Orlando Bloom
George the Poet / Anson Boon Toheeb Jimoh / Eyal Weizman / Preti Taneja Mark Ruwedel / Hew Locke / Irene Solà Nuno Mendes / Douglas Kennedy
£8
CONTENTS Portfolio Words Kalpesh Lathigra, Imogen West-Knights, Alberto Saibene, Nuno Mendes, Stephanie Sy-Quia, Bret Easton Ellis, Rosalind Jana, Tom Bolger, Matthew Turner, Felix Bischof, Hettie Judah, Dylan Holden, Reiss Smith
45
Orlando Bloom Words Tom Lamont Photography Ryan James Caruthers
88
113 100 Anson Boon Words Simran Hans Photography Ian Kenneth Bird
Special Watch Innovation Report An innovation-focused edition of TenTen examining incredible horological feats, including sapphire-crystal micro-sculpture, why Cartier’s outré case shapes still have the power of now, how ‘connected’ smartwatches are entering the legitimate luxury lexicon, and the marginal gains that keep Rolex ahead of the game
166 Toheeb Jimoh Words Kemi Alemoru Photography Adama Jalloh
PORT 30 Violence at the Threshold of Detectability: Eyal Weizman Words Deyan Sudjic Photography Daniel Castro Garcia
Inland Guggenheim Fellow Mark Ruwedel talks to Ayla Angelos about a selection of photographs from his four-part in-progress epic Los Angeles: Landscapes of Four Ecologies
Commentary George the Poet, Brian Patrick Eha, Douglas Kennedy, Refaat Alareer, Irene Solà
201
178 186
304 All Colours Agree in the Dark Photography Hugo Mapelli Styling Mitchell Belk
324 Strong Fortunes Photography Jukka Ovaskainen Styling Mitchell Belk
09
68
Portfolio
PROCESSION By Hettie Judah. Hew Locke discusses his grand commission for Tate Britain, a poetic work of sculpture examining colonial legacy, global finance and the human bodies at the end of the paper trail
It’s countdown time on the largest commission of Hew Locke’s career and biosecurity at his studio has gone near-laboratory grade. As the new etiquette demands, we exchange cute snapshots of our matching negative Covid tests before we meet. On arrival I have to disinfect my shoes. Locke apologises: under other circumstances we might have had an informal chat over a cup of tea, but so much hangs in the balance that the virus invading his studio at this point would be catastrophic. The British artist has received the annual commission to fill Tate Britain’s grand, neo-classical Duveen Galleries. “I’ve often said, half joking, half serious, that Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall is easy because you can do what you like,” says Locke, against the clatter of busy assistants. “But the Duveen is really tricky, because it’s in the museum. You’re in this highly charged space. All this history – Charles I, Charles II, Elizabeth, the Tudor portraits – are just two steps away from you.” This is not idle chat: In 2014, Locke staged a performance in the Turbine Hall. Inspired by the impact of gentrification on the Notting Hill Carnival, it featured a Brazilian bateria band, and placards of the neighbourhood’s grand properties being used like police riot shields. Locke is no stranger to substantial sculpture commissions either. In 2015 ‘The Jurors’ was installed in a field at Runnymede – 12 chairs, cast in bronze, each referencing struggles for justice and equality over the 800 years since the Magna Carta was signed. The centrepiece of his 2019 solo at Ikon in Birmingham was an entire flotilla of model boats suspended from the ceiling in a chapel-sized gallery.
