he’d be just another Black boy, another number. But to me he’s my family and he’s so much more.” The song chronicles his

Sumayya Vally’s design and research practice is committed to finding expression for hybrid identities and contested territories. She is the co-founder and director of Counterspace, the Johannesburg studio established in 2015 that occupies a place between pedagogy and praxis. Port talks to the youngest architect ever commissioned for the Serpentine Pavilion about mapping migrant experiences, being inspired by South Africa, and non-static ways of creating space

Material Histories

WORDS GEORGE KAFKA PHOTOGRAPHY MAITE DE ORBE

AJ TRACEY

With the release of his second album, the west London rap star is hitting nothing but net. Continuing to prove his sonic versatility and ambition, the independent artist talks to Port about the beauty of basketball, staying humble, and the electric pull of live performance WORDS JESSE BERNARD PHOTOGRAPHY SILVANA TREVALE STYLING LEWIS MUNRO

The godfather of ambient and generative music, Brian Eno’s reverberations can be heard everywhere. Talking to acclaimed author Jeff VanderMeer, the pioneering “non-musician” discusses his long-standing environmental activism, holograms, hypocrisy, and his newly launched charity, working to reduce the music industry’s carbon footprint

Brian Eno

WORDS JEFF VANDERMEER PHOTOGRAPHY CECILY ENO

GEORGE MACKAY

Fiercely thoughtful, George MacKay is interested in cinema that deals with difficult questions – the unfamiliar his preferred comfort zone. In between shooting, the magnetic British star reflects on artistic enquiry, adjusting to ‘real life’ after filming, and acting as an animal instinct WORDS CLAIRE MARIE HEALY PHOTOGRAPHY JEFF BOUDREAU STYLING MITCHELL BELK

ALEXANDER MCQUEEN

OUR DIVINE COMEDY

Purgatory and Paradise: Acclaimed artist Tacita Dean reflects on her debut design work for Wayne McGregor’s balletic interpretation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy WORDS THEA HAWLIN PHOTOGRAPHY MUHAMMAD SALAH

CARTOMANTIC WORLD-MAKING

What alternate worlds may be summoned from card reading? Gavin Turk invites artist and writer Jonathan Allen – who rediscovered mystic and artist Austin Osman Spare’s lost tarot deck – to discuss the history of cartomancy and how it might imaginatively model possible futures WORDS GAVIN TURK & JONATHAN ALLEN

Gavin Turk: Looking into the future and thinking about the role of artists, there’s a wonderful line from the British artist and mystic, Austin Osman Spare. He wrote that “Scientists will never solve or prove anything relating to foretelling the future; it is a work for ‘artists’. Science may subsequently prove more fully what the artists have already discovered.” In terms of “foretelling the future”, I wanted to ask you about a project that you’ve been involved with recently that was based around your discovery of a lost tarot deck made by Austin Spare, one that got you thinking about cartomancy [divination using a deck of cards] as a tool for reimagining the future. I wonder if you could tell me how you found this amazing artefact. Jonathan Allen: From time to time, I work as an associate curator at London’s Magic Circle Museum, which is connected to the well-known international organisation for theatrical conjurors and illusionists. The Magic Circle’s remit is to promote the conjuring arts but importantly that also includes exploring magic’s cultural history. As with all museums, the collection contains items that don’t strictly ‘belong’ to the official story of that institution, and at the Magic Circle, that includes Austin Spare’s

A NEW LITERARY MAGAZINE LAUNCHING AUTUMN 2021

FEATURING ORIGINAL CONTRIBUTIONS FROM JONATHAN LETHEM KAE TEMPEST TOM WAITS BEN OKRI MARGARET ATWOOD CATHERINE LACEY BEN LERNER ALEXANDER CHEE JIA TOLENTINO WELLS TOWER JOYCE CAROL OATES TOM WAITS LARGE FORMAT. NO ADVERTISING. NO DIGITAL VERSION. ONE ISSUE PER YEAR FOR 10 YEARS, THEN IT STOPS.

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Giorgio Armani x Elif Shafak

COM— MENT— ARY To celebrate Port’s 10th anniversary, we have partnered with Giorgio Armani on a twoissue Commentary special. Working with leading contemporary writers to bring you timely original work, we present here, for the second instalment, a new piece of writing from the multi-award-winning writer Elif Shafak.

COVER STORY

EXTRACT

POEM

182

194

198

202

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In Flux By Elif Shafak

The State By Shon Faye

The Kingdom of the Sick By Hatty Nestor

Stasis By Sequoia Nagamatsu

Captions & A Dream For John T Williams of the Nuu-Chah-Nulth tribe By Raymond Antrobus

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Tectonic Shift

Styling Mitchell Belk

Photography Dham Srifuengfung

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GUCCI

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Part-Time Persona

Photography Laurence Ellis

224

Nick: Leather Jacket VINTAGE, Jumper FENDI

Styling Stuart Williamson

Augustus: Jacket DIOR, Rollneck DIOR, Trousers DIOR, Sneakers ADIDAS

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The Moon Under Water

Styling Julie Velut

Photography Louise Thornfeldt

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Suit SALVATORE FERRAGAMO, Shoes MIISTA

Shirt BOSS, Jacket BOSS

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