Category: Profiles

Muhallebici — pudding shops named after an Ottoman speciality of shredded chicken thickened with rice water, sprinkled in sugar and rose water — serve profiteroles, baklava, sütlaç (rice pudding, with a burnt top), and kaymak (a rolled, sour, clotted cream) throughout Istanbul. They are traditionally made with buffalo milk, which has a consistency more akin to cream than cow’s milk, making for full flavour, rich puddings. The use of buffalo milk in Turkey has declined due to the complexity and cost of keeping water buffalo, as their habitat is compromised by urban development. As part of their research for Climavore: Seasons Made to Drift — an exhibition and public programme that considered how to eat as humans change the climate, shown at Istanbul art institution SALT — spatial practitioners Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe) looked into the disappearance of the wetlands in the north of Istanbul, which had been home to water buffalo since they migrated with Bulgarian herders during the Ottoman period. “We wondered: What could be an interesting move to protect the wetlands as free roaming space for buffalo? And for the herders, who have been taking care of them for centuries.”

The wetlands were formed among the ruins of abandoned coal mines, in flooded pits that became wallows for water buffalo to rest while roaming the landscape. Now the land has been reclassified for real estate, and the wetlands drained. “There has been a cultural shift in the perception and understanding of how traditional dishes like sütlaç or kaymak are made, and how they need the free roaming of buffalo for the production of milk, and for the ecosystem to function.” Cooking Sections met with buffalo herders, and dug a new wallow along a stream, turning the extracted clay into pots for sütlaç and yoghurt. They collaborated with muhallebici, serving buffalo milk dishes (in some cases from the 1,000 pots made with ceramicist Başak Gökalsın), introduced buffalo milk to the curriculum at the Culinary Arts Academy, and produced a new edition of mapping project Between Two Seas, charting the network of buffalo wallows. “We were looking into different, or new possible seasons that are emerging in the anthropocene,” says Cooking Sections. “Over the last few years, we have been working on what it would mean if instead of the four seasons in Europe, we identified new seasons in action; periods of drought, periods of flash floods, or alterations to the sea shore, which are non-sequential yet repetitive and underpin contemporary food infrastructure and eating habits.”

For this year’s Istanbul Biennial, Cooking Sections elaborated on their research in Wallowland, a project that seeks to preserve the wetlands, and highlight the cultural and ecological role of water buffalo. “It manifested in two ways, as a series of metabolic surveys, for which we commissioned experts to help us understand the digestive or metabolic relationships between buffalo, and other ecologies — the birds interacting with buffalo on the wetlands, the struggles and dependencies within the context of draught, the grasses, and songs about buffalo written in Turkish, Kurdish, and Bulgarian. These studies will manifest as an installation in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district, and as a manda festivali (buffalo festival) — the first edition of what will be an annual event — which took place in the outskirts of the city, celebrating these interactions.” Visitors enjoyed performances, cooking demonstrations, research presentations, and an ‘open house’ led by the herders, “almost like a field work day”.

Cooking Sections are known for their ability to communicate the complex narratives and systems that organise the world through familiar settings involving food. Their first collaboration, with Forensic Architecture, Modelling Kivalina, The Coming Storm, took place above the Arctic Circle on the northwest coast of Alaska and sought to support the people of Kivalina, an Iñupiaq village on the frontier of the climate emergency. “Their food practices organised a lot of the yearly cycles. As the climate changes, [it postpones the formation of sea ice, and exposes the shore to storms], changes the terrain, and impacts the seasons.” Cooking Sections interviewed village residents, scientists, and political representatives, making a film and a series of models, seeking to produce a new negotiation platform supporting residents in their fight for oil and gas companies to contribute to their forced relocation costs, as the area became inhabitable. “Food becomes a lens that allows you to chart these places in transformation” says Cooking Sections. “It is also a practice that touches every living being of this planet. Food cuts across so many constructed strata of society, and between species. It becomes very effective.”

As their practice progresses, Cooking Sections have maintained their interest in the overlaps between art, architecture, ecology and geopolitics. This focus has formalised in their ongoing, site-responsive project CLIMAVORE, which has manifested as an exhibition in Istanbul; an installation and performance — of a dining table at low tide, and an oyster table at high tide — exploring the environmental impact of aquaculture on the intertidal zone at Bayfield on the Isle of Skye; a series of dishes served at museum restaurants across the UK, made with ingredients that improve soil and water quality, and cultivate marine habitats; a series of interventions and performances delving into a holistic health model for the human body, the body of the mussels, and the body of the city of Los Angeles; and a salmon trilogy, exploring the gap between the appearance and the reality of salmon, and their inability to escape intensive farming.

