I can’t quite remember when I first encountered Sameer Farooq’s work. It may have been during the years I was working full-time in a museum. What I do remember is the surprise of seeing his name, years later, on the roster for a movement class I was teaching at Mosaic Yoga on Sterling Road—just a few doors down from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto. I felt shy about striking up a conversation with an artist whose work I so deeply admired. Eventually, though, I gathered the courage to introduce myself as more than his Pilates teacher and asked if he might be open to talking with me about his practice. We met after class one afternoon in early March, settling into Mosaic’s small studio as the season began its slow shift from a frigid winter toward the promise of spring. Farooq is warm and generous, immediately turning the conversation toward my transition from arts worker to movement teacher and acupuncturist. We linger for a while on the more difficult aspects of working in Canada’s arts sector—how rigid and joyless it can sometimes feel. In what now feels like another lifetime, I worked in gallery archives and museum collections: operating in dark, cold and quiet climate-controlled basements where objects rest in carefully monitored stillness. We note, with relief, that today we are sitting in sunlight. Over the years, Farooq has closely observed the museum, often making its structures and habits the subject of his work. For Farooq, the museum is never a neutral container. It is a site where objects are ordered, narratives stabilized, and histories made to cohere—until someone unsettles them. Across sculpture, photography, film, and research-driven installations, he enters institutional spaces to rearrange their logics. What happens when a display is disturbed? What new relationships emerge when objects are allowed to lean on one another differently? Farooq has exhibited widely, including at the Toronto Biennial of Art, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the The British Library. His exhibition The Fairest Order of the World, curated by Mona Filip, is touring across Canada through 2027, stopping at the Dalhousie Art Gallery, the McMaster Museum of Art, the Musée d’art de Joliette, the Varley Art Gallery, Art Windsor-Essex, and the MacKenzie Art Gallery. The exhibition considers the museum’s authoritative voice—its vitrines, taxonomies, and carefully regulated timelines—while gravitating instead toward adjacency, iteration, and fluidity. In our conversation, Farooq reflects on fear and fragility within museum culture, the interplay between intuition and intellect in his creative process, and the generative potential of gaps. We return, again and again, to the possibility that the museum might be something other than a temple of preservation. What might unfold if it were understood instead as a permeable, relational space—resilient enough to withstand a little rustling around? Things need to be able to be easily moved around inside of the museum. Vitrines need to be able to be opened. People need to be able to touch the materials, cry over things. The title of your exhibition “The Fairest Order in the World” comes from a Heraclitus quote. Can you tell me about how you relate to this passage, and how you came to this as an organizing theme for the exhibition? The complete quote is from the pre-Socratic scholar Heraclitus, who is mainly understood in the world through fragments. They’ve discovered these incomplete, esoteric fragments of his writing. Fragments have a way of transmitting knowledge in the world in far more interesting ways than cohesive, calcified narratives or stories. The full quote is “the fairest order in the world is a heap of random sweepings.” And I loved that because I really believe that how histories are formed is that things cohere and break apart again, and cohere and break apart again. They keep forming in different constellations and iterations. This idea of how history is formed in museums is that narratives are set. They're decided and solidified in museum displays, and then they stay like that for 50 years until there's a rehang based on the politics of the moment, and then it sort of changes again. This quote is about unfreezing museum time. Museum time really aims to stop a moment in its tracks and then expand on it through display, and through arrangement, and through conservation. That's why I was really drawn to it. When did your interest in museums and collecting institutions start? When you're separated from your country of origin, you scramble to find remnants or fragments of where you come from. My mom is from India via Uganda, my dad is Pakistani, and all that they managed to keep through processes of migration was this one metal chest. When I was a kid, growing up on Cape Breton Island, I used to go down to the basement and rifle through it, and it was like a little museum in itself. There was a dried six-foot-long snake skin that I think my mom kept from Africa. And then there were these etched tin vases from Pakistan, and some photographs and some papers. I think from a very young age, I was really interested in this combination of materials and what it said about our family, and myself, and where we came from. We couldn't have moved to anywhere more different—this rural Canadian life, this island. It's cut off more than most places. So I think that impulse came from trying to make sense of the world. In my work that's not research-based, you still see that compulsion to organize and arrange, to create meanings by adjacencies, and opposites, and symmetries, and dissonances. Growing up in Cape Breton, what were your early experiences with museums? That's a great question. There wasn't a lot. All arts funding was cut except for music. So there wasn't a lot of money going into museums. I think my interest was solidified a lot later when I moved to Amsterdam for art school. I was in Montreal for my undergrad in anthropology. But I don't think my interest in museums developed until I was in Amsterdam, where I saw these vast collections that were built out of theft. The first museums I started to build were called The Museums of Found Objects (2011) with Dutch artist Mirjam Linschooten, who I still collaborate with. We started building these speculative improvised museums based on neighborhoods. We did one in Istanbul where we told the stories of different neighborhoods through the objects found in them. In the one we did in Cairo, we asked 50 people to suggest 50 items that were looted from the Egyptian Museum during the revolution, and to replace objects that were looted with objects from their homes. We were really interested in personal collections. Collaborating with museums came later, when I had a little bit more of a reputation as an artist, and then I would be invited by museums to decolonize their collections [laughs], whatever that means... To perform in their collections. That came a bit later. Much of the work that you do is about the provenance of objects, their use, their display, but also the ones that aren't on display—the ones that stay in collection spaces, and the collecting or hoarding that happens in these institutions. Often, you are embedded in the museum, in the belly of the institution. Can you talk about some of those experiences? I think these days museums are very interested in having contemporary artists come in and work in their collections. Museum workers are often overwhelmed by the size of their collections. Often the provenance of their collections are not known, and they see relationships with contemporary artists as very collegial—in that here's somebody who we can support to rechoreograph the collection, to play within the collection, to make some discoveries. With older encyclopedic museums, this also builds public, you know? Like, “Oh, this artist is coming in. They're gonna offer a series of workshops.” I've worked with youth in museums. I've worked with visitors, like, in terms of them making donations. I've worked with deaccessioned collections; I had this whole project where this creepy doll collection was being deaccessioned from a museum, and I built a huge doll museum, and then invited all the kids from the community to come and loot the museumand take all the dolls back into their homes. So I think that there's this desire to work with contemporary artists. I’m thinking about a repaired museum, or repair in the museum. If you were to imagine an ideal museum, what would that space look like? And have you come across any examples of things that museums are doing that work towards that ideal? Is there a perfect museum that you've come across in your research and all the work you've done? My favorite museum in the world is the Anahuacalli Museum in Mexico City. Have you been? Yeah. So you know[chuckles]. That's a purpose-built museum by an artist for his own collection. And the materials speak to the materials of what he's collecting. There’s these gorgeous vitrines and combinations of things. And now they're inviting contemporary artists to make very autonomous works in certain spaces in the museum. But that's a bit of a different type of museum than I’m usually studying. The ideal museum I haven't seen. Because I think a lot of museums are overly concerned with security and safety. There's a lot of fear around the collections, a lot of fears around conservation. And I think that impedes the museum to develop a type of fluidity it needs to match the richness of the world around it. You know, if you think about a museum, there's a thick wall that separates it from the outside world. But what I’d love to do is have an exercise of having objects on the outside wall be at a one-to-one relationship to stuff that's inside, so that they speak and rely on each other. I think a lot about the Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hanh's belief of interbeing, which is that everything is really connected as a long chain. Everything is everything else. Everything is relying on each other. A piece of paper relies on trees, trees rely on sunlight and rain. In order to get this piece of paper, there's all of these relationships. And in a similar way, I think a museum has to be cracked open. This idea of relationships and cross-pollination needs to be achieved more. How do we do this? I think display mechanisms need to be more flexible. Things need to be able to be easily moved around inside of the museum. Vitrines need to be able to be opened. People need to be able to touch the materials, cry over things. Sacred belongings that belong to different communities need to be able to be accessed and cried over, held, used in ceremony. There are moves in that direction for sure, but, for the most part, they're still very concerned with arranging things in one line and telling a single story. And then I think if an object is returned through a process of repatriation—or rematriation—I think we should leave those gaps in the museum and see those as incredible opportunities to use them as spaces of contemplation, use them as spaces to really meditate on the human desire to hoard, to collect, to own, to calcify stories. Like, why are we so obsessed with stories? Why can't we allow things to form and reform and shape-shift? There's so many things we can think about in those gaps if we just leave them. Museums are generally gorgeous spaces that are kind of built to look like temples, so why don't we actually use them as temples and actually get into our bodies and encourage people to work somatically in museums? So that's sort of my ideal. I'm sure you've even taught yoga in the museum. [laughs] But I wish we would go a little further and really allow ourselves to question these deeper impulses because the museum is a bit of an old compulsion, and I think we have to really allow the public to think through that in these spaces. So that would be my ideal. I also think large encyclopedic museums have the potential of introducing new relationships that don't exist already. So when I visit the Metropolitan Museum in New York, sometimes I toggle between different rooms that have nothing to do with each other but are next door to each other. For example, the South Asian Buddhist room, like the Gandharan Buddhist room, is next to the Korean ceramic room. And I just love to think, like, what relationships do these series of objects have with each other? Maybe it's formal. Maybe the curve of a bodhisattva's cheek is similar to the curve of a fermentation pot or something. And then, you know, that talks about how our bodies are made, how sculptures work across countries and across disciplines. So to me, there's a lot of value in these large encyclopedic museums and within their collections. I just don't think we're allowed to work in them as fluidly as we need to, and I don't think the public is able to do that. There's so much security and surveillance that you can barely even lean against the wall. Or you're told to, like, stand upright. Sameer Farooq, “The Fairest Order in the World.” Installation view at the McMaster Museum of Art. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Darren Rigo. Sameer Farooq, Ascension (Onions), 2022 (detail). Fired ceramic, mason stain, bricks, steel poles. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Paul Litherland. Sameer Farooq, Ascension (Omphalos), 2021. Fired clay, stepped display. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Darren Rigo. Thinking about your way of making, it sounds like you're toggling between intuition—this inner sense—and intellect—a more outer sense—and moving between these two spaces when you're creating. Does that sound right? It does. For sure. There's always a research component where I lean on theorists to give me the language and a roadmap to how to look at things.So, you know, I think about someone like Édouard Glissant that talks about the joy of crossing one boundary into another, and rather than seeing it as a barrier, to see it as a relation. So that's very much how I walk through museums. But then at the same time, you're right, I really like to counterbalance. I put the theory aside, I put the reading aside. My partner's an academic, so we often get in these big conversations about these issues. And then I put it aside, and I really try to allow the spaces and the materials to speak to me as well. So what's always been important to me is, like, a process of evocation, and I think you sort of have to sit around in silence for a while to allow things to appear. I'm really excited that something always appears—whether it's an image, an object, a text. And then that usually will be the starting point of the actual physical work that I'm building. Speaking of the idea of uncovering, can you talk about some of the texts that show up in the work, and about that intentional veiling that you're doing? Those texts are a collaboration with the poet Jared Stanley, who is a Bay Area poet, who currently lives in Reno, Nevada. I work with him a lot because we figure a lot out together. I was making these meditation prints where for three years, I sat, and did different somatic practices. Actually, at this period, somatic practitioner and Executive Director of the South Asian Visual Arts Centre, Indu Vashist and I were talking a lot about this stuff. I realized that repetitive movement was evoking a lot of images from my internal eye—my third eye or whatever. I was coming up with these prints that were mirroring what I was seeing after periods of movement, and then I told him, "Rather than having museum labels about these prints, I want you to take all the liberties possible to interpret what you're seeing." So he then also went into a guided meditation with these prints as anchors. What you're seeing in these prints is that one phrase appears really strongly in one, and then it's faded in the other. The idea is that all of these texts are like a cyclical poem that is appearing and getting duller in different pieces of paper. It’s operating in this way where no narrative is calcified, the poem is also appearing and then going underwater. Moving away from the work in the touring exhibition, I also wanted to talk to you about Flatbread Library (2024)which was exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art during the 2024 Toronto Biennial of Art. What first drew you to explore flatbread as a subject and material? I went to Pakistan in 2019 with my dad, after 22 years, and traveled around the whole country. What really stuck with me was the tandoor ovens and how they were these central community hubs. We would bring dough to the tandoor and have it cooked every evening with my family. I just became obsessed. And then my dad, I realized, is also obsessed with bread. He had a lot of stories around flatbreads. He said this beautiful thing: that growing up, the flatbreads were like newspapers. That the baker would bake them, and then he would deliver all the news and gossip of the town by delivering the bread door to door. Mmmm… Wow. So there was all of this lore around bread. We come from a family of traders—we used to trade kitchen utensils along the Silk Road. Baking bread ahead of the journey was always a huge part of it. I didn't quite know how poignant the project would be when I set out to do it. I started building these tandoor ovens in different spaces. One was at the Scarborough Museum. One was at an art collective called Materia Abierta in Mexico City. I started making tandoors and baking bread. Then I began to be really interested with the forms of bread themselves. When the Toronto Biennial asked me to come up with a new work, I suggested a flatbread library for Toronto because it was almost like the next logical step—going a bit deeper into all the breads that are made in vertical ovens. I wasn't prepared for how rich the actual project would become in this city. Within 20 kilometers of the museum that it was shown in, I discovered almost every type of flatbread that is produced in the world—within this pretty small amount of space in Toronto. That's really how it started. It was a move from tandoor to the bread itself. I learned a lot from that project. So, in contrast to these very intense cultural critiques of museums, this project felt more universal and more joyous. People really wanted to open up and talk about it more. That was a real discovery—I was talking about the same ideas in museums but it was a gentler entry point. Can you talk about how you worked with flatbread—an organic, perishable material—to create this display? You bring up a great point about perishability—it's supposed to challenge what gets left out of museums. If we think about what gets left out of these collections—anything that's live, anything that's perishable, anything that's gestural, is not represented in museums. But they're such huge parts of our human history. So, that's a real gap, like, how are you gonna understand human culture if you don't have any bread in your collection? You know what I mean? It's pretty simple, you know? Or, like, if you don't have apples or onions. You know? I did a whole piece about onions and I'm like, "This is the beginning of every evening in every kitchen in the world." Wow. Yeah, you chop an onion. You chop an onion. So that was a real push to think about—how do we sort of make a taxonomy of bread? The process involved flattening and drying the bread under drywall sheets—an old tile making technique. The water gets pulled out of the bread, and then they stay flat. And then I coated them with shellac and flexi paint, which was this acrylic medium to preserve them. The display is meant to look almost like a textile piece, like a woven archive. I didn't want to put individual specimens separate from each other on a wall, for example, because bread is a very fugitive object. It crosses borders and boundaries in a very, very fluid way. So you have lavash from Iran and lavash from Armenia, and when it crosses the border, it's still called lavash, but it, like, shapeshifts slightly. Or you have scorvegi from Romania and Indigenous fry bread. It shows up in these different areas, but it's the exact same looking bread, you know, just with a different name. I knew I had to come up with a display that was not just a typical scientific display. So that's why it kinda looks like this huge hanging curtain of overlapping breads. Also in Pakistan and Afghanistan, bread in bakeries are displayed around the doorways of bakeries as these overlapping curtains of bread that are put on nails, and then the baker will just pull one off and sell it to you. So it also spoke to this historical example. But I like to think that that was how bread wanted to be shown, and then I just mimicked that in the display. I like the idea of it being like a tapestry. I’m thinking about your work Bring It Up From the Dark (2025) which was shown at The Gibson Art Museum at Simon Fraser University (SFU)–it is also a piece that integrates weaving. Did one project inspire or lead into the next? Oh, for sure. People saw the Flatbread Library and they said, "Wow, this looks like a big loom." And I was like, "Oh, a loom." A woven archive, as opposed to a taxonomical archive. Pushing relations between things, dissipating the edges and the boundaries between things in order to create interrelationships. Again, interbeing. So at SFU, my whole idea was to translate an archeology museum into a loom. What would that look like? Imagine all these objects migrating out of their very distinct cabinets and then going onto a loom and, like, what would that look like? If you put those two pieces beside each other, they are very similar. They're these large wooden structures with this almost-textile hanging from them. They both originate from this idea of encouraging relationships between things that have been kept apart for their entire lives, or for a large part of their lives. Sameer Farooq, Flatbread Library, 2024 (detail). Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Toni Hafkensheid. Sameer Farooq and Jared Stanley, Bring It Up from the Dark, 2025. Wood, polyester silk screen mesh, ink, paper, linen, sample bags, polyethylene foam, polyurethane foam, glassine, ace-tate, polyester batting, Tyvek soft wrap, bubble wrap, polyethylene plastic, cotton twine, packing tape. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Rachel Topham. In Bring It Up From the Dark, you have these objects that come together in assemblies on this loom. Can you talk about the objects, textures and forms in the installation? Are there particular dialogues or contrasts you wanted to foreground? The loom is divided into three sections. So the bottom part is a sort of collaged tapestry where I transfer images from the collection of the museum, and you have things finding each other in a formal way. Things nestling into each other and forming these different constellations of objects that do not appear in the museum. The second part is concerned with conservation and the materials of the museum. I've been really interested in this since 2012 around the lives of conservators, the materials they use, and really foregrounding the materials as a subject in the museum itself. I think often conservation culture hides. They try to be invisible and put the object up front. But I also want to show that that's part of the practice of the theater of the museum. They very much are part of that. So you see in the middle part this constellation of materials that come together, and the pattern it's making are these sedimentary layers that I found in these archaeology journals that were also in the museum. Students would go out on these big digs, and then they would draw these sedimentary layers of what they were finding on their digs. And so I did the same with the materials of the conservators. And then the final section is these screenprinted pages that run the materials from the conservators through a press to make an imprint. When a weaver is starting to make their work, they have this guide that they call a cartoon. The cartoon is like the layout of the tapestry. And they have it printed on sheets of paper, and then they hold it within the strings of the warp, within the strings of the loom. I thought that was a really nice display method. The top is like the guide for the rest of the loom. You know what, I'm curious when you saw it, what were your initial impressions? Just because I don't know really many people who saw that work. I thought it was beautiful in the space that they put it in. Because it's showing objects that are from a collection space. I've worked in collection spaces. They're in the deep, dark basement. Yep. [laughs] With the HVAC system, the proper lux of lighting, and not too many humans breathing carbon dioxide around the space. To “protect” the objects. And then to see—I mean, it wasn't the actual objects—but representations of those objects in this space that is so light-filled, and with life—with people. You could see the trees outside through the strings of installations. And the sky. And then to bring you back to the collection space, you have the contrast of seeing those purple polyethylene gloves of the conservator. The hands touching and prodding and poking, and hovering, and guarding the objects. I thought it was really, really poignant. I was really happy with it too. I hope it gets shown in other places because, yeah, I don't have such a huge community in Vancouver. I would love to show it here or somewhere else one day. You reminded me what I was thinking about that piece. I made it in collaboration with Jared Stanley, the poet, and a lot of our discussions were around using the action of the loom to also unfreeze museum time. So to sort of stir up how things are held in collections and encourage them to be in new relationships with each other. There was his poem accompanying the loom, and it took a Malay form of the pantoum poem, which is this poem that repeats itself every few lines. So the poem itself is like a weaving—you have different lines repeating and weaving back and forth to each other. The poem was built from statements in the journals from the students. We started pulling language out from the journals and the notebooks, and what we discovered was a very dark, very sad, very morose account of stirring up the earth. These students would go on these digs, and there would be a lot of expectation, a lot of, like, sadness about the lack of finding things. They were encouraged to write down everything, so a lot of, like, crushes and failed romances and fights between mentors and students. It was just really, really... It was, like, the most unscientific thing, you know? But then it's presented as archaeology, as a science. It was really, really bizarre. If you read the poem, there's just a realization of impending death and that the actions that they're doing are quite futile in a way. [laughs] And it really came out in these journals and in his poem. Did you say you studied archaeology? Anthropology. But I took an archaeology class before. Ah, ok. I was wondering if there was any connection to seeing those student journals and if that brought up anything for you. Yeah, I only just took a lecture class on it. I never participated in any digs. Maybe I should ask to go? I don't know. It would be really funny. [laughs] Have you ever done anything like that? No. I studied photographic preservation. So I was in the darkroom or, like, collection spaces. You just love these cavernous spaces. [laughs] Oh God. [laughs] Ok, I have just a couple more questions. Can we talk about the ceramics that you make? It seems like you like to work with repetition or iteration in your ceramic works. With the ceramic works in the touring exhibition,The Fairest Order in the World, there are three pieces that are these monolithic, iterative ceramic works. Each sculpture was an image that appeared during a meditation. So the first piece, which is called, Ascension (Omphalos) (2021), I envisioned this piece that had a flat bottom that was pointing upward. Which is similar to the cornerstone or what they call an omphalos in ancient Greece, where a village would start from the beginning of this stone. Because it's pointing upward, it's meant to symbolize the earth connecting to the heavens. I saw that in a meditation, and what I'm trying to do is, through repetition, get to know what this thing is and to really figure it out and to see how it transforms over time. With the second piece called Ascension (Radio) (2021), the meditative vision was of an egg cracking and splattering and then going up along the side and turning into an egg again.So it was almost this egg cracking on a loop. I tried to do that in ceramics, and that was more trying to perfect it and do it over and over and over again and try to get this egg form, and I really failed. It doesn't look anything like that. [laughs] And there’s Ascension (Onions) (2022). I meditated and envisioned this unfurling onion. In a lot of these interior images, things are moving and repeating all the time. I'm just not envisioning a static image. So in one way, the iteration is about figuring out something, but in another way, I really see all these works as a representation of my body over time. You can see my breath in all of the work. You can see my body, like how my arm is attached to my shoulder and how my body is working in time. You see a documentary of the ceramic studio I'm working in—what glazes were available. I was using what was around me. I think these pieces are really about bracketing time, and then showing a process that's going through time. My mother’s grandmother, my great-grandma—who I'm named after—was a ceramicist. We have some pieces at my parents' home. She coil built her work—which is a handbuilding technique—and you can see where she put her fingers or thumb in some of the pieces. And I can slip my thumb into the spot where she slipped her thumb, and it just feels like I'm connected to her. Oh, completely. I love this quote by the Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco who said, "What does my body want to make?" And I think clay gives you the chance to make an imprint of your whole body and what it wants to make. I think dough is like that, too. Why I think bread making is so interesting is because it is bread, but it's also your embodied knowledge imprinting onto this medium. And there's something about clay and bread that are so malleable and shapeshifty. That is really, really interesting. Where was your great-grandmother a ceramicist? Here or— In Britain. Yeah. She was never a big artist or anything like that. She was a crafter, you know? And, she taught pottery to kids with disabilities, like how to work with clay. It’s a special medium, because it's evocative and simple, and something we all have access to. Oh, that's the best. How amazing. Yeah. I have one last question. I was thinking about the film that you made in collaboration with Mirjam Linschooten called The Museum Visits a Therapist (2021). In the film, the museum is being asked these questions by the therapist and is able to respond. And so, you’re thinking about the museum as a sentient being. So, if the museum became this sentient being and you were able to ask it a question—what question would you ask the museum? [pauses] What keeps coming up is, like, are you afraid? I don't know. Like, are you afraid of losing your objects or are you afraid of ... There's just a lot of fear and surveillance. There's a lot of actions that are provoked by fear in the museum, because once you steal something, you work very hard to manufacture a story that isn't about that, and you work very hard to preserve what you stole. So yeah. Yeah, I would just ask if it's afraid, I guess. Not afraid of me—but just afraid in general. But, also, maybe—Are you afraid of me? Are you afraid of me coming in and rustling around? [laughs] The above conversation was conducted by Lodoe Laura, an artist, writer, and movement instructor based in Toronto. Editorial support by Hannah Bullock.Cover image: Sameer Farooq, Flatbread Library, 2024. Installation view at the Museum of Contemporary Art as part of the Toronto Biennial of Art, 2024. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Toni Hafkensheid

Prior to reading Andrew Durbin’s The Wonderful World That Almost Was, 2026 (published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on April 14), I had frankly a very brief and limited grasp of Peter Hujar's and Paul Thek's lives and work. The art gallery I used to work for in 2022 curated an online presentation from a selection of Paul Thek’s etchings, reprinted from copper plates originally discovered in his storage unit in 1989, the year after his death. Among a few that the website presented were depictions of “Plums,” “Bouncing Earth,” “Burning Book,” and “Tarbaby.” In my role at the gallery, I had the privilege of encountering Paul Thek’s work in real life for the first time. Artists Paul Thek and Peter Hujar were deeply captivated by rendering the evanescent beauty of the world as well as its atomization. The Wonderful World That Almost Was (2026) is its cinematic testimony, a never-before-told story of two intimately entangled artists who redefined queer art, written by Durbin. Resurrected and rendered as flash and bone, I was captivated by Durbin’s extensive account, navigating art criticism and personal narratives of the two most relevant American artists of their time. Like a cultural archeologist, Durbin sifts through the private notebooks and diaries and chats with artists’ peers to reveal one of the gay love stories of the 60s and 70s. In his deeply researched portraits of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, Durbin is not out to expose but to understand both artists, and who and what shaped their unapologetic, truly visceral rendition of the world transpiring into their art. Durbin walks alongside them on their trips. Composed of five consecutive parts and thirty chapters, the biography forms the collective memoiristic testimony and includes a multitude of voices—including Susan Sontag, Ann Wilson, Andy Warhol, Fran Lebowitz, John Waters, and David Wojnarowicz—that orbited around Peter and Paul. As one reads, one asks: Where was their frontier? What lands and shores have they grown close to? Who were their friends and lovers? What legacy have they left behind? Born in Orlando and raised in South California, Durbin, the editor in chief of Frieze magazine, is the author of two novels: MacArthur Park (Nightboat Books, 2017), a finalist for the Believer Book Award, and Skyland (Nightboat Books, 2020). He also edited Fascination (Semiotext(e), 2018), Kevin Killian’s collected memoirs of gay life in 1970s Long Island by one of the leading proponents of the New Narrative movement. His writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, The Believer, The Paris Review online, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He lives and works in London. Durbin, just a few days before the official release of the biography, told me about the process of his research, writing the biography and how he fell in love with many incredible people whom he interviewed. I asked him about the young generation of queer artists being aware of the legacy Hujar and Thek left behind. A biography can only capture so much of real life, there are so many unknowns, so much that escaped the record. I loved the challenge of assembling a true story from all these disparate parts, the letters, the diaries, the memories of friends. Your readers know you for your previously published fiction—Skyland (2020) and MacArthur Park (2017). Both novels embed the recurring topics of gay male figures asking what it means to belong to a place. Your new book is a biography. What was it like to dive into writing non-fiction this time? It was a completely new process for me. I’ve never had to research at this scale, and unlike with a novel, I could no longer just play around and invent, I had to tell the story of these real lives; if I had a question, I had to find an answer. That said, biography, nonfiction—they’re about narrative choice and emphasis. A biography can only capture so much of real life, there are so many unknowns, so much that escaped the record. I loved the challenge of assembling a true story from all these disparate parts, the letters, the diaries, the memories of friends. It was much more creative than I realized. In The Wonderful World That Almost Was, you excavate and “reincarnate” the lives and work of Paul Thek and Peter Hujar, as well as their friends, lovers, companions, and places that have been crucial to their artistic lives and existences through new extensive lenses. I’m curious—as the editor-in-chief of Frieze, you wrote and oversaw many cultural topics. What was the pull behind devoting your research and time to writing The Wonderful World That Almost Was? When did you decide to write the biography? And how have you approached its research, information collection, and the writing process? Before I wrote this book, their work always raised more questions than answers. I was fascinated by them, but I knew very little about how and why they made what they made, and who they were. As a writer, I’m always drawn to those lingering questions. Once I decided to write about them, I called people who knew them—Vince Aletti, Stephen Koch, a few others. I slowly began to build a picture of their lives through the people who knew them. Eventually, I entered the archives. Every conversation, every document suggested more lines of inquiry. I followed as much as I could in the time I had. It was so much fun. One of the hardest things to do in the book was to stop researching. The title of the biography, The Wonderful World That Almost Was, carries a tender and ephemeral promise. A twinkling of the daylight and the apprehension of fading—its inevitability, if one can be “Didionesque” here. Nevertheless, the title is a testament to one of Paul Thek’s notebooks, a kind of novel he was writing at the time (starting from 1977). This writing is addressed predominantly to Susan Sontag. How did you decide on the title? About half-way through the process of researching and writing the book, the title seemed inevitable to me. Thek’s notebook is a proposed autofiction/treatise, only partly completed, in which he planned to write a kind of personal history of some of the most important relationships in his life up to that point. If I squinted, he was basically describing my book. And Thek’s title was so perfect; it encapsulates the mood I was aiming for. I was particularly drawn to the parts about Paul’s and Peter’s fascination with relics/reliquaries in the catacombs of Palermo. You write: “They were obsessed with death, and if they can be said to have shared a subject, it was almost certainly death. They looked for signs of mortality everywhere in the world of the living. Peter photographed corpses in the catacombs, and the catacombs inspired Paul’s wax flesh,” [artworks]. Although they were certainly magnetized and drawn to the underworld, their work informs us about the living and the way to live on one’s own terms, unapologetically, artistically, and sexually. As you say, “Both artists, drawn to death, were also captivated by birth and renewal.” What emerged in my mind during my reading was the image of a phoenix rising from its ashes and being reborn. Their work truly outlived them. The process of self-transformation would become a habit for Paul. What are your thoughts on this as a writer? Yes—rebirth, resurrection, renewal are important themes throughout the book. As I write in the introduction, Adam Phillips’ idea of a culture oriented toward birth—which sounds very Thekian to me—became an important organizing principle while I was writing. While Peter’s photography was rooted in how he rendered the inner psyche of his subjects: animals (especially horses), children, his lovers and friends. How he managed to get under the skin, be intimate, not because he would judge but because he would comprehend them: “Peter had a core of sadness. Above the sadness was the anger, and above that was the absolute appreciation of beauty—of finding beauty, offbeat beauty.” Paul’s sculptural environments seemed more ephemeral, delicate, collapsing, unfinished, ungraspable and graspable only by a few who could perceive its potential at the time. They were more ideas than realized works. The sublime way he approached his art was close to the way Eva Hesse’s works spoke to the public, meaning their ephemerality. Do you encounter such ephemerality in today’s cultural sphere? I think people are afraid of ephemerality, even though we’re surrounded by ephemera. They don’t want to think too much about the enormous loss we face every day. They were afraid of it when Thek and Hesse were making their work, and they’re afraid of it now, because ephemerality is too close to death and nobody wants to think about death. But “nothing lasts forever, other than paradise,” Thek writes. I find that so comforting. It frees you to live. Cover for The Wonderful World That Almost Was (2026) Farrar, Straus and Giroux. While the book is dedicated to following both artists’ figures, their love and fall, it also examines gay histories, the social upheaval of the Stonewall Riot in 1969 and the economic poverty of the 60s and 70s in the US. It has a political feel, religious background, and includes descriptions of trauma, self-destructiveness, paranoia and depression in parts. It has a psychological dimension, too. How did you navigate and balance writing about this? I followed my artists wherever they went. When I began the book, I did so with an open mind—I didn’t know what it would and wouldn’t encapsulate. For instance, I had no idea how important the Be-Ins would be to this project, but then there they were, in Hujar’s pictures and Thek’s notebooks, and so they had to find their way in the book. Hujar and Thek lived in the world; they weren’t isolated from their times; their work thought a lot about what it meant to live, and die, in the twentieth century. Three years ago, I traveled to Ponza. At the time, I had no clue that this remote island had been a retreat for Paul. Like many places, for Paul and Peter, their Fulbright residencies were places of creation but also their atomization. Light follows darkness. Do you believe that the true magic of their artistic work would not have developed the way it had without the sadness, depression, and losing oneself completely? We probably overemphasize sadness and depression as generative in artist’s lives; a lot of the time, depression delays and disrupts creation, and making art is the last thing you think about. As a reader, I was entertained by the inclusion of Fran Lebowitz’s quotes on Peter and Paul’s world. Susan Sontag wrote, “What she liked was ‘mad people,’ that is, ‘people who stand alone + burn. I’m attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.” I wonder if, during your research, you encountered people who refused to give their take on either Paul or Peter? What emotions have the conversations about them generated for you? A few people said no. Sometimes the “no” was really a way of asking me to woo them. But if it was a firm no, then I didn’t press any further. Most people said yes, which I am so grateful for, because the book would not exist without the support of Hujar and Thek’s friends, lovers, collaborators—especially Linda Rosenkrantz and Ann Wilson and Gary Schneider and John Erdman. Their memories, which they so graciously shared with me, were always emotional; there are conversations I had with them that will stay with me for a lifetime. I fell in love with a lot of the people I interviewed. Although non-fiction, a memoir, the book includes, retraces and pays tribute to works of fiction that were inspired by the artistic and personal life of Peter and Paul. It’s Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp (1964), Linda Rosenkrantz’s novel Talk (1968). You also mention William S. Burrough’s Nova Express (1964), Edmund White, and John Rechy’s City of Night (1963): “malehungry looks hidden by the darkness of the night.” Apart from being their peers, why was it essential to mention them in the biography for you? It was important for me to bring in some first-hand accounts of the larger world Thek and Hujar lived in. All those writers bore witness to their time and wrote so clearly—and fiercely—about it. The literature of the sixties is so rich; I couldn’t resist! Do you think the younger generation of gay and queer artists is aware, or pays attention to what their “ancestors” or “fathers” like Paul and Peter and many others achieved for them? What’s the post-Hujar and Thek legacy like for you? I hope so. Many of my artist friends cite them as important touchstones for their own work, and Thek is regularly taught in art schools here in Europe. In fact, almost every young artist I know is obsessed with both. For a long time, it was difficult to know much about their lives, and their work was exhibited only sparingly; seeing a Hujar or Thek was a rare thing. Thankfully, that’s really changed in the past ten to fifteen years. They’ve become much more accessible. The only way to really know them is to see the work in person, and once you see their work, there is no getting over it. Have you watched Peter Hujar’s Day (2025), directed by Ira Sachs? And if so, what did you think of it? For the New York Review of Books, I wrote that I generally liked the film, and I liked that Sachs was willing to adapt such unconventional material. But I brought so much baggage to my viewing of it, too; I was always going to have strong opinions about how Hujar was portrayed on screen after spending so much time with his work and life. I can’t say I loved Ben Wishaw’s rendition of him, but I adored Rebecca Hall as Linda Rosenkrantz. She was spot-on. For many years, perhaps even today, artists like Paul and Peter and many more were/seemed “stigmatized.” Do you think the biography can help dismantle it? That, to the reader and a wider public, it reveals the true essence of their work and life? I don’t think I agree that they were “stigmatized,” necessarily, though they have certainly been side-lined or under-emphasized in most histories of twentieth century art. For a long time, nobody seemed to know what to make of them, especially Paul Thek. Mike Kelley speaks about how difficult it was for the conservative art world of the 1980s to assimilate Thek’s installations into its view of art history—his “cosmic junk piles.” But I hope my book helps to reestablish their place at the center—where they belong. What’s the oddest place you’ve ever read? And what are the most recent books you read? A few summers ago, I was staying alone in a hotel in a remote part of Crete. Every day, I walked about an hour through the desert to a faraway beach where about six to eight nudists, all Greek men, erected little shelters by stretching their towels over these boulders. It felt like Mars, except for the NATO jets practicing manoeuvrers overhead. At the time, I was reading Henry James’s Princess Casamassima, which I didn’t think was very good, though I was committed to finishing it. The men kept distracting me by performing these odd rituals to attract each other’s attention, since it was a gay beach and in theory we were all supposed to be having sex. I don’t remember if anyone did. Right now, I’m reading the collected stories of Katherine Anne Porter, Martin Duberman’s biography of Lincoln Kirstein, and Jean-Jacques Schul’s Dusty Pink. The above conversation was conducted by Filip Jakab, a writer and editor based in Brussels.Editorial support by Hannah Bullock. Cover image: Andrew Durbin. Photo by Suzannah Pettigrew.