Hew Locke. Photography Fergus Riley
69
13
AFTERMATH By Stephanie Sy-Quia. Preti Taneja reflects on her astounding new book
Preti Taneja taught creative writing in HMP Whitemoor for three years. Usman Khan, perpetrator of the Fishmongers’ Hall attack on November 29, 2019, was one of her students, and Jack Merritt, one of his victims, was her colleague. Aftermath is not a work of a fiction, but a book of fictions: of those we hold about ourselves and each other, the society we live in, who to trust and how safe we are. The book relinquishes linearity, instead favouring an elliptical movement through the inquests, ‘with asides, insertions, questions and other patterns repeating’ to ask how Khan came to be; through griefs racial, intergenerational and personal; through the works of African American abolitionists and feminists, to insist again and again on the disastrous knowledge gaps at work in Britain today. Taneja’s novel We That Are Young won the Desmond Elliott Prize for best literary debut of 2018. She is professor of world literature and creative writing at Newcastle University. Which texts and writers did you look to in writing this book? The terrorist event is placed so much outside of context and history, a distancing which denies pattern and cause. I tried to look for solace in poetry and resistance. I turned to writers and texts who have given me maps all my writing life for ways of looking at racial grief and generational trauma: June Jordan, Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine, Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Tongo Eisen-Martin, or Wendy Trevino – people who know violence in systemic forms, how it pushes some individuals to deeper violence; who know prison in different ways, and know how it sits in society as the endpoint manifestation of the racialised disgrace that humans mete upon ourselves. But these works are so clearly not for the specific violence and knot of grief that I was reckoning with, and I felt I had lost the right to go to Black women abolitionists talking about civil rights in the US with this event. Ultimately, I’m not a lawyer, journalist or criminologist; I’m a fiction writer. And I taught fiction to this person whose fictions about himself and what he believed,
78
Portfolio
and what others wanted to believe about him and themselves – as doing something good – were all fundamentally important in what was enabled. From there it became a question of moving in circles through different texts and ways of thinking, including poetry, law, philosophy and politics, testing out where solace, answers and responsibility could be held, to find context for what happened. I was searching for an opening to grieve and understand how it came to be. The first piece of writing that did this for me was Adrienne Rich’s seminal poem on trauma, ‘Diving into the Wreck’. The resulting book is deeply intertextual, which is the political and aesthetic bedrock of my writing; this is the way I choose to voice the nuances and multiplicities of identity: a form of solidarity and resistance to tokenism, or a ‘solitary hero’ narrative, if you like. You have a term, of your own coinage, which you use throughout the book, of the “atro-city”. What can you tell me about it? The word ‘atrocity’ was being used a lot to talk about the exclusivity of this event, as if it came from nothing. Because I’m multilingual, aural rhymes have a real significance to me. ‘Atrocity’ calls to mind the word’s etymology: It was brought into English from Greek via the Latin and French for “extreme cruelty”. So the idea of breaking an atrocity down into the atro-city, this coded social place in which atrocities cannot but occur, appealed. It’s a really simple way of saying that the atrocity and the city – ‘civilisation’ – are intimately linked, without having to write a whole book about just that. The broken-down term is a way of showing a place and a system that articulates our collective responsibility. The atrocity is a place that holds ivory towers and high-security prisons in a binary as if they don’t have anything to do with each other. But events like the attack of Fishmongers’ Hall will come from our societies and our cities, which are so very cruel. We need different psychological, social and economic spaces to survive and thrive in, to nurture us all at the roots, before prison is even thought of. That’s what abolitionism is to me, and the
Preti Taneja in her studio, Newcastle
Photography Reece James Morrison
79
How do you remain grounded after being in some of the biggest film franchises of the 21st century? For the industry veteran, the answer is simple: keeping faith, and family, close WORDS TOM LAMONT PHOTOGRAPHY RYAN JAMES CARUTHERS STYLING JULIE VELUT
The up-and-coming actor is set to make waves as Johnny Rotten in Danny Boyle’s Sex Pistols mini-series. Having fully immersed himself in a world of anarchy, he ruminates on his physical transformation and the joy of celebrating underdogs WORDS SIMRAN HANS PHOTOGRAPHY IAN KENNETH BIRD STYLING MITCHELL BELK
SPECIAL WATCH INNOVATION REPORT
PHOTOGRAPHY LEANDRO FARINA AT EAST PHOTOGRAPHIC SET DESIGN ALICE WHITTICK PRODUCTION ASSISTANT HERMIONE RUSSELL AT ARTPRODUCTION
CALIBRE
Movement in Focus
WATCHMAKER
Bulgari
YEAR OF ORIGIN
2019
VITAL STATISTICS
433 parts 55-hour self-wound power 4Hz balance oscillation
HOUSING
Octo Finissimo Chronograph
BVL 318
Intricate ‘integration’ of the stopwatch mechanism into the already-wafer-thin base movement, along with a platinum weight rotating about its circumference, Bulgari scored its fifth slimmestever record in 2019, cementing Octo as so much more than a sculptural design classic. 137
Fresh from winning hearts and an ensemble SAG Award for his role in Ted Lasso, the actor is continuing to seek out roles that portray nuanced narratives. Talking to Port, he reflects on growing up navigating disparate worlds, theatrical ambitions and belonging in a changing Brixton WORDS KEMI ALEMORU PHOTOGRAPHY ADAMA JALLOH STYLING REUBEN ESSER