Multi-year investigations have proved integral to Cooking Sections’ intention of practicing ecology, rather than discussing it for one project. “We have been on a big journey in the cultural sector, and there is a certain expectation to respond to the climate crisis. Raising awareness is important, but for us the growing question has been, ‘what does it mean to practice ecology?’ Not only for the duration of an exhibition, a biennial, or other inherited formats, which are in many ways counterintuitive to and ill-equipped for addressing these questions”, they note. “We are focused on how we can use the infrastructure available for us to develop ecological projects in a rooted way. That requires us to continue asking the same question, in order to go beyond the level of highlighting harmful or violent practices, and transform them, or develop alternatives to them. It is a process that takes a lot of time.”

While they tackle complex, intersecting issues, across a breadth of contexts and practices, Cooking Sections settle their work in familiar settings — a festival, a dining table, a shop — with a light touch that makes multi-scalar investigations accessible and enjoyable to interact with. “The way we work is we start looking into questions that we find relevant or, at least for us, urgent to address, and from there we start having conversations with people. As questions emerge, we think about how to communicate those messages to other people, or reformat them into a platform”. For Wallowland, alongside the studies and festival, Cooking Sections worked with muhallebici, serving buffalo milk sütlaç and kaymak: “We thought the format of the pudding shop was interesting, because it interacts with the street, and is in peoples imagination”. During their research, Cooking Sections found that only a few of Istanbul’s muhallebici still source buffalo milk from small-scale producers in the local area, and they wanted to convey the importance of local pudding shops supporting the ecology of the wetlands.

There is a long tradition of supportive ecology in Istanbul, with Ottoman bird pavilions — grand mosques and palaces in miniature — built high on the walls across the city; cat houses — made from wood or cardboard boxes — in parks or settled along alleyways; and bostan (communal urban allotments) for growing and sharing food, and maintaining soil for microbes, insects, and birds. Building and maintaining habitats for other species is thought to bring luck; the practice is also grounded in a belief in the importance of treating animals well, as we can’t ask for their forgiveness. The muhallebici support the herders, the water buffalo, the wetlands, the birds
who gather there, the people savouring rice pudding and clotted cream in the afternoon heat, and the stray cats curling themselves around chair legs, purring until a prize spoonful is dolloped onto the floor. Caring for other species, and practicing ecology, is nothing new: “It has been common sense for centuries. It is just within cities that it has been forgotten.”

“I find the term ‘glass artist’ frustrating,” says sculptor Miranda Keyes. “I think the binary nature of describing my work as ‘glass art’ ties in with a real ambivalence about the material. Glass isn’t taken seriously, maybe because it’s so seductive.” Keyes, who works from a beautifully-lit studio in south London, learnt how to sculpt with glass on her own terms, training in bronze at university in Scotland and during a stint working at a foundry in Germany. “I loved working with bronze,” she says, “but the way that you create form means that you have to know what it will look at the end. Everything is set. What I found so exciting when I first started working with glass, and what I still find so exciting, is that it is all in the moment.”

Keyes works with scientific glassblowing, a method that allows her to work alone in her studio, because unlike soft glass, the material isn’t in a molten state. Working with scientific glass, the furnaces don’t need to run at all times, she doesn’t need to be in a shared studio, working with assistants. “It becomes a very private, quiet space”, Keyes says.

Last year, she had her first solo show, Tulips, curated by Jermaine Gallacher at the Ragged School in London, followed by an exhibition in Istanbul, and a group show in London, which marks her second appearance that the Ragged School. The exhibition, þe Sellokest Swyn, is curated by Gallacher, and Keyes is working on a number of pieces including a collaboration with artist Gala Colivet Dennison. “There is something so special about the Ragged School. Lighting glass is a nightmare — it can lose everything, and be completely flattened, but the way the sculptural gypsum walls reflect light is extraordinary.” As the show opens, Keyes discusses the balance of knowledge and mystery, control and serendipity, thoughtfulness and chance encounters that make up her approach to work and life.

Billie Muraben: Working with glass, it seems like there’s a degree to which the material decides for you. You can make decisions in the moment and make gestures that show up in the final form, but you can’t dictate exactly what will happen.

Miranda Keyes: If you have a clear idea of what you want to do, you’re kind of fucked. Whenever I come to the studio with an agenda, it doesn’t work. And if you try to impose too much will on glass, it gets tired on a molecular level, so it’s harder to work with. It’s a really good exercise in patience and knowing when to give up. People who work with glass tend to be obsessive, because it is such a mysterious material. You can delve into it for your entire life and constantly return to making glasses almost as an exercise, it’s like the formal weight-lifting place for glass. I’m never bored. I just find it so extraordinary and so strange. It will probably always remain mysterious to a certain extent, which I think is the essence of love.