Aline Bouvy is a Luxembourgish visual artist who lives and works between Brussels and Luxembourg. Trained at ERG – École de Recherche Graphique in Brussels and the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, she has built a multidisciplinary practice spanning sculpture, installation, sound, moving image, and publication. Rather than treating objects as self-contained statements, she uses the exhibition as a constructed situation where norms and social codes are tested in public. Bouvy’s work is informed by a feminist outlook and an acute attention to the power mechanisms that shape desire. With rigorous systems, careful construction, and a deliberately offbeat humour, she returns to what society labels clean or dirty, proper or inappropriate, visible or marginal. Shame is central to her thinking, not as confession, but as a cultural instrument that regulates what can be shown, who can speak, and what must be concealed. Her projects often respond to their sites, borrowing from architecture and display to create thresholds, detours, and moments of uneasy recognition. Her recent trajectory includes the large-scale solo exhibition Cruising Bye at MACS Grand-Hornu (2022), as well as presentations at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2019), New Space, Liège (2020), Kunsthal Gent (2021), and Triangle-Astérides, Marseille (2024). In 2025, Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain hosted her solo show Hot Flashes, a choreographed passage that played with scale, reflection, and shifts from childhood to adulthood. The exhibition embodied her conviction that the exhibition itself is her primary medium, a place where space and relation intertwine. In 2026, Bouvy will represent Luxembourg at the 61st Venice Biennale with La Merde, on view on the first floor of the Sale d’Armi in the Arsenale from 9 May to 22 November. In the conversation that follows, she speaks about moving between research and production, and treating filmmaking as an open process that stays flexible until the end. She also returns to her long-standing interest in sound as a spatial experience, and to wit as a way of creating distance without neutralising discomfort. The result is a film project that confronts impurity and social sorting, while insisting on the viewer’s active role within its staging. Alongside the immersive audiovisual installation, a publication expands her archive of scatological images and references, developed with designer Olivier Vandervliet and including texts by Jessica Gysel and Robert Garnett. Curated by Stilbé Schroeder, the Venice presentation sharpens Bouvy’s focus on how expectations are enforced, and how they can be unsettled. I need to find a way to make the space speak so that it starts to reveal something very deep or hidden within itself, and becomes the catalyst for the feelings and perceptions I want to provoke. Last fall you presented the solo exhibition Hot Flashes at Casino Luxembourg, exploring stages and passages across a lifetime. Where would you place yourself now? What phase are you in? I’ve had a little more than a year to focus almost exclusively on the Venice Biennale project, conceived as a film, an installation, and a publication. It seems like a lot of time, certainly because it’s also a project I’ve been nurturing in my mind for nearly a decade, and yet everything has happened very fast. Many aspects of my practice are coming together with this project. There are ideas I’ve already tackled in previous works. The publication part was deeply fulfilling, as I could indulge my interest in digging and researching. My interest in space and architecture comes together with a different intensity through close collaboration with people I’ve been working with for a few years now. Sound, and the ways in which it is experienced in space, is also a recurring interest of mine, but it takes on a new dimension within this project. Nevertheless, there’s also an unfamiliar, and therefore exciting, new way of working, which is filmmaking. Translating my ideas and feelings into a script, gathering a film crew, organizing the whole shoot, and then entering the long months of editing, both image and sound, have all opened new processes for me. It really is my favorite part, and I’m still very busy with it, reorganizing, changing, experimenting, actually working on this film as if it were an exhibition in its own right. I wanted the process to remain very open. I’m lucky enough to be working with patient and committed film and sound editors, as well as with a graphic designer who is constantly flowing with invaluable ideas. You’ve said before you don’t privilege any medium, because the exhibition itself is your medium. What do you mean by that? I understand it as thinking and working towards the idea of the exhibition as a whole. I might first think of its general design, atmosphere, and light. More importantly, I need to find a way to make the space speak so that it starts to reveal something very deep or hidden within itself, and becomes the catalyst for the feelings and perceptions I want to provoke. I really need something to happen with the space. So the individual works in the exhibition almost become subordinate to the larger idea of the exhibition. The exhibition is like a stage, a construction, just as artworks are constructions. Does this make the works become props? Maybe. They are all important, but in the end I’m not that attached to the individual works. For me, only a few of them are separable from the exhibition context they were conceived for. That’s why I rarely produce works on their own. Space and architecture feel decisive here. I’m thinking of your mirror-glass and steel installation, structural, almost pavilion-like, with an echo of Dan Graham. How do you direct the viewer’s movement through your works? That work, Wall, is a good example of how I like to approach a given space. On the floor plan, I noticed there was a possibility to play with the different entrances to the Casino’s exhibition space. By placing a divider, the public would have two different route options to experience the exhibition, and also experience their own perception through the mirror-glass, in a choreographic way. My interest in the perception of space is inseparable from a reflection on how we perceive one another as human beings, and more specifically, the mechanisms that inform that perception, moving from architecture to psychology, from spatial perception to relational perception. Dan Graham is of course an important influence here. The reference is very clear. But where I believe the work drifts away from Dan Graham is with the addition of the two hybrid sculptures, E.T. The Excremential, a morphing between E.T. and myself, positioned to face each other across the partition wall. Wall, 2025. (glass and metal structure, one-way mirror film) E.T. The Excremential, 2025. (PU foam milling, resin, pigments) © GRAYSC Wall, 2025. (glass and metal structure, one-way mirror film) E.T. The Excremential, 2025. (PU foam milling, resin, pigments) © GRAYSC Aline Bouvy, Hot Flashes (installation view), Casino Luxembourg, 2025 The body—human, non-human, gendered, in glory and decay—reappears throughout your work. What keeps drawing you back to the corporeal? I guess the experience of my own body is the closest tool I have from which I can think and work. I think about its social and performative expectations, and how it feels shame, desire, or rejection. I often put it in weird situations that can sometimes be uneasy for me, but that’s how I can push the boundaries of its limits and, with a bit of distance, keep it manageable. Humor is also persistent, as if you’re winking at the viewer. Is it a strategy, or is it simply how you move through the world? This distance I’m mentioning can certainly happen through the use of humor. Humor creates a gap. It lets discomfort exist without immediately shutting it down. Humor engages in an affirmative process of becoming. Whether it mirrors who I am in daily life, I don’t know. You’re preparing to represent Luxembourg at the Venice Biennale with a project titled La Merde. Why this title? Why “shit”? It’s the subject of my film, in all its splendor, in all its sadness, in all its tragic, comic, abject, and deeply human dimensions. Who is the protagonist, and how does the narrative take shape? There is a central character that changes appearance throughout the film. At times it’s a puppet, at others an animated figure. It can also appear as an abstract presence, a stain, a smell, or an embodied character. What matters is not psychology or narrative development, but the effect this presence has on its environment and on those who encounter it. The film is composed of different scenes, and I prefer to describe them as arranged in a circular structure rather than in a loop. I like to think that the film recycles itself once all the scenes have played out. This structure reflects what the film is ultimately about. Shame seems to be an important thread. Shame about what, and how do you handle it? I’m interested in shame as a social mechanism rather than a personal confession. Shame regulates behavior. It marks what should remain hidden, controlled, or excluded. By placing viewers in situations where attraction and discomfort coexist, it can make those mechanisms perceptible without explaining them. Do you consider yourself a feminist? Should we read this project through that lens? That feels like a bit of a euphemism. I don’t necessarily want the work to be read through a particular lens, including that one. Feminism certainly informs how I think and work, it’s part of my position in the world, but I would rather the project be encountered as it comes, through the experience it creates. Aline Bouvy, La Merde (film still), 2026. Courtesy of the Artist. Aline Bouvy, La Merde (film still), 2026. Courtesy of the Artist. How will the pavilion installation be structured? What kind of setting will hold the film? It is structured around a modified version of Wall (2025), a work I first presented at Casino Luxembourg. It will be transformed into a half-circle architectural structure, lined with acoustic padding on the ceiling and inner walls. I think of it as a kind of communal headphone. The idea is to create an enclosed, immersive environment that holds the film acoustically. The audience sits inside this space on chairs that also appear within the film itself, functioning as a sort of extension of the film. I’ve been closely collaborating with Pierre Dozin, aka Late Bush, on the sound design and musical score of the film. He also developed the 4DSOUND programming, which allows the main character to sound different at each viewing, making it feel even more alive. In recent years, there’s been a clear rise in moving-image presentations at the Venice Biennale, often with highly elaborate productions. Why do you think that is? I’ve only been to the biennial three times, with long gaps in between, so I don’t really feel in a position to comment on that. There will also be an accompanying publication. Is it a catalogue, a making-of, or something else? The publication has been an amazing process. In 2024, I started frenetically collecting images of shit-related artworks, films, photographs, and more. At first, I thought I would include all these images in the film somewhere, but later, together with the graphic designer Olivier Vandervliet, we developed the archive into a non-exhaustive anthology. It has been a crazy process getting in touch with living artists, directly or through their galleries, to ask for permission to reproduce their works. Some really interesting conversations have come out of it, and it feels like I’ve made a new network of ‘shit friends’ around the world. The publication itself is quite small. It looks a bit like the Bibles you find in German hotel rooms, with a dark brown textured cover and LA MERDE printed and embossed in gold. Furthermore, the publication includes two excellent texts by Jessica Gysel and Robert Garnett. I’m very happy with how it turned out because it works as an autonomous object, while also showing how artists have used bodily material, both literally and in a more symbolic or conceptual way, to speak about politics, life and death, or simply for sheer fun. The Venice Biennale is a milestone. What do you hope this participation will open up for you? I feel lucky that Stilbé Schroeder, my curator, shares the same mindset as me. Of course it’s an important event, but we don’t overthink it. I see it as a celebration as well, certainly with artist friends like Pavel Braila representing Moldova. For Moldova, it has been a long process that required a lot of effort to finally participate in this year’s edition. Pavel is a longtime friend. We were together at the Jan van Eyck Academie, and we even went together for the first time to the Venice Biennale in 2001, along with Robert Garnett, who is also contributing to the catalogue and who was in the theory department at the same time as us. It feels very special to be here ourselves as artists, 25 years later. I have no idea what it will unlock for me. I’m more curious, and concerned, about how the Biennale will respond to the state of the world, and what it might or might not unlock at that level. The above conversation was conducted by Nicolas Vamvouklis, a curator and writer focused on contemporary art and performance, based in Athens.Cover image: Aline Bouvy, Hot Flashes (installation view), Casino Luxembourg, 2025

There’s perhaps no better emblem of contemporary existence than a shattered phone screen. Abundance and dysfunction, it turns out, are not mutually exclusive. It follows that a broken phone recurs in Flat Earth, the debut novel by Anika Jade Levy, billed as “Speedboat for the Adderall Generation,” which is to say, zeitgeist-y and written with abrupt prose that skewers a certain downtown artistic scene—but with its own dissociative flair. Flat Earth follows Avery, an aspiring writer, occasional sex worker, and grad student living in New York. At the outset of the novel, she accompanies her best friend Frances on a cross-country trip to help shoot an experimental documentary (which shares a title with Levy’s book) about the decline of middle America and the rise of right-wing conspiracies. In one of the novel’s more wayfinding passages, Avery observes: “It occurred to me that the players in the downtown art scene weren’t so different from the flat-earthers in flyover country—we each thought we had some unique insight into the way the world works, but in reality, we were all part of one big consensus machine, downstream from everything.” In addition to being a writer, Levy is an editor and co-founder of Forever Magazine, a literary publication that champions provocative girl-coded short fiction. Cut from the same cloth, the novel includes a series of omniscient dispatches which report back on the state of our faith (“Many of us pretend to be Catholic, but only two join a convent”); wellness trends (“Right-wing nutrition fads fall into fashion that year: an uptick in bovine meat, unpasteurized dairy, seed-oil skepticism, vaccine hesitancy.”); and regressive gender dynamics (“The girls are upending all the progress our mothers made, demanding lower hem lengths and mandatory home economics course”). Flat Earth primarily takes place post-pandemic, on the heels of a period of overwrought hyperpoliticization and a collective recoil toward reactionary, sometimes performative conservatism, as evidenced by Frances’ hard pivot to become a tradwife and Avery’s brief stint at a right-wing dating app called “Patriarchy.” The novel operates on lucid, if ungenerous, terms. Avery is a dogged scorekeeper, constantly tracking her value by way of metrics like youth and fertility. At various points throughout the book, Avery is told that she’s not as young as she thinks she is, a sobering refrain delivered by an ex-boyfriend, her grandmother, and a mentor. In another passage, Levy writes that “youth is something borrowed, a non-fungible currency, a cup of salt water scooped from the ocean, already evaporating.” The naked transactionality of it all can be bracing, but Levy is surgical in rendering how beauty, youth, and clout circulate within the economy of the art world. Incidentally, my conversation with Levy took place just as the term looksmaxxing was completing its ascent into common parlance. We spoke about the aestheticization of belief, channeling cultural whiplash into prose, the prescient legacy of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, and having your brain rewired by reading Shoplifting from American Apparel in middle school. I’m interested in what conspiratorial thinking and hyperpoliticization does to people socially, especially in milieus where belief is aestheticized, and where having a transgressive take is treated like a sartorial choice. Flat Earth takes place in a moment where conspiratorial thinking, religious faith, and hyperpoliticization are on the rise. What drew you to write specifically about this moment? I’m suspicious of the idea that this moment is uniquely conspiratorial or hysterical. The writer Caroline Busta has spoken about the parallels between the present—the narcissistic psychedelic AI surveillance apparatus we’re all inside of—and the advent of the printing press. How Europe was suddenly flooded with competing authorities, and then everyone had sources, citations, and enemies. It made the culture sort of schizophrenic. I’m interested in what conspiratorial thinking and hyperpoliticization does to people socially, especially in milieus where belief is aestheticized, and where having a transgressive take is treated like a sartorial choice. Would you say that beliefs have become the new basis for subculture, the way music or other cultural products once were? Maybe. But it’s hard to say what subculture is in the absence of any legible monoculture. Maybe those terms have outlived their usefulness. Avery has a Bolaño tattoo but admits she hasn’t read him, and at one point she pretends to read A Fan’s Notes. Rather than telling us much about her interior life, these moments seem to reveal how she wants others, especially men, to perceive her. How were you thinking about the performance of identity while writing? The unflattering answer is that the book itself is probably a performance for men on some level. But with Avery, I was interested in writing a passive and porous narrator, someone who comes into view based on her anxieties and observations about other people. And I was thinking about how identity is flattened and optimized for a small screen, how taste functions as social capital and how we assess people based on the novels they reference, the magazines they subscribe to, the theory they pretend to have read. Much of the book shows Avery procrastinating or avoiding writing. But on a date with a guy from the Patriarchy app, she receives a scathing assessment of her diminishing value in the sexual marketplace and suddenly feels inspired. How did you approach that moment, and why does such a brutal critique trigger creativity? Why do I find the idea of young women as objects of sexual commerce so creatively compelling? I guess that theme came up in my own life while I was writing the book. Muriel Spark had this refrain about being a “magnet” for the experiences she needed to write whatever she was working on, and that seems to have been true for me so far. She’s also one of a million artists and writers who spoke about the idea of creativity as a channel. In this instance, that monologue came to me fully formed. It was one of the few moments where I was actually writing the way I want to be writing. It seemed natural to me that Avery would become productive and creative after an experience of acute embarrassment. And embarrassment is usually just an inopportune instance of visibility or exposure. She felt like that man saw something in her she’d been trying to conceal. Avery’s fixation on fertility and youth reads as symptomatic of the moment. How much of this anxiety do you see circulating in your milieu, and why did you choose to make it such a central obsession for her? My friends basically don’t think about their fertility, as far as I know. But I could see how all the manosphere chatter about throwing empty egg cartons might make a woman neurotic, and that was something I wanted to satirize. Certainly, people are waiting longer to have children. Some are mourning the disappearance of the single-income household. Mostly though, I was thinking about the idea of youth as a currency, and that there’s not really a right age to be a woman. By the time you’re old enough to be taken seriously, old enough to feel self-possessed and worldly, your beauty is allegedly plateauing. That cruel paradox plays out between Sally and Avery. There’s a scene where Avery notices Sally has had a bad facelift, and it’s devastating not because of the facelift itself but because seeing the insecurities of someone you admire laid bare produces its own kind of vertigo. Yes. Because Avery imagines that Sally’s status and professional reputation are enough to armour her against those anxieties, or, more charitably, that someone as sensitive and intelligent as Sally wouldn’t be so neurotic about aging. Book cover for Flat Earth (2025) Catapult Press. Something you do especially well in Flat Earth is capture the uneasy coexistence of wealth and precarity in the art world. Avery is wealth-adjacent but can’t pay her rent or replace her busted phone screen. I’d love to hear your take on how these dynamics play out in art and literary scenes, and how that informed the relationships between the characters. I think that in the same way Americans have incoherent political ideologies, we also have very warped relationships to our own class backgrounds. The coexistence of poverty and decadence in New York City is something I set out to capture, and of course, many of us will continue to live beyond our means—people with debts going to dinner and whatnot. But I think I was also trying to untangle my own upbringing, and how it accounts for my whimsical attitude towards money, my inability to understand it, my ambivalence towards my credit card debt, etc. The flash-fiction cultural reports punctuate the text with a delirious, predictive tone, almost like a slightly unhinged trend forecast at the end of the world. Where did that voice come from? That material came from somewhere else. I don’t know where it came from. I’d be curious to hear about non-literary influences that were on your mind while you were writing as well. I’ve watched Mad Men all the way through at least a dozen times, and I owe some of the book’s ambient regressive misogyny to that. I’ve been listening to Bright Eyes since I was a child, and I’m sure that’s had some effect on me, helped me to retain some sentimentality. The Christmas I was fourteen, my older brother gave me the book Shoplifting from American Apparel and The College Dropout on vinyl, and I think that combination probably rewired my brain. That’s like a crash course in the spectrum of American Masculinity! Yes. My brother is going to hate this. The Whole Earth Catalog shows up in the text and is referenced on the cover design. In recent years, its brand of countercultural techno-optimism has come under fire for being, at best, politically apathetic and, at worst, recklessly libertarian. It’s hard not to draw parallels to Silicon Valley’s recent turn to the right. I’m curious how you think about the catalog’s legacy and how it’s meaningful within Flat Earth. I’m happy you clocked that. I don’t think I realized what a perfect nested literary object The Whole Earth Catalog is for this book until I finished writing it—I just thought it was a cute Mise en abyme. It’s easy to romanticize a project like that, something that emerged when counterculture was more than just a set of hyper-niche consumer demographics, especially because it’s so aesthetically compelling. But if anything was radical or prophetic about the catalog, it’s that it was a lifestyle object, a way of signalling you were in the know, well before counterculture was focus-grouped and redistributed as a menu of consumer identities. In terms of its legacy in Silicon Valley: The techno-fascists at the fringes I satirize in the book are reckless and probably genocidal, but in general, I don’t think the average Bay Area tech-bro libertine has changed that much. If you look strictly at social and cultural values, a lot of the behavior that codes as right-wing today—I’m thinking about distrust in institutions, vaccine hesitancy, survivalism—circulated at the turn of the century as lefty, back-to-the-land utopianism. In addition to being a writer, you’re also an editor and co-founder of Forever Magazine, which champions, in your words, “style over plot.” What styles are you seeing emerge right now? I haven’t been reading much contemporary fiction lately, other than the work of my students. I will say that some of the undergraduates I work with are playing around with mid-century experimental short stories in the tradition of Donald Barthelme, and that excites me. Otherwise, the only contemporary novel I’ve finished this year is Claire-Loise Bennett’s Big Kiss, Bye Bye, which feels fresh in some ways and mannered in others. The book is almost entirely about correspondence, which gives it a sort of Victorian tone, but I was happily surprised by how enrapturing this book is, being that it’s just a woman checking her email for 250 pages. As my friend Mariah Kreutter put it: I’m glad Bennett wrote this book so I don’t have to. Around the same time I was reading Flat Earth, I came across an interview with Chris Kraus where she reflected on her early work and how she was able to be a bit reckless in a way that became difficult once she gained recognition within arts institutions. I’ve been wondering whether it’s possible or even desirable to preserve that edge as the stakes shift. I’m curious if this is something you’ve thought about, having just published your first novel and as your profile has expanded as the editor of Forever. I think that what passes for recklessness in this book is actually just freedom. Chris Kraus writes with a lawlessness that I admire and rarely achieve. I was neurotic about reception from the moment I started writing Flat Earth, but I’ve never been particularly careful about curating a public profile or a serious reputation. The successes and the failures of this book are self-evident. I’m not so concerned with preserving my own edge, and especially not if that kind of rawness comes at the expense of developing taste. The best moments in this book were a surprise to me as I was writing them, and that creative intuition is the main thing I care about preserving. At one point in the novel, Frances’s film, also titled Flat Earth, draws criticism. You write, “People were writing that the film made a spectacle out of white poverty… others denigrated the film for humanizing the conspiracy theorists allegedly tearing at the fabric of our democracy.” Was this meant as a provocation to critics or a reflection on the pressure for art to resolve itself into a moral position? Since the book came out in November, how has the press cycle been so far? It wasn’t meant as a provocation to critics. I do think that we’re in a moment where art is expected to announce a moral position, which this book refrains from. But my press cycle has been thoughtful and generous for the most part. Last question, what are you working on now? It’s a secret. The above conversation was conducted by Madeline Bogoch, a writer, editor, and film programmer based in Montréal.Cover image: Anika Jade Levy. Photo by Bronwen Wickstrom.

An auctioneer wearing a judge's black gown sits stern-faced, between an international currency conversion table suspended in midair and a large abstract painting for sale. Above him, a foreboding night sky appears where one expects a ceiling. This is the scene of Nicole Eisenman’s The Auction (2025), where a painter is also present, with a canvas, similar to the one on sale, by his side. Positioned within the composition as if he had been called to testify, he’s rendered in flat Cubist color blocks, which make him look gobsmacked—if not by the fact that he might be on trial than by the sight of an eager bidder before him whose hand is reaching way too high for anyone’s comfort, Sieg Heil style. That sharp discomfiture you feel in your gut when facing total contradiction was at the heart of Eisenman’s STY, her most recent solo exhibition at New York’s 52 Walker. Comprised of paintings, works on paper, sculptures, and videos made between 2024 and 2025—after the start of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and throughout the first year of Donald Trump’s presidential re-election—the exhibition depicted the artist and her milieu amid a battered social and civic landscape. These works were shown inside a floor-to-ceiling enclosure of Homasote board, a material commonly used by artists to allow for easily installation and deinstallation inside the studio, built inside the gallery walls, suggesting that Eisenman’s STY was not only a reference to an increasingly paradoxical outside world, but the effects of such a world on the walls of the mind. Here, no amount of focus, intent, or artistic autonomy can keep a person from brushing up against the threat of fascism, or from their own obliviousness to the violences that are every day surrounding them. We’re in this together. Shortly after STY closed, Eisenman and I had a conversation about the collision of styles and sightlines that inspired her exquisitely rendered canvases and sculptural works. We talked, also, about humor and its limitations; about narrative and abstraction; about the difficulty of making anything, including sense, during the present moment; and about the things that we are compelled to hold very close, even if we don’t yet understand them. I like the idea of edging up next to a joke but not making or landing one. The paintings might be jokes without punchlines. They don't resolve themselves. You just closed STY. How are you feeling? I'm feeling satisfied! I think it was a good experience. Going into it, I was worried about the show holding together and wasn’t totally able to wrap my head around how all the works were connecting to one another, but, in the space, it solved itself. It took a couple of weeks for me to really see the show and to understand it. The show was also up for so long—about three months—so I went in periodically and started to see connections that surprised me between the paintings and between the paintings and sculptures. When did the work for this show begin? The work for this show began with the painting that has a giant pig floating above an art opening, Archangel (The Visitors) (2024), which I made before Trump was re-elected. Making that painting at that moment was important, because it’s about what I thought might happen—and what, eventually, did happen. It’s also a painting of my world here in New York. There’s an art opening, a lot of my New York friends are there in it, and there’s some extremely ugly figures in it as well, which is also true to life. It’s often like, here we are, at the same opening as this guy. In the art world, we traverse this universe with that kind of feeling all the time, like: I don't know who all is in the room. When I was first offered to make STY I knew that I needed to get that painting back. I wanted it to be the anchor of the show. Your work straddles humor and discomfort with very serious restraint. I’m thinking of the self-portrait that appears among the throng of art people in Archangel (The Visitors). “You” are pickpocketing a collector. That’s pretty funny. But then, one looks around, to see that, for fuck’s sake, Goebbels just into the room. Your paintings are comic, for sure, but there’s almost no joke to land. What’s your relationship to humor? I like the idea of edging up next to a joke but not making or landing one. The paintings might be jokes without punchlines. They don't resolve themselves. Though, I’m not even sure what the joke would be, like “How many pigs does it take to screw in a lightbulb at an art opening?” I don’t know. I don't feel like I have jokes in me, or at least I don't feel like a very funny person. I work with absurdity, but you have to keep it on a tight leash on it or it slips into the surreal. I want my absurd worlds to make sense—in fact, I feel like the paintings are incredibly realistic in a way. They're very close to something inside me, my realism, perhaps, or, what's real for me. My project has always really been about looking at the world and all the abhorrent politics going on in it, seeing how that experience lands emotionally, and then assigning a kind of symbolic language to those feelings. Once you find the symbolic language for the feeling that this shitstorm is producing in you, you've got your painting. To me, they are not meant to be funny, insofar as they are honest and realistic depictions of what I'm experiencing. The title, STY, suggests a group or crowded space, which we see in paintings like Archangel (The Visitors) and The Auction. Two of the other paintings show artists alone in their “studios.” What role does isolation or solitude play in STY? Most of my time is spent alone; I think that might be true for anyone who paints or writes. The figures you are referring to are both painters; both are a sort of self-portrait. One of them, in Fiddle V. Burns (2024), is in a hole in the ground, with treads of a tank on the ground above him. I was thinking, with this one, about the ditches soldiers sat in during World War I. The other artist, in The Bunker (2024), is surrounded by insulation foam, cinder block, and noise reduction foam. There are layers and layers of things isolating that person from the world. To me, this painting was very much about what I feel like I have to do to paint. Or rather, it's a psychological portrait of what all of us as artists have to block out in order to function. The painting is very much about this impossible position that these psychotic governments put us in. It’s about balancing what it means to witness things like the genocide in Palestine and then to take care of yourself. It has been artists, poets and activists who have adequately, with rage, responded to what’s going on in the world. But, even still, since the start of the genocide, I have a feeling of embarrassment that I can just be in my studio, not thinking about it, and instead thinking about painting. I feel like the artists in the paintings look like total jackasses. One of them has his big thumb up in the air. And the other, the one in the hole, has this smug look and doesn't seem aware of their surroundings. Nicole Eisenman, STY, 2025. Installation view, 52 Walker.  Nicole Eisenman, STY, 2025. Installation view, 52 Walker.  Nicole Eisenman, STY, 2025. Installation view, 52 Walker.  What role would you say art plays in a moment of despair such as this one? Art is, of course, a safe harbor. But it’s also like one of those places that were popular in like 2015 where you could pay to go into a room and throw plates at a wall and break electronics. What was that called? A rage room? Art is a rage room. It’s helpful for me to not only understand my fear and anger, but to do something with them, you know? I mean, what else are you going to do with life? You have to spend the time it takes to live through it, so you might as well make art. The Auction (2024), for instance, was an outgrowth of a moment that was truly one of the vilest moments I've ever experienced in the art world, which has obviously, by and large, treated me pretty well. When I was 12 or 13 years old, I would often draw mean caricatures of my teachers in the margins of my textbooks. It was my own small revenge. Rage is such a pointed feeling, but it can feel so abstract. To me, your paintings are so the opposite of that: they’re precise and orchestrated. They’re narrative. What role does narrative play in your work? They're definitely narrative. I like that word to describe my work, because when I'm designing those big, multi-figurative canvases, I feel the same kind of writerly angst that my writer friends talk about when they're doing their work. In terms of process, I feel more aligned with novelists than I do with most painters. I understand how difficult writing is because I know how difficult it is to construct a story. It's sit-at-your-desk-and-pull-your-hair-out kind of work. But, if you get it right, it's also really satisfying. It can be really amazing to orchestrate a story in an image. I feel very influenced by the idea of subtext and the subconscious—all the sub stuff. I try to remember my dreams every day and to analyze them. I find it very helpful personally but it can also help spur ideas for work. Since STY opened four months ago, I’ve been trying to think about what the story is now. Like, now the pig isn't floating above us like this big abstract thing that nobody's paying attention to. Now the pig is down in the room and walking amongst us. It’s here. I love that STY came with a list of “Related Reading.” Balzac’s The Unfinished Masterpiece,a favorite of mine, appears on the list. And there’s another I want to ask you about. It has a great title: Alexander Woodcock and Monte Davis’s 1979 book,Catastrophe Theory… Oh my god, that's a great book. It's a mathematics textbook, so I don’t know exactly how to read it. The copy I have, which I found at an antique shop, is old and beautiful. It has these great illustrations and graphs of when equations change from one form into another; it's about tipping points. That's not a book I read. That's just a book I have. Maybe we ought to adjust what “reading” means. Carrying a book in my bag for months or a full year—can’t that be reading too? Yes! Carrying a book in a bag is one of the great pleasures in life and should count as reading. I mean, this weird old book, I can't understand it but it's still inspiring and magical in its implications. What you imagine it to mean is important and drives imagination, but also, in a way I can loosely pick up the idea. Nicole Eisenman, STY, 2025. Installation view, 52 Walker.  Nicole Eisenman, STY, 2025. Installation view, 52 Walker.   When I think about your sculptures, I think about found objects and plaster all smashed together, and I think about the visibility of touch. The sculptures in STY are made of scagliola—a composite plaster technique the Medici family once used to make swirling ersatz marble and terra dura constructions. They have such a smooth and pristine texture to them. But they’re also very complex. I want to call them “poetic” in the sense that they made me think, long after I saw them, about how the materialcame together to make them. How did you come to scaglolia? I’ve been thinking about color and sculpture for a long time. It’s a baffling question. Color at first seemed extraneous to me. Coming to sculpture as a painter, I needed to take color out of the equation in order to keep things simple; there was enough to think about just making stuff that sits in the same world as us. In recent years I have been wondering how to use color without simply throwing paint on a 3D form, where color would seem extraneous and decorative. As for the scagliola, it's dumb how I came to it: I first saw the material on Instagram and immediately liked the idea of using colored plaster, like fresco but thick. It’s hard to teach yourself. There are very few people outside of Italy who know how to do all the techniques, but I found this woman in the Midwest, Melissa Vongley, who was taught by people in Italy. I invited her to come to New York to teach me how to do it. So, we worked together to produce the sculptures in the show. They're extremely complicated sculptures to make, so I'm glad they feel complex to look at. It’s tricky material and it easily requires like ten times the amount of touching than any other substance I’ve used before. It’s mind-boggling just how soft they are. If a bunny rabbit could be hard, it would feel like that. I was nervous about the slickness, about how angular and svelte they are, and about what it means to put figures out into the world that look like they could be based on some fucking supermodel or something. But, as you point out, they are also weird, cut up, sliced and diced. I was thinking a lot about the trans body while I made these works. One of the figures has indications of top surgery, for instance. All three sculptural figures carry a flat-screen TV playing video works you produced in collaboration with Thomas and Anna Eisenman, your nephew and niece. Unlike the paintings, the videos depict some pretty abstract stuff, like hurtling through space. What was this collaboration like? Do you think of the videos in terms of abstraction? Thomas is a filmmaker and Anna is an artist who has used a lot of video. The three of us conceived of the works together, but the two of them really made and directed the videos. The videos seem abstract but if you were to watch them back-to-back, a story emerges. So, I wouldn't call them narrative but there is an arc that goes through them. The titles of the sculptures that carry each one of the three videos in the cycle are called Creation, Burning and La jetée. The entry point is the video that rests on the head of the black-and-white figure. In this one, an idea floats above you in its perfect state, before it comes down to earth and becomes embodied. The embodiment is terrifying—that's shown in the video that the figure with red and blue limbs is holding, which is the part of the sequence that's like a zombie apocalypse, with figures emerging from the mud. In the third video, there's a re-emergence from below and into a state of exaltation. That’s the subway surfing part. I look at footage of kids doing this and ask what it might be like to have that feeling, of being a teenager standing on top of a train, of feeling invincible. You’re basically like a god. One figure carries the TV screen on its head; another one holds the TV to its side. They imply different ways to be attentive to things, including art. They favor distractibility and suggest, to me, how you might spend quality time with something you don’t totally understand. Right, like how carrying a book in a bag is reading. It's heartening to imagine how these pieces could suggest a way of interacting with art rather than being simply burdened by screens. I wish we could take a painting out of the Met to walk around with for a day, or perhaps a month. A month would be good. They could provide you with a nice, strong leather portfolio so the painting doesn’t get damaged, and you could open the portfolio to take a peek at the painting while you’re riding the subway. Okay, Nicole. If you were to pull an item out of the Met to have for a month, what would it be? This is not a reasonable object to take out of the Met but there's this one samurai armor that is so wicked and fierce and gorgeous. It frightened me as a kid. I might take that and just wear it and walk around. Maybe I should choose something more realistic to carry around. No, that’s perfect. You’d be like Lancelot in Jack Spicer’s The Holy Grail. He’s all worked up and has this great line: “If no one fights me, I’ll have to wear this armor / All my life.” The above conversation was conducted by Shiv Kotecha, a writer and editor living in New York. Kotecha was a 2025 editorial resident with Public Parking. This is his final contribution as part of a four-part creative exploration with our publication. Read Kotecha's previous features here, here and here.Special thank you to Nicole Eisenman for participating so generously in the above conversation. Cover image: Nicole Eisenman. Photo by Brigitte Lacombe.