Eyal Weizman is the founder of Forensic Architecture, a research agency investigating human rights violations and violence perpetrated by states, police forces, militaries and corporations. Using the latest in spatial and architectural analysis, digital modelling and immersive technologies, as well as documentary research and academic collaboration, its findings have been presented in international courtrooms and cultural institutions worldwide. Here, he reflects on moral paradoxes, making evidence operative and the traces left by trauma
VIOLENCE AT THE THRESHOLD OF DETECTABILITY
WORDS DEYAN SUDJIC PHOTOGRAPHY DANIEL CASTRO GARCIA
Los Angeles-based photographer Mark Ruwedel talks to Ayla Angelos about a selection of photographs from his four-part in-progress epic Los Angeles: Landscapes of Four Ecologies
Inland
The landscape has been an enduring muse of yours; why so? When I was a graduate student, I moved from Pennsylvania to Montreal. My subject up until that point had been the people I knew. I started photographing the edges of Montreal as an island, and gradually I became more interested in the urban landscapes – what some people would call wastelands, the edges. They’re the buffer zones between the wild and the urban. This is what drives my current work. Twenty years ago, I moved to Southern California. Then, in 2014, I started concocting this landscape project of Los Angeles, a location which – at least in North America – has the largest wild urban interface of any city. I devised this one-year project in preparation to apply for a Guggenheim Fellowship, and I received the fellowship in 2015. When I started working, I realised it was going to be more like 10 years. So, I devised this four-part epic. It’s interesting that you’ve described it as an “in-progress epic” – you’re setting yourself up for a long photographic journey; will it ever finish? There’s been a lot of terrific photography made about Los Angeles over the decades, but there’s been very little that’s tried to be comprehensive. I’m modestly attempting to do that. I’m just trying to cast a really wide net and see what I can pull in. Los Angeles is widely depicted in the media, so you’d think that the world has a fairly good understanding of it as a city. But through your imagery, you present a different – a deserted, intricate and fragile – side of it. Is this intentional? Part one focuses on the Los Angeles River and its major tributaries. You think about what
the Los Angeles River looks like from movies, and it has this concrete channel with a trickle of water in the middle. There’s car chases and the Terminator goes down there, and so on. But in my photographs, the Los Angeles River is made to look more natural. You think you know what the real Los Angeles River looks like, but you would never associate it with what I’m showing you. When I plotted the project, I was thinking about these epic places that would define the relationship of Los Angeles to the natural world. I found that, over time, more of my pictures were about these little secret places, so that’s really interesting to me. Los Angeles includes, for lack of a better word, nature. The land has been abused, as you’ll find with the orchards; they’re disappearing faster than I can make pictures. They’re being bulldozed for housing developments and warehouses. Climate change goes hand in hand with the natural world; is that something you try to address in your work? I’m not deliberately trying to make a statement about that. There’s a fairly large group of pictures that I’m not quite sure which part of the epic they fit into, because they fit all of them – it’s the burned landscapes. There’s an interesting set of contradictions, because fire is a natural part of the ecosystem here. There’s always been fires. But now, of course, they’re hotter, they’re bigger, and they last longer. They’re both expected, and at the same time, they’re a prophecy of future horror. I’m not trying to say, ‘Look at these pictures and stop driving.’ The works are not didactic in any manner; people can look at this work and make certain assumptions or draw certain conclusions, and I’m fine with that. I don’t want to tell them what to think about it.
How important is the sequencing and structure to your work? People have asked why I don’t make really big prints, like a lot of my colleagues. It’s because of the way I think about photography and the way I work; I would rather have 12 or 15 small pictures together that are talking to each other, rather than one big one that tries to sum up something. It’s not that I’m a traditionalist, but I think there’s something unique about photography that allows for that voice. I’m not against other people doing things differently, of course, but that’s my position for my own work now. In my epic, especially by contemporary standards, the pictures are really, really small. What can we learn from these photographs? Is it the changing landscape in LA, the ecology, the nature? Or are your pictures made purely for aesthetics? I don’t have a main goal, but everything you just said is okay with me. Obviously I’m interested in aesthetic issues – I’m interested in the histories of art, in terms of how this place is pictured. I’m interested in pop culture and the way that Los Angeles is portrayed through various media, especially film and television. I think what I’m trying to do is add to that history or complicate the reading of that history, or probably both. But I’m not trying to tell somebody something – that’s not of interest to me. What I’m trying to do is make some sort of contribution to the history of pictures about this place and, by extension, the history of the place itself.