BM: The nature of scientific glass means that you can work alone. Is the private nature of it, and potential for spontaneity, what drew you to this way of working?

MK: What I love about the glass that I work with is that you don’t have to plan everything before you start, which you do with soft glass. There is something about working alone, and not having to negotiate with other people, it becomes a very quiet, tender space where I can just concentrate on the form. In a way, as well, it’s a lot sexier. I really like the fact that you don’t have to wear ear protectors or a breathing mask. I hated all that stuff. You get all clammy, and you feel far away from the work. We’ve had really hot summers here when I’ve been working in just a loincloth. You wear wraparound glasses to protect your eyes, and that’s it. You look like you’re on holiday.

BM: The way your work is represented in images is so specific. How and where it is photographed, often in a way that is abstract, with the scale and place hard to read, and a sense of narrative coming through more in atmosphere, is so specific. Do you feel like the methods of display for your work, whether in an exhibition or in a picture, is almost part of the work?

MK: To me, photography is the completion of the work. I get locked in on that particular part of it: photographing the work in a very non-contextual, scaleless way, where it just becomes a formal exploration with lots of depth. Then I go back and start again. It’s an endless cycle. And I’ve always found print so interesting. I collect postcards, and print off hundreds of pictures that I reference to inform my work, which I keep in stacks. It’s all photographs I have taken on my phone, like cropped images of other people’s work, interiors, and objects. I sift through them and pair them up so there are these moments of cohesion.

BM: How does that process inform your work?

MK: Dowsing myself in these stacks of images is quite calming for me. I can feel weary searching things out online, and not in a fetishistic way, but I also like that it is an analogue process. Some of these pictures I have had for years, and I’m always surprised by them, finding new details or new meanings. Or even just a glaringly obvious detail I never saw before.

BM: They give you what you need at different times.

MK: Exactly. The pictures are quite fluid in that respect. I’ve got all my books here, too, and box files filled with clippings. I’m lucky to have been in this studio for a long time, so I can pull things off the shelves and they jolt me a little bit.

BM: I feel like there’s an expectation that if you work with glass, all of your references should be glass, too. It’s rarely true.

MK: I know. That is the whole problem of being put in a big glass basket — that’s not where I want to be. If anything, painters avoid painting shows. The way I see it, we all have our methods of processing and expressing what we want to communicate with the world. What the material is is almost arbitrary. That’s why I really balk at being called a glass artist. It’s just the method I use to do the thing that I couldn’t live without. In the end, it’s a very human thing, I think, to filter information into whatever form and for that to push you into a new place. I think you’re incredibly lucky if you’re able to harness that in your life, because it’s what makes life interesting. It’s what makes life bearable in many ways, because it’s an autonomous space that is mysterious and driven by instinct. It’s these things that we can’t pinpoint that make life worthwhile.

BM: You can feel when someone is making work in a particular way because of a drive to express something, and when it is a self-conscious or cynical choice. The form is somehow both meant to be, and yeah, almost arbitrary… When do you know a piece is finished?

MK: The moment when I look at it and it looks beyond me, and it doesn’t look “of”me. I don’t like to think about it too much, because it’s so mysterious and charged, but there is an alchemy to it. There is something else at play. It’s not a vain thing, you’re constantly trying to get in touch with this feeling, which in the end is to create works that are beyond you. That’s the exercise. When you’re doing something you love, and 10 or 12 hours pass without you realizing — that’s an extraordinary thing to achieve. You become so engaged that all of the normal stuff — getting hungry or tired — disappears. We spend so much time locked in cycles, so getting out of them is really liberating.

BM: It’s like a vanishing point thing, of seeking that feeling, which makes the process so captivating. How do you think being self-taught, and wanting to learn through the process of making, impacts your work?

MK: I had no desire to be a person who worked with glass, going through expensive training and having to buy all these tools — I would have felt so much pressure that first time I sat down to try to make something. Feeling your way through is so important. You can’t bludgeon the best parts of life with a formula.
That’s why friendship, and all forms of love, are so important, because you really understand how to feel your way through things. It’s about looking after this internal equilibrium, which will point you in the right direction. You can let go of the tyranny of trying to fix everything. The way I see it, it’s a very good way to spend time.

BM: There’s a pressure, and arrogance, inherent to knowing exactly how something is supposed to be done. But on the flip side, there is an entirely different pressure when you veer away from that approach and focus more on your instincts and doing things your own way. You’ve said that you seek a sense of control, but you also work in ways that are very instinctive and up to chance. It’s interesting thinking about where we put ourselves in that sense, and the pull between two opposite modes.

MK: I spend so much time organizing this space, because other than that, my life is so unstructured. It’s really good to create a framework in which you can then go to this very wild place. But for me, the idea of living in that place all the time is intolerable. It’s the archetype that we are plagued with, in terms of the great painters and the great whatever. The alcoholic writer, chain-smoking in ancient underwear. When you actually look at what their lives were like, it’s not something I’d ever want for myself.

Being in the studio all the time, and cutting yourself off from that back and forth between pleasure and different forms of chaos – which is such an important dialogue and such an important part of living a full life – is born of a desire for control that spills out into this grandiosity in relation to your vision, and your need to achieve at the cost of everything else. It is just really depressing. You’ve got to live in order to make good work.

“Ornament, function, unlikely colour palettes, impulsive design choices, and juxtapositions of elements from contrasting eras and cultures all come together to create a kind of folk architecture. It’s fresh, and such a contrast to the contemporary design aesthetic we are bombarded with through social media”, says Ekin Ozbicer, of her project @hurriyetemlakblues, an Instagram account where she uploads screenshots from a growing archive of pictures from real estate sales ads.

Ozbicer is a photographer, and regularly took pictures of people in their homes: “I was always interested in the relationship between people and their environment, and the unlikely aesthetic choices they make”. With the pandemic, house visits came to a halt, and the novelty of exploring homes moved online. “I had been browsing real estate sites for fun and fantasy, looking at amazing houses that we could never afford, and places that were plain outrageous in their disregard for all cultural conventions”, Ozbicer says. While scrolling, she came across a place on Istanbul’s Bosphorus coast, in an affluent area populated with villas, palaces, and embassies, which has a painting of Turgut Özal, “a Turkish president from the 1980s, and a still politically controversial figure”. She took a screenshot to share with family and friends, which became the starting point of a sort-of archive of “oddities and peculiarities”. “There are a few main drivers for the archive. It’s based on my personal tastes and interests, and my main motivation for continuing with the project is the possibility of encountering — any given day — the vast potential of people to create aesthetics that have absolutely no place in the continuum of the history of art and design.”

Amber, tortoiseshell and marble -effect plastic, whirring fans, pattern on pattern, gold on gold, lace, velvet, tassels, wood polished up to a high gloss, chairs set up ready to receive. The look is maximalist, diametrically opposed to the sparse “mattress on the floor + one plant” Instagram aesthetic, and all the better for it. Many of the pictures on @hurriyetemlakblues are of communal areas, or rooms that guests are likely to see (the bathroom). They are made up like a scene from a film, dressed to impress, to entertain, and with hosting and generosity in mind. Living rooms have a formality to them that mimics reception rooms in palaces and grand villas, firm chairs and shallow sofas set up in a round for conversation, rather than cushions slouching back towards a TV.

The rooms on display are heavily-populated with furniture, objects, pictures on walls, pictures as walls, clashing colours or fully-committed-to themes, surfaces overlaid with surfaces. Those that lean towards sparse functionality don’t shy away from a throne chair or blousy bouquet, like Marie Antoinette in a high-rise apartment. To say it’s kitsch would be an understatement, it would also be reductive.

Tropical island wallpaper, a dome-effect mural of a growling leopard, or a stiletto chair, aren’t practical choices, but they are choices led by a desire to bring theatre into everyday life, to excite guests, to create a transportive setting. Such elaborate interiors are popular across the socio-economic spectrum (although there is also, obviously, a spectrum of tastes, as there is anywhere else), informed by celebrity homes photographed in magazines, houses on TV, the popular home stores of the time, or what’s available at markets. “It is easy to write these off as ‘kitsch’ or ‘camp’, but they are mostly choices made according to what had been readily available at a particular time, given their circumstances. The colours, lights and ornaments add life and joy to these rooms, and they are cultural artefacts; documenting the availability and abundance of Chinese products, witnessing cultural influences from a popular tv series, or a reflection of a social or political ideology.”

Driving along A-roads on the outskirts of town, you’ll see pile-ups of plastic statues and garden ornaments, bootlegged Louis XIV furniture; markets selling fake flowers, elaborate plastic kitchenware and lace. At my aunt’s apartment in Istanbul, the living room is set up like the set from an 80s drama, all white leather, carved wood, clear plastic and marble-effect. Coffee shows up on a tray, with rose Turkish Delight dusted in sugar and almond biscuits on a paper doily on a gold-trimmed plate, Turkish coffee in a tiny decorated cup, on a saucer. (Like an espresso, but with the opposite intention — it’s not designed to be quick — and with coffee grounds sat at the bottom of the cup, waiting for you to take a sip too far, and to be tipped out for your fortune read.) I’m part of the family, but every guest is met with the same offering of coffee (or chai), a generous theatre of hospitality. It’s a performance, but one rooted in the want to have guests feel celebrated and comfortable, welcomed into the home.