“I wanted the dangerous love built on long-distance plane rides, trauma, and failed girlhood,” the unnamed narrator of Grace Byron’s Herculine confesses, walking quietly along the narrow river that runs through a patch of land in rural Indiana inhabited by 15 or 20 trans girls, inhabited, in turn, by their 15 or 20 corresponding demons. 700 miles from New York with a broken-down Honda Civic and spotty cell service, she weighs the risks of remaining long enough to trial the return to her first love, her ex-girlfriend Ash. The most notable risk is that of demon possession, which would tether her eternally to Ash’s trans separatist demon cult. “Choosing T4T was just choosing one kind of hurt over another. It’s no more valiant. It’s a survival tactic.” Amid the onslaught of both the U.S. administration’s executive orders and Canadian provincial and federal bills directly attacking trans existence across the continent, anti-trans rhetoric has moved from the fringe into the core of right-wing political agendas and proliferates in mainstream culture. When it was released by Saga Press last October, Herculine arrived into a world infected with severe anti-trans hostility—a not uncomplicated moment for a novel populated by demonic trans girls and themes like in-fighting, identity politics, conversion therapy, and convoluted spiritualities. In the mainstream literary world, flattening marginal narratives is made compulsory and coerced—but, with Herculine, Byron breaks from what is easily digestible and, influenced by trans horror novelists that came before her, pushes her readers to tread further “into the muck.” The muck of trauma, jealousy, regret, dissociation, disappointment, and so on. Byron has forged a space for herself as a journalist and critic, with a long roster of publications in spots like The New Yorker, Bookforum, The Baffler, and Vogue. Her work spans art and literary criticism, political reporting, memoir, short stories, and profiles. Byron’s debut novel Herculine is a departure in many ways—her first longform fiction project, her first engagement with horror writing. The throughline of her work, however, is an unfaltering and exacting critical voice that pierces through the haze of violent social and political schema, grounded in a real, mundane, and clear-eyed sense of solidarity. I spoke with Byron about all of that, and about constructing gritty characters, how criticism and fiction bleed into one another, and the use of horror to write in the shape of trauma. I think literary fiction has always been about people fucking up. I don’t care about characters being likable or good people. The idea of reading as a manual for morality is pretty grim to me. How does it feel to have Herculine out in the world and to be on the other side of your book tour? It feels good! It reached a lot of wonderful readers and it was fun to interact with people in person. And also, to see Herculine have a life of its own is a strange thing, since I wrote it a few years ago and at a very different time in my life…it’s been interesting to see what has and hasn’t changed both in the culture and personally. Well, the book is really about community—its promise and its pitfalls—so I wonder how it was to gather around Herculine in community and discuss its themes? I think it really forced me to refine what I was wanting to say. A book can be a really flexible thing in a wonderful way, but when there are political stakes, it feels important to say what you mean very carefully. Like, it felt important to say that community is not all bad. The book has a pretty pessimistic take on community and T4T, but there are obviously great things about both of those political endeavors. It’s more “here's what not to do” rather than “this is always bad”—I think, in the book, that’s clear. But talking about it is tricky. I want to get into the world you’re building in Herculine. It was such a fun read—so spooky and horny in a perfect way. But it's also such an incisive work on trauma. The horror genre was a beautiful choice for this kind of project—it’s especially fitting as an exploration of religious trauma where the ‘monsters’ are literally demons, straight out of Christian demonology. How did you come to build this sort of internal world for the book, and what was your research process like? For most of my life, I was really anti-horror. I was raised in a religious household, so I had a lot of encounters with demonology and exorcism. I grew up in the church and youth group, and I was a big reader and took a lot of Christian studies classes, so I felt very versed in it. In the same way people use the mythology they grew up on in a flexible way, I used Christianity. So instead of Greek myths or whatever, I turned Beelzebub on its head. That was the context I started to play with, and it felt electric to change it and make it funny and weird and horny and strange. I think that element was always in my work—thinking about the vexed relationship between queer and trans people and religion or spirituality. I wanted to build that out, and then that interplay became the most interesting thing about the book. I was thinking about memes and internet culture and trans culture and also demons and the church and religious trauma. So those binaries sort of ricocheted throughout the book—cis and trans, New York and the Midwest, demons and God—they became the engine of the plot. And then, my boyfriend and I started watching a bunch of horror movies—that’s a big thing they enjoy, and I was like, okay, fine. We watched Candyman and The Blair Witch Project and Ari Aster movies that I’d never seen. Well, the horror tropes are so potent in Herculine. Like this doubling you mentioned, where two things are presented as opposites, one seemingly good and one more sinister, so it casts a shadow over its other. It comes up with this faith or belief in T4T separatism, or in utopia in the kind of queer leftist sense, which is doubled by Christianity. The ‘back to the land’ commune project is doubled by a demon possession cult. The horror comes out of this suggestion that they aren’t as opposing as we want to think. Complicating those binaries felt important. Queer and trans community is difficult—there can be a shadowy side. And, there are moments where the main character is getting something from Christianity or spiritual community. But, I think I've always been fascinated by cults. I grew up watching the X-Files and there are so many cult episodes. And I thought Midsommar was an interesting film, not because it's the best film ever, but in a way it really executes the sort of eeriness of wanting belonging, and joining a cult—this need for belonging being weaponized against you. I’m curious about the banality of cults…like, it makes so much sense that people want to feel belonging. I think that can be hard for a lot of queer and trans people, so it’s rife for being taken advantage of. But the need to feel loved makes sense. People want to feel like they have community, and if you can't find that in a more traditional way, you're going to go outside of that. The way belonging is presented in the bookbecomes this never-ending series of returns to a sense of belonging or sense of family. The narrator goes back to the Midwest, back to her ex and T4T community. Then, at the end, there’s this return to the mother and the childhood home. But at every turn, the home is no longer a home. The familiar is made strange or dangerous—mostly with the demons that keep popping up—so the narrator has to keep moving. It felt tied to this idea of trauma, of moving with it; it stays in the body. It's not something you’re getting away from, but you're moving with it. There's this line where the narrator is recalling how, as a kid, every time she got home from a conversion therapy session, she would drop her backpack and go for a walk, because the house felt stagnant. The ‘therapist’ and the house were these sites of ongoing violence and walking was a way of letting things move, even if she eventually returned to that place. The book’s form sort of mirrors this process of leaving the house and walking around the block, even if the eventual return is inevitable—so, also the shape of processing trauma. Oh, for sure. There's such a relationship between geography and trauma. Trying to outrun something and it still being there, returning to the wound again and again. It makes sense that the narrator has to return, physically, to the site of the original trauma—that happens in a few different points in the book. She has to confront the conversion therapist in a sort of spiritual and metaphysical way. She has to confront the house she grew up in and the state she grew up in, and then she has to confront this ex of hers, which also means breaking with the idea of T4T being a completely good thing in her life. Yeah, there’s a lot of moments where space is playing a pivotal role in processing. You can’t outrun the wound. And you can't return home the same way twice, you know. I found those two truisms to be interesting cliches to play with. Yes, and once she gets to the commune there's this real ambivalence around leaving—there were so many opportunities for her to have left sooner but she’s hanging on to the idea of Ash and this notion of real love. Like, of course her car gets destroyed. As a reader, you're like, oh my god, get out. Absolutely. That is the mark of trauma. Like, you can see a friend enacting and reenacting their trauma and be like, don't do that. Don't date this avoidant person again, cut this person out, whatever. But when you're in it, you are just not operating on the same logic. You do it again and again and again. Some readers have been like, why doesn't she leave sooner? And it’s like, what if your first love called you back? That is a pretty seductive siren song—that is the promise of utopia. Cover for Herculine (2025). S&S/Saga Press.  The book also thinks about the inverse relationship of trauma and solidarity. I think especially in queer and trans spaces, we want trauma alone to build a shared foundation for solidarity, and a sense of real belonging or community. That can be a risky logic. The risk is that you build unity or a kind of misplaced allegiance rather than solidarity. And things crop up in our spaces that can mirror the outside; almost nationalistic, carceral ways of thinking about community—casting people out, or having really intense rules for engagement. Solidarity means I don’t have to be like my neighbor, but I will fight for them or care for them. And, solidarity means a more expansive idea of who I consider as my neighbour. Community takes work and a shared ethic—shared identity is a starting point, but it's not an ending point. It can be beautiful, because you can share each other's burden, but it shouldn’t be a closed door. I think the narrator comes to that very slowly by the end of the book, though she never fully articulates it in that way. By the end, there is real solidarity, and it's just a lot less glittery than she imagined. It’s not always sexy. It's not always triumphant. Sometimes it’s eating at a fucked-up diner with your friends and complaining. But I think those things are actually really important, like, that is the glue that holds people together. It’s worth considering as an important praxis. Definitely. So, Herculine is a bit of a cautionary tale, but there’s still this grounded ethic of community that’s rooted in that mundane sense of friendship. It’s anti-utopian but there’s still a hopefulness. That ethic seems to guide a lot of your writing—your criticism and political reporting. You invoke a sense of care and commitment to the world and your communities through a very honest, incisive lens. I think that's true. That is the ethical framework that my work operates on, regardless of format. I also just really didn't want to write a well-behaved narrator or a how-to ethical guide. I care about characters that are grittier, I don't really have any interest in writing for the Goodreads crowd—there's enough romantasy novels if that's what people want to read, and more power to them. But, I think literary fiction has always been about people fucking up. I don’t care about characters being likable or good people. The idea of reading as a manual for morality is pretty grim to me. You’ve written about this trap of good vs. bad representation discourse where, as a trans author, everything you write has to do some kind of explicit political work for your community. It makes sense to use fiction as a vehicle to move away from that. I feel like the book riffs on that more than engaging with it. Like, it derides that kind of binaristic thinking with its jokes about the freelance crowd or the trans clickbait titles. I took a lot of courage from writers like Gretchen Felker-Martin or Alison Rumfitt, who cared more about putting grossness and ugliness into the world in a way that got at something deeper than, like, a trans memoir that’s like “here's how I overcame my challenges.” That kind of representation is fine. I’m sure that is really important for some people. But, Herculine isn’t for a reader who doesn't want to get into the muck a bit. In an article in The Baffler on trans literature and the present tense, you write “We need books that acknowledge the pain of our current moment and books that imagine how to live in the ruins.” Herculine sort of straddles this line of the real and the constructed, fantastical. It is really rooted in the actual present. Well, it's hard, too, because I feel like so much has changed about trans culture and discourse, even in the years since I wrote it. This isn’t a book you could write during the second Trump term. It's about a different era. Perhaps it could be set during Trump's first presidency, but I think these characters would have a very different set of concerns if they were operating in the contemporary moment—it almost feels harder to try and write about the current moment in a fictional way, even if there are resonances that ricochet out to now. I don’t know…I feel like I can never write good fiction about the contemporary moment. I need a little bit of distance usually, to engage with it. I want to hear more about your writing life at large. How did you come to your current writing practice? What’s been nourishing you throughout that process? So, I went to school for film and that just never really came together in a real way. At the end of 2020, my friend Erin Taylor became the arts editor at New York Observer and asked me if I wanted to write anything, so I started doing reviews for them. I did a review a month, so I felt like an unofficial book columnist there. It ranged from, like, Sally Rooney to Agatha Christie. Then I branched out to reviewing art shows, I wrote about Greer Lankton, and then I started learning how to pitch articles and pitching at other places. So I was writing every day. And to be a good writer, you have to be reading a lot—reviewing books forced me to be reading. I also put myself through a Classics crash course… and that's really how it started. I was ambitious, I started to do bigger pieces and more political journalism because it was in demand. It was all very random, a lot of falling into things or finding the right person at the right time. I like to invite the reader in, and make them feel like they're getting a take—not in a ‘hot take’ way—but getting an opinion, getting something at a slant. That does seem to be the way it works these days. How did you find your voice within your criticism work? It was hard! I think it took a long time. I know some writers who are very young who came up very quickly, and I think that that's brutal. It was nice at the beginning to have the room to develop a voice and try things out. I think every writer will say the first few years of writing criticism can be embarrassing or difficult. A lot of it was about repetition, just doing it over and over again. And, it's important to have some sparkly bits. You have to have a few lines that feel true to your voice as a critic, and that takes time to figure out. I also think not enough critics are reading and admiring each others’ work. Patricia Lockwood is an amazing literary critic—reading her was really important. And Jenny Diski is one of my favorite critics of all time, she makes really interesting and surprising connections and just has a really natural voice. I also love Andrea Long Chu. I think she's such a great writer, very detail-oriented, but also has really beautiful, vicious prose. I just immersed myself in the world of criticism. My work has a political tinge and a bit of a voiciness that is hard to get into some places—a lot of critical outlets have a house style. But there are still ways to say what you want to say in a fun way. I like to invite the reader in, and make them feel like they're getting a take—not in a ‘hot take’ way—but getting an opinion, getting something at a slant. Well, the impact of your critical voice on your fiction is very clear. Has that been a two-way process? Like, did delving into this longform fiction work shift anything in your nonfiction practice? I don't know. It's an interesting question. I think it is important to tell a story with criticism—to have a sort of narrative arc. You can’t force it, but I think a good review is a conduit to say something else, other than just what the book is about. How was it shifting between the two modes, having these overlapping projects of longform fiction and shorter nonfiction pieces. Was that nourishing or just difficult or…? I think I kind of thrive on creative chaos. I am a bit of a workhorse, but I also think I like doing different modes at once. Fiction feels so much more magical and strange. With nonfiction, it feels like there’s something I’m reporting on that I have to excavate, whereas fiction often feels like making something out of nothing. And the interplay is always interesting—seeing what does trickle into the fiction—because it's never a one-to-one. The interplay can be really elusive and subconscious. I really admire writers like Joan Didion or Annie Dillard or Ursula K. Le Guin, who could jump between those modes. There’s something very politically potent about that kind of fictional work that can be really overlooked or neglected. But it seems like the temporal distinction is big—the sort of political work being done in shorter-form nonfiction has a really different texture to that of fictional work. Less time to gestate, for sure, yeah. There’s definitely a pressure to be reporting on trans issues right now. I feel a pretty intense obligation and ethical commitment to doing it. Especially when I’m writing for places with a wider readership, it feels important to get in as much as I can, not giving into sentimental narratives about transness and getting as many voices in as possible. It is difficult, because being trans isn’t my whole life––it often feels like people want to make that my whole life, whether I want it to be or not. There are a lot of ethical quandaries that come up when writing nonfiction, both internally or externally, I think both are important to pay attention to. You wrote a piece for Lux calling for a return to the feminist polemic, where you write: “The polemic has taken a backseat to other genres of feminist literature because such texts are seen as inherently naive. It’s considered militaristic rhetoric of a bygone era. This is a loss. Polemics, even when ostensibly ‘wrong,’ offer a starting point to move discourse and energize debate. They give us a common language. The ability to take positions, to build an erotic charge on the left, to build and articulate feminist positions based on more than just dispassionate historicity.” It’s interesting to think about polemics in the context of cults like Herculine––cults have that “erotic charge,” that, on the left, we’re really allergic to because we sometimes see a strong politic as a ‘hot take,’ something prescriptive… Absolutely…which I think is fair. I think it's good to be skeptical of ‘hot takes.’ I guess I’m circumspectly defending the polemic. I have probably not written very many polemics…I think this piece is a polemic about polemics. I think I’m defending polemics and polemicists that I've enjoyed from being tossed aside—there are pretty few polemicists right now, which is sad to me. I think it’s a really interesting form. I would love to write a polemic. Well, as you said, Herculine is a bit of a “what not to do” thing, but is not trying to tell anyone what to do. Will there be a sequel, or a new book project, that might take that on? I could imagine a kind of Monique Wittig-esque Les Guérillères type thing. Oh yeah, maybe there should be…[laughs]. No, I don’t know. That's definitely not what I'm currently working on. I’m not very pro-sequel. I really like the work of Hayao Miyazaki because I'm sure the temptation for him to do a sequel is strong but he’s so against it. I like how each of his works is a self-contained world. What are you working on right now? I'm currently working on an essay about Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and the new Ryan Murphy show, on her mythology. I am working on a new longform project, but I don't want to say too much. But there is something cooking. Very exciting. The above conversation was conducted by Abby Maxwell, an artist, writer, and gardener based in Tiohtià:ke/ Montreal.Cover image: Grace Byron. Photo by Hunter Abrams.

I annotated Wayne Koestenbaum’s My Lover, the Rabbi, in the middle of February, while I was visiting my boyfriend in Zürich. Each day, I walked to the library and clutched the printed galleys in my hands, sandwiched between my iPhone and a bottle of Swiss Alps water. I spent most of my time with the neurotic-and-slightly manic narrator inside the brute-concrete wing of the Swiss National Museum, or Zürich’s Landesmuseum. From the beginning of the novel, the melody and baroqueness of Koestenbaum’s sentences (sometimes spanning across an entire page) harmonized with my view of the Crystalline-clean Limmat river that I faced. My Lover, the Rabbi, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, on March 17, cascades the lyrical rhythm of language with overtly faggy submission and obsessive adoration toward the one and only center of the narrator’s world: the Rabbi. Hyper-sexed, yet tender, and piercing with passion, it is laced with pompous discoveries, frisky fiction and liturgies of incubated love, reflecting darker, more decadent, gripping, yet distinctly human traits. Set between Hoboken and Charlottesville, Warsaw and the Hamptons, the ornateness of Koestenbaum’s narrator resides in his “mission” to decrypt the bond between him and the rabbi. The 400-page novel reels between flaccid and erect genitals; sermons and sinners; synagogue attractions and “kosher” trips; the rabbi’s hairy chest and narrator’s pull to absorb the unabsorbable—another human being on their own orbit. To the readers of Dennis Cooper and Kevin Killian, or Robert Glück, Koestenbaum’s fiction adds to the legacy of extravaganza-queer writers. The author grants the reader a “gayscape” or “gayage,” of seductive, titillating litanies about a gay love between a fuckable narrator and a less fuckable rabbi. Beyond the corporeal, the novel asserts that the vast unknown of love is a force of human nature so vivid and potent that it may move or detonate mountains. Who are lovers if not another fleeting matter, someone you go into in search of yourself, or who you never wished and wanted to be? The writing of Koestenbaum, a San Jose-born and New York-based poet, critic, fiction writer, painter, filmmaker and performer, spans more than twenty books. His devotees may be familiar with Stubble Archipelago (Semiotex(e), 2024), The Cheerful Scapegoat: Fables (Semiotex(e), 2021), Camp Marmelade (Nightboat Books, 2018), Figure It Out (Soft Skull Press, 2020), Jackie Under My Skin (Picador, 2009), Humiliation (Picador, 2011), Andy Warhol: A Biography (Open Road Media, 2015), and The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality (Grand Central Publishing, 2001). The author’s poems and essays have appeared in Vogue US, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and the London Review of Books. His artistic bravura extends to compelling solo exhibitions of his visual art and musical performances of his improvisatory Sprechstimme soliloquies at the Hammer Museum, Centre Pompidou, Walker Art Center and other venues. He is a distinguished professor of English, French and comparative literature at CUNY. On Zoom, Koestenbaum and I spoke about his new nonchalantly written stream of lust and diaristic phallic adoration. Through the screen, Koestenbaum wore a Pucci-like shirt and his signature square glasses in the same hues. His ubiquitous grandeur and zeal sparked through the entire conversation and peaked when I asked him what he would wear to a fancy literati event. He confided about writers he admires and how poetry shaped his entire life. In a dream on February 23, I kept persuading the author of yet another title. “Perhaps the book,” I said, “should be: My Boyfriend, The Architect.” When I DM-ed Koestenbaum about it, he said: “That’s astonishing!!! My husband is an architect.” Asymmetry, like conflict or ambivalence, generates literature. I mean, literature demands asymmetry. The lascivious sentences in My Lover, the Rabbi emanate with gay poetic gestures, like strokes of painting or a choreography of queer bodies in space between the Hoboken apartment and the Charlottesville of the financier. Your stylistic keyboard is ornate; words and sentences are opulent and baroque-injected. A mélange of jet-set queer private diaristic stories erupt from the pages. Although vividly sexual and manic, the writing never sinks or bottoms out toward the depraved or filthy. Can you tell me about the behind-the-scenes and the writing process for My Lover, the Rabbi? Yes, thank you first for that eloquent, sparkling description. I wrote the first draft of the novel in one burst, over a period of 6 weeks in August and September 2024. I hadn't intended to write a novel; I had finished a book of poems, which has yet to come out, called The Group Tickling Experiment. I had space to think about what I wanted to write next. I had just read two novels: Maurice Blanchot's When the Time Comes, and Constance Debré's Playboy, and I wanted to write something that had honesty and directness, but also a sense of metaphysical and melancholy distance. The first sentence of the book just came to me, and I wrote it down, and I said to myself that I would write 100 sentences just like that, and that I would make a tiny little book with one sentence on each page. And each sentence would begin, “my lover, the rabbi.” I started doing that, and it grew into an actual novel, rather than, in a way, a litany or a serial poem. The novel blossomed from that original, diary-embedded outburst. The first sentence was the DNA of the whole book. And I had no notion, when I began, that there would be characters, or anything like a plot. Writing in the first person, the narrator of the novel is ubiquitously obsessed with all the rabbi’s universe, his fixings, decor, past and present. He says, “My dislike of his body could coexist with my attachment to his body because of the extreme alchemy that his flesh made when it stamped me, sealed me, authorized me to breathe and sleep and wallow and press harder into his body.” His frantic, uncontrolled adoration—almost ceremonial—has a vector of asymmetry. All points to the rabbi, his crotch, his orbit. We don’t know much from the narrator’s background, except that his teen years were a blur and his parents were actors. At one point, I thought the narrator would devour the rabbi, that this would be the end of the rabbi. How essential was this asymmetry, this imbalance, to you? And how were those scenes driven to reach a final crescendo? The asymmetry was essential. The core of the book was that the narrator desired the rabbi, with a ferocious, unsatisfiable intensity. An intensity that would never be, in mortal terms, met or reciprocated. On the other hand, I understood that such an intensity of desire included, as well, a measure of disgust. And so I would need to convey a sense that the narrator also feared and was repulsed by the rabbi. The core asymmetry is that the younger, unnamed narrator, with a sketchy background, with no identifiable personality traits except for his obsessiveness and a certain loftiness of language, desires this rabbi. Asymmetry, like conflict or ambivalence, generates literature. I mean, literature demands asymmetry. The inter-connected gay quest for a family—the adoptive son, Dito, his boyfriend Pablo, the financier Atlas, Dominic the dogwalker, etc. Though fiction, it’s not far from some of the realities that occur in life. The throuple. The young generation of gays is mingling with the older one. There’s push and pull that tie and untie them together. In the novel, there’s a beautiful part when the narrator asks the rabbi about the impossible. In the current political climate, do you believe such a quest for the gay multi-family is possible? Or is it some periphery of the distant, utopian imagination? I feel strongly that the complex, uncategorizable queer family needs to exist, and does already, and is existing all over the place, with new language to describe it, and new confidence felt by the participants in these families. There's an efflorescence of descriptive experiential language surrounding such families. I felt it deeply in the novel. You worked on the novel with your editor, Jackson Howard. How was that experience for you? It was delightful. It's such a luxury to have somebody enter your imaginative world, because the process of writing a novel or writing anything is so lonely and so internal—particularly a novel, because nothing in it exists. And so you're alone as the writer with all these phantoms. It is remarkably consoling when the moment arrives and there is a sane, reasonably objective fellow traveler who can step in and offer advice. I greatly benefited from Jackson's sense of reality. His edits were tactful and not exorbitant or invasive, but they gave me a sense of when I needed to be watchful over certain kinds of temporal and spatial continuities, which are ambiguous enough in this novel. He helped me tether some of these coordinates. There are two book jackets or covers for the novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux released a more stripped-down, abstract version with a rose over the faded pink backdrop. Granta opted for a hairy chest image. As a writer and visual artist, what are your thoughts on the cover and how do you think the two represent the book? What’s your reading of the two? I'm fascinated by both covers. I love both covers. I'm fascinated by the divergence between them. I feel somewhat responsible for that divergence. I was asked by FSG if I had any wishes for the cover, and I think I said that I didn't want any representations of the rabbi. I didn't want people pictured on the cover. I didn't want stereotypically gay or Jewish iconography on the cover. I wanted it to look like a work of severe, molten literature. FSG produced this floral cover, which I love, by Evan Gaffney. I don't think Granta asked what I wanted the cover to be, or maybe they did, but they sent me this cover, designed by Jack Smyth, and asked for my approval. It was so titillating and hilarious that, of course, I said, yes, understanding, too, that in the UK, there's a different semiotics of book covers than in the U.S. And understanding as well that in the U.S, a cover like that Granta cover might not go over as well. It might lead to a sense that my book was a niche book, indistinguishable from soft porn. But the way Granta did it is sexy and witty. And FSG’s cover is also very gender fluid, if we investigate the nature of a rose. Cover for My Lover, The Rabbi (2026) Farrar, Straus and Giroux.  What came to me while I was reading the novel was some scraps of Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe—particularly, the story of her devotion to Jesus. This obsession, the feeling of being submissive to the god-like figure, the iconoclast, feels like an affinity to the relation the narrator has with the rabbi and, somehow, also toward his housemaid and protector, Monica Prague. Have you read Robert Glück’s book? I have read all of, or much of, Robert Glück's published work, and I deeply admire it. I think of him as a compatriot in this zone of a recognizably gay male literature that is nonetheless anti-representational, or that plays with—or toys with—a reader's wish for security. Robert Glück is famously associated with a literary movement, as you know, called New Narrative, and I'm not part of that group exactly, but they're some of my favorite writers. Dennis Cooper, Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian. They're my allies. And so, yes, I definitely think of my book as in conversation with the work of Robert Glück, and also my book, like New Narrative works, is heavily autobiographical, but also entirely fictional. You have previously published ten poetry books and two fiction books. As a writer, what do you feel you can do with fiction that somehow is not perceived with, or you can’t do with poetry? Which genre is sexier to you and why? I'm always more at home as a poet, and becoming a poet was a decision I made very early in my writing life, in my early 20s. I decided to devote myself to poetry rather than to fiction, and that was because I understood that my strengths lay in language play and in semi-surreal, imagistic scenarios. I wasn't as interested in a conventional plot or consistent character and motive. I was also more interested in reading poetry than in fiction. So, I felt a cultural, intellectual, and spiritual alliance with the values of poetry. My Lover, the Rabbi is, in a secret sense, a poem. It is fiction, but it's written with the structure of a poem, in that it's based on intense repetition and on a fealty to the errant law of the voice. There's a line by the poet Frank O'Hara in his poem “Homosexuality,” where he says, “It is the law of my own voice I shall investigate.” That's a poet's credo and it's also the credo of this book. Once the characters began to enter the scene, the book’s nature shifted. It begins more in the realm of a poem: apostrophe, invocation, salute, and love song. But once the people start clogging it up, the tone changes and becomes more, not conventionally fictional, but more recognizably novelistic. Your publicist from FSG, Tracy, shared with me the image of your handwritten first drafts in a pile of colorful notebooks. Do you always handwrite at first? Do you archive these notebooks? I archive everything. My archive up to 2018, except for my diaries, is at the Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. So it is literally archived, and maybe in a couple of years, all the notebooks for My Lover, the Rabbi will also enter the library at Yale. I don't write everything longhand. These days, most of my essays I write on a keyboard. I dictate sometimes. In the last few years, I've often dictated my essays into my phone and then transcribed them and edited them. My diaries are always longhand, and I began this novel in my diary. I stopped writing my actual diary for a few weeks, and I just started keeping the novel in notebooks as if I were simply continuing to write in my private diary. Then I typed it all up and started editing it. In the past, I was very devoted to actual typewriters. And I still miss them. In your interview with Ben Shields from The Paris Review (March 15, 2018) over Camp Marmelade, your poetry collection, you talked about figures like Gertrude Stein and Susan Sontag. You also said you’re a reader of Dennis Cooper and one of my favorites: Elfriede Jelinek. What’s your relationship with their writing? Yes, I really love Elfriede Jelinek's books. They are difficult and weird. They are not cozy. They are volcanic. They are astute in their analysis of gender and cultural politics, and they are relentlessly visceral to an ugly extent. And I identify with that tropism toward the visceral. She's a real role model of mine. Did you see The Piano Teacher? Oh, yes, many times. That's a very important film to me. Not only because I'm a pianist, and I've had many piano teachers, but because I am an Isabelle Huppert completist. Toward the end of the novel, the phallic-driven scenes and their extreme alchemy—“each time I rubbed my body along his coil-rich body, I was siphoning funds from my diminishing nest egg,” seem to warp into more inner-and-reflective-fueled periphery. The rabbi dies in the fire. The narration softens. It’s more intimate. The narrator still tries to comprehend what had happened to the rabbi, his death and his wish of the impossible—undying. It’s a beautiful and deeply touching ending. He finally seems to detonate his obsessive submission, as though the fire purged and melted his encrusted heart. How have you approached the end of the novel? In general, I plotted the novel a day at a time. I would write little notes before each composition session. Each day, I would write fragmentary indications about what was going to happen next, what loose ends needed to be dealt with. As the writing progressed toward the climax, those notes got longer and longer, and I deliberated a lot over what would happen. I didn’t know how the book would end, until I finally wrote the last scenes. In fact, I remember considering the book finished right before the last section. The lines with which the book originally ended were Chapter 187, the penultimate chapter of the book. But then I felt a sense of restlessness, and the next day I wrote the truly final chapter, number 188. It's almost a musical feeling that I am familiar with from writing poetry, where you sense that there are still some beats missing in the phrase. When I wrote the end of chapter 187, the plot had ended, but I felt the need for another melodic trespass. Another gesture. Another leap across the stage. Even if it was a surreal leap. That was a beautiful part of that dream that he had, or whatever it was. And it's also a great momentum, where it kind of peaks, and then it just collapses, cocoons itself. Now I'm also thinking about the use of the symbolic number 6, which appears in the novel. The events in the rabbi's past formed the investigative core of the book. A lot of the plot is about delving into the rabbi’s repressed, mysterious prehistory. Those materials seemed governed by magical logic, magical reasoning. And to that extent, the numerological play is also a function of sorcery, or alchemy, or superstition. So I don't have a fixed symbolic program for what the recurrence of the number 6 means in my novel, but I'm aware of the number’s biblical significance. I felt that the rabbi's past, which is never very easily documented, has, for me, as it did for the narrator, a sensation of sky-writing, or ancient relics found in Pompeii. What are your favorite gay/queer novels? And what books are on your nightstand? Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten, even though people don't consider him a queer writer. To me, he is, and that book is really queer. It's about an obedience school. Others would be Gertrude Stein's A Long Gay Book and A Novel of Thank You. Neither of those, of course, are strictly speaking novels, but she calls them novels, and so there they are. Also, I would add her novel, Lucy Church Amiably. Those are three very important queer books. But also Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher because it covers all the bases of perversion. The novels of Dennis Cooper, aforementioned. Jane Bowles' Two Serious Ladies. A deep favorite of mine. All the novels of Willa Cather, especially The Song of the Lark. James Baldwin's Another Country and Giovanni's Room. Some of the essays of Hilton Als in his book White Girls are essentially fiction. Jamaica Kincaid's book, My Brother, is an autobiography, a memoir of her brother. It’s not fiction but it’s novelistic and it's a very queer book. (So is her Autobiography of My Mother.) She's one of my favorite writers. The book on my night table right now is Kincaid's Talk Stories. This is a collection of her New Yorker Talk of the Town pieces. Now I’m in the middle of reading Modern Woman, a book of poetry by Edith Södergren, translated by CD Eskilson, published by World Poetry. What kind of columns have you written for Vogue? That was a really long time ago. I wrote small pieces for a section called, People Are Talking About. I think the first thing I wrote was a tiny essay about the photo of the actor Jeanne Moreau on the cover of a Miles Davis CD, the soundtrack for a Louis Malle movie, Elevator to the Gallows. I interviewed the movie star Alec Baldwin, the opera diva Renee Fleming, and Vanessa Redgrave. Some of these pieces are collected in my first book of essays, Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars, and Aesthetics. You’re invited to the VIP literati event and dinner. It may seem like a drag but you know you must go. You can take three of your friends. What would you wear and who would you take? There's a little Comme des Garçons shop around the block from me, and I would go to Comme des Garçons, and clearly, someone else is providing me a clothes budget for this VIP event. As Vogue editor Anna Wintour said in a recent New York Times interview, “To be clear, Jessica, we have a very healthy budget at Vogue.” I would buy tight velvet pants, a floral shirt, and a hat. I definitely need hats. And I would buy a little purse—a white, shiny pocketbook. I have a necklace of Murano glass that I bought in Venice several years ago, and I would wear that, just like Anna Wintour does. She wears layers of necklaces. I would definitely bring my editor, Jackson Howard, and my UK editor from Granta, Daniel Bird, and my agent, PJ Mark. If I'm only allowed to bring dead people, I would certainly bring Emily Dickinson and James Baldwin, because I know they would get along. I know he could really work his charm on Emily Dickinson. I would bring Susan Sontag, though she might make a pass at Emily Dickinson, and literary history would be forever changed. The above conversation was conducted by Filip Jakab, a writer and editor based in Brussels.Editorial support by Hannah Bullock. Cover image: Wayne Koestenbaum. Photo by Jan Rattia. Sourced via.