Works courtesy of Large Glass, London, and Gallery Luisotti, Santa Monica
187
GEORGE PHOTOGRAPHY JESSICA MADAVO
STYLING CAROLINA AUGUSTIN
THE POET WORDS BECOME THINGS
202
COMMENTARY
George the Poet is a London-born spoken word performer of Ugandan heritage whose unique work has won him critical acclaim both as a recording artist and social commentator. His audio offering, ‘Have You Heard George’s Podcast?’ – a brilliant mix of memoir, music and storytelling exploring inner city life – won a prestigious Peabody Award in 2020. Specially commissioned for Port, the following piece offers 10 reasons why everyone should write, celebrating how the act of articulation brings clarity, closure and coordination of intent, touching something deep within ourselves as well as those around us. GEORGE THE POET WEARS GIORGIO ARMANI SS22 THROUGHOUT
203
ESSAY
Extremely Online with Thorstein Veblen: My Descent into NFTs By Brian Patrick Eha Brian Patrick Eha is a New York-based journalist, fiction writer and author who spent nearly five years following the rise of Bitcoin, leading to his book How Money Got Free. Over the past year, he has been investing in and researching the meteoric rise of non-fungible tokens, examining their impact on our physical and digital realms. Part reportage, part personal essay, the following text charts the feverish highs and lows of buying the riskiest, most volatile asset class in the world
Cartoon faces with animal eyes stared back at me: bear noses, bared fangs, skin in unreal shades of green and red, some wearing masks or goggles, others flanked by flies or carrying spears. This was the new frontier of art and identity; these were the faces of my peers and compatriots, a motley crew of collectors, flippers, influencers, opportunists and superfans. It was December 2021 and I was browsing the online marketplace Objkt.com, looking at Ziggurats, the new non-fungible token collection from Linkin Park frontman Mike Shinoda. I had sorted the collection by price and was scanning the first page of results – a small cross-section of a horde 5,000 strong. Designed for mass appeal with an edge of transgression, like the music for which their platinum-selling creator is famous, the Ziggurats were JPEGs, digital avatars, each one a tokenised and tradeable asset backed by the Tezos blockchain. The common ones were going for a couple of hundred dollars apiece, the rarest for thousands. The collection had sold out in just half an hour, earlier that day, and was on its way to racking up, in the first 24 hours, more than $500,000 in sales on the secondary market. I’d managed to grab six Ziggurats in the initial drop. Almost immediately I resold three of them, covering the costs of all six and making an instant $120 profit. In the three months I had spent living and breathing NFTs, it was a rare easy win.
bers’ clubs. The latter aspect was occasionally explicit in the name, as with Bored Ape Yacht Club – a collection of 10,000 cartoon apes, launched in April 2021, which now sell for over $300,000 apiece. Among collectors and creators alike, the universal motto was WAGMI: we’re all gonna make it.
A “non-fungible token”, if you don’t know – and millions of people do know, today, who didn’t know a year ago – is a digital item that is provably unique and the ownership of which can be verified on a public blockchain. The acronym, NFT, has come to stand for a whole fertile realm of cutting-edge creative expression, shysterism, and speculative finance. Or, as Bloomberg Businessweek put it, “a bottomless rabbit hole of innovation and intellectual intrigue”.
The optimistic gloss on NFTs is that they represent a paradigm shift for the art world on at least three fronts: First, by undergirding digital art with permissionless, open-source software and offering it to a global marketplace, they democratise art collecting; second, by allowing artists to bake a royalty percentage into each piece they sell, NFTs enrich artists with passive income from secondary sales, obviating the need for Patreon; third, and most crucially, NFTs represent real and verifiable ownership of unique assets online.
I bought my first NFTs in February 2021 but didn’t really dive in until August, at the tail end of a bull market. Lured by stories of overnight fortunes, and with years of crypto knowledge to draw on – I had published a narrative history of Bitcoin in 2017 – I was nonetheless unprepared for the heady brew of art and optimism I found. Independent artists who might otherwise have been siloed or silenced in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey and Cuba had found a global market for their work. Large NFT collections boasted roadmaps, community managers, business partnerships and marketing – ostensibly art projects, they operated like a cross between technology startups and private mem-
220
COMMENTARY
Among those riches, in my first weeks, I was Augustus Gloop in Wonka’s factory, grabbing fat handfuls of whatever looked delectable. NFTs give you permission to be a kid again – an appeal so seductive that within three months, having created a new, pseudonymous Twitter account to take part in it all, I had gained 1,000 followers, joined the board of curators for an organization which invests in NFTs and brainstormed a major piece of the roadmap for one of the hottest projects of the day. In a small way, I had become a tastemaker. No one was more surprised than me. I had also made – and lost – tens of thousands of dollars. My life had become an endless round of Discord channels and drop announcements; the chronic stress of keeping up with it all was eating me alive. My wife struggled to understand my new obsession. I had raided my savings and destroyed my peace of mind, and for what? For JPEGs?
*
Ecoutez. Whereas dollars, pounds and cryptocurrencies are fungible – one pound note is as good as any other – art isn’t: Only ‘Starry Night’ by Vincent van Gogh is ‘Starry Night’, and god help the curator who tries to swap it out for another painted canvas. By marrying art images to digital tokens – binding them together on a blockchain which tracks their provenance – NFTs make it possible for art to be both digital (thus nonphysical, easily shareable and transportable, with near-zero storage or maintenance costs) and rare.
ARTWORK ELEANOR TAYLOR
221
THIS MUST BE THE PLACE
Photography Lars Brønseth
234
DIOR
Styling Mitchell Belk FENDI
235
252
ZEGNA
DUNHILL
253
THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY
Photography Joe Lai
276
BORSALINO X AMI
Styling Lune Kuipers
Set design Jade Boyeldieu d'Auvigny LOUIS VUITTON
277
310
Shirt NANUSHKA Shorts VALENTINO Boots LOEWE
GUCCI
311