The smaller details, the air conditioning units, electric fans, layers of lace, plastic containers and protective coverings really feel like home. When the living room is “off duty”, or in the rest of the house — the kitchen, the bedrooms — the setting is often more sparse, focused on cleanliness and ventilation, and preserving high-impact furniture. The ‘Scarface-chic’ aesthetic that my aunt adores is dated, it’s also fun and light and envelops you in that one particular setting. The mishmash of references, eras and cultures meet in the kind of “folk architecture” Ozbicer describes, where interiors are informed by tastes, finances, experiences, histories, and traditions, not designed to fit with the ascribed aesthetic of the day. The homes on @hurriyetemlakblues have an emotional pull; of the soap opera, high drama variety, but also one rooted in the vulnerability of expressing your desires through your surroundings, and welcoming people into your home. “The images become truly unique and fascinating when they give these insights about the social and cultural circumstances that create them” Ozbicer says. “They are artefacts that deserve further reflection than an ironic smile.”

Shanzhai Lyric had intended on “tracing the pathway of a shanzhai T-shirt”, with visits to informal markets in South China, and the Museum of Counterfeiting in Paris, but as was the theme of 2020, “all our plans were cancelled”.

Founded by Ming Lin and Alexandra Tarkovsky in 2015, their research practice started in Beijing; where they collected “shanzhai lyrics” found on T-Shirts during their daily visits to a multi-level women’s clothing market. Shanzhai is a Chinese neologism meaning “counterfeit, replica, knock off or rip off”, describing bootleg clothing, phones, perfume, and bags; but shanzhai more precisely translates to ‘mountain hamlet’. “In reference to this enclave on the outskirts of empire, where bandits stockpile goods to redistribute among people living on those margins, or in the mountain stronghold area”, says Shanzhai Lyric.

Describing their research practice as “parasitical and responsive”, Shanzhai Lyric invented the Canal Street Research Association — a “temporary centre of operations” — in direct response to an opportunity to work from an empty retail space. They dug into how aesthetics signal what’s going on in a space, and sought to exist “ambiguously between categories”. They got to know long-time residents, passers by, and street vendors, who would come in to see their archive of poetic garments, various versions of Statue of Liberty crowns, bootleg Mickey M(ice), caricature portraits, postcards, and other collected ephemera; contribute to a photographic timeline of every building on Canal Street — adding personal anecdotes about places they recognised or once were — watch performances, film screenings or attend lessons. People would come back several times a day “checking in on us, or to drop off ephemera. Anybody who was intrigued really became a close collaborator”.

Adopting the space had been proposed to them by curators Constanza Valenzuela and Jack Radley, who had been offered it as Canal Street emptied out during the pandemic. Despite its central location, Canal Street, and particularly the strip west of the intersection with Broadway, had long resisted the kind of “upscaling” that property owners, and city bureaucrats, sought. Since an operation against counterfeit merchandise in 2008 — when Mayor Bloomberg shifted the financial liability of illicit trade onto landlords — the practice of shops operating as souvenir shops in the front, and warehousing for counterfeit goods in the back, had largely been eliminated. Spaces stood empty until the potential of ‘art as advertisement’ entered the mix, as a spatial placeholder and deliberate strategy that both allows landlords to appear generous — as if they are contributing to the arts — and in most cases, add value to their properties. ‘Artwashing’ rinsing off as gentrification. The landlords, United American Land, had been operating a pop-up model — alongside other property owners on the street — with creative agency Wallplay, which closed in early 2020, leaving many spaces unoccupied, open to interpretation, and ripe for spatial ‘subversion’. “The project has always been like an open research question of how it might be possible to take resources that are available, and redistribute them, while also attempting to subvert the very circumstances that made it possible for us to access those resources” says Shanzhai Lyric. But the CSRA ultimately became a “depressing, but also interesting” dialogue with their landlord, which concluded in them being kicked out. “[They] became the arbiter of aesthetics and art. Our aesthetics didn’t fit the scheme he’d imagined, which was a validating process for his property.”

While working from their storefront, Shanzhai Lyric continued their research into the etymology of the poetic phrasing of shanzhai garments, and found that they could chart “the evolution and disappearance of experimental English, as proportional to the homogenisation of cities”, an observation distilled by their space on Canal Street. “We both grew up nearby, and feel very connected to the block” Shanzhai Lyric tells me, “It became a chance to reflect more deeply on how the global flows and trade routes we had planned on following around the world, could actually be found on one block of Canal, between Mercer and Greene Street. We think of Canal Street as a hamlet of sorts”.

Like many places around the world, New York was — albeit, temporarily — unrecognisable during the first months of the pandemic. With lockdowns in place, offices emptied out, shops were boarded up, businesses permanently closed, advertisers went quiet; street life shifted from one shaped by consumerism and the privatisation of public space, to one where it was possible to take in the city anew. “Many people who have lived in New York for a long time remarked that during Covid the city felt in some ways more similar to a city they remembered from many years ago. Without business owners around to police and criminalise the act of gathering in front of their spaces, street life became possible again”.

Right across from their shop space was Little Senegal, where street vendors set up shop. “We met Khadim Sene, who’s a vendor, musician and teacher, and we held outdoor lessons with him. Khalifa Thiam, another vendor, who’s trained as a film maker shared hours of footage recorded on Canal Street between 2008-12. He’s captured this former era of [the street], which he considers the best years of his life in the US, because that’s when Obama was president”. After meeting street vendor Leo Liu, a caricaturist, they learnt that portrait art can be pursued without a vendors licence, as it’s covered under freedom of expression laws. “Following that line of the possibility of redistribution, we were interested in how art could be operational. How could we [mimic these strategies] of skirting legal parameters [by citing artistic expression]?”

Adopting shanzhai strategies — and knowing they were about to lose the space — the CSRA became a “store in drag”; ’ripping off’ the aesthetic language of retail — “making something shiny to cover up the real mechanisms of redistribution, and so-called theft, that might be going on”. They enjoyed a final round of adaptive ambiguity, which also functioned as an homage to the history of the neighbourhood: “of artists using retail as an experimental medium to disseminate experimental ideas to the masses”. One of the objects in their shop, as an offering and proposal of how to make use of loopholes and the privileges afforded to art objects, was a counterfeit bag: “which is technically illegal, but in this case was categorised as a ready-made art object, thereby skirting that legal parameter.”

All these interactions, relationships and adaptations happened quite naturally, a consequence of just being in one place for a long time — also a consequence of the pandemic. There was a period of several months on Canal Street that had a sense of freedom and calm, before the city worked out how to monetise outside space through permits, and hide communal life. “There had been a lot less police presence” says Shanzhai Lyric, “until around Christmas when raids started again.” Since then, police presence had increased and permanent surveillance apparatus was installed, making it dangerous to be conducting street trade. “It’s really something to think about, how the threat of genuine class mobility is what needs to be actively destroyed by the state.”

Canal Street has always been in flux, and people adapt, “strategically shape-shifting as a survival mechanism and tactic”. Although the CSRA lost it’s retail space, Shanzhai Lyric has moved up the street to an idle office, where they plan to enter the realm their collaborators operate in, “doing your work on the street, en plein air”. “We’re in the planning phases of thinking through how there could be a street school, a collaborative film crew, or market.”

Reflecting on the past year, and the time and space that opened up as commercial units became available, street life became possible and government financial support provided temporary respite from a system that characteristically lacks a safety net, Shanzhai Lyric considered how “precarity, high rent and financial anxiety make experimentation really difficult in a city”. “It begins to seem very deliberate, right, that people are too exhausted and too anxious to indulge in open exploration that’s really about time, being without a goal, and welcoming whatever happens.”

Design writer and critic Alice Rawsthorn has always counted László Moholy-Nagy as one of her heroes. Her book Design as an Attitude draws its title from Moholy-Nagy’s Vision in Motion, where he argued for the connections between art and life, and how design and the profession of the designer “has to be transformed from the notion of a specialist function into a generally valid attitude of resourcefulness and inventiveness”. An attitude that connects projects with the needs of the community.

This principle carries through Rawsthorn’s work, where she consistently champions design’s potential to address complex social, political and ecological challenges. In 2020, Rawsthorn co-founded the Design Emergency project with curator Paola Antonelli, to investigate and present the design response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The project started with an Instagram account, where Antonelli and Rawsthorn would post projects, and host interviews on ‘Live’, and it is now also a podcast, and a book, Design Emergency: Building a Better Future.

The project soon expanded from its focus on the pandemic to tell stories of how designers are responding to ecological and socio-political emergencies, and how advances in communication and technology are influencing change. Themes that Rawsthorn has previously investigated in Design as an Attitude, in Hello World: Where Design Meets Life, and in her journalistic writing for the Financial Times and The New York Times. Billie Muraben met the writer at her London home, where they spoke about the role of photography and open source intelligence in design, how rigour is essential to improvisation, and the appeal of fetishised, or impossible projects.

Billie Muraben: With Design Emergency, why was it important for you and Paola Antonelli to have an open definition, or interpretation, of what design is and who designers are?

Alice Rawsthorn: Well, I can’t think of any other way of defining design. And Design Emergency really reflects the vision of design that I’ve shared as a writer, and that Paola has shared in her exhibitions, in a world where design means life. The book, Design as an Attitude, was predicated on the notion that affordable, easily accessible, incredibly powerful digital technology was transforming, or had transformed, the practice and possibilities of design. It liberated designers from the restricted roles they played during the industrial age when design was routinely stereotyped as a styling and promotional tool, generally under the instruction of someone else. Designers have been liberated to work independently and to pursue their own social, political, and ecological goals. We developed the idea for Design Emergency initially as a response to the COVID-19 crisis, to investigate the design response to that, which we did at the start of the first COVID lockdown.

BM: Design Emergency has a balance of different forms of rigor in terms of research and practice. Both that of trained, highly skilled designers, and many brilliant examples of improvisation from people working in the moment with available resources, being very responsive to their context, whether that is the COVID-19 pandemic, natural disasters, or socio-political turmoil.

AR: We began by identifying what we saw as the key areas of all of our lives, in the broadest possible sense, that needed positive design interventions. We then identified the people who, we believe, were at the forefront of innovation in those fields and who, crucially, had already delivered practical projects. While they might also engage in a lot of purely experimental or conceptual work, they had to have proven that their approach would work because we wanted to reach a general audience beyond the committed design community.
We drew a list of all the pretty gloomy problems that we face, but also the opportunities, and then identified who was tackling them. One of the joys of design, particularly if you write about it, is A: it’s a ubiquitous force in our lives, so it touches absolutely everything and B: it can be interpreted in so many different ways by different people. Some of the people we interviewed work in what could be seen as a more conventional form of design, but they have all done so in a really exemplary, innovative, original, and iconoclastic way. A wonderful example is Irma Boom, the book designer. Book design is one of the oldest conventional areas of design with centuries of rich and inspiring history. And Irma is so brilliant, she has reinvented it completely.

BM: How does photography come into Design Emergency as a research tool, or otherwise?

AR: All sorts of new photographic technologies have been made available, many of which have enriched and empowered design. Also, many of them are particularly pertinent to terrible emergencies of different types. If you think of the climate emergency and photography’s impact on that in terms of design, until recently, photography, other than in photojournalism, played a relatively restricted role. But that has changed dramatically, partly because the technological changes of satellite images, drones, and advances in geospatial imagery have completely transformed the way that we can visualize the climate emergency. One strategic design project I’m interested in is the Great Green Wall in Africa, which is the epic design endeavor to cultivate vegetation across a five-thousand-mile strip of the southern edge of the Sahara Desert from Senegal to Djibouti. That is very difficult to portray at scale, but the satellite imagery, particularly from the ESA [European Space Agency], has done so brilliantly.

BM: And what about individual photographers?

AR: One example would be the Bangladeshi photographer Asif Salman, who works with Marina Tabassum, the humanitarian architect. Bangladesh is a country at the forefront of reinventing the design of flood defenses by moving away from the gray infrastructure of concrete dams, which we know doesn’t work, to literally letting flooding flow naturally to irrigate the land and, ultimately, cause far less damage. His photography of Marina’s work has not only made people realize how effective that has been, but he humanizes all her projects. Similarly, Iwan Baan—who is a famous architectural photographer and has produced very intelligent, but sort of fetishized images of works by architects including Rem Koolhaas, Herzog and de Meuron, and so on—recently did a body of photographs for the Room for the River project in the Netherlands, which, again, is all about the switch from gray infrastructure to naturalistic flood defenses.

BM: How can photography contribute to investigative design research, and respond to emergency contexts like refugee crises?

AR: There’s been incredible photojournalism in that field, with large-scale satellite images showing the sheer scale of refugee settlements like the Za’atari camp in Jordan and the Cox’s Bazar settlements in Bangladesh, which, I think, have over a million people living there. But also the work of photographers such as Asif Salman, who’s humanized the crisis, and the Italian photographer Matteo de Mayda, who for years has traveled to Africa to refugee settlements but has also done a lot of photography of the support for refugees and migrants in Italy.
If you look at investigative design research, which is a hugely important, rapidly expanding new area of design, photography is absolutely integral. Groups like Formafantasma, the Italian design studio run by Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin, have mounted long-term investigations of complex and contentious areas of our lives that have seldom been explored.

BM: Forensic Architecture, the multidisciplinary research group that investigates state violence and human rights violations, makes use of photography to reconstruct crime scenes, sites of conflict, and other architectural spaces to communicate evidence.

AR: Forensic Architecture has been one of the great design phenomena of recent years, and one of the first people I wanted to interview was Eyal Weizmann. He’s absolutely extraordinary. He says that it’s all down not just to smartphones, but to the first feeble cell phones that could make photographs with just a few kilobytes, which basically empowered citizens to witness instances of abuse and criminality, and to provide evidence that could be used for government policy reviews and legal cases to secure justice for the victims.
And it’s not just photography that has formed part of this, it’s the whole phenomenon of open-source intelligence, everything from CCTV-footage apps such as Find My, satellite imagery, and video clips. All of this is analyzed by Forensic Architecture and the teams of relevant specialists that it assembles to investigate climate crimes, miscarriages of justice, contested killings, and so on.

BM:Open-source intelligence is being made use of and analysed more widely, as a way to prove or contest claims during conflict.

AR: At the New York Times, or even BBC Verify, where journalists share their evidence gathering, there are less complex and sophisticated investigations than Forensic Architecture’s, but there are important ones, particularly at a time of such horrific catastrophes and emergencies as those we have now. You see the impact that open-source intelligence has had on Russia’s war against Ukraine. The number of claims and counterclaims that the Ukrainians were able to verify because they did have CCTV footage of what actually happened, or people had recorded it, or snapped it on their phones has been very moving. It’s been absolutely essential in Gaza from which international journalists were expelled at a very early part of the crisis. Both sides release information that’s immediately contested and contradicted by the other.

BM: Your book Design as an Attitude (2018) explores design as an agent of social, political, and ecological change. The title is drawn from a quote from László Moholy-Nagy’s book Vision in Motion, how has he been important to your thinking?

AR: Moholy-Nagy has always been one of my design heroes. I’ve always found him to be this really thrilling, charismatic, dynamic figure, constantly committed to experimentation and intellectual inquiry, very open and generous. And, also, his first wife, Lucia Moholy, I find her fascinating too. She was, of course, a highly influential photographer. He was responsible for many great feats, not least championing the then-new media of film, and new approaches to photography—and also developing an early cultural critique about them. He saw them having a huge influence over cultural change in years to come, and that was something he worked on with Lucia Moholy very closely. He completely reconceptualized design by identifying a relevant and productive role that liberated it from the constraints of industrial design.

BM: Lucia Moholy’s photographs have influenced how the Bauhaus Dessau has been seen and understood.

AR: She’s a fascinating example of the old-school relationship of design and photography, demonstrating how a photographer who is really passionate about a particular city at a particular time, or a particular movement, or another phenomenon, can produce work that’s so powerful and so compelling that it goes on to dominate—not in a negative sense but in a very positive sense, an enlivening sense—public perceptions of that phenomenon. You could also think of people like Julius Shulman on midcentury Modernist architecture in the Los Angeles area, and Berenice Abbott on Modernism in early twentieth-century New York. Lucia Moholy cataloged the daily life of the Bauhaus. It’s very interesting that in her photography of the buildings and the interiors, they look like impeccably framed stage sets. They are generally devoid of people. They are incredibly seductive. She also pioneered what became the dominant typology for industrial-design photography for the twentieth century because Laszlo Moholy-Nagy really championed the industrialization of product design. They are beautifully composed. They are very fetishized. They are in black and white. There are no shadows. And industrial objects have been photographed in the same fetishistic, generally no-shadows manner ever since.

BM: The work of Alessandro Mendini and Superstudio are similarly characterized by photography. For example, when Mendini designed the Lassù chair and then set fire to it with a photographer capturing the event. And Superstudio’s photo collages of unbuildable buildings and scenes that imagined utopian futures, or poked fun at the status quo. The ideas are kept alive through documentation.

AR: You are absolutely right. Many of Superstudio’s projects were wholly unrealized and became increasingly unrealizable and fantastical, which is very appealing but also very sad.

BM: And then, a completely different but related point is Wolfgang Tillmans’s interest in photographing man-made objects and structures. I went to see him interview Rem Koolhaas a few years ago and Tillmans asked him, “You’ve designed so many buildings, yet still, I’ll go to your public buildings and the queue for the women’s loos is a mile long, and there’s no queue for the men’s loos. Why haven’t you just started designing your buildings with twice the number of loos for women?”

AR: Wow. Full marks to Wolfgang for asking such an incisive question, which doesn’t surprise me at all. There are a number of artists over the years who have interrogated design in a particularly intelligent and imaginative way. Richard Hamilton would be another example, and Wolfgang is undoubtedly among them. One of the things I really love about his work is the way that he investigates the materiality of daily life. He will do extraordinary images of, say, door keys, digital interfaces. He’s very interested in technology. But my favorite of all these projects was a series of photographs he made of car lights, which have been a minor obsession of mine for a really long time. Over the last ten years, there’s been an explosion of technological development in car lighting. As a result, automotive designers have become ever more theatrical, flamboyant, and sophisticated in their treatment of them. It’s a very jugular interpretation of industrial design that I’ve found really interesting—and it certainly enlivened night-time drives around London. So, I was thrilled to discover that Wolfgang is a fellow obsessive.