In the wake of what has been termed the "livestreamed genocide" in Gaza, images of Palestinian suffering have saturated our screens with an unprecedented persistence and immediacy. Yet these images demand something different from us. This conversation with scholar and writer Milka Njoroge brings us into the heart of her urgent question: “What demands do images of suffering place on our viewing practices?” As Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University whose dissertation explored the colonial logics undergirding humanitarian imagery, Njoroge brings a critical lens to understanding how Palestinians' own documentation of genocide represents both continuity with and rupture from historical modes of visual witnessing. The interview traces a path from Njoroge’s own research on nineteenth and twentieth century “humanitarian” images‚ and their role in establishing hierarchies of humanity, their mobilization of Christian missionary work, scientific racism, and up to the present moment, tackling the consumption and circulation of images of suffering in the digital sphere. Njoroge’s research and scholarly work sets up a fundamental challenge to what images can do. When Palestinians film their own survival, their clearing of rubble, their steadfast rebuilding amid systematic demolition, makes visible not only Israel’s genocidal warfare but Palestinian refusal to disappear. The conversation moves between theoretical precision and political urgency, between questions of digital circulation and questions of global solidarity. As an interlocutor Njoroge guides us through the reading of images as a condition to heed the call for action from Palestinians, and to connect this moment to expansive histories of resistance in Palestine, from the symbolic weight of the key of return to contemporary practices of life-making under the constant threat of annihilation. What makes this exchange particularly valuable is its refusal of easy answers. Rather than offering a definitive framework for how to view images of suffering, the conversation models a practice of sitting with discomfort, of resisting both “compassion fatigue” and the liberal impulse to collapse difference. It asks us to understand Palestinian image-making not as a plea for inclusion in "the human family" but as an invitation to participate in the abolition of colonial modernity itself. We are able to see, and what I'm also trying to argue is that if Palestinians themselves are documenting this suffering, then it is a call for us to also engage differently with these images. We cannot use the old imperial way of looking at these images. We now have to ask: how are the terms different? The legacy of Palestinian resistance against colonialism from day one has been to record, to document the brutalities of occupation, colonialism, genocides, the violences that have continued. I think back on a documentary I saw that was specifically on the occupation in the West Bank, directed by the prolific Muhammad Bakri called Jenin Jenin, it came out in 2002, it was a remarkable moment for me. The film is about the horrors committed by Israel that had just occurred in Jenin, a city in the West Bank. We saw the destruction and the bulldozing of the area, and the atrocities that ensued. I remember at the time, I was living in Montreal, and after the screening the people around me didn't want to watch stuff like that. They said things like this is too much, I don't want to see this. People didn't want to encounter the image. There was a refusal to see or hear the witnesses, to confront the reality of the situation on the ground through what was being depicted on screen. That moment marked something for me, it was a mix of pain, sadness, and frustration. I'm curious to know your thoughts around this for thinking through and with images because of your scholarship and writing, and all the discussions we've had together regarding the genocide in Gaza and in the West Bank.1 We really need to contend with this term of the “livestreamed genocide.” Why is it being called that? Why livestreamed? How is watching what is occurring different this time? But first, can you introduce your current research and the new text you wrote called “What demands do images of suffering place on our viewing practices?” My dissertation was primarily preoccupied with humanitarian images, that is, images of war, atrocity, genocide, and other conflicts that are intended to stir an emotional response that moves audiences to action. Humanitarian images have historically been produced and circulated as objects for sympathetic identification with the sufferer and as mechanisms for establishing distance between the fortunate and unfortunate. Christian sensibilities thus constructed codes that distinguished whose lives were grievable and whose were not. My dissertation was primarily preoccupied with images of female circumcision from Finnish photojournalist Meeri Koutaniemi among the Maasai people in Narok, Kenya, to consider Finland’s self-presentation and its messy entanglements with colonialism. In my theoretical analysis, I read a lot on humanitarian images because I wanted to situate Koutaniemi’s photojournalistic practices within a broader context of humanitarian visuality. For example, when famine struck the subcontinent of India in the late 19th century, white Christian missionaries in India embraced iconographies of suffering as sufficient visual depictions for alerting their U.S-based congregants to the horrors of the famine and as a simultaneous motivation for almsgiving. So the images played a very important tool for mobilizing a kind of Christian sensibility. This is not to say that Koutaniemi’s images of female circumcision are the same as those of starving Indians, but to highlight the kind of logic that underpins both contexts. In this sense, the circulatory practices of humanitarian images reinforce a kind of narrative that determines boundaries of belonging. And as Sylvia Wynter describes, Judeo-Christianity needed to establish this separation because that was the only way there could be a relation. So that's where I began. So, how I came to think about images of Palestinians, and especially in the wake of October ‘23 and the genocide, was because my dissertation looked at analog humanitarian photography. I was very intent on not thinking about the digital circulation of images because this kind of digital humanitarian visuality we are experiencing requires a more expansive analysis that I wanted to explore after my dissertation defense. So when images started coming out of Palestine in 2023 and were instantaneously and simultaneously shared on various social media platforms, there was a sense of “compassion fatigue” as well. This feeling of helplessness, while the demands of our other lives must continue, and where the images kept coming, and their production was rapid, instantaneous, and simultaneous, demanded, I think, a different kind of analysis. And I want to emphasize that these are images many of us have witnessed. Images I need not describe here because readers know what we are both talking about. I wanted to think about what the internet enables and what the accelerated advance of digital technologies makes possible. I found myself torn between competing interpretations: do they enable a kind of unthinking resharing, an almost automatic redistribution? I was particularly nervous about the phrase "livestream genocide." As someone who watches many YouTube videos, I knew the word "livestream" primarily through influencer YouTubers, where streaming has become its own category of visual consumption. The questions I was asking myself were: does calling it a livestream genocide undermine the genocide part of it? Does this framing merge body and technology in a way that makes Palestinian subjectivity disappear? Those are great questions. Wow. To invoke this question of does the term “livestreamed genocide” detract us from the genocide? I also wanted to add that what emerged from my asking this question, of what the word “livestream” enables or deters, led me to a published paper in Antipode called “On Grassroots Witnessing: Gaza and the Terrain of an Epistemic Intifada”. Who wrote it? Patrick Anthony and Gada Dimashk. You referenced them? Yes, I referenced them. And this is an article that really made me rethink my wanting to be repulsed by the term livestreamed genocide, because for them, the argument is that livestreamed genocide is also about Palestinians themselves documenting the genocide. This is their way of telling the world. I think what they argue in the article is that digital technologies also provided an avenue for Palestinians themselves to document, and to do so through “grassroots witnessing.” We are able to see, and what I'm also trying to argue is that if Palestinians themselves are documenting this suffering, then it is a call for us to also engage differently with these images. We cannot use the old imperial way of looking at these images. We now have to ask: how are the terms different? Yes. This is part of the call from Palestinians in Palestine that they're documenting and making evidence of what they are experiencing and what they are witnessing. While they are running from one bombed out building to another to save their relatives from under the rubble, they're also filming. If they are doing that work to expose this reality to the world, then what is our responsibility in receiving it? What is our responsibility, and how do we sharpen our ethics now? How do we sharpen our viewing practices so that they are not just informed by a liberal form of compassion fatigue? Or what Wendy Hesford calls “a professed egalitarianism,” which is trying to collapse Palestinians into a liberal humanism, rather than paying attention to Palestinian subjectivity. And as you say, as they are escaping the bombs, saving their loved ones, and pursuing many life-affirming and life-making strategies, they're also filming it and consistently uploading images and videos! There isn't a break. It's not like it's one video or image once every few months. It's multiple every day. And I think for me, I think the call is to reorient our senses, almost like even when we think about the eye, the eye as an organ that is not passive, but as an active organ, that whenever lights hit the eye, something is happening to be able to perceive that image. What does that mean for us to participate in this viewing, but also to make demands or several demands, in order to end the genocide, for the end of colonial modernity? We also must carry the call and like you said, start to activate these demands. Yeah. And I was also thinking right now as you're talking, there's another Antipode article that I came across by Kahlid Dader and Mikko Joronen titled “Fitful Infrastructures: Dwelling with Infrastructural Elimination in Gaza”. I appreciated this article for the way it describes how even when Israel is producing the edge of collapse, Palestinians are still working with and against this collapse of infrastructures. And we know this because Palestinians themselves are filming these videos where they go back to their bombed homes and clean the rubble. And living with this edge of collapse and urbicide, facilitated by Israel’s settler-colonial project, makes living a relentless and fragile endeavour. I watched this documentary on Al Jazeera about the political ramifications of the Balfour Declaration, a sustained zionist effort where Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homeland. One of the subjects of the documentary was the keys that Palestinians kept to their homes, and the symbolic and literal meanings behind them: to go back, to clear the rubble, to reestablish life again. Yes, the Palestinian Return. The Palestinian Return. Yes. [...] we should think of humanitarian images as invitations to participate in the abolition of colonial modernity. Rather than resisting these images, we must sit with them and engage in a different epistemology of the image. Yes, and I do want to put emphasis on that: the constant way in which Palestinians have rebuilt and rebuilt and rebuilt and rebuilt despite all these attempts at annihilation. We know this isn't the first time that Gaza is bombed. We know this isn't the first time that Gaza is destroyed. The shock is in how extreme and accelerated the complete destruction and razing of Gaza’s life sustaining infrastructures (I think the Israeli army wiped out 94% of Gaza’s infrastructure). We are watching this colonial project unfold in real-time as they attempt to completely extinguish life by completely demolishing infrastructures that sustain it. But Palestinians continue to rebuild and return, despite it all. This is the legacy of Palestinian resistance. Yes, absolutely. The first time, I started to understand what return means, not just as a literal return, but also the symbolism of the key to the home, and holding onto this key, for decades - is this idea that return emphasizes the temporality of colonialism. There are limits to the settler colonial project – its attempt at permanence. This is undermined by the Palestinian return. In order for the settler colonial project to establish a kind of permanence, it has to keep producing this image, to keep producing the story of violence, because it feels that it's constantly under threat. And that is something I've come to understand from thinking with Françoise Debrix’s work in his book The Global Powers of Horror: Security, Politics, and the Body in Pieces. He argues that permanent security is maintained by katechontic power which he describes as the instituting of military restraint as a way of fending off the threat to its theologically-ordained sovereignty. And so, I was trying to apply this theoretical formulation to understand how Israel’s settler colonial project is sustained by this nervous condition where Palestinians represent an entity that needs to be kept at bay through highly technologized and brutalizing efforts. This also means that, across the globe, we understand that we have to constantly be in solidarity with Palestinians, not just for Palestinians, but also for ourselves. Exactly. That's what makes for a more expansive solidarity. Palestine is showing us to what extent the larger colonial project is still very much at play. I cannot bear to hear the word “decolonize”. Feels violent to use such terms when others are suffering and dying because of another genocide caused by a massive colonial invasion that other colonial powers are invested in. And this allows us to also think about how the logic of settler colonialism is particular for Israel, but also we can map it on other colonial projects. We can map it in South Africa, Kenya, Namibia, Australia, Canada, and the US because its logic is to establish a sense of permanence. And when it cannot do that, it has to eliminate the threat. And eliminating the threat also means all the ways that Israel has been able to get so many Western countries to support its “anti-terror project,” where Hamas is solely designated as a terrorist group. So this way of thinking about Palestinian presence as a constant threat to Israel's own ontological narration undermines the way Israel understands itself as an everlasting project. Yes. This is brilliant. By the presence of Palestinians and by the presence of all subaltern groups, Israel is constantly reminded that it is not an everlasting project. Absolutely. That presence fractures the timescape of the colonial process. Which brings me to the kind of last prompt I had. I feel like you touched on it a bit, but yeah. Can you speak to how documentation, image making, image distribution, dissemination, recording through images has been key to Palestinian resistance and to the discourse of how evidence is collected through what Palestinians have filmed or photographed themselves. How does that help us situate the genocide in the context of today's colonialism and settler expropriation of land? What do these images do to break from, as you say, colonial visuality? By way of answering that question, I also wanted to return to a film we watched during your Open Secret screening series at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre: A Fidai Film by Kamal Aljafari. There was no dialogue in the film. It's just sonically a film that really captures, and deliberately so, the viewer's attention by demonstrating how archival footage can act as a counter-visual film that refuses erasure and colonial amnesia. It came out in 2024. These images and reels of documentation belonged to the Palestine Research Centre in Beirut that the Israeli army raided in 1982. The film left me not only reflective but also searching. I remember asking where the filmmaker was. I wanted to hear what they thought. I had questions, and the filmmaker was not there to answer them. In that absence, I found myself experiencing a nervousness familiar to graduate student researchers: the impulse to collect, collect, collect, to hear enough so that I could calm my own discomfort. Yet the film was remarkable precisely because it combined and transformed an archive of footage, editing it and compiling it without dialogue, without the filmmaker present to answer questions. This raised a crucial question for me: what is my responsibility as a viewer here? Beyond that, how do we think about the dissemination and distribution of the images we are seeing now? After October 2023, I wanted all of them to mean one thing—I wanted to see them all as colonial modernity at once. It took me one year to recognize that the technology Palestinians are using is the same technology through which I was viewing these images on Instagram. I found myself deeply conflicted because my previous research had taught me that the trouble with images of suffering lies in how they're produced and the speed with which they're reproduced. But what was I to do when the reproduction continued for one year, when it did not stop in October 2023? I had to confront my own affective nervousness about these images. Riffing off Jacques Rancière's concept, I had to sit with “the intolerable image,” asking myself: the image is still here, new images keep coming, so what now? Actually, they got worse and worse because the violence got worse and worse. Each day was worse than the other. What does it mean to hear that today is worse than yesterday? This question leads to considerations of image confirmation and evidence. Perhaps one way to think about evidence is to turn it on its head and return to the concept of “grassroots witnessing”—evidence that does not pursue a deterministic frame. Our responsibility as viewers is not to see these images merely to confirm our superiority as people who live in the West or elsewhere, who are not undergoing or being subjected to colonial annihilatory violence. What these images must do—what I refer to as breaking with colonial visuality—is refuse to confirm what anthropological scientists once did: establishing that non-Christians and non-Europeans were inferior to Europeans. We must reject that premise of the humanitarian image. Instead, we should think of humanitarian images as invitations to participate in the abolition of colonial modernity. Rather than resisting these images, we must sit with them and engage in a different epistemology of the image. This is why I insist that our viewing practices must break away from colonial visuality. They cannot perform the scientific measurement that race scientists once applied to such images. And you're saying that this is what you feel like might be the difference this time? Yes. Absolutely. And also, that because of the acceleration of technology, well, not that we ever do away with technology altogether, but can we reorder the world? Can we create a whole new world that is not informed by colonial modernity? Yes. Because it is not only for a liberated Palestine, but it is also a liberation of all colonized peoples. It's a relational solidarity as you and I have been talking about. Yes. Liberation for a new world to come. We’re in the “long middle of revolution” as the poet Fargo Tbakhi would say. Yes. And I think that is what the images are supposed to do, to situate us in the long middle of the revolution by inciting us to action and in solidarity with colonized peoples everywhere. The above conversation was conducted by Nasrin Himada, a Palestinian curator and writer. Himada was a 2025 editorial resident with Public Parking. This is their final contribution as part of a four-part creative exploration with our publication. Read Himada's previous features here, here and here.Special thank you to Milka Njoroge for participating so generously in the above conversation.Cover image: Film still from A Fidai Film dir. Kamal Aljafari 2024 © kamal aljafari productions.

Have any of you ever imagined logging into your Cloud to find your phone after your death? The strangeness and a sheer, frantic-like ineffability of it? Would a ghost remember a password? Would it qualify for a face recognition app? Perhaps not. I mean, how would or could we? How could we know that? Inside the bardo realm of Amie Barrodale’s novel Trip (2025), Sandra—the protagonist’s soul or its clumsy scraps—attempts to access her former Cloud on her laptop. The habitual memory of what’s left of her reels in between the astral realm of death and rebirth. Within a baffling waiting room with a tapestry of bizarre shapeless entities and spaceless anti-matter, she experiences a perpetual drifting hallucination: all’s twisted and helter-skelter. As though an eidolon from another sphere—never starving, never sleeping, Sandra finds herself always lurking among wispy realities. Hence, quite likely, facial recognition software would not perceive the presence of a nocturnal “bardo-normie.” At least not yet. Such is the karmic sap that sifts through Trip (2025), Amie Barrodale’s first novel published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. A writer and editor, Barrodale is the author of You Are Having a Good Time: Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), a critically acclaimed, unsettling short-story collection of compressed tales that expose the chaotic, hidden desires of its characters. You Are Having a Good Time was named a Best Book of 2016 by the Wall Street Journal, Vulture, Financial Times, and Guardian. In January 2026, Trip was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. It was selected as one of the New York Times’s Notable Books of the Year and one of The New Yorker’s Essential Reads. Barrodale’s stories and essays have appeared in publications including The Paris Review, Harper’s Magazine, VICE, and McSweeney’s. In 2012, she was awarded The Paris Review’s George Plimpton Prize for Fiction for her story “William Wei,” the first of her ten stories in You Are Having a Good Time. From 2014 to 2017, she served as the fiction editor of VICE, shaping a program that brought together established and emerging writers in an unlikely setting. To the ones who read the novel: There’s a before and after Trip. As a reader, you linger from one surreal perception to another. You’re looking through a person’s fingers and flesh, their former self, the soul-substance, and what’s left out of it, occasionally awakening to pinch yourself and possibly question your own existence. You are exercising to unfear it for whatever it is. Straddling the unhinged and the mundane, the incompleteness and unpredictability of life, Amie Barrodale’s Trip will clench you by your mind’s throat. During our early February tête-à-tête Zoom, Barrodale (raised Buddhist in Texas) and I spoke about the birth and behind-the-scenes of writing Trip. Publishing her second book nearly ten years after the initial success of her first, the author’s aura emanates from the pages with stark, comfortable interiority. “I like messier sentences now,” she said. I mean, that's the truth about motherhood. [...] In some ways, you just can’t win as a parent. Your first book, You Are Having a Good Time: Stories (2016), is a collection of 10 short stories. Trip (2025) is your first novel. There’s a shared, interlinked eeriness present in both books. But how different was writing Trip? How did you come up with its premise? I’m asking because I’ve never read anything describing a mother-son relationship and the bardo of such a surreal and unsettling, “impish” fiction. The novel really left me wide-awake in a great awe. I was in Kathmandu with my son when he was one year old, and my Buddhist teacher invited us to breakfast. He is a film director, and suggested that we should work on a novel together, a love story set in the bardo. I thought it was a good idea, but he just never wanted to talk about it again after that. I would email him some thoughts, no answer. I would write something, like Bradley Cooper in his living room on a spaceship or whatever I was thinking the bardo would be at that time. Nothing. So I started to write the book myself, but over time I realized that I wasn't really interested in romantic love at all, probably because I had a small child. And slowly the novel became about a mother and son, probably because that was where my head was at the time. From the beginning of the novel, there are several dramatic indications—as though bad omens are foreshadowing Sandra’s early death. It’s in a short detail when Trip plays with his phone and says, “It’s this game where you go inside people’s bodies. You can help them.” Afterwards, the whole journey to the local naga cave felt like a huge warning for Sandra. A picture of a snake is nailed to the wall in the hut. Then a rung from the ladder snaps. Sandra eats from the sacred vine—“I took food in the dark realm.” Before she tries to pass through the cave, she asks if she fits, and a shrine keeper says, “Only sinners cannot pass.” But she gets stuck there and fears this is her death. Except her actual death is quite comical—in its low-key bluntness, but the process of dying is written with a stellar plasticity! I loved the irritation of that hard-core, wry-wrought humor and softer sentient parts which felt “tectonic,” like grinding plates. And I wonder how you have intended to write that death build up? Was this something that you wanted to play with and construct through the narrative arc of the novel? I felt that for Sandra’s death to be plausible, I had to prepare readers for it. Actually, I had this agent ten years ago who really annoyed me once. She criticized one of my stories, saying that the problem with it was that there was no foreshadowing. That seemed like the most stupid thing I'd ever heard. Like, are we in eighth-grade English? What are you talking about? But it stayed with me, and I slowly came around to her point. In a story, we do need to have an idea of what's coming. Such an ordinary death of slipping on the hair brush felt wicked, and at the same time, it’s written with a great sense of hedonism, chaos and relief collaged altogether. More untethered was how you marveled at the whole process of Sandra’s dying. The hairbrush thing was borrowed from life. I knew a woman who died slipping in the shower. I'm a bit out there in some ways, and I do have friends who claim that they can speak to someone after they've died. One of them said she spoke to this woman, and the woman said, “At first I was really confused, but then I figured out what had happened.” That always stayed with me, because it sounded so true. It sounded like what someone would say after dying that way. Also, I have an acquaintance who almost died that way. He slipped in a hotel room, and had a really bad injury. So it just seemed plausible to me. That plausibility, precisely, was a great part of it. Because, as readers, we could identify with it. It was comical, but it was also very mundane in a way that this could happen to anyone. Yes, I think it is a common way to die. A quintessential element is the novel’s complicated mother-son relationship. The introspection we’re granted as readers. The bizarre and wry parts rebound in the more slowed and mundanely familial. Sandra’s made to understand that her son needed to be a different person, and that it was her job to change him. A maternal nexus clashes with what society expects from a mother, and how Sandra experiences it—that is a very unique portal into her character. She feels watched, evaluated, and judged on what kind of mother she is to Trip. It pressurizes and moves the story further. What was your construct behind this? I mean, that's the truth about motherhood. These descriptions are taken from life, mostly. In some ways, you just can’t win as a parent. I remember once, my son began to despise the place we took him for play therapy. He just was done. At first, we tried to work through it. Maybe we come five minutes late, we enter through the back. Maybe the speech therapist comes to the car and escorts him in. Just quick fixes. At one point, the people who run the clinic asked for a meeting with us, and they’d made this whole slideshow with this bullshit ladder of developmental needs. And at the bottom of the ladder, the first rung, was something called “felt safety.” And they said to us—and they believed it too, which was the worst part—that our son didn’t have felt safety. And we asked, you know, what are you talking about, and they told us he was afraid to come into their clinic. Like… they couldn’t see that maybe this had something to do with their clinic. No, it went back to our original failure as parents. And that’s something you’re dealing with all the time. I really hoped that Sandra would ultimately meet with Trip. I imagined that while he’s lost at sea, decrypting the stars in the night sky, he could draw some inner connection to his dead mother, whom he doesn’t know is dead. Despite that, Trip is portrayed as a highly sentient teenager, and a sense of eerie mirroring runs between the two of them. Trip’s knowledge of stars and objects in the universe is somehow metaphorical to how the novel operates in a realm of Sandra reeling in the bardo. Trip says: “The night sky itself is associated with Kali, goddess of death and destruction. But then they also say she is love itself,” and “I looked it up once, and read that it is a mistake, thinking that life is about being happy—that it is much more interesting than that.” and “He listened to the water. He thought if he listened to it long enough, it would reveal ancient wisdom.” I thought that Trip is more prone to perceive his dead mother. Was this “mirroring” essential to you? Yes, initially I planned for her to get to him inside of Donald’s body, but then I felt that was misleading. I didn’t want to suggest that if you really really try hard, you can reach the life you left behind. Also, if she were to reach him, that wouldn’t be the greatest parenting, or the greatest representation of life. I think in life, you can’t fix things for your children. I did let her influence him. She does get a message to him, you know. Through Donald. I guess like, this life, this being, this Amie and this Filip, are doomed. We’re going to die. But whatever awareness is experiencing us… whatever that is… is going nowhere. The dialogues radiate with quirkiness and loom with a madcap, wry energy. Even the seemingly most normcore exchange plummets into a tragicomedy, a satire, a loony place to feel. And I had a great time laughing a lot! Whether I’m thinking of Sandra and her colleagues at the death conference, the caretaker and Trip’s teachers, then Trip and Anthony’s journey, and Sandra’s new consciousness with various bizarre deities in the bardo. The crow and Sandra’s incomprehensible talk when she’s inside Donald’s body. That wit and wryness—is this something you consciously employ to “enlighten” and de-sentiment the story? Or do you regard it as something inherited in your writing in general? What do you think of it? Maybe a little bit. It’s who I am. I used to go see stand-up comedy in my twenties. I remember one time we had sort of attached ourselves to David Cross’s table. For some reason, I decided it would be a good idea to make him say out loud what he was thinking. I was like, “Hold on. Do I drink too much?” And he was like, “Amie. Yes.” I don’t know why I feel like telling that now. There’s something very specific about the uncanny craft of your sentences, which are, at times, cut short to deliver the profound “high.” But what’s even more enthralling is how you leave “chapters in a hang.” Each seems to hang in an open suspense, perhaps semi-finished; some are at their bleakest. Like hanging off the crumbling cliff—edging the reader to nudge further and through. From 2014 to 2017, you were the VICE fiction editor. How do you feel this role has contributed to or formed your fiction? When I was an editor, I was a lot more in touch with what would be interesting to read. I was opening a lot of things and starting them. I wanted my work to be immediate; I wanted it to be scene-driven, to move quickly. But now I'm getting all the vices of writers I used to be impatient with. I'm comfortable with interiority, and I like things that go long. I like messier sentences now. I don’t know why. It just appeals to me now. That’s interesting because I find your sentences stylistically nifty. And that niftiness is quite perceptible, and it culminates at the finish lines of some chapters. What do you mean by nifty? What I mean by niftiness or nifty in connection to your writing is a craft the author develops, or possesses and it becomes their very own DNA. A hallmark. Like a stream that runs through their mind and hands, without them perhaps really registering it, at first. Can you give me an example, maybe? “Trip found the star called Algol. ‘The demon's head,’ he said. ‘Okay,’ Anthony said. ‘Good.’ He stood, unsure what to do. Trip took the wheel. Anthony said, ‘I'll bring back some hard alcohol.” I just opened a random page to point to such an example. I don’t know. I remember once interviewing Renata Adler. I came in with a lot of specific questions about her work, and she deflected them all. So we ended up gossiping the whole time. She asked to cut the gossip, so I had nothing to send my editor but pages and pages of me saying, “Why’d you do this?” and her saying, “I’m not sure.” And he said I’d basically spent thousands of dollars to ask a fish over and over again what it’s like to be wet. While reading Trip, I have been thinking about “longevity,” and how this term invades and operates in public spaces and media now. It’s quite alarming and panic-striking. However, with the novel, you ponder and vector toward the contrary of that experience. Like, into a forever escape room. To me, the novel is less about transformation and more about transcendence. A vaster, cyclic and spiritual form of the soul’s longevity. Rei Kawakubo, a Japanese fashion designer (Comme des Garçons), was once asked how she wanted to be remembered. She replied, “I want to be forgotten.” And I’m bringing this up because forgetting and letting go is one of the ingredients the protagonist and deities fear but undergo in the novel. Eventually, they’re consumed by it, they’re swallowed by time. You wrote a book about bardo, afterlife, and rebirth in a world that’s obsessed with physical longevity, and seems mostly performatively-transcendental. How do you think about and relate to that? Does that affect your writing? At one point before my son was born, I went up to a drupchen in Maratika, this remote area of Nepal, and the Rinpoche leading the retreat said something about long life being unattainable, but deathlessness being in reach. This is based on a memory of something that I heard a long time ago. But I feel your question is touching on that. I guess like, this life, this being, this Amie and this Filip, are doomed. We’re going to die. But whatever awareness is experiencing us… whatever that is… is going nowhere. Book cover for Trip (2025). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.  What really got me was when Sandra’s consciousness in the bardo revisits her past and then tries to locate her iPhone. Such parts to me were truly crispy, like this one: “I went upstairs to the bedroom. I opened my laptop to do 'find my phone,' but the cloud wasn’t accepting my password.” How have you imagined what souls-in-waiting in bardo do? It came slowly. I researched what the Tibetan Buddhist idea of it would be. And it changed. Initially, I had a view that it would be crazier, more like a story of Jacob's Ladder. As if everything were changing all the time. I thought it had to be like that, because I've read that. I think I mentioned this a few times in the book, that when you think of a place in that realm, you're there. I thought it would just have to be like changing channels all the time. But then, as I researched it more, I started to feel like it might be more normal. Like a normal part of life. What’s really startling in the book is how you imagined and wrote the surreal descriptions in the consciousness of the dead Sandra in the bardo. Creatures with tentacles surrounded by flames, ghouls, spirits, deities, a dog’s digestive tract, a woman with the head of a horse, the dead waiter, owl-faced lady, a man with a dull black crow’s wing instead of his arm, or “a pyramid who feels stupefied—physically dirty and lethargic.” At one point in the bardo, Sandra is not even sure if she was a man or a woman; she has only a memory of her hands. The surreal intensifies toward the end when Sandra switches with another soul inside Donald’s body. The whole descriptive tract is totally madcap, I mean, it’s just insanely great. A kind of fourth dimension penetrates the narration. There’s this liquidity of some sort hazing the novel. It reminded me of some of Remedios Varo and Dali’s paintings, perhaps even Hilma af Klint. Were you working with some visual maps while writing a novel? Those weirder characters were some of the first ones that I wrote. That was when I thought the bardo had to be crazy. And I kept some of them. That waiter, he came at the very end, and I really liked him. The crow is from one of Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche’s talks about the bardo. One of the examples he used was that you might suddenly have a crow's claw. You might be putting a sock onto your claws, finding it’s not working, but not feeling bothered about it. In the novel, Larry, one of the academics refers to The Shining by Stephen King, and a movie by Stanley Kubrick. Some scenes in the novel brought the utmost neo-Hitchcockian perspective. I had flashes of films like Birth (2004), Ghost (1990), or even Transcendence (2014). My unconscious was perhaps registering them as references while I read, although these movies are totally Hollywoodized. Have you seen them? What have you recently watched? I haven't seen Birth and Transcendence. I've seen Ghost. One thing I think Ghost does really well is, right after—Is it Patrick Swayze? Right after he dies, he sees these other ghosts wandering around. A woman who's dropped her son off at school, sort of just wandering through a cemetery stops and waves at him, and I think that's really good. I think they really got that right. I also saw Enter the Void (2009) from Gaspar Noé. It was helpful, because he started out with a character doing DMT. I was like, oh, this is so stupid, and then I cut my DMT scene. You have studied and adapted a selection of traditional Buddhist writings. Apart from that, I’m curious what other literary writers and works have influenced your writing. And, what have you been reading recently? I really have been liking Ben Lerner. I know people get annoyed when I say that, because everybody knows him and everybody likes him, but I came to him late, because when 10:04 came out, I was so jealous that I couldn't read it, and I was able to read it just a year ago. Then I started reading all his stuff. And I've been enjoying that. I finally read Don DeLillo this year, and I liked him. Oh, which one from DeLillo? I read White Noise and Mao II. Actually, I was a little disappointed, maybe because I spent my whole life hearing about them and starting to read them, but not finishing them. And when I finally finished them, I was like, “Oh. Okay. I mean, sure.” We were exchanging DMs about Szalay’s Flesh. You read it, too, right? Yes, I read that. I loved it. He's a unique writer. For a while, I lost interest when he married that woman. The scene when they’re at the estate sitting by the pool got me nervous. But I finished it and felt a little bit destroyed. I admired what he did, but it made me nauseated and afraid, also. I really liked Susan Minot’s Don't Be a Stranger. She’s a special writer. What I really liked about the book was that she's writing about an uneven relationship. A 53-year-old woman is in love with a younger man. And when it gets to the part where he's pulling away, I feel like most people just can't bear to write that. They exaggerate it, or they gloss over it. The experience of being abject is just too painful and too embarrassing to see clearly, but she does it. I was wondering what you would do if you got a proposal to turn Trip into a script and film. Would you consider something like this if that were an option? Yes, of course. I’m not Sally Rooney. I’m not in a position to turn an opportunity like that down. Also, I love movies and I love TV, so of course. I really thought about Trip being turned into a series. Something like White Lotus could be fantastic. Oh, yeah, I loved White Lotus. That would be great. I thought about Steve Coogan, actually. He was cast in the next White Lotus 4, and he came to my mind as a good person for embodying Donald. As I was finishing the book, for some reason, I kept seeing Steve Coogan as Donald; it's weird. The above conversation was conducted by Filip Jakab, a writer and editor based in Brussels.Editorial support by Hannah Bullock. Cover image: Amie Barrodale. Photo by Chase Castor. Sourced via.

When I reflect on the films of Christian Petzold, a host of indelible images return to me. The end of Phoenix (2014), for instance, when Johannes (Ronald Zehrfeld) finally catches a glimpse of the serial number on Nelly’s arm (Nina Hoss), and cannot bear to bring himself to face her: the weight of his betrayal and deception, both within and beyond the film, crashing down on him. Or, in Jerichow (2008), when clandestine lovers Laura (Hoss) and Thomas (Benno Fürmann) are forced to embrace by a rose bush in order to obscure their faces from a group of school children walking past, and the gentle breeze that caresses them. In Afire (2023), which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival—where Petzold also won Best Director in 2012 for Barbara—it is the shot of the corpses of gay lovers, who’ve died in a forest fire, wrapped in golden emergency blankets. These images return to me in the realm of dreams, they feel plucked from reality, are portals to the souls of their characters, evoked through sight and sound alone. Since the turn of the century, Petzold has cemented his position as a singular, key voice in world cinema. Every film by Petzold is an event to be attended to, even if sung in a minor key, for they drip with their distilled intentions and their classic executions. Across 11 German-language features, each of which are in dialogue with each other, he has established a body of work that is, by turns, reliable, sensual, elegant, and enchanting. The living and the dead; the past and the future; the real and the double; these are the inextricable preoccupations he has been deepening with each of his gem-like constructions, conjuring up cinema magic en route to instances of revelation. In recent years, his attention has turned to the cares and conditions of the contemporary world, from the importance of myths and historical foundations in Undine (2020) to the isolating effects of climate catastrophe and pandemics in Afire. His newest film Miroirs No. 3 is his most subtle and unassumingly devastating. It tells the story Laura (Paula Beer), a music student on the verge of a nervous breakdown who loses her boyfriend in a car accident and then immediately falls into the orbit of a broken family headed by Betty (Barbara Auer). Over a certain period of time, as each member of the family is touched by Laura’s mollifying presence, the entanglement grows complicated, and the enigmatic absence at the centre begins to glow. On a balmy afternoon during the Toronto International Film Festival, where Miroirs had its North American premiere, I met with Petzold at a French-inspired restaurant located inside Le Germain Hotel. When I entered the room he placed his spectacles back in their case and, as we waited for the waitress to bring cream for his espresso, I pulled out my copy of filmmaker Robert Bresson’s book Notes on a Cinematograph from my backpack and handed it to him. Awe-struck, he leafed through it, and from behind his glossy, green eyes I could see the gears of a fierce cinephile begin to turn. As much as he is a filmmaker, Petzold is, first and foremost, a student of cinema, his mind a generous archive of indelible images. He returned the book to me and I placed it on the table so that, over the next hour, it remained there between us, an emblem and an anchor. He started to speak about Bresson before I realized the conversation was already under way. When I asked if I could start recording, he playfully pouted and his eyebrows jerked up as if to say: if you so wish. The object is not the cinema. Cinema is not interested in the object—it’s always interested in the people who are watching objects. Objects are for commercial advertisements. So the people who are staring at the object, this is cinema. You were saying: a flight over Tokyo? Bresson saw this film, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, in a French cinema, at the beginning of the 50s I think. It’s footage of a flight over Tokyo by an American interceptor during the war. He said: “Nothing happened. In reality, everything happened.” You know, I’m a Protestant and Robert Bresson is Catholic and it’s very interesting. The Protestants, we have music, we have Johann Sebastian Bach, and the Catholics, they have pictures and colours. For me it’s Bresson who makes Catholic subjects and themes like a Protestant, because they’re clean and clear. On the other hand, I was in church when I was a very young boy because my parents believed in God until my father lost his job at the beginning of the 70s. He was unemployed andlost everything about his identity, lost his trust in religion as well. But until he lost everything I had to go to church two times a week. I hated church. I hated it completely. But there is one moment in church I loved. It’s at the end of the session when the doors open. You’re sitting and behind you the doors open to the world and Johann Sebastian Bach’s music is there. You stand up, turn around and you go back into the world with the music, with something you have seen. This, for me, is cinema. It’s the same moment. Therefore, I understand what happens in David Chase’s The Sopranos because he takes the music out of the score. He leaves the songs for the final credits. So in The Sopranos I have the same feeling as in the Protestant church. At the end, the doors open. The music is coming. You have to go back to your life. But something stays inside of you. This was something. For me Bresson is doing the same. Mouchette is my favorite film by him. When Mouchette commits suicide the second time, when she’s rolling down into the water, the second time the music starts, it’s Monteverdi. It is as if the Catholic director uses the Protestant view of the world and souls, and this I like very much. After watching Miroirs No. 3, I actually thought of Mouchette.In her introduction to the New York Review of Books re-issue of George Beranos’ Mouchette, the late poet Fanny Howe writes that “suicide, like little else, makes people aware of chance…Suicide is detachment beyond recognition…Suicide is the answer to one question…Suicide is a lonely surge of unhope.” When I looked back on your recent films, I noticed how often suicide appears as a way for the secondary characters to add pressure to the narrative: in Phoenix, the sister, Lena (Nina Kunzendorf) who has survived the loss of her entire bloodline and faced the horrors of the aftereffects war, suddenly erases herself; in Transit, it is the icy, privileged character played by Barbara Auer, who suddenly slips out of view. In Miroirs, this element is placed into the narrative in a different way. The film opens with the character of Laura—played by Paula Beer, in your fourth consecutive collaboration together—standing on a bridge, contemplating, about what we don’t know, before a man in all black paddles across. It brought to mind Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer as well, meaning that it reads as suicidal ideation. And later, too, we learn about what exactly happened to Yelena, whose absence allows Laura’s presence to exist. Why suicide? It’s all in the question. For me, I saw Mouchette for the first time in my life I was 17, 18, and I later read a critic who said that the suicide of Mouchette says the whole world is unjust. The whole world is not right. This suicide says you are all bad, you are mean. I have the feeling that in my movies the suicides are without any morality. The people are just vanishing. This is, I think, because the world doesn’t notice them. So this has something to do with modern societies. Students are on a bridge near water, they see a symbol of the boat with the guy who brings you over the sticks. But he is a sportsman. For her, it’s a guy. It is death, I thought, a figure of death, like in a tarot card. The Germans, they have images from the 18th and 19th century from their painters. Arnold Berklin was a very famous German painter, he’s a painter of the Romantic period. The German Romantics have something to do with it. We have a modern world which is coming, then industrialization starts, capitalism starts and the German intellectuals and artists want to re-enchant the world. This was something. So Novalis and Frederich Hölderlin, they’re talking about Greece, about the wind, about the flowers and Arnold Berklin made a painting called The Island of Death. There’s an island like a big stone, like a rocket, and there’s the sea and a boat, and on the boat is a white angel with a stick, a paddle. The guy who died is sitting there in the boat. It’s a moment when you’re coming from living to death. It brings you over the sticks. This is a very, very popular painting. When I was a child, I was afraid of this picture. Because this island is like the place you're coming through when you are born, there are two thighs of a woman. In the middle, the vagina, but in the middle is the death in this picture. You’re going back into the...like in the album by Nirvana…you’re going back… In Utero. It’s a little bit like this. It’s in utero. It is as if the romantics want to go back into the mother’s body because the world is too complicated and when people…it’s over-interpreted now. No, no, no. But I think like this. I’ve never told the actors about this. I don’t want to make them crazy. They come from all over the world and you can’t find a way. You’re reading ten books at the same time, they’re lying on your bed, you have a new idea and then the next idea. It’s the idea that when you have problems and these problems are complex then this romantic picture says to you: “Death is the answer. Go back into the utero of your mother. Then you’ll have the possibility of a restart.” It’s fascistic. It’s a fascistic vision because the fascists, they don’t want to work with the complexity of our world. They want to be like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. There must be a big frame to wash all this shit away and I want to have a clear world. So this young woman is standing there under a highway in a very, very ugly place. But the reminiscence of the German romantic is there. I think at this moment, when you make a film, you have to think about all these meanings behind it. You have to think about them, but then when you start shooting you have to also forget them directly. But what was interesting there, you can see it also in the movie, is that when we changed the camera position to the other side of the sticks of the river, where you see the guy with a pedal, and Paula Beer is standing there and he’s passing her you can see, in the back, there’s graffiti there, very old graffiti. It says “Beer.” “Beer” and “Undine.” And Paula said to me afterwards, “What’s this? Did you do this?” I said, “No, I’m innocent.” It’s very old. It has nothing to do with Paula Beer. It has something to do with the fact that during the world championship of soccer there were poor English hooligans who had lived under the bridge for the two weeks of football and they had beer, and because they were swimming in this ugly water they were thinking about girls and had written down “Undine.” But it was a coincidence. Circling back to the in utero part, when she sees the mother, it’s almost this…when they were driving by, it’s almost this…an escape. She wants to be outside. It’s a perverted thing to say “I want to be someone else,” but so many people in the world want to be someone else. When she's in the back of the car with her friends, it reminded me of the end of Barbara Loden’s Wanda, which you have previously talked about as a major influence. I want to read you this passage from Nathalie Léger’s Suite For Barbara Loden, which interprets the end of Wanda: “We don’t know what she will lose, or what she is going to find. She is coming back to herself. Perhaps she would prefer to disappear into a life of solitude—exhausting, but her own. At this point Barbara decides to let Wanda take control of her life.” Despite the fact that critics have related the character of Laura in Miroirs No. 3 to the protagonist of films like Yella and Hitchcock’s Vertigo, I saw her as a shadow of Wanda, one who doesn’t belong, isolating her from whatever nucleus she finds herself in, as though she were the ghost of a normal, so-called well-adjusted person. At the start of your film, there is this car accident—you’ve said before that accidents need to happen in cars in order for the narrative to take place—but it is the same way the murdered man in the bar in Wanda caused the plot to swerve. The thing about all of your films is they swerve away from the starting point but then they always swerve back, but with its essence forever altered. She’s from method acting, Barbara Loden, but she’s playing the opposite of it. There’s no energy in her. She’s slow and in the final scene when the guy, the bank robber, is dead and she’s sitting there with strange people, she’s looking in the direction of the camera. This is something which impressed me totally. Like with the death of Mouchette. These are things which are deep in my mind when I’m making movies. But in this moment, when the car is passing the mother the first time, she is like Wanda: you don’t know where she can go, where she can live, she’s like a leaf on the surface of a river, and in this moment when someone is staring at her I wanted to create the impression as if the mother is taking her. It’s not her who has made the decision to go to this place. It’s the mother who says, “Come to me.” Like a spider, for a moment. “You could be the one.” And she knows: “Oh, this could be a possibility to find an identity. It’s a wrong identity, but it’s mine. To be the wrong daughter.” It’s something. The wrong daughter is better than nothing. It’s a perverted thing to say “I want to be someone else,” but so many people in the world want to be someone else. When the tsunami was in Indonesia and Thailand there were many, many people who vanished. They never found the bodies. So many people who everybody thought was dead tried to find a new biography. They went to another country, to have a new life. Then there was research five years ago that found ten people who everybody thought was dead. Now they lived in another country with another identity but they had recreated and copied their life from before: they had two kids and a woman again, they couldn’t get out of this. But the dream, the desire of people to have new identities, I think, it’s great for Laura to have this wrong identity. The first morning, when she’s coming out of the house and the mother is painting the fence, she says to her: “Yelena.” She knows about it, from the very beginning, even if she acts like she didn’t at the end. She knows, but she never asks. The mother never asks her, “Where are you coming from? What are you studying? What is your family name? How old are you?” She says, “Here are your clothes. Here is something to eat. Here is the bed. Here is my warm embrace. Here is a wrong name.” “So it fits,” she says. It fits. So it’s something perverted. I like people who say it’s a wrong identity but it’s mine and I’m working with this. I can be deliberate and myself and I can find relief and comfort with wrong things and this thing has something to do with cinema, where everybody’s playing actors, playing the movies, playing with our dreams. It is interesting to me that in 1895 the Lumière brothers made the first movie ever, Workers Leaving the Factory, at the same moment that Sigmund Freud discovered dream work. It’s the same moment in history: dream work and cinema have something to do with each other. The content of your films are always informed by outside forces—for instance the suicide of the daughter that happens before the time of the film—but here you also allow all of the events to happen off-screen: the car accident, the dishwasher malfunctioning, the son recording Laura in the public park. I’ve read that you cut out a few scenes from the start of the film; but even in the writing process, how do you go about figuring out what can be removed and what must stay? How do you measure this and create the balance with the ellipses? It’s something I learned with Harun Farocki in a seminar in 1989, my first year at the German Film Academy in Berlin. We saw the movie The Soft Skin by François Truffaut. In this movie, there is a sequence where the sexual desire of the man begins. He’s a professor of literature and he’s on a plane working like everybody nowadays, with a notebook, but then there is a stewardess. Played by Françoise Dorléac. Yes, and she’s working there and the flight is going to Lisbon. The captain says: “Now it’s time for landing.” It’s always the same, the stewardesses go to their part of the plane and close the curtains. So she’s closing the curtains and you can see, because there is a gap between the curtain and the floor, you can see how she’s changing her shoes. For a long moment you see her naked feet and the professor is watching, looking at the naked feet and falling into his sexual desire because of a partial object, not because of the stewardess, but because of the naked feet. But it doesn’t work in the movie really, and we asked ourselves why it doesn’t work. We read an interview with Truffaut, who said: “I really made a mistake with this scene.” His mistake was that he showed the naked feet for one minute then showed the literature professor for 10 seconds. It must be the other way around. The object is not the cinema. Cinema is not interested in the object—it’s always interested in the people who are watching objects. Objects are for commercial advertisements. So the people who are staring at the object, this is cinema. I learned this in 1989, a very long time ago. It has something to do with your question. When you see the car passing and you see the woman who’s watching the car and the car is going away then you have to stay on her face and hear the car crash. I’m not interested in this fucking car crash. It’s better if you hear something and you see the face of a woman and you are with her and you understand everything but you don't know it 100% and then she’s running and you see her reaction before you see the object, the car. These are things I learned from cinema. When you see a bad movie, they like the car crash, they think this is something. This is, in Marxist terms. This is, in Germany, called the money shot. But it has nothing to do with cinema, the money shot. I like when you see Godzilla destroy these houses in the old movies of 1954, because there’s nobody living there, it’s all very cheap. Christian Schulz, still from Miroirs No. 3. © Schramm Film. Christian Schulz, still from Miroirs No. 3. © Schramm Film. Christian Schulz, still from Miroirs No. 3. © Schramm Film. In Miroirs, the money shot occurs sonically. In the days leading up to watching the film, I played Maurice Ravel’s “Miroirs No. 3” on loop, because I wasn’t familiar with it, and I was on the look out for it. The first time we hear a snippet of it is in the car with the father; the second in the house with the mother; and the third is with the son in the car. The fact that the final scene in the film is a culmination of these brief moments, in which the song acts as a sort of homage, an act of redemption, deeply moved me. We don’t see their reaction to it—how cheap would that be—but the way that the music has changed the air in the room. Like how you said, the Bach music at the end of church, it feels like the doors are opening in the film. For some people, the film might not make sense if you're not familiar with the music, but you build up to this moment. The money shot is a sound. You’re totally right. That’s what moved me. This music by Maurice Ravel. The father has the music, the son has the music, and the mother has the music, and at the end my idea was that when she’s playing it, she’s playing it for herself and also for this family. And so, the decision, that when the editor goes back into the house, when they’re preparing eggs and coffee, the final scene, the music is there too. She’s making the music for this family so this family can live on. They’re hurt, they’re wounded, they have scars, but they can live on now. This is a comfort for them. The music says goodbye to them. And so, I can live on my own now, too. I can play my music and it’s also music for you. We can separate in a good way. I could live as a daughter. Okay, I must say it like this: the real daughter, Yelena, committed suicide because the mother is too strong. That was the idea. You can feel it. She’s always there at the bed, always staring. She’s so needy. She’s always asking Laura to come back. “I need you, I need you.” I showed Barbara Auer the movie Rebecca by Hitchcock because Rebecca was the dead wife, and when John Fontaine is coming to the castle, there is the governess and you never see her moving, she’s always there. When Paula Beer, on the first morning, makes a ding, ding, ding sound she’s like the governess from Rebecca, Barbara Aucher is there. So with the music at the end of the movie, Paula Beer’s Laura can live this life, this independent life the other daughter didn’t reach, who found in her suicide an exit door, but she can live on. This was the idea. The mother and the whole family understand this for the first time. This is just made by music. Therefore, you’re totally right to say this is also a money shot. The money shot, yes. It’s a money shot. I wanted to ask you about your approach to including “the uncanny” (das Unheimliche) in your films. In this film, there is the scene when Betty introduces the men to Laura, but they assume that she has lost it and is speaking of a ghost, so that when Laura does appear, having made dumplings, they are shocked to see her. In a sense she is presented to them as a ghost—which is a representation of a living thing. It also brings up the idea of “the return of the repressed” that marked Phoenix, and it is also in relation with Transit’s conceit of taking over the identity of another man. So when father and son arrive with their American car, with this green car, what you see is them through the window of the kitchen. Which you also do at the beginning of Afire, with a shot of Paula Beer on the bicycle the first morning, where she goes through the back of the forest. But in Afire you see the guy who is watching: in this movie, you don’t know who’s watching. This was the idea. It sounds very intellectual, but it’s like this. For me the whole scene is about these two guys who are invited to the house of a psycho woman, who always thinks: “My daughter is coming tonight.” It’s like the Sigmund Freud story: “I know my daughter’s dead, but she’s coming in five minutes.” This is a dramatic situation. And so, these two guys, they’re coming to this place and they think, “Oh, it’s a dinner like we have seen and we have had in the last two years three or four times, and that means that we have to bring her back into the mental hospital.” Like this. And the first thing you see is their arrival from the point of view of someone. If I make a second shot of Laura, who is watching them coming, it doesn’t work anymore because I wanted to make her a phantom, a ghost. Because I don’t show her, I just show a view. And so I’m on the side of father and son and I’m on their side of the fear when they hear a noise from the kitchen. There’s a plate, there’s a noise from the kitchen and this noise is made from someone whose view we have seen, but who doesn’t have a body. Sometimes, for me, in cinema we must help the audience, not the characters. [...] That means we have to respect the audience, and this, for me, is freedom, relief, comfort, everything. You are a filmmaker who is steeped in literary theory, and have spoken about how you like to liberally bring in constellations of inter-text into your work. Your films have led me to discovering W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, Ella Fitzgerald’s “Speak Low,” the novels of Anna Seghers and the short stories of Ingeborg Bachman. This film features a brief anecdote from Tom Sawyer. In the past, you’ve also said that your films are the result of trying to remember the plot of a film you’ve seen, but remembering it like a faint dream. In the past you’ve misremembered with The Postman Always Rings Twice, Carnival of Souls, Eyes Without A Face. When I heard about this film, I thought of Pasolini’s Teorema. In an interview with Dennis Lim for Film Comment, you mentioned Nanni Moretti’s The Son’s Room. What are you productively forgetting, or subconsciously referencing here? Nanni Moretti was for the actors. I wanted to show them a movie where they can see how death would destroy a whole family and how they can find comfort with someone from the outside. But it has nothing to do with my movie. There’s no suicide and no guiltiness there. For me, Teorema was more interesting, and also a movie by Jean Renoir called Boudu Saved from Drowning. It’s about a homeless guy coming into a rich family and everything changes. The girl finds her sexuality, the boy gets into anarchy. There was a remake made with Richard Dreyfus called Down and Out In Beverly Hills. So, for me, it was like someone is coming from the outside into a traumatic structure and this arrival is something like an angel or something like that. And so, the structures are open and can change. But on the other hand, because it’s a mirror, I want to show both sides of the mirror. We have the mirror of death on the one side, and the living on the other side. We have the side of death is Yelena and her family, and on the side of living is Laura. Both sides are coming together. This was the mirror theme. Everything is in this movie, I see some people in it I know very well. Everything in this movie is based on two things: the mirror, the picture, the reflection. We have the wind. The wind is sometimes a symbol for ruins. The wind is going through open windows and destroyed doors through a house. Sometimes the wind is refreshing when you open a window. So, you have a house, as if this house of death, like the island of death, the house of death. And on the other side, Laura is bringing a fresh wind into the house and they are rebuilding something. Then you have things that are totally destroyed and they start to repair them. So, their behaviour starts to be like a dance. The moment when the two young actors are sitting there with a bottle of beer hearing this Frankie Valli song, I said to them, “OK, there is no dialogue for you. You’re just drinking beer and hearing a song and there is no meaning, nothing, just five minutes for yourself.” This is very hard for actors. Because in this movie, where everything is so built, in this moment, to sit there without any text is very hard. I just knew that after one minute they would start laughing because they’ll feel ashamed to be there by themselves without a character to play. I just wanted this moment because this moment means there is a new breath, the new wind inside. This is freedom. Now they are young. Everything, the whole luggage and baggage is gone for a moment and they can feel what could be. So it was like this. The more that I think about your films the more that I realize that, despite the loss that marks them, you are always arguing for the fact that people happen to come into our lives and change them for the good, that it is only through other people that we might find meaning and return to who we were. Unlike your other films, where the politics might be more explicit, the four-part dynamic in this film acts as a metaphor of the desire for re-unification after a central trauma has occurred. Your films have the power to, and are designed to, perhaps, fall to the other side and devastate us, but they don’t. You never let it. In our oppressed times, why do you choose hope? I think hope is a good word for this because we started with the Protestants and the Catholics. Hope is very deep inside of this. But I think at the end of Wanda, or the end of The Searchers, or a movie like Modern Times by Charlie Chaplin, the hope and the relief I feel as part of the audience is not something to do with something that happened on the screen. It’s something to do with having the feeling that now the characters don’t need me anymore. They are for themselves. Charlie Chaplin goes away and the iris is showing him out. In Wanda, it’s a freeze frame. So now it’s hers, and now it’s ours. So we have to go back to our life and they go on in theirs. For me, this is relief. It’s a little bit like this crime novel by John Le Carré, The Little Drummer Girl, the first sentence is something like: “What we have to do is to help the people who love us to get independent.” It’s something to do with parents and kids and love affairs. We must help them. Sometimes, for me, in cinema we must help the audience, not the characters. We must help the audience to get independent. That means we have to respect the audience, and this, for me, is freedom, relief, comfort, everything. I love the final scenes. I remember when we made Phoenix, the final scene was written by me but the last camera movement was improved at the end. We made this movie chronologically. It was the last day of shooting and the director of photography, Hans Fromm, wanted to follow Nina Hoss when she left the room and went outside. But at this moment I said, “Oh God, we are Germans. We can’t follow. We have to stay. And our work for the future is to stay and to repair and not go to Palestine as if we are guilty. We are the killers. Or sons of killers. And we have to stay.” But Fromm said: “I want to follow her.” Everybody wants to follow her. But we have to stay. This is our position of morality. Therefore the final scene is much better. She’s going out of focus into the light. It’s hers. It’s for her to have. What are you working on next? I’m making the fourth movie with the same actors from this series of crime stories for TV. I will make two movies for cinema in two years. One is based on the Bertolt Brecht movie from 1932, Kuhle Wampe or Who Owns the World? and now in the same era in Berlin. It’s also a fight against capitalism for a small group of people. They work with curses. Very hard curses. I have to write the last sequences and can do it in one and a half years. Then I will make a movie about a group of a theater which will be erased by the government and their opening night and the fight against it. I want to do anti-capitalistic movies. I have all the actors and everything is there. I have to work in the next five years. I want to make a movie with Nina Hoss and Paula Beer together in the next three or four years too. I don’t want to go to festivals anymore. I want to stay home, read and meet the people I want to work with. The company, the distributors, they send me everywhere. It’s stolen time. I lay in the hotel room, like a serial killer, waiting for the call. For me, it’s like this. The above conversation was conducted by Nirris Nagendrarajah, a writer and critic from Toronto. Editorial support by Alana Traficante.Cover photo: Christian Schulz, still from Miroirs No. 3. © Schramm Film.

I met Rhayne in the summer of 2020 in Winnipeg, shortly after I moved to Canada for my PhD. She was DJ’ing, already with a visible spark, already operating beyond recognizable structures. There was a sense, even then, that she was not simply participating in a scene but quietly rearranging the conditions of it. Our friendship grew slowly, largely through what we did not exchange: not turning proximity into possession, not forcing disclosure into currency. I’ve come to understand her films in much the same way. They refuse extraction. They withhold resolution. They linger, knowing that true confrontation and disclosure is impossible in the wake of large-scale catastrophes—genocides, cultural genocides, residential schools, ecological extinctions, and their afterlives. Rhayne Vermette is a Métis filmmaker, visual artist, and animator based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Her practice spans experimental animation, short films, and feature-length works, often created through small, intimate, and deliberately non-industrial modes of production. Her films are deeply rooted in place, family, and Indigenous presence, while resisting the demands of legibility often imposed by settler and international film circuits. Rather than explaining catastrophe, Vermette treats it as an ongoing and quotidian condition. As she states plainly in our conversation: “We’ve been living inside of it.” Her debut feature Ste. Anne (2021) marked a breakthrough. Premiering at the Berlinale, the film went on to win the Amplify Voices Award for Best Canadian Feature Film at TIFF and received international acclaim for its allegorical reclamation of Indigenous land, memory, and familial reconnection. Shot in Vermette’s home community and featuring her relatives alongside herself, Ste. Anne established many of the formal and ethical commitments that would come to define her work: non-professional performers, cyclical time, and a refusal to translate Indigenous experience for an external gaze. Her second feature, Levers (2025), premiered at TIFF Wavelengths and screened at NYFF Currents and other international festivals, further solidifying Vermette as a singular voice in contemporary cinema. Set against a day-long disappearance of the sun, the film unfolds through tarot-structured episodes, dense soundscapes, and dreamlike opacity. Catastrophe is not climactic but procedural, something endured rather than explained. Inspired in part by the endurance of Manitoban winters, Levers also gestures toward the province’s historical and ongoing experience of colonial violence—what Vermette understands as an apocalypse that has already happened, and continues to happen. “I don’t think about the audience,” she says. “It’s me looking inwards, prodding those places I don’t quite understand.” This inwardness does not result in isolation. Vermette’s films are made through proximity and care: friends, family, cousins, parents, and animals recur across her work not as symbols but as collaborators. Her approach to collaboration extends into material conditions—non-hierarchical wages, shorter workdays, and a deliberate refusal of exploitative production models. The credits, she suggests, function as records rather than acknowledgements: scrolls of who is actively participating in culture at a given moment, and who is usually excluded from it. Music—particularly experimental jazz, hip-hop production, and looping structures—shapes both her editing practice and her philosophy of time. Influenced by figures like Sun Ra, Madlib, and J Dilla, Vermette treats film as a rhythmic art form, where interruption, drift, and return matter more than narrative clarity. Language, for her, is increasingly insufficient. Throughout this conversation, Vermette returns to unknowing as both method and ethic. Her films do not protect themselves from misreading, nor do they attempt to resolve contradictions. What remains instead is an invitation: to sit with opacity, to endure without resolution, and to recognize that some images—once chased—may begin to reorganize your life in return. I was really trying to create a beautiful mirror to hold up to the very messy, contradictory and deranged world we are experiencing today. I’d love to start with a classic from the Proust Questionnaire: What is your current state of mind? My current state of mind is deranged and unstable. I’m thinking of rebranding my life, and likely too open to public suggestion and opinion. Got any thoughts for me?[Laughs] I’m definitely not the right person to give advice but that sounds less like a crisis and more like a mind in motion. I don’t have guidance so much as curiosity: do you experience that openness as disorienting, or as a condition that makes new forms possible? It’s more like I’ve been putting the brakes on my mind. Seems like all artful thoughts are dead thoughts so why bother. I’m trying to take a break from my abstract headspace by focusing on the body in preparation for the end of the world. Trying to both soften (in terms of my capacity for love, honesty and compassion) and harden (muscle, strength, and endurance). Speaking of the end of the world…In Levers, the sun’s disappearance evokes responses that feel deeply procedural—people simply performing their roles, while, in the background, televisions quietly register the fear of a possible apocalypse. Rather than explaining the event, the film sustains an almost-end-times tension. How did you approach working with that atmosphere as something to be held rather than resolved, and what kind of attention did you want it to draw from the viewer? I was really trying to create a beautiful mirror to hold up to the very messy, contradictory and deranged world we are experiencing today. It’s a crisis film, but sets a stage where ideas of survival collide with the idleness or pettiness of the contemporary every day. A large universal crime occurs, but is eventually clouded by the individual, or personal events: some more trivial (a fight over cribbage rules), some more consequential (the loss of a friend). At first, I was also really inspired by how Manitobans endure the winter. The central idea to the story was: it’s the end of the world, a literal ice age has taken over, but in Manitoba, life goes on as usual. And the more I developed this idea I recognized it both as a prosaic suggestion in regards to our winters; but also as a catastrophic ongoing reality in terms of the province’s historical and ongoing relationship to the Indigenous nations on this land. Collectively, the end of the world has been experienced here many times over, it's an ongoing organization of happenings, always precariously near, occurring at both micro and macro scales. Do you see apocalypse less as an ending than as a condition people learn to live inside? We’ve been living inside of it. I see how your thinking about catastrophe, endurance, and eternal return shapes the film. Levers doesn’t follow a strict linear story, and the sun feels like the central pivot around which everything orbits. The chapters marked by tarot cards seem to invite the audience to inhabit or interpret the film in their own way. In that context, whose eyes are we seeing the world through, and who or what guides the perspective of the movie? It’s my eyes. I don’t think about the audience. It’s me looking inwards, prodding those places I don’t quite understand, or ideas which I am curious about. Levers is a collage of lived and dreamed images. It’s also a set of contradictions playing against each other. The film making is just me, trying to make sense of it all. I think a Manitoban audience may get the most of it due to the symbols used, the metaphors, the acutely regional sense of place, so I guess it's for them. I think of prophecy a lot, and the power of prophecy and manifestation which presents itself in image making. Thinking of prophecy urges me to meditate on Louis Riel—a central metaphor for Levers. I don’t know where a lot of these images come from, they just come to me through some channel. It takes me years to understand what I make and why I make it. Sometimes I think it’s like my future self talking to me in the process of filmmaking, flagging things, premonitions, highlighting information… You mentioned not thinking about the audience and seeing the film as your inward collage, with images arriving through channels like prophecy or future self. Does that mean the tarot cards and fragmented images are more for your own sense-making—or do they leave space for viewers (especially Manitobans) to find their own connections or stories? Yeah it’s my own sense-making. Each film I make is an exercise in thought. But, I think, as someone who is living in this world, it’s absolutely relevant to others, whether people think that or not. It’s open for audiences to jump into and derive their own reading from it. What I generally notice with my films is that, when someone alludes to what a film is about, it gives me an insight into their life, things they’ve experienced or witnessed. It’s more interesting to me to center unknowing, rather than a western-logic of knowing, it's more like interpreting a dream or something, but just as relevant. My interest in the tarot cards came out of a desire to subvert the bureaucratic approaches of scriptwriting, it became a new model to think about approaching a story, outside of a 3 point narrative. Instead of introducing a problem and solving it, the writing was motivated by thinking of how one chapter can oppose or mirror another, or be the sum of two other chapters, these sorts of ideas. I really just kept with the cards in the film as a means to keep time, for anyone who could pay attention. Still from Levers (2025). 89 minutes. Still from Levers (2025). 89 minutes. Still from Levers (2025). 89 minutes. Your films are so closely tied to where you come from—your Métis roots and deep connection to Manitoba—yet they don’t feel confined by identity or place only. You often appear alongside friends and family, bringing people who might otherwise remain unseen into a shared public frame. How do you think about the responsibility of presence, exposure, and care when working so intimately with people and places that are part of your life? I follow what comes naturally. My first animations came from a natural impulse to destroy other filmmaker’s films (likely some subconscious instinct driven by the patriarchal space which surrounded me at the time), and that compelling moment to deconstruct and reconstruct with other filmmakers’ 16mm film prints in many ways naturally embodied who I am, where I come from, my state of mind, and in turn a sense of Indigenous innovation—yet these works still remain far beyond the reach of the somewhat stiff conception of Indigenous cinema. Collaboration is approached as a natural process as well. Working with friends and family was not really something I actively set out to do, it just occurred through proximity to my very small orbit, as someone who likes to remain fairly isolated, comes off as standoffish in public, and has zero interest in networking. My dad is likely my most faithful collaborator. He’s helped me on many short films and appears as concept and image throughout many of the works, as well. There is a lot of love there, he is always around to help me and I trust him the most. He also was the one who taught me how to conceive of an image (using his 35mm camera when I was a teenager). My mom is also very supportive but behind the scenes most times. She’s the one who listens to me cry about the films, the tribulations of making them, etc… And there’s also Manners, my cat, who is in many ways the hero of each film I make. His fur is also found on every frame of my animations, as he loyally sits next to me whenever I work. The presence of all of my cousins, my godfather, and extensions of my family in Ste. Anne happened naturally: we were all at a funeral, and I was talking about the film project, expressing that I needed to find actors and didn’t know how to go about it, and everyone just said “We’ll be your actors.” So I just wrote everyone into the script, and that was it. There are some deliberate choices when it comes to certain ways I think of whom I will collaborate with…Ste. Anne was an all female crew, mostly Indigenous women, peers and friends who I met over the years or who were part of the Indigenous Filmmakers Collective in Winnipeg. Levers was a natural progression from the network built in Ste. Anne, with a lot of family members also lending a hand. I try to care for the cast and crew through the line production: the money. Providing non-hierarchical wages which are higher than the exploitative industrial wages from American and other Canadian films taking advantage of our Manitoba tax credit. We also run shorter days, we try to keep it around 8-10 hours. And the films sort of get formed around this decision. We prioritize labour so that means there’s less money for expensive gear, rental trucks, etc—so we just use 3 lights and some broken cameras. I consider the credits at the end of a film as a record. It’s a scroll of who is actively participating in the culture of Winnipeg or Manitoba at a specific time. You look at other Winnipeg films, and there are a lot of recurrent names, which, to me, points to a glaring omission—folks who are here, but don’t have the privilege, the network, or “on-paper” skill set to participate. This is also why I like to work with super emerging people, non actors, and artists from different backgrounds to transform the scroll. It’s so much richer than a handful of seasoned union guys. In terms of the feature films, I’ve been portraying what lies beyond the patriarchal lens of a particular “Winnipeg,” which has been propagated by more internationally recognized films. I actively focus on feminine experience, Indigenous presence, and Manitoba ie: the land beyond Winnipeg, as someone who grew up in rural Manitoba, and who works often in the North. I try to showcase the beauty of the province and capture its spirit as a means to balance the more deprecatory and whitewashed images which audiences are used to seeing. I’m not interested in making jokes about this place. Instead, I try to make space for all the contradictions that we as Manitobans endure, to converge. Things like the hardships of 7ish month long winters, the innate tensions which arise in a city densely populated by Indigenous people and immigrants, the difficult paradox of our province’s Indigenous leadership and the myriad of ways they’re selling off the land and their Nations, the persistence of colonization, the fact that the North burns every summer, the ongoing crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people…All of this is swirling in my films, I don’t feel the need to explain it, or dumb it down for a European audience. Either you get it or you don’t. But, the energy of dissension is real here, it’s always present, everything is happening though it feels like nothing happens at the same time. You said you’re not interested in explaining or translating your work for an external gaze—“either you get it or you don’t.” How do you protect that refusal in a film world that often rewards legibility and simplification? These days, I don’t think it can be protected, honestly. I only make films to fulfill some desire to chase the unknown. I keep myself interested in the work through titillation and unknowing. I’m not interested in making something that looks like what was written on the paper, but interested in what occurs off the page... The film opens with a Sun Ra quote, and music is clearly central to how you work. You’ve said producers like Madlib and J Dilla taught you the most about editing. Sun Ra’s experimentalism often disrupts time, structure, and causality, while beatmakers rely on looping, sampling, and fracture. How do those musical approaches translate into concrete editing choices in Levers—particularly in moments where rhythm feels interrupted, delayed, or allowed to drift? Music is the ultimate art form, it’s the most universal language. The more films I make, the more I want to take the words out, reach for some universality that’s not really grounded in this rotten Earth. I think films are losing touch with the fact that they are moving images, there are too many words, too many explanations, too much dialogue, too much voice over—it’s exhausting. The moment I begin thinking of a story through the word (a script), the idea of a loop is innately part of my creative process. In large part due to my fascination with producers like Madlib and Dilla—but also since I started making films as an animator—the loop is really how I start thinking of building a film. In writing for Ste. Anne, I really thought I was sampling Paris, Texas—taking the shiniest bits from that film and remixing them to appease my own narrative interests. The idea of the sample also instructed a lot of the moments in that film, yet I was approaching the written sample through revisiting these spatial details, the window or the dining table, but each time you see them, they’re evolved, they’ve changed. This is also how the script of Levers came together, it was all poetry, constructed through this idea of looping images, reoccurring symbols presented in a new way each time, etc. So any notion of time is written into the project under these influences. Even in production, music is always playing on set. It’s always wafting in the air, influencing my mood and the mood of my collaborators. Part of my choice to use Bolex cameras for Levers was to remove the ability to have synched sound, so we could even play music while we were shooting. I also have a deep, deep natural hatred for slating. It’s like once I’m ready behind the camera: let’s go. I remember reading Ahmed Abdullah saying that when Sun Ra would count down he’d be like “Ready one!” and start. He never got to “two,” you just had to be ready. I feel a deep likeness to this avidity when on set. I keep thinking of when we saw the Arkestra perform in Winnipeg, that one night in June on the equinox. Industrial film sets are so constrained, and this oppression is heavy throughout most of the process. But it was enlightening to watch the Arkestra, see how rigid and tight they performed (required for the complexity of the musical compositions), but there was always space for them to drift away and improvise. Then, when they needed to hit that specific note, they’d all converge, together, precisely at the right moment. My ideal film set runs this way, the chaos that comes on my sets comes from this desire—it’s not a working machine yet, but maybe one day it could exist. The edit is sort of forcedly intoxicated under these written and collaborative impulses. But, I can also accredit my editing approaches to my interest in djs, and always listening to dj mixes at home. I’m very interested in transition, always listening for how a dj transitions from one song to another. My favourite mixes are built from transitions between vastly different sonic rhythms or beats. So in the edit, I’m thinking of the dance floor, bringing people up, bringing them down, surprising them, giving a moment to take a breath…Building on how you described the script for Levers as poetry, looping images and recurring symbols that evolve each time, and your desire to strip away words for something more universal—I had the chance to read it, and it felt visceral and visual rather than literary. How does starting with poetry help you arrive at those images and rhythms that can ultimately stand on their own, without needing words at all?The choice of poetry was to gather on set at the crossroads of individual interpretation versus some bureaucratic outline of events. With Levers, it really felt like the crew, the cast and I were finding our way in the dark while making it, but I was holding onto the flashlight, centering the logic. I only make films to fulfill some desire to chase the unknown. I keep myself interested in the work through titillation and unknowing. I’m not interested in making something that looks like what was written on the paper, but interested in what occurs off the page, as well as the evolution of an idea and especially this sense of eroticism, disrobing the filmic figure to see what it's really about, or looks like. In some ways, it’s about chasing the shadow self, prodding into questions of my relation to the material and the immaterial planes. And ultimately the ways in which the seams of the imaginary (the film) cross over in my life, sometimes it's a blessing (Ste. Anne), other times it’s a curse (Levers). It’s an invitation. Images can really fuck with your life when you start chasing them. Can you say more about that eroticism or danger in prodding the shadow self through filmmaking? It comes back to centering the unknown versus the known, writing an obscured figure in the script, and then chiseling away the matter to find the true form of what is at the core of the project. During production the eroticism plays out often, behind the camera, witnessing the words come off the page for the first time. There’s also a sense of titillation in the ways the frame reveals or hides the intentions of the script. On set, we played around with this a lot, trying to find ways to skew the images, frame events so they don’t necessarily give us what we expect from an image. The thrill for a project is then reignited when the rushes come in—it’s another moment of revelation. Revelation is what keeps me interested during the edit. Sorting out the mystery of the work, and also the drive of the work—that outside hand which helped me form it. Figuring out the metaphysical plan onto which it exists, that’s what keeps me interested in the work. It’s like, while editing Levers, there was something pointing to an inner-knowing, this inner logic which held the whole together, which I wasn’t necessarily aware of—but it came to light in the ways certain images cut together, you know. For instance, the first moment I saw the image of the sun on the tv screen followed by a cut to the beam of a film projector. These small moments point to something much larger at play. The above conversation was conducted by Kadir Yanaç, a poet, editor and researcher based in Philadelphia. Editorial support by Hannah Bullock. Cover image: Rhayne Vermette behind the scenes for Levers. Photo by Junior Whitefish.

At a moment when many artists and arts workers feel increasingly distant from the institutions that shape their professional and cultural lives—and determine their income—questions about institutional leadership and operations have taken on new urgency, especially in light of ongoing controversies around donors and financial transparency. Institutions are sites of power and control, but also of possibility. They shape our understanding of art through the exhibitions they present and the structures they create. For many people, a public art museum is their first encounter with art and what they see there often defines what they think art is. Curator, writer, and researcher Kate Wong brings this question into the local context: why do arts institutions feel so disconnected from artists, arts workers, and communities in Toronto? This line of inquiry forms the basis of SITE Toronto, a newly formed not-for-profit that positions itself as a new kind of institution for contemporary art. Wong’s approach to shaping SITE Toronto is informed by an awareness of what the word “institution” means: how it affects people, and how institutions, in turn, shape society alongside the communities they serve. She understands the term within a broader framework that spans national museums, kunsthalles, university galleries, and even artist-run centres and grassroots organizing. For Kate, institutions at their best are not fixed structures, but ongoing processes and active sites developed in relation to place and people, grounded in relationships and shared responsibility. Wong has held curatorial and leadership positions in Canada and internationally, including commercial galleries like Sadie Coles HQ and artist-run centres and non-profit arts institutions like V.O Curations, Serpentine Galleries, and MOCA Toronto. I first met her a few years ago, somewhat fittingly, while I was interviewing for a job at an institution. We reconnected more recently to discuss how our thinking around institutions has shifted over time, and what kinds of structures might be possible moving forward. SITE Toronto first took shape as independent research undertaken in part during a curatorial residency at Fogo Island Arts, and then as part of a three-part public program at Mercer Union in August and September 2025, engaging local artists and communities in conversations about what an institution could be. The project draws inspiration from a range of international models, including SESC in Brazil, RAW Material Company in Dakar, and Park Fiction in Hamburg, examples that demonstrate how institutions might operate differently depending on their local social and cultural contexts. With SITE Toronto’s first initiative, a residency program designed to support both local and international artists and curators, set to launch in March, I spoke with Wong about her curatorial practice, what “institution” means to her, and the significance of this new project. When I talk about SITE Toronto as a new entity and use the word “institution,” I can sense that it brings up strong emotions for people. It does for me as well, and that’s why I’m invested in this work—to unpack these feelings, this complexity, and to build from it. You’ve described institution-building as a form of curatorial practice. How do you define “institution” in this context? I use the term “institution” very intentionally, rather than “arts organization,” because we live in a world structured by institutions. For me, shaping an arts institution is about creating something that extends beyond an individual, something that lasts beyond a single person or moment. It is a form of curatorial practice because it is deeply relational, and because it shapes the long-term social, intellectual, and material conditions through which art is produced and experienced. Ideally, an institution is a framework that can shift and adapt to changing times and to the evolving desires of artists and communities. That’s why this work is so important. When I talk about SITE Toronto as a new entity and use the word “institution,” I can sense that it brings up strong emotions for people. It does for me as well, and that’s why I’m invested in this work—to unpack these feelings, this complexity, and to build from it. Could you tell me more about how you came to your work as a curator? My father is a painter, and my mother—after running a framing shop and art gallery in Vancouver for two decades—founded a charitable organization supporting the education of women in rural China. Yet despite growing up around art, I did not spend my childhood visiting museums, nor did I know what a curator was until much later in life. After moving to London in 2012 and working for over seven years with artists such as Sarah Lucas and Ding Yi within different commercial gallery contexts, I felt an increasingly urgent pull to develop my own curatorial practice. Working closely with artists and being able to travel and experience culture in many different parts of the world allowed me to understand that I too had something urgent to contribute to contemporary artistic discourse. Over the past twelve years, my approach as a curator evolved into a form of social practice. Across all my work, I seek to create the conditions in which contemporary artistic production can reveal—and contend with—the power structures that shape how we live. How do you understand the role of the curator today? For me, curating is about observing, interpreting, and imagining. To do the work well requires both an attentiveness to the specificity of an artist and their practice, and an ability to situate that work meaningfully within a world that is constantly shifting. Increasingly, I understand my role not only as interpreting or framing artistic production, but as creating the conditions—the environment and infrastructure—through which art can be encountered, questioned, and lived with by the public. Shaping an institution is an extension of this same practice. It involves negotiating power dynamics, positions, and competing desires. It requires a clear understanding of existing structures, alongside the capacity to imagine and build forms that can hold nuance and complexity. How do you think your experiences working at different types of arts institutions have shaped the way you think about what an institution should be? My perspective on institutions has been shaped by the galleries and arts organizations in which I have worked, but even more fundamentally by who I am. I grew up in Vancouver—a city structured by ongoing colonial systems, layered with successive waves of immigration, and marked by profound social and economic inequality. From an early age, I felt a strong sense of justice and a desire to work against inequality and exclusion. My curatorial practice is inseparable from this orientation. I believe institutions—whether artistic, academic, or civic—do not merely reflect society, they actively shape it. They are sites where meaning and values are negotiated and contested. Institutions are not neutral containers; they are active structures that distribute power, as well as possibility. Living in Vancouver, then Montreal, more than a decade in London, and now Toronto—alongside my family’s experience as immigrants with roots in China and Hong Kong—informs my curatorial practice and my understanding of institutions. They can reproduce inequity, but they can be shaped as sites of resistance and solidarity. You mentioned that your curatorial practice is focused on social practice. I’m curious what kind of artists you work with and what draws you to their practices? There’s definitely a social practice element to my curatorial work, but there’s also an interest in experimentation. I feel very stimulated by artists who are exploring new forms of contemporary artistic production. My work as a curator is not bound to any particular medium, geography, or temporality. What draws me in are artists who are putting forth something new—through the mediums they’re working in or the visual languages they’re employing. It’s about a perspective that feels fresh, like they’re saying something we haven’t quite heard before, a new way of seeing. It could be an artist using paint in a way I’ve never seen before or using photography to propose something unexpected. That sense of newness often comes from how they’re thinking about living in the world. There’s a connection between the artistic output and the social conditions that shape it. SITE Toronto Workshop: "Why Are Toronto's Arts Institutions in Crisis?" Courtesy of Mercer Union and SITE Toronto. Photo by Miao Xuan Liu. SITE Toronto Workshop: "What Alternative Funding Models Are Possible?" Courtesy of Mercer Union and SITE Toronto. Photo by Miao Xuan Liu. Toronto is celebrated for its diversity and sense of community, but it also faces inequality and resource challenges. How does SITE Toronto respond to these realities? I think the way arts institutions frame and present artwork has a real impact on who feels invited into that work and who feels excluded. For public institutions funded by the government, there is a civic responsibility to move beyond historically elite models and to broaden access and engagement. In Toronto, our arts ecosystem largely operates within a set of legacy frameworks. These range from the national museum model—emerging in the late eighteenth century, with the Louvre as an early example of a public museum built around a permanent collection—to the Kunsthalle model focused on commissioning and temporary exhibitions. Within this spectrum we also have university galleries and artist-run centres. These are the dominant institutional forms in the city, and they are the structures I engage with in my institution-building work. What has become increasingly clear to me—through research over the past several years and especially through the community visioning process I facilitated at Mercer Union during the Groundwork exhibition—is that these models were developed in very different historical, economic, and social conditions. Artist-run centres, for example, emerged primarily in the 1960s and expanded across Canada in the 1970s. Many of Toronto’s existing centres were formed during that period. We are therefore working within structures that were designed sixty or seventy years ago, under radically different funding landscapes, property markets, and political realities. My work is not to question whether these institutional models are valuable—they are—but to ask why they often feel out of sync with artists and publics, and why their underlying structures have remained largely unchanged despite profound social, economic, and cultural shifts. SITE Toronto emerges from that inquiry. It asks how we might rethink funding frameworks, governance models, and organizational design so institutions can respond to contemporary conditions rather than inherited ones. How do we build arts institutions in the twenty-first century that are both sustainable and equitable, and that genuinely serve the people who call Toronto home? How would you describe Toronto’s art scene and its dynamics? Having lived in Toronto for three years, I still consider myself a newcomer. Through situated research, lived experience, and building relationships with artists and arts workers deeply embedded in the city, I have come to understand Toronto as an arts ecosystem coloured by collectives and sustained by grassroots organizing. At the same time, there is a significant disconnect and mistrust between Toronto’s larger arts institutions and the local arts community. I felt that early on while working as Curator at MOCA Toronto, and over time I’ve come to see it as structural—rooted in funding frameworks and systemic inequities. After October 7th, and in the context of the genocide in Palestine, that fracture became even more visible. As David Velasco wrote, those events “broke the art world”—not because they created new tensions, but because they exposed existing ones. Long-standing disparities and institutional failures have been laid bare. Within this context, what kind of art institution do you think Toronto needs today? For me, the question isn’t whether Toronto needs major institutions—it does—but what kind of institutions can genuinely serve artists and communities today. The models that inspire me are grounded in place. Their relevance comes from sustained relationships with artists on the ground, rather than aspiring to generalized global templates, even as they remain in dialogue with international discourse. Toronto doesn’t need to emulate MoMA or replicate another MOCA. It needs institutions focused on this city, our communities, and the specific conditions shaping them. That thinking is embedded in the name SITE Toronto. It signals an institution that is grounded rather than aspirational—one that reflects the city as it is and, like still water, holds it clearly enough that we can see ourselves in it. It is about building a nimble, flexible, process-driven structure that remains responsive to changing conditions and to the artists and communities it serves. I’m thinking about the three-part public program you organized at Mercer Union. Can you tell me more about these sessions? The program unfolded across three sessions, each combining talks, public conversations, and workshop elements. The first session introduced my research through dialogue with Theresa Wang and Aamna Muzaffar from Mercer and opened into a broader discussion with participants. The second session focused on funding models. I invited Sally Moussawi, who joined virtually from the UK and has worked with organizations such as the Mosaic Rooms, not/nowhere collective, and Cubitt Artists. Sally describes their work as developing anti-capitalist approaches to funding not-for-profit arts organizations—language I rarely hear articulated so directly within the sector. Our conversation connected funding conditions in the UK and Canada and was followed by a workshop examining short- and long-term strategies for ethical and sustainable funding models. The third session considered how institutions respond to place. Emilie Chhangur, director of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, joined as the guest speaker. We discussed her institutional approach alongside the work of architect Lina Bo Bardi and the organization SESC in Brazil, particularly its deep integration with the surrounding community. That session also concluded with a workshop. The format was about knowledge production through exchange—it was also an extension of my individual research, allowing it to live and breathe in dialogue with the community. The conversations and workshops directly shaped the thinking that later informed SITE Toronto as a new kind of arts institution. I’m curious who attended the sessions and what kinds of conversations emerged. In terms of who was there, my intention was to cast a wide net. Initially, I had intended to bring in people who were not just visual artists or arts workers. I was inspired by Park Fiction in Hamburg in the 1990s, where artists mobilized a broad-section of the community—café owners, children, elderly folks, creatives, tenant class—to prevent a park from being turned into apartments. I thought this program might start that way, but after the first session it became clear that the people most invested in these questions were arts workers. For me, an arts worker is defined as anyone whose livelihood comes from the arts sector. The term “worker” is inherently connected to labour, so it includes artists as well—anyone primarily sustaining themselves through the arts. The majority of people who showed up were those impacted directly by arts institutions through their work—people who had worked in institutions or on institutional projects in Toronto, also public and private funders, foundations, private donors, and people from the city. There were individuals in their seventies and sixties alongside people in their early twenties. Bringing those cross-generational perspectives into the same conversation was incredibly valuable. The word “community” is used constantly—and I care about it deeply—but within contemporary arts institutions it has become diluted. For now, I’m focusing on the sector itself: labour, funding, sustainability, censorship, and equity. These are the conditions that determine whether arts workers can build and sustain careers in Toronto. I appreciate that you invite the local community to contribute their thoughts. Could you share a few examples of what participants brought up during the sessions? Participants broke into small groups with large sheets of paper to brainstorm. One prompt asked what felt urgent, missing, or overlooked within Toronto’s arts institutions. Some responses were emotional or conceptual; others were concrete and data-driven—for example, the need for rent support, the desire for protected spaces for art, and references to city polling showing declining public support for funding art and culture. Each group then presented their key points, and we mapped them collectively in a live format. We also discussed the tools needed to address what’s lacking: fewer barriers to entry, less siloing, art more embedded in daily life, and institutions that say “yes” rather than defaulting to “no.” People spoke about reducing alienation, increasing public buy-in, creating more opportunities for exchange, and dismantling hierarchical or colonial structures. Some proposals were practical, such as free access and eliminating ticketing. What I’ve been thinking about since is how to sustain that momentum beyond the workshops. It felt like a beginning. I believe we need to band together more deliberately as an arts sector. The word “community” is used constantly—and I care about it deeply—but within contemporary arts institutions it has become diluted. For now, I’m focusing on the sector itself: labour, funding, sustainability, censorship, and equity. These are the conditions that determine whether arts workers can build and sustain careers in Toronto. These conversations are happening, but often in silos. Change happens when people organize, come together, and articulate shared interests. That was the intention behind the program, and it’s what I hope to continue through SITE Toronto. Can you elaborate on your intention in organizing the program? One thing I was very conscious of when developing the program was that it wasn’t about what I think arts institutions should be. I don't think there is a definitive answer. I was interested in creating a format where knowledge could be produced collectively and through exchange. I have my perspective, but it was really about learning through other people's opinions and experience. In that sense, I very much welcome debate. I wanted critique, I wanted people to be critical of my approach, because I'd been working on these questions alone. And that's also a very crucial way that I like to work as a curator. It's a relational process for me, and it's about working in collaboration and dialogue with other people. This is how I wanted this program to function. What do you hope participants take away from the program? The questions we explored in the program are already very much alive in Toronto. Many people are thinking about and building new ways of working, often through collaboration and pooled resources. What I hoped was to learn from others, and for the sessions to function connectively—to bring together conversations more intentionally across the sector, so artists and organizations working in parallel might recognize shared interests and begin working together more often and deliberately. I also hope participants left with an expanded sense of what constitutes contemporary art in this city! Too often, disciplines are treated as separate—visual art here, performance there, music somewhere else—when in reality they are part of the same contemporary moment. For me, expanding this understanding of what contemporary art is creates the conditions for more interdisciplinary exchange and experimentation. When we think of contemporary art as a porous and evolving field rather than a fixed category, it becomes easier to collaborate across forms and to build institutions that reflect how we actually think and work as artists and people. This kind of openness not only fosters creativity but also strengthens and sustains the cultural sector more broadly. What are some of the upcoming initiatives that SITE Toronto is planning? SITE Toronto is a new institution for contemporary art—not only because it was recently formed, but because it proposes a new methodology for how an arts institution can function. At its core, SITE focuses on strengthening the cultural landscape in Toronto by building a just and equitable infrastructure that supports critical inquiry and rigorous creative practice. Toronto is deeply diasporic, yet the arts sector can feel insular. SITE bridges local commitment with international networks and connections. The first initiative is a residency program launching in March that supports both local and international practitioners. The inaugural session, which runs for three months, will bring an international artist to Toronto while supporting a Toronto-based curator in undertaking research abroad. This reciprocal model is further rooted in Toronto's layered histories, foregrounding questions of land, colonization, migration, and belonging. In 2026, we also plan to launch a mentorship program focused on strengthening local networks. Artists and arts workers will be able to share projects in progress, receive feedback, and build professional relationships. The program will also connect participants beyond the city—for example, pairing a Toronto-based curator with someone internationally to foster sustained dialogue. We are also planning a symposium on institutions in the twenty-first century, with a focus on understanding institutions as processes rather than fixed endpoints. One of the first questions I’m often asked about SITE Toronto is whether we have a space. A physical space is certainly a goal, but it isn’t the starting point. For an institution to meaningfully support artists and remain connected to the community, it must recognize that artists and communities are not static—they are constantly evolving. Institutions, therefore, must be responsive and adaptable. We are living at a time when many people feel constrained in what they can say publicly, particularly within Toronto’s arts sector. One responsibility of a contemporary arts institution is to create space for discussion and disagreement—for criticality. The language of debate may have receded from our cultural vocabulary, yet it remains essential if we are to live together in this city. At their best, institutions can serve as spaces of exchange—bringing people into dialogue not through consensus, but through the differences we hold. If they are flexible and responsive, our arts institutions can make room for complexity and contradiction, and in doing so, play an active role in shaping Toronto into the kind of artistic city we have the potential to be. The above text was written by Gladys Lou, a curator and critic based in New York. Editorial support by Emily Doucet.Cover image: Kate Wong. Photo by Gloria Wong.

The book I’m holding is sturdy like a rock but appears as vibrant gradation, like a spear of light in a prism or the memory of a peacock in flight. I thumb open the tome guided by one of three ribbons, each a different shade of red, to mark the start of something, or my eager return. Inside I find lines of instruction, but also many other kinds of lines, some that provide directions (“Journey inward toward new exteriors”) or pose questions (“What are the heroics of a lack of heroic qualities?”). Still others simply stretch open the mind. I’m describing here the properties, physical and psychic, of Lucy Ives’s latest volume, three six five: prompts, acts, divinations (an inexhaustible compendium for writing), out this spring on Siglio. The book is an abundance of things, depending on how you choose to use it. Not least, it is a marvel to behold. Designed by Nathalie Kraft and featuring a suite of drawings by the artist and writer Nick Mauss, three six five aggregates more than a year’s worth of everyday ways to conjure, bend, or arrange time and language, to give shape and contour to the wild movements thought can make, when you let it. Every time I read something by Lucy Ives I’m compelled to write. That’s true of her novels and poems just as much as the vertiginous essays in last year’s An Image of My Name Enters America, which take her readers to the brink of that genre’s form. That is just the kind of writer she is. So it made perfect sense, when, in 2021, Ives used her Instagram account to circulate prompts for writing, exercises for the mind, and ideas for working collaboratively, many of which now appear within three six five. With this publication, I’m once again provoked by Ives to consider how writing exceeds the fact of being a private symptom. It can be a way to make things, and to make things happen, a reason to gather, a defiantly social act. I spoke with Lucy about her longstanding interest in the writing exercise or prompt, as well as the process of making this boon of a book. We also talked about her collaboration with Nick Mauss, about the past selves she writes for, and about how writing gives access to ways of living that this world so wrongly tries—but fails—to deem impossible. It's a relief to realize that the thing we ostensibly don't care about, or don't notice, can become the most precious resource.  Do you remember your first encounter with a writing prompt? It would have been in school. But it wasn’t until I was a teenager that I learned a prompt can be more than “what I did over summer vacation”; that it can be a game with language. When I was 16, this kid who was into punk rock was like, “Hey, did you know there's this cool poetry thing, ‘Killing a Word’? And I was like, “No….” And he was like, “Yeah, it's super cool. You choose a word, then repeat it.” And I was like, “What happens then?” And he said, “The word will die. If you keep saying it, eventually it will stop meaning anything.” And I was like, “You can do that?” A light went on and I thought, oh, here is a way you can get around suffering—if I'm not being too dramatic. I'm not exactly a spiritual person, but there is, for me, an aspect of emotional and personal survival, which I could extend to a larger community, that is associated with this sort of practice. (“Killing a Word” is prompt 102 in three six five: prompts, acts, divinations.) I held onto that first prompt, and over time I found that language-based prompts like this are a way of doing something that's also, simultaneously, nothing. They can help us find balance, a sense of being absorbed or held. They might help us be surprised, or love something that isn’t an object or another person, but that is instead a quality of ourselves and a quality of the world. It’s this enmeshing of the objective and the subjective that is so beautiful to me, and that I think art is good for. Visual artists often come up with exercises I see as analogous to these writing exercises: thinking of ideas or words as material, as opposed to something that's for expression. This is part of the reason I’m very drawn to visual art. I love artists, as the poet Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge once wrote in a book title. I first encountered your prompts—which I also think of as poems—on your Instagram account, starting in 2021 or so. How did the idea for this book come about? I think it all started—by which I mean, the material for the book—around 2014, when I was teaching regularly. There must have been a day when I had forgotten how long the class was or we had extra time, and there was an extended, possibly awkward silence. I was like, “Now we will do a writing exercise that I've planned for a long time! It’s called…Exercise for Writing from Memory.” (This is prompt 72 in three six five.) I had everyone take out a piece of paper. I asked them to write about things that happened in the past, but in a ridiculous way, like something that happened exactly five years ago yesterday, which is a hard mental gesture to execute. At the end of the exercise, I asked everyone to describe something that they’d completely forgotten, which is, of course, impossible. I was responding to how patronizing or sentimental some writing exercises can be. I wanted it to be impossible to do the exercise “correctly.” The next year, I invented another prompt, “A Group Novel,” which is a multi-part exercise included as an appendix in three six five. I didn't know at first if it would work, but it works! When you are done, you’ve created a novel authored by a group, and you can publish it, if you like. I don't think of myself as the author of these exercises, exactly. They're co-created, and they aren't about me expressing myself, as much as they are ideas for organizing time and work and imagination that I thought of while working with others. Maybe because of this, at some point I put them on Instagram. It was soon after the pandemic, and I felt out of touch. I thought posting exercises could be a way to reach people without trying to tell them something—like trying to workshop these ideas. What would people respond to? What would they pass on? In the beginning, I tried to post one a week. Then I tried to post daily, but that became exhausting. It wasn’t the right rhythm. Lisa Pearson of Siglio press and I had worked together on an edited collection of Madeline Gins’s writing, The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words, and she asked if I had other projects that were a little unusual, that I wouldn't be able to find a trade publisher for. I mentioned these prompts. We decided to try it out. three six five is a way to have a relationship with other people through the idea of the prompt. It’s also for readers who are interested in poetry in a broad sense, which I think is many people. I like the format of the book—the experience of reading the prompts together—because it becomes clear that they don't have to be used as tasks. You could “use” them the way you would use a poem, aphorism, or very short story. You can read one and think about what's happening, then you can read another. Having them in a book lets you engage with them more as literature than as something related to productivity or creativity in the way these are often iterated on social media. I read a lot of children's literature, and to me, this book functions like a long bedtime story or episodic verse. It’s immersive. Cover of three six five: prompts, acts, divinations by Lucy Ives (Siglio, 2026). Courtesy Siglio.  Some exercises in three six five are an invitation to write, some are an invitation to do other things: go on walks, take the day off, do nothing. Long non-writing sessions lead to very short writing exercises, as well as the opposite, short spells of non-writing lead to more durational writing exercises. What’s the relationship between writing and not writing? How, for you, does writing relate to other forms of living? One of the things I discovered in my early 20s was that you can write things and not know what you're saying. I know that’s obvious, but I still find it profound. I learned you can say things about your life as you're living it that are true. You might not be able to read your own account correctly, or you might not understand everything right away, yet something true is still touched on. There's a form of contact. I don't know what makes this possible. Is it a feature of language? Does it have to do with the writing utensil, the medium? Is it about doing something with your body? Is it about some inaccessible part of a person, like the soul, that is finally at liberty? You could think about this in a religious or psychoanalytic light; there are lots of different schools, but definitions don't interest me. The possibility and multifarious grace that writing engages are things I was told would not be available to me as a human. I don't know who told me that—if it was culture, America, or my family. But I do know I was told that those things weren't available. Then, through this practice, I came to see that they were. The prompts that seem paradoxical, like, walk ten miles and write five words, or go across the room and write 10,000 words, are maybe jokes. But they are also very serious attempts to get people out of the clutches of certain ideas we have about what is consequential; getting people to see how broader social measurements we have for what matters are wildly inaccurate. For example, we tend to think of a single sentence as inconsequential. It's like, who cares? Throw that away. But if you have the experience of taking a long walk and writing a sentence, and you feel satisfaction doing that, you might see a single sentence as really meaningful. You might see how a sentence is amazing, how it's totally worth it to walk ten miles to find it. By the same token, what if you went across your room and that act generated thousands of words? What does that tell you about just being present in your room? How can this be? That's a thing to think about. It's a relief to realize that the thing we ostensibly don't care about, or don't notice, can become the most precious resource. These prompts might knock you off kilter a little and help you uncover something that possesses a value that can’t be measured—that refuses measurement. It’s something I discovered a while ago and found useful in terms of navigating the world. That's what I meant earlier about survival. I’m thinking about this claim you make in the book’s introduction: “[Memory] already belongs to you. You have endless amounts. You can never run out.” It reminds me of the fact that even one’s first attempts at writing are fundamentally acts of remembering. When you first learn to write the letter A, for instance, you’re trying to recreate a shape you saw moments earlier. Do you often use prompts or exercises to produce writing? More broadly, do you think writing is always, in some way, responsive? In my life and writing, I'm often thinking about my past self and how I could help her, how I could write something for her to read that would make her feel hopeful. I know she can't read things I write in the future until she gets to the future, but I'm always trying to write things for her anyhow, so that she can have a reason to make it here, to my present. In the past, I promised myself I would get us to this present, where we have what we need and aren’t in great confusion. I know that's a little cheesy, but that's a big reason I write. My past self is my main audience. With this book, I wanted to say to the reader, “You have agency.” This said, you don't have to use agency to make meaning from words. You can go into the world and do stuff, or think about the past, or invent something. You can do all these things in a nonsensical way, and that can be gentle, that can be magic. You don’t have to serve reason, or, for that matter, any institutionally certified or certifiable meaning. To go back to the practice of a young person learning the alphabet, I personally had a long period of not being literate. I didn't learn to read until I was 9. So I know the feeling of being a person who's not literate but is able to watch people read and write and observe their fluency with things that seem strange and difficult. I'm drawn to holding on to that strangeness because I think that there's meaning and value there that isn’t reducible to semantic or linguistic meaning. There are other forms of meaning that are important, that I want us to have access to. And I do think, paradoxically, writing can give us access to those rare meanings, if we handle it thoughtfully. Spread from three six five: prompts, acts, divinations by Lucy Ives (Siglio, 2026). Courtesy Siglio.  Spread from three six five: prompts, acts, divinations by Lucy Ives (Siglio, 2026). Courtesy Siglio. This book not only encourages collaborative modes of writing and making, it is also the beautiful result of one. The artist and writer Nick Mauss contributed a suite of drawings that appear very incrementally over the course of the book. How did you and Nick come together for this project? I've known Nick for a while, I think we met in 2011 or 2012. I admire his sensibility and the way that he works in different media. He's a person who's so careful and painstaking and simultaneously so prodigiously talented. I wrote an essay about his work once that was called, “There Once Was a Person Who Could Draw Anything,” and that's sort of how I think of Nick, like, he can draw anything, you know? He seems invincible to me. The book didn’t begin with the idea that it would be illustrated, but when we thought to ask an artist, the first person I thought of was Nick, in part because a lot of his drawing isn't representational in the sense of photographic realism. He's a dancer and works a lot with dance, and dances in different ways. Dance creates communities and leaves an archive, in Nick’s orientation to it. It’s also a way to negotiate movement with others or across spaces. I thought about the fact that this is a big book, and what it needs is a line that's very good at navigating complexity. I think Nick's way of drawing and thinking about lines is germane to what I'm trying to do with the book—the sort of aphoristic nature of it. What the drawings give us isn't exactly a representation of something that would be in the world. Sometimes they refer to things that are happening in the prompts, but often they seem to have just absorbed some energy that's in them. They're beautiful, and I like them as moments that are also mysterious. It's not always clear what the thing is, and I think it's important for there to be some interpretation that's coaxed out of the person who's looking at the book. Like, do you see this shape as a door that's opening? Or a stop sign? Or an unusual birthday card? What is that thing for you? The fact that this could change over time is important to me. Going back to childhood and literacy, that's something I remember loving as a kid—noticing myself seeing something in a book and interpreting it differently on an alternate occasion of reading. I wanted that to be possible with this book, too. If you look at the book again, it will reward you. Nick's drawings contribute to this metamorphic quality of the pages. I like this connection: that writing, like dance, can be used to make things—even a whole archive of things—that are bigger or stranger than the self. Writing, in this sense, is freed from the task of self-expression. As a person who also enjoys purposelessness, I want to ask: When does a response to an exercise become something that resembles or is a “work”? I can only answer this in a personal way, and the way I think about this is very old-fashioned. Like, somebody has a notebook, and sometimes they write in it, and one day, they either finish writing in the notebook, or they decide to read it, and as they're reading, they find something that surprises them, and they're like, “Oh, maybe I should do something more with this, maybe I should type this page up, because the writing has started being something independent that needs to be more alive.” I know a lot of people, probably all people, struggle with thinking: “Is this something? Is this anything? Should I keep working on this? Is there any point? Even if it were published and people liked it, would that matter?” We all struggle with this. But I think you can have an experience of certainty. I mean, it's probably temporary. But you can see it for a second, and you can think, “Yes, this is real. I believe in this.” Like, you've enchanted yourself so much that you start to believe your own story. Once that happens, that's when it stops being practice or an exercise and starts to be something that approaches a work, so called. But that's just a guess. I know people love to hate him but Lucy…I feel like you might be the new Rumi! It’s not that I find three six five to be either a very mystical or moral book, but I do think it is intensely philosophical. The exercises compiled here suggest that daily writing gives one access to any number of otherwise impossible things. How is writing similar to or different from spiritual activity? One difference between Rumi and me(there are many!) might be that, instead of something like scripture or the soul, I’m interested in a more material notion of writing, because it is a preeminent medium for movement through the world and transformation. Mine is a secular experience of this movement and this transformation, because that’s what I’ve got. Not because I'm down on anybody's beliefs, but because I just don't have access to certain levels, like the divine—although I do go in for the irrational and the intuitive, and various hints, upheavals, and impossibilities. I'm flattered by the comparison to Rumi, so thank you. As I was saying earlier, the one thing I know about writing is that it shows me there are things in the world that, by and large, people in technocratic society are told don’t exist. It would be difficult to enumerate all those things, but the main takeaway for me is that the self (I mean, it's an Emily Dickinson truism) is way bigger and older than we generally comprehend, and for whatever reason, I don't know if it's culture or what, we have severe and even tragic limitations in terms of sensing the vastness and diversity of the self. That vastness is a thing that makes what’s happening here on the planet a bit less overwhelmingly corrosive for me—the vastness and ancientness and plural-ness of the self. It seems that if the self is connected to the past, it's also connected to the future—and therefore aspects of the future can become accessible through writing. I don't feel comfortable saying more than that, because I can't promise anyone that they're going to be able to, like, make a lot of cash on the stock market if they do the right writing exercise. I’m not in that line of work. But I have tried to be interested in the pathologically secular world I exist in, and respect that, and not try to fake it. A teacher once told me, “Acceptance has a form.” This statement made me incredibly angry at the time, given certain human activities, but I continue to ponder it. Maybe what I ask myself is what I plan to do if acceptance, as such, is not possible. How will I meet death? What will I eat for lunch tomorrow? These prompts represent one person’s attempt to think about agency differently, to expose herself to other, denigrated aspects of it. This is important to me as a teacher, but also as a person. Agency is troubling. It doesn't work the way we want it to. On that note, many of the prompts invite readers to channel or spend some time with moods or thoughts that are conventionally negative, including obsession, paranoia, or conspiratorial thought. There's even a prompt called “Ugly Feelings” (no. 154). How are abhorrent feelings related to writing? Fear and hatred can be extremely exciting emotional experiences. They make your hair do funny things, and they make you feel compelled in certain ways. There’s a Frank O'Hara poem where he's like, “Hate is only one of many responses.” And he says, “Why be afraid of hate, it is only there / think of filth, is it really awesome / neither is hate.” I find that question useful. “Is it really awesome?” I ask myself that all the time. Extreme feelings like fear and hate can be easy to have. They dissipate quickly, or you can stockpile them, if you want. They often feel portable, contagious, volatile. They’re everywhere. There are other feelings more difficult to have than, say, fear or hate, feelings like disappointment, for example. Disappointment can be one of the most difficult feelings to experience, because it can range from something like, “My mom didn't love me,” to something like, “I forgot the card I need to get into the swimming pool today, so I can’t go swimming.” But it's not about getting over or blotting out these liminal feelings as much as it is actually having the experience we're already having. This book is less about a feeling like fear than it is about a feeling like dread, less about hate than disappointment. It's about trying to find ways to turn into those feelings, or back toward them, or treat them like they're a familiar character you’re in dialogue with. When you can be in dialogue with ugly feelings, there's so much material. Once you can have that relationship, it's like a superpower. You can endlessly create from that dynamic. Now, who knows why things are like this? I don't know. Fear and hate make us do destructive, irreparable things. These other feelings that are more ambiguous and difficult can help us do other things andhaveother forms of agency that are challenging to have, and that people later admire. I often notice that visual artists are engaged with one or more of these difficult, ambiguous feelings to produce whatever they're doing, and it's the reason their work is so engrossing. It has those same features of ambiguity that difficult feelings have. This book is a form of hoping—that you don't have to be those ugly feelings, because it's very hard to be them, but instead you can enter into a relationship of mourning or grief with them, a relationship of irony, or even something more joyful. There's an exercise in the book I've never done but wish I could. It's an exercise to make a list of all the mistakes you've made in your life. (This is prompt 167 in three six five, “exercise for recovery of joy.”) I would like to be able to do that exercise. I think it would be an incredible autobiography. It's hard to explain the emotion that would accompany this writing but I have the intuition that writing something like this would give life back to me. That's the reason it’s so difficult. Because it's frightening to get life back. We’re more comfortable with having lost life, for whatever reason. I don't know why. In My Life, Lyn Hejinian writes, “I saw my life as a struggle against my fate, that is, my personality.” I often think about the equivalence she makes here, of fate with personality, and life as that which is made despite them. Your book does a similar thing, reminding me how writing enables a liveliness that personality, or memory, or experience alone cannot. I’m sorry, this is not a question. That’s a beautiful statement. There's a commonplace people use about the “hand” you’re “dealt.” I think the personality Hejinian is talking is an orientation to that “hand.” It’s how you play the game. You could think about it like perspective in a video game—first or third person, for example. Fate is a format. When a format becomes narrative, it has consequences, right? It’s particularly consequential if you don’t know what the format is and you’re stuck in the narrative. That’s what Aristotle thought theater could be good for, helping people learn about format so tragic loss would stop befalling them. In some peoples’ conception of this innovation of Western culture, you can create narratives that allow for full recognition of the format. I’m speaking broadly. Freud might have touched on this. However, I have doubts about recognition as the thing that solves for fate.I'm not sure recognition allows us to understand the origins and consequences of action, which is another way to talk about fate.I think it's an interesting paradox that even perceiving your actions may not be enough to save you from whatever caused them or their reverberating aftermath. These prompts represent one person’s attempt to think about agency differently, to expose herself to other, denigrated aspects of it. This is important to me as a teacher, but also as a person. Agency is troubling. It doesn't work the way we want it to. The reason these prompts aren’t lyric poems or philosophical aphorisms is because I'm so interested in agency, in the many things it might be or become, once you begin to contemplate it in its most forgotten guises. Which are actually the only parts of it that are, in my opinion, possible and truly alive. The above conversation was conducted by Shiv Kotecha, a writer and editor living in New York. Kotecha was a 2025 editorial resident with Public Parking. This is his third contribution as part of a four-part creative exploration with our publication. Return to discover his final piece. Special thank you to Lucy Ives for participating so generously in the above conversation. Cover image: Lucy Ives. Photo by Will Matsuda.

The art history of Toronto is specifically and heavily indebted to performance artists. Accepted definitions of what constitutes “performance art” vary depending on who you are asking, and the landscape of spaces that make room for it has changed drastically. But where there is institutional neglect there have always been those who make their own opportunities. Describing her practice as a mix of “prop comedy, experimental theatre, performance art, absurd literature, existential anxiety, and intuitive dance,” Bridget Moser has been making audiences laugh with her performances and video works since 2012. Her characters and vignettes lampoon real people, or more accurately personas, that we are all more or less familiar with from the celebrity manufacturing machines of reality TV and social media. She has worked with the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), 7A*11D International Performing Arts Festival, the 35th Rhubarb Festival, and many others. She was also shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2017. Over the past fourteen years, Moser’s performance practice has made use of her talents in observation, adapting her characters, set designs, and monologues to changing cultural currents and the people responsible for them. Originally conceived for a residency at the Banff Centre, Moser describes her performance Baby Don’t Understand (2012) as “the performance that launched a thousand ships.” These early works show Moser’s experimentation with the structure of stand-up comedy, including using a microphone and incorporating furniture and props. Today her works feel more like scrolling through a feed, being faced with belligerent personalities that don’t quite seem real. Through a process of collecting objects, dialling into internet culture (and subcultures), and watching television, Moser has developed a unique framework for her performances—an approach which has unfolded noticeably over the course of several works since 2020: Hell is Empty; All the Devils Are Here (2025), Dreams of Dusk (2025), A Malevolently Bad Map (2024), When I Am Through with You There Won’t Be Anything Left (2022), and My Crops Are Dying but My Body Persists (2020). Moser takes our new cultural archetypes and points us towards what I would call neoliberal brain rot about self-optimization and the capitalist posthuman subject, extracting and presenting us with the absurdity of these mindsets. According to Andrew James Paterson, Toronto’s performance scene today has some purists who maintain strict boundaries for what counts as performance art, what is theatre, and what doesn’t belong; he says there are some who do not consider Moser a performance artist, but rather an avant-garde stand-up comedian. The implication being, perhaps, that no serious performance artist can be funny. While Paterson recalls that he’d seen her perform previously, the two first met at an AGO party in 2014. They would meet up a few times a year at Hair of the Dog in Toronto, where they would gossip and talk about Samuel Beckett. The two performers have an affection for each other’s work, with Paterson standing up for Moser being seen as a performance artist. “She’s more verbal than some performance purists, they don’t like language. She’s funny, and she’s a good writer. That’s the first thing that really hit me other than the fact that I find her very watchable.” He recalls her early performance works showing off her dance background, fluid movements while negotiating a love-hate relationship with furniture. To Paterson, Moser’s work is very rooted in body art, and specifically body sculpture, over time transforming into works that investigate the body in relation to technology. Where did this penchant for prop performance come from? Moser’s sister, art historian Gabby Moser, suggests that this might have been a natural course from when the two took dance classes and playacted at home with toys and other things. She recalls that Moser would incorporate props into her solo dance routines, often made for her by their uncle, a set-maker who worked on the TV series Battlestar Galactica. Their fourth-grade teacher made students perform monologues, as practice for the schoolwide speech competitions; Moser says she still uses his teachings on how to memorize and deliver a speech off-paper. In her BFA at Concordia Moser studied painting, which turned into more fibre- and material-based work that became performative by the end of her degree. Her final project in 2007 was a Swiss hunting lodge environment made entirely from fibres and screenprinted fabrics, including axes and logs, referencing her paternal Swiss heritage. Inside a tent was a video of Moser wearing a fake mustache, doing a deadpan but wordless impersonation of her father—making coffee, doing the crossword, chopping wood, cooking Mickey Mouse-shaped pancakes over a campfire. The key to her sister’s comedic performance turn, Gabby says, may actually originate outside this personal history of dancing, acting, improv, and being naturally funny; rather, it was solidified by attending Kira Nova and Michael Portnoy’s “Experimental Comedy Training Camp” residency at The Banff Centre in 2012. Moser was among 20 artists who participated, along with familiar names in the Toronto performance scene like Neil LaPierre, Fake Injury Party (Derrick Guerin, Scott Leeming, Paul Tjepkema), and Life of a Craphead (Amy Lam and Jon McCurley). Residency participants were asked to perform at “club nights” with only an hour’s preparation directly beforehand. Otherwise, the group underwent intensive workshops that trained performance through voice, stage presence, and even anatomy. Nova and Portnoy’s collaborative practice in “experimental comedy,” involving “the sublime, the blatantly inscrutable, the abstract, the primal, the operatic, the choreographic, the theoretical… etc., into the frame of stand-up,” highlights a combination of the bodily with the study of theory into a cohesive and robust practice. Bridget Moser, When I Am Through with You There Won’t Be Anything Left, 2022. Courtesy the artist and Texas State Galleries. Photo: Madelynn Mesa. Bridget Moser, A Malevolently Bad Map, 2024. HD video, colour, sound, 13:09. Courtesy the artist and The Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin.  Moser had seen Portnoy’s infamous appearance as a backup dancer for Bob Dylan’s 1998 Grammy award performance, when he removed his shirt and outflanked Dylan, dancing with “Soy Bomb” written across his chest and stomach. This, alongside an aggressive performance by a male artist in her residency cohort, inspired her to aim for making people uncomfortable. The residency upended definitions of comedy as a means to a laugh, rooting the practice instead in the absurd and the sublime, exploring the limits of language and communication with an audience, and acknowledging the potential for a hostile interpersonal experience. The structure of a stand-up routine resonated with Lam and McCurley, who organized the Doored performance series (2012-2017) upon returning to Toronto. The key elements—a seated audience and short performance with a microphone—were a fruitful foundation, allowing for a clear distinction between audience and performer. Doored was an opportunity to build a community that workshopped performance practice together in real time and in front of reacting viewers. Over 120 artists participated in the series during its five-year run, with Moser being a frequent performer. Moser’s newest performance, Hell Is Empty; All the Devils Are Here, first performed at York University, then Art Windsor-Essex, and the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, is a Saturnalian romp through the grotesque and carnivalesque spirit of a triumphal capitalism on its last legs and in denial. In Moser’s words, “I’m trying to bring forth the fact that we live in hell.” Honing her skills and the subjects of her works from the last few years, Moser takes our new cultural archetypes and points us towards what I would call neoliberal brain rot about self-optimization and the capitalist posthuman subject, extracting and presenting us with the absurdity of these mindsets. She captures the pathology that undergirds ideas about the hyper-networked neo-human, primed to be an uber-productive entrepreneurial subject living three six-hour days per 24-hour period, and exposes how hilarious it is to take these views seriously. She recalls: “After the performance someone asked me if the woman with the raw milk attorneys is based on Lisa Barlow [from Real Housewives of Salt Lake City], but I wrote that before the new season of the show started. Though I realized it is indeed Lisa Barlow, and every woman of her ilk.” What makes it fruitful is Moser’s canny ability to draw out subtle humour in a way that is not on-the-nose like an SNL skit, rather giving form to the spiritual cores of these figures with a wink and a nudge. Moser wanted the performance to feel like scrolling through TikTok, experiencing its unique brand of psychosis from the many personas trying to sell or convince you of something. It is the free market made flesh, where you could or should always be doing something you saw in a short clip, whether or not it is a scam or would have any real benefit. This threat worsens with AI, and with it, Moser suggests, a decreased understanding of aesthetics. Ultimately, Hell Is Empty is about scammers, and Moser understands that much of the mainstream cultural class is made up of losers. She showcases the ways that aspirational objects, like a Birkin bag, sit at the frontier of an affluent, influence-laden society, positioned as a seductive, symbolic reward for submitting to it. Maybe less consciously, Moser’s critique is leveraged at the crumbling foundations of Western civilization, showcasing the psyche of the average consumer as simultaneously pacified and plunging into ennui from a seemingly endless stream of new and improved products, in the spirit of Mark Fisher’s theory of depressive hedonism. In this vein, Dreams of Dusk, a soap opera produced for CBC’s Creator Network, is acted out in miniature through props with AI-generated voices, each of the main characters carrying some heavy cultural baggage. Sarah is played by a 50 mL bottle of Glossier You perfume, a millennial favourite that “wears close to skin—so it smells a little different on everyone!” She is a real estate heiress and patron of the arts, consumed mostly by guestlists, gossip, who was wearing what, and nightmares of seeing herself flayed and pulled taut like Lady Cassandra in Doctor Who. David, played by a mini replica bust of Michelangelo’s David, is an out-of-touch C-suite type—indicted for securities fraud, estranged from his son (an even smaller David replica bust), obsessively introspective and self-consciously writing bad poetry in his leisure time. The bust itself was an original inspiration for the series, a collected object in Moser’s repertoire referencing the trend of right-wing posters obsessed with espousing white supremacy vis-à-vis masculinity, Western traditionalism, and the classicism of Ancient Greece, hiding behind their avatars of marble statues. In three episodes just under six minutes each, with titles like “Dying to Be Relevant in a Dying World,” “We Haven’t Done Anything Wrong, We’re Normal,” and “Can God Just Kill Us?,” Moser solidifies her position on the absurdities of socio-cultural structures being imposed on us from above, where what we internalize is dominated by the self-interested opinions and overdetermined anxieties of the rich and powerful, which we are perpetually forced to behold and take seriously. There are even subtle references to local art politics and the leaked letter demanding Wanda Nanibush be removed from her position at the AGO. What makes it fruitful is Moser’s canny ability to draw out subtle humour in a way that is not on-the-nose like an SNL skit, rather giving form to the spiritual cores of these figures with a wink and a nudge. She says the series is about dreaming and the end of an empire, perhaps in the spirit of one of her underrated influences, the late David Lynch. Lynch did have an affinity for the conventions of the soap opera, the melodrama of tarnished idealism, unraveling conspiracies and uncovering the secrets of the middle-/upper-classes fighting for their comfort in a rusting America. Moser, like Lynch, understands the power of gnawing guilt and the subconscious threat of punishment among this subset. Bridget Moser, Dreams of Dusk, Episode 1: "Dying to Be Relevant in a Dying World," 2025. HD video, colour, sound, 5:31. Courtesy the artist and CBC Creator’s Network.  Bridget Moser, Dreams of Dusk, Episode 2: "We Haven't Done Anything Wrong, We're Normal" 2025. HD video, colour, sound, 5:44. Courtesy the artist and CBC Creator’s Network.  Bridget Moser, Dreams of Dusk, Episode 3: "Can God Just Kill Us?" 2025. HD video, colour, sound, 5:49. Courtesy the artist and CBC Creator’s Network.  Over the past few years, the character of the paranoid, self-absorbed protagonist recurs in Moser’s videos and performances again and again. In A Malevolently Bad Map, a video work in the eponymous exhibition at Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin, Moser plays this role in conversation with a beaded towel of a Grecian amphora and a talking pair of pants. The protagonist meanders and focuses her talking points squarely on issues of self-expression, emotional intensity, and consumption. Moser refers to this time as “the Amazon age,” where any and all whims, even the ones that can’t be consciously articulated, are catered to through buying things. This exploration of selfhood is complicated by the onslaught of advice and affirmations that come from all the nooks and crannies of TV and online spaces, ultimately trying to sell a solution to a problem that was created in the sole hopes of selling more products. When I Am Through with You There Won’t Be Anything Left, performed in her installation of the same name as part of “I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality” at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Nebraska, makes bedfellows of charismatic, cultish, self-optimized figures; victims of the supernatural; an anti-identity politics landscape painter; and evangelicals extolling heavenly organ transplants. The vignettes kick off with a TikTok manosphere guru pontificating on “the construction of the perfect male body” and espousing “the healing field of misinformation.” Taking these self-serious, if cynical musings of the right-wing grifter class on their own terms, Moser uses their circular logic, pseudo-science, and total belief in divine intervention to highlight that they ultimately say very little. The fact that new-age concepts like energy, vibration, portals, manifestation and alignment have become more or less naturalized within a lexicon of skeptics to scientific experts whose research can be bought and sold reveals that people are afraid of what they don’t understand—especially with regard to the self and the body. The exhibition, “I don’t know you like that,” takes up the concept of hospitality alongside what it means to be in a body. Considering the relationship between the self and others through the experience of embodiment, the exhibition asks: what can bodies do, and how do they relate to each other? Moser’s answer: “We’re all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins for life.” Her character monologues of the last few years operate much like comedian Tim Robinson’s characters: those who bring the suspended social contract of the internet—which puts no limits on anti-social outbursts, conspiratorial thinking, paranoia, constant misrecognition, and openly communicating one’s pathological instincts—into the real world without compunction. Moser simulates the discomfort of these encounters and makes clear to us that this barrier has been irreparably broken, because we no longer collectively agree on the rules of the game. When I Am Through with You is a direct ancestor of Hell is Empty, with a similar format that employs a comparable mode of pantomiming advertisements, influencer culture, and basing characters on reality TV personalities and familiar pop culture types. When I Am Through with You expertly satirizes an era of hyper-self-obsession and pop-psychology that has only become more entrenched in the few years since this performance. Moser is also sure to reference the ways in which the awful things happening in the wider cultural sphere are impacting arts institutions and the way artists have to work now. Through her expert manipulation of archetypes, characters, and props, Moser shows us what it really means to be a performance artist who is also funny. In 2020, Moser opened My Crops Are Dying but My Body Persists at Remai Modern during a COVID lockdown. The central video work of the same title is highly attuned to Moser’s foray into anxious identity formation in a hyper-networked and highly influenced era. One part meditation video, one part alternate-universe-infomercial, one part soap opera, the video features a familiar protagonist: self-conscious, paranoid, needing to be recognized. “Enough about me, let’s talk about you, what do you like about me?” The voiceover occasionally uses the same female-coded text-to-speech voice that many video artists began using in the 2010s for monologues about the posthuman self, as though creating a cyborg character in a frictionless world of rest and relaxation. Moser injects this archetype with her surrealist humour and reveals the very human anxieties behind statements about not pursuing “unique living for my own benefit” and being “more than a purposeless body waiting for eventual death.” The set is abundant in the trappings of luxury, filmed in a room of French-style moulded wall panels with a pink velvet settee, the costumes and tables of haute consumer props conforming to a colour palette of pinks, yellows, whites, and golds. She spreads La Mer face cream on a slice of bread. Moser’s tableaus show an interest in the iconography of vaporwave as a movement about nostalgia amidst dying consumerist spaces, which didn’t explain itself with a grand theory but still seemed to resonate and proliferate with a subset of artists in the mid-2010s. In its maneuvering of post-2008 capitalism in decline vis-à-vis the aesthetics of 1980s consumerism and cyberspace futurism, vaporwave traffics in the saturation of the digital and a dissolution of authentic human experience. Moser identifies that we live in a post-vaporwave ecology that has diffused its symbols among different subcultures, like the marble statue avatars on right-wing text posts from various platforms. Her frequent use of pinks and blues is taken from 2016 when Pantone named two colours of the year, Rose Quartz and Serenity—right on the heels of vaporwave’s near-mainstream popularity, solidifying the colour palette of Gen X/millenial nostalgia. What shines through is that Moser is a keen observer and takes stock in a vast array of useful artifacts and references that cohere into a worthwhile and darkly funny critique. Bridget Moser, My Crops Are Dying but My Body Persists, 2020. HD video, colour, sound, 21:57. Courtesy of the artist. Bridget Moser, My Crops Are Dying but My Body Persists, 2020. HD video, colour, sound, 21:57. Courtesy of the artist. Bridget Moser, My Crops Are Dying but My Body Persists, 2020. HD video, colour, sound, 21:57. Courtesy of the artist. Bridget Moser, My Crops Are Dying but My Body Persists, 2020. HD video, colour, sound, 21:57. Courtesy of the artist. Bridget Moser, My Crops Are Dying but My Body Persists, 2020. HD video, colour, sound, 21:57. Courtesy of the artist. Moser’s influences are varied, owing as much to pop culture as to other artists. She cites the late American performance artist Stuart A. Sherman, best known for his Spectacle series in the 1970s and ’80s, in which he created miniature theatrical choreographies with everyday objects on a tabletop. This influence shines through in Dreams of Dusk. My favourite vignette is the opening scene of Episode 3. David laments losing control of his poetry as though it has become sentient. Commanding Alexa to call his ex-wife—to which Alexa asks: “Which ex-wife?”—David resigns to whichever one will answer and we are treated to Linda: a wispy pair of Barbie stockings (a gift from Neil LaPierre), cross-legged with her tiny French rotary phone in the Modway Casper Armchair in Clear, which went viral in 2017 after a woman purchased it for her apartment and received a dollhouse chair (the human-sized and miniature versions have since been clearly differentiated). Dreams of Dusk highlights Moser’s penchant for collecting, as well as her talent for paying attention to trending aesthetics. She likes Ryan Trecartin, and credits him with predicting TikTok through his frenetic pacing and over-the-top confessional characters. Where they also overlap is a love of television, particularly reality TV. Moser considers the importance of reality TV shows (namely, the Real Housewives franchise and Vanderpump Rules) alongside the larger, mutually reinforcing universes they exist within, but also help to create. That is, reality television begot influencers as we know them today, as a medium that creates celebrities out of regular people and catapults them into perpetual publicity through brand ambassadorships, obligatory social media presence, and more reality spin-off shows. Throughout Hell Is Empty, A Malevolently Bad Map, When I Am Through, and My Crops Are Dying, a similar character reemerges whose monologues reveal deep-seated anxieties about rapidly changing social and cultural norms. They exhibit a pathological self-obsession, as Moser puts it, “inhabiting the dream and the nightmare simultaneously.” This person constantly reflects on whether there are multiple versions of themselves out there, doing evil things that they have no control over. What continually comes through are extremely banal fears about the self and recognition, channelled through advertising slogans and pop-psychology affirmations, much like the way reality TV personas operate. Moser admits that this is an amalgam of some specific personalities from the Real Housewives franchise. Rolled into this character, and Moser’s strategy for writing monologues, is what she has learned from her day job at a plastic surgery clinic in Toronto. Earlier on, it fed much more into the way she made and wrote her performances. Doing the clinic’s marketing, she was “figuring out how to talk to people about their bodies,” and this language made its way into the work rather heavily. Now, Moser says, “I don’t fall back on that as much anymore. I don’t find it as interesting.” However, I suggested that this kind of vocabulary still naturally finds inroads in the way that the people she emulates talk in a celebrity-influencer environment saturated with plastic surgery. An aforementioned influence from David Lynch is more apparent the closer attention one pays, showing up in set design, camera takes, characters, backwards-talking objects, and an occasionally unsettling mood. The self-absorbed Housewives-esque character, narcissistically oversuspicious of what other versions of herself might be doing to make her look bad, dovetails with Lynch’s beloved theme of the evil doppelgänger. Moser says her greatest desire would be to make work that is more Lynchian (i.e., unsettling), but she’s certainly had her moments. Letting a handful of fake teeth slowly fall out of her mouth, falling to the floor and slowly crawling on her hands and knees to a low rumbling soundtrack (both My Crops Are Dying), and the entirety of How Does it Feel (2016), a silent video performance inside a hotel room wearing a completely royal blue outfit. Her affinity for creating hands out of other objects—hot dogs with press-on nails, a latex glove filled with beans, black fetish gloves manipulated by sticks—also helps. Moser admits, “My greatest anxieties are about making something that is too twee or cute.” I think she has nothing to worry about. Returning to Hell Is Empty; All the Devils Are Here, the performance encapsulates much of what Moser has been perfecting over the years, as well as some truly frightening developments that happened at the same time. It is the rich and powerful that can actually afford delusion, but the world made as their mirage has trickle-down effects for the rest of us. Moser is also sure to reference the ways in which the awful things happening in the wider cultural sphere are impacting arts institutions and the way artists have to work now. Through her expert manipulation of archetypes, characters, and props, Moser shows us what it really means to be a performance artist who is also funny. The title of her newest performance is more on the nose than it might seem: the loudest tastemakers and “culture-producers” gaining ground are ghouls and psychopaths, and the only real antagonism is our ability to laugh at them. The above text was written by Angel Callander, a Toronto-based writer, editor and curator. Editorial support by Emily Doucet. Cover image: Bridget Moser, My Crops Are Dying but My Body Persists, 2020. HD video, colour, sound, 21:57. Courtesy of the artist. 

Three boots hang from the pole that greets me; something of an archway, a threshold to sidle and cross before the room comes into view. Two more poles partition the space of Split Hairs to suspend Kyle Alden Martens’ boot-sculptures—the lines of gaping bodies in an abattoir or the draped garments of a walk-in wardrobe, everything hangs in the air like open secrets. ---------- To my left, boots of deep purple leather drip with scissors and loose threads, punctuated by three jackets sewn shut. To my right, a line of snakeskin boots with turquoise soles and dangling watches. The matter of handicraft—thimbles, scissors, thread—is taken up as adornment, but produces instead a set of signs that point to the hands (the past hands that handled the work) as the sculptures themselves point to the feet (the invocation of future feet). Time spreads out as the hanging beings encircle me, winding and unwinding on their poles, drawing little loops in air, and I am urged to go around again, to make some sense of their arrangement. The room proposes a closet, so I am moved to reach out—to take from the rack, to step into these skins as I do my own. When I choose clothes from my own wardrobe, I encase my animal body, wanting to inhabit something that intimates, however briefly, my imagined ‘I’. Queers have more language for this act: we perform, we flag, we enact ourselves, and we find each other through these visual codes—but it is anyone’s daily labour. As I approach Martens’ garments, I see that they are unfinished and splitting at the soles. The object of my reaching, this me concealed in cloth, but one lapsing iteration of many, splits open in turn. ---------- Kyle Alden Martens is a Montreal-based artist working across sculpture and performance. Informed by years of performance and videowork, their sculptural practice provokes imagined gestures through compositions of familiar objects. Common sense and comfort are both encoded and undone through the artist’s play with ambivalent signifiers and scale. The home, the familial—sites and systems that violate queer life—are denaturalized, disoriented from. Martens’ new solo exhibition, Split Hairs, which opened in January at Galerie Diagonale, blends sculptural practice and artisan shoemaking into a craft of disturbing the language of clothes or skin–exposing both the seduction and risk of coherence for the queer, or any imagined, body. I. Skin “[W]e should need no further warning as to the importance of clothes in human life and human personality; indeed, the very word ‘personality’...implies a ‘mask’, which is itself an article of clothing.” (John Carl Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes) Martens’ practice has long incorporated clothing, with handmade sandals, clogs, socks, jackets, and gloves doubling as containers for unexpected items like keys, marbles, combs, and rings. Placed on the ground of galleries, the shoeworks seduce the viewer to step into them—the embedded objects, then, interrupting this habitual act. Split Hairs presents a departure from the artist’s past work, exhibiting a constrained focus on the form of the boot, yet exposing its own (incomplete) process of making. The familiar is suspended, distinctly. Whereas clothes denote one’s ability to step into themself, to produce themself as a self, Split Hairs lays bare the careful labour of this process: one of excessive, gorgeous artifice. Kyle Alden Martens, Split Hairs, 2026. Exhibition view, Diagonale. Leather, thread, sandblasted watch faces, watch buckles. Photo © Mike Patten. Kyle Alden Martens, Split Hairs, 2026. Exhibition view, Diagonale. Silk, leather, thread, horse hair, paper, mat board, aluminum. Photo © Mike Patten. Suspended on their racks, the boots withhold this offer to step in. Their wide shafts gape open in uncut leather, retaining a fleshiness not yet obscured by clean stitching. One piece, a boot in burgundy leather, splits all the way down its shaft and hangs ajar, revealing a spinal column of stiletto heels protruding from its interior. This boot is a body, fortified by heel vertebrae of leather stuffed firm with horse hair. The spine signals strength and capacity to stretch, a series of bones in relation with muscles and ligaments. The spine, whose name comes from the botanical word also meaning ‘thorn,’ as in the spines of a cactus, signals threat. The spine may be a weapon, a protective apparatus. Shoes derive fully from a protective impulse—at some point, primates descended from the arboreal realm and our feet touched the sharp, hot earth. Shoes invoke a threshold, this risk-laden boundary of person and world, me and not-me. The foot, too, inhabits this crossing—the appendage is taboo; arousing and disgusting. The hands made the shoe to sequester the foot, guarded (or withheld) from the threat (or promise) of the wild ground. Split Hairs toes the limit of tedium and tumult. The dragged time of meticulous making and the mess or murk of the unknown, the anarchic, the animal. Exacting care and disorder, hand and foot. To split hairs conjures a meticulous, obsessive labour or process and, yet, split hairs, as a qualified noun, imbues the work and its dangling threads with what was always already feral and broken open. II. Stretch “The aesthetic was ‘more more more,’ and every layer conveyed meaning as we created eclectic mystical collage on our bodies. With my drag, I was collaging myself together.” (Fayette Hauser of The Cockettes in Fray) Invoking queerness via subverted gesture, the closet space of Split Hairs brings up Judith Butler’s “repetition with a difference.” The boots are shaped by stretching new leather over a single mould, culminating in a set of drafts. The mould is worn down with each reuse–every citation decays its origin and derives the next. The result is not a sequence; boots hover in a circle, evading implications of progress. Time is stretched and stitched and left agape along with the rest of the show’s vital matter. Dozens of watches drip from the exposed bootsoles; more are strung from inside the opened gauntlet of the show’s single glove. While their clocks’ hands are made illegible behind sandblasted crystal, the artist’s hands are everywhere, unobscured. The time of handmaking is doubled in the allusion to craft, which is always an engagement with the past: traditions of making are repeated with a difference. Craft is subverted as it cobbles together the queer body. And time becomes another material for such manipulation. Kyle Alden Martens, Split Hairs, 2026. Exhibition view, Diagonale. Silk, leather, thread, sandblasted watch faces, watch buckles, horse hair, mat board, aluminum. Photo © Mike Patten. Kyle Alden Martens, Split Hairs, 2026. Exhibition view, Diagonale. Silk, thread, vintage scissors, hammered thimbles, sandblasted watch faces, watch buckles, horse hair, mat board, aluminum. Photo © Mike Patten. In Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Elizabeth Freeman critiques Butler’s theory of performativity—in which the production of subjectivity is primarily citational—for its adherence to linear temporality. For Butler, every act is a reference. Queer selfmaking, then, is situated progressively, entailing the constant subversion of remnants of a heteronormative past. As Freeman writes, “the results of these temporal formulations can be that whatever looks newer or more-radical-than-thou has more purchase over prior signs.” And, “to reduce all embodied performances to the status of copies without originals” actually overlooks the provocation of the past—its residue; the atmosphere we live inside of in the present. The repetitive act of producing a (gendered) self—this “collaging [a self] together” engaged in drag but extending beyond explicit performance—occurs in a referential loop. For better or worse, the past is always in the room. The past is the room. Drag lives in this temporal gap between referenced and reference, working as “a productive obstacle to progress, a usefully distorting pull backward, and a necessary pressure on the present tense.”1 ---------- An inventory of garments made and remade, Split Hairs is the back of a shop, strung up with unfinished works, and an archive. It sprawls multiple pasts, residuary presents, and imagined futures—an index of indistinct time. The materials—cowhide leathers, silk taffeta, horsehair—bear their own lifespans, narratives outstretched and stained by time’s passage. Left undone, the absent referent is stitched to the present. The works reconfigure actual/imagined or prior/future bodies, in resonance with drag artist Fayette Hauser’s practice, where “shredded red velvet upholstery layered against an ochre gold tablecloth came not only to signify but to potentially reorder her own blood and flesh.”2 ---------- From within the closet, we withhold the secret of ourselves. Nothing is as precious as this secret, even as it hangs open. There is tenderness in its concealing. A certain care, immixed with the certain horror of its exposition: what madness sits on the other side? The secret’s matter is infected with the desire for meaning: we want to make sense. The idea of clothing adheres meaning to the body as it signals the calculus of gender. The idea of skin adheres meaning to the body as it proffers the enclosure of the human. Together, the ideas form a matrix for the (always violent) organization of bodies. ---------- Here, Martens constructs a closet, not to contain a secret so much as exhibit the negative space surrounding it. Held cautiously in rich cloth, a question hovers in the air: how do we step into ourselves? Gazing into our closets, we confront the possibility, and proposition, of its container––but Split Hairs begs deeper inquiry. Through Martens’ repetitive use of skin as the cloth that collages the self together—each attempt failing to conceal or cohere— common gestures of self-making are split open. The above text was written by Abby Maxwell, an artist, writer, and gardener based in Tiohtià:ke/ Montreal.Editorial support by Hannah Bullock. Cover image: Kyle Alden Martens, Split Hairs, 2026. Exhibition view, Diagonale. Silk, leather, thread, sandblasted watch faces, watch buckles, horse hair, mat board, aluminum. Photo © Mike Patten_______________________________________1. Elizabeth Freeman. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke University Press, 2010, 63-64.2. Julia Bryan-Wilson. “Queer Handmaking,” Fray: Art and Textile Politics. University of Chicago Press, 2017, 64.

The day after the opening of her solo-exhibition, Primary Information, I met Julia Dault in the basement 'Bunker' at Bradley Ertaskiran—a space that she specifically requested for her third presentation at the gallery. There's a certain drama to the room, given the mass of concrete, visible rebar, ventilation ducts, and amalgam of building material that cover the walls, like mineral deposits from preceding epochs of use. There we sat, shoes off, cross-legged on the most uncannily-coloured carpeting I've ever seen—not quite sulphuric, nor mustard, but somewhere between the two on the binary of fertilizer and food. The colour of the carpet wasn't planned ahead of time, as the massive quantity was repurposed, and yet, its presence doesn't feel accidental, either. This is no doubt due to the material sensitivity that lies at the core of Dault's practice. Across her career and through the various disciplines she engages with—sculpture, painting, and, more recently, public art—there is a recurrent lightness of touch and precision of treatment, stemming from a keen awareness of the affective dimensions of the materials she engages with. Dault began as an art-critic for one of Canada's main newspapers, then pivoted from this work of producing secondary information to that of primary information: she "came out as an artist," completed an MFA in New York, and has since had developed a rigorous practice marked, in part, by a curiosity and interrogation of what is at stake for those working in the tradition of Modernism and Abstract Expressionism. Having had solo-exhibitions in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and group exhibitions across the world, Dault is now shifting gears, not for the first time. Where, previously, Dault took up electric, straight-from-the-tube colours with intuitive automation, this exhibition is instead rendered in a grounded, deeper, and complexified palette. Related to this revision of hue is an underlying question concerning whether or not a long-term commitment to abstraction forecloses the possibility of using painting to process certain experiences of raw, primary emotions. Here's where Dault's work crosses into the realm of literary deconstructivism, as she regularly does and then undoes her own tools. Over the course of what was a freezing cold morning, we spoke of how, perhaps, the distinguishing characteristic between primary and secondary sources—and therefore the type of information that each category contains—is rooted in touch and manipulation; the affective dimension of industrial materials; and the possibility to exhaust one's physical or chosen form. I'm left thinking about how secondary information has literally been handled a second time, fed through the machinery of augmentation, elucidation, or complication. This distinction between first and second, top layer and underlayer, immediate and gradual, float around the exhibition, our conversation, and Julia's practice writ-large. On a negative day, I can feel that stylistic cohesion is just the market speaking, and that the real creative freedom comes from not worrying if something's coheres into a ‘body of work.’ I find this title, Primary Information, to be particularly intriguing. I’m interested in this category as one that contains raw data, original documents, and firsthand accounts from people who physically experienced something. Mm-hmm, go on. So there's this evidential quality that then you can base analysis or interpretation on later. I'm wondering about two things: the stickiness of identifying primacy, like a primary document, but also how we identify this primacy, because it's not an objective enterprise. I was raised by a fairly well-known art critic who also made art and believed that as an artist, you're producing primary information. If you're an art critic, you’re producing secondary information, which is wholly dependent on the primary information. He always said to do something primary. So Primary Information hearkens back to his idea—which I always disagreed with. I always felt writing about art is itself a beautiful act. Yes, it might need art in order to exist. But ultimately it's its own thing. Right, like chain reactions of primary and secondary. Yes, that’s it. I’ve printed a book to coincide with this show, and it’s also called Primary Information. But, in a way––in his way––you could argue that this is secondary information. The primary would be the paintings in this space. But I believe the contextual information of the essays is itself primary. A factor that often distorts, or comes into interaction with primary information is time. Memory fails. Documents are damaged. Then we die, and the information we carry also dies. So I’m curious about elapsed time as a compositional tool that has a direct, or at least distinct, relation to primary information. 

 For sure, that's definitely a through line. In my last show at Bradley Ertaskiran, I made a clock. It was a painting covered in spandex. It had a piece of matching spandex draped over its face, and at the bottom of that drape was a rock with a hole in it; it was a very heavy, beautiful rock. The spandex wove into the hole, and so, over time, the rock pulled the spandex lower and lower and lower to the ground. This work also came with a soapstone pedestal that you could place under the rock to effectively stop time.

 Around the same time, I was labouring on a giant painting, and it had layers and layers of work that I was never happy with. So I covered it entirely with white paint—but of course you could see the texture from each previous layer. I took the smallest brush I could find and painted tiny black marks on every single bump or mark. Covering the white surface in this way took two years. Tiny little black marks on every single bump on the topographic relief. When it was exhibited, I placed a small black shelf next to the work that held a flipbook of photographs I’d taken of every single layer. A viewer could stand there and effectively go back in time.
 In this show, “Big Boss” was painted again and again, each time with a single color. Each time I added to it, I made the marks smaller and smaller. Then, when I felt that it was nearing completion, I had it photographed. Then I took a knife and essentially destroyed it. Okay, wow!

 I then collected all the bits of paint that fell away from it. I had the documentary photograph of the not-yet-destroyed version, printed on mesh. So you're looking at an earlier version of the work that is then skewed and stretched over a later version. The effect is that it looks almost like a lenticular print, as if it has depth, yet it's all surface. I later put those little bits of paint on a different canvas, called “Rare Earth.” It felt almost timeless because it looked like it was made of minerals. Which essentially it is. Paint is mineral. So these two works have a connection, like simultaneous chronologies, or timelines. This ties into a question I had about iterative potential, through repeated lines of inquiry, repeated forms, gestures like scraping, repurposing, or transposing. Also known as self-cannibalization, right?

 Yes, exactly. So I’m wondering about exhaustibility, and if you have thoughts around exhausting form, material, or yourself? Yes. That's a very prescient question, because this show is different from my past efforts. I've always worked with self-imposed rules: off-the-shelf colour only, say, or pitting my physical capabilities against my sculptural material’s capabilities—and we’re always meeting in the middle. These rules worked for me for a long time, but then I had this crisis because I'd stopped learning. The ways I had been working didn't feel right for the complexity of the time in my life, in the world. I had been drawn to bright, almost day-glo, colours. But then I started to feel like I had pushed this palette as far as I possibly could, iterated as much as possible, like I was starting to go through the motions. You know when, at midlife, Jerry Seinfeld got tired of his jokes, and he threw them out and started over? I'm not suggesting that I'm Seinfeld [laughs] or even that I started over, necessarily, but there is something to be said for this midlife awakening. For understanding that something doesn't fit anymore because you've changed. As an abstract artist, how could I bring in all of that complexity? How do I become less tightly wound, or how do I stop obfuscating and let myself do more with fewer tricks? In the past, I always thought I was being direct. It’s been a tough journey! [laughs] I’m thinking of this in terms of the repurposed carpet that covers the floor of the exhibition space, and that you’ve also stacked squares to create makeshift stools around the exhibition space. The colour of the carpet is pretty distinct, almost sulphuric. It doesn’t seem like a colour that would’ve fit into your previous, flashy palette. Is it a colour you would naturally gravitate towards, before? Probably not, no. Right, but then you got a massive quantity of it. And this colour comes with its own tone and associations. Yes. While working on the show, I had this plan for the carpet. And because it was in my mind, it surely affected my choice of colour. But at the same time, I don't need everything to perfectly coordinate. This hearkens back to a fundamental aspect of my practice: I always work by responding to what is given. The key here is that there is so much waste in general, but also in the art world. And some of the carpets in these stacks are disgusting! Thousands and thousands of people have walked on this material in its previous life—it was installed at a museum—but now the carpet has a second life. I used to use this term, ‘dirty minimalism,’ to explain parts of what I do, especially the Plexiglas sculptures, and I’m happy that it still applies here. Julia Dault, Primary Information, 2026. Exhibition view, Bradley Ertaskiran. Photo by: Jean-Michael Seminaro. ulia Dault, Bigg Boss (detail), 2026. Printed mesh, acrylic, and oil on canvas, 72" x 60." Photo by: William Sabourin. Courtesy of Bradley Ertaskiran and the artist. Julia Dault, Rare Earth, 2020 - 2025. Acrylic and oil on canvas in painted wood frame, 24" x 18." Photo by: LF Documentation. Courtesy of Bradley Ertaskiran and the artist. Julia Dault, Rare Earth (detail), 2020 - 2025. Acrylic and oil on canvas in painted wood frame, 24" x 18." Photo by: LF Documentation. Courtesy of Bradley Ertaskiran and the artist. Now I want to ask about style, because this seems to tie into a question I had about Raymond Queneau. In his 1947 book, Exercises in Style, Queneau tells of a brief moment witnessed first on the bus, then in the metro, and then recounts the anecdote 99 different ways. The culminating effect is not of solidifying one style in particular, but rather of disassembling style, and therefore any mythology surrounding cohesion itself. I'm wondering about how you think about or approach repetition. As we do things again and again, what happens to this notion of style, or to the cohesion of style? On a negative day, I can feel that stylistic cohesion is just the market speaking, and that the real creative freedom comes from not worrying if something coheres as a ‘body of work.’ I get bored easily, and I also swore that I would never make the same move twice—that I wouldn’t make the same painting over and over. Sometimes people say, and I take this as a compliment, that my solo shows look like group shows. I think this is also because I operate with the premise of X and Y… like, if you take this tool or you take this colour palette and you put it here just so, what do you get? When I was younger, I worried about things fitting together, but in not cohering, there is, in fact, cohesion. You can do so many different things in one space and still have a legible aesthetic because you’re declaring it. The more experience I’ve gained, the harder it is to surprise myself, and it’s when I surprise myself that I know I’m exploring new terrain. Oh yeah, there’s a prop painting in this show that many people haven’t noticed, at the entrance to the space. It’s titled “The Hawk Painting.” Did you see it? Yeah, I was wondering who made it. In the book we printed for the show, the central essay, “Primary Information,” is about my work. In it I describe a moment that encapsulates the crisis of abstraction that I’ve described. I was out on a walk with my kids and saw a hawk descending towards a bird’s nest, swooping in to eat the baby birds. I could see the birds’ parents flying around, and I had never heard birds scream that way. This scene was in my head for a long, long time—but as an abstract artist, what could I do with it? It represented a lot of things that I'd been going through. So I painted it, “straight.” The experience of making the hawk painting opened up a different painting in the show, also called “Primary Information,” which initially was covered by taut fabric. It was very unsatisfying, and I stared at it for a long time in my studio trying to figure out why it wasn’t working. I eventually just started slashing and cutting into it. I became less concerned with tightness, or the optics of the object. It took a while to come to that place. It sounds so simple when I put it into words, but it wasn’t—or isn’t. That might be because I have a background in art history and art criticism. My mind second-guesses itself: how is that relevant? How does this fit into a broader historical trajectory? This ties into how I was thinking of exhaustion, because to me it seems like we typically, or historically, think of exhaustion in biological terms, whether that’s our bodies or our planet. Or our spirit. Yeah, exactly. In my mind, this kind of exhaustion comes into tension with industrialized and modernized production. So I’m wondering what you identify in the industrial materials that you engage with. Your bound sculptures are quite iconic, and to me they seem to be a momentary unraveling of efficiency—like they’re made useless or incapacitated by their own restraints. I think there’s also something about permutations in here, again. Well, that's why Queneau is interesting. With the Plexiglas, the question was, “What can a four by eight sheet do?” And the sculptures are iterative, each one a different version. They're never repeated. I say that I’m like a magpie when it comes to shiny, industrial materials. Working with the material is also about globalization. Industrial materials are available wherever I am; I just have to come in and shape them. Yet the works are never secure, I like to say they are securely insecure. One of my rule sets declares that with the Plexiglas sculptures, if the forces and physics meant that they weren't tied tightly enough by me and they sprung out, I would then have to leave them installed like that, splayed out, and collapsed on the floor. That never happened, even though I secretly wanted it to happen. There was no obfuscation.
 Yeah, totally. And about the materials, there’s a painting upstairs called “Infinity Fades” with silver, perforated spandex hanging off it. That the material is hanging instead of stretched taut feels to me like a statement on the power of that twentieth-century industrial era. But it also plays with the idea of what is a substrate and what is a painting. And also, finally, the question of what happens to us when we look at art IRL? There must be a justification for coming to see something in space. So of late, I seem to be asking how I can reward that viewing. Prolongated viewing, or like, reciprocity? Exactly. With the Plexiglas sheets or Formica that I used, I would install them so that they would appear to have mass and volume, but galleries and institutions were never actually burdened by the mass of the work because it was temporary. The works could always be taken apart and laid flat. Maybe this connects to my deep-rooted, Modernist self. I appreciate the grid, for example, but I’m always breaking it down. My “structures” always fall apart in some way; and then all of a sudden you can see the fallibility of humans. Full stop!

 I’ll just end the interview there. There's an essay on your practice written by Jason Farago entitled “Better Angels.” In that essay, he notes that the majority of your paintings “are structured according to an underlying grid,” but then the “...grids get wonky and elastic as [you] over-paint and erase with frequent all-over motions” which expresses an infinity for “more gestural kinds of non-objectivity.” I often think of the grid as a non-hierarchical structure that assigns logic, or has a categorical function. What is the relationship of the paintings in this exhibition to the standardized measure of the grid? Is this a method that you're still employing? Specifically, in this show, there’s a work titled “Fate Xclusive” that’s all about grids. In 2021, I made the drawing that is on the right side of that work. I thought, “I need to see this work again, somehow.” And as I was making the painted version of the drawing, I thought “God, I never work this way.” Normally, I call my approach ‘making is thinking.’ That is: I don’t plan or preconceive, I just go in, respond, make, be in the moment. I couldn’t fathom what I was doing, which was reproducing something I had already made, but bigger. So the joke with the title, “Fate Xclusive,” or the play, is that they could only have ended up together, their fates are connected. The title, like many of my artworks’ titles, is something I found; I think I saw “Fate Xclusive” on a sign somewhere in Toronto. Later, I realized that I wanted them framed together, to make this relationship between the two more apparent, rather than discard the “study” work. And then it dawned on me that this was a plan view of the space we’re in at Bradley Ertaskiran, of this bunker. As we were planning the show I got five shag carpets that I thought of installing in this space to mirror the rectangles in the drawings, and the carpets were these amazingly disgusting colours. Then when I finally got in the space it didn’t work at all! But I had to go through with it, and so now this work is pure potential of what could have been. Like a score for a performance that didn’t happen. And the rectangle space of the carpet makes me think of how the grid evokes the way we orient in space. All these rooms, units, rectangles and squares that we inhabit on the grid of the city. My next question is about whether there is an underpinning to your sculptural works like the paintings’ grids. Do these works request a similar scaffolding, grid or otherwise? The Plexi pieces are titled based on how long it takes me to make them, which is in many ways their structure established in real time. But at one point, I did a 180° turn and created a series in collaboration with a computer programmer and robotics expert; we made ceramics with a programmable robotic arm. Whereas with the Plexi works I shaped industrial materials with the human hand; in these works, ceramic, which typically carries an expectation of human impressions, was instead made by this robot. I loved “making” these “organic” forms in a highly industrialized way. We made grids and spheres that looked like woven baskets, forms that would be impossible to make by hand. The process was amazing to watch. Yet when the arm made a giant sphere out of clay, and I placed a clay grid inside of it, there was inevitable decomposition. Oh wow, like the trace of a human hand gets totally distorted. In a productive way though, it seems? This is something I think about a lot. It’s funny, in the hierarchy of making, if you touch too much, it’s craft. It’s not considered valuable. If you have paint on the surface, people love it. If you don’t have paint on the surface, it’s no longer valuable or as valuable. There’s this thing about how much an artist has touched a work, how involved or present they are in the production. Can we see their hand? I’ve spent many years trying to obscure my own gestures. This latest work is more about letting in the viewer, for real. I have two compositional questions. First, it feels like, in what I’ve seen of your work, there’s an attention to equilibrium, without symmetry. Between the works in an exhibition, or in and of themselves? Good question, but I’m thinking more in and of themselves, each individually. Is this something you think about, or not really? I think I must be in some way, but it’s not conscious. I do get this thrilling feeling in my knees when a work is done, when I know that I can’t add anything else. It’s very bodily. And in general I’m very analytical, I love words, so I appreciate that this is another way of understanding the work. That seems to be what harmony feels like, no? Yeah, I don’t like to be too spiritual, but it does feel as if it’s beyond words. But I do still think that artists have a responsibility to be able to talk about their work. My other question comes from being initially struck by the dynamism in both your wall and sculptural works. Does this stem from a preoccupation with time and materiality—since neither of which can be static even if we try to manipulate them into being that way? Do you think about movement in your practice? Well, I definitely think about choreographing the space when I do installations. In this exhibition, I placed one of the carpet benches in a specific spot so that visitors have to move around it. Often when I build a show I’ll integrate an element that obscures sightlines, so that you can’t stand at the threshold and see the whole thing in one glance. So, in a way, I like to guide the viewers’ movements in space. But that’s installation-specific. I think this dynamism probably comes from the fact that I just don’t want to be bored. But don’t get me wrong, I also love paintings that are really static. I guess this is a question of the relationship between work we feel drawn to from a viewing perspective, and then the work we feel compelled to make ourselves. And how often they don’t entirely overlap. I guess it’s the dynamic of input and output. Should we say primary and secondary information again? Why not! My last question relates to the encounter between material and concept. For you, do materials arrive first, with their inherent affective dimensions that then lead to concept? Or do you seek out materials that can respond to certain needs that you have? For me, the most successful pieces balance concept and material in perfect harmony. For example, with the sculptural piece that I consider my first real artwork, I went to a place in Long Island City in New York that was like a warehouse of recycled materials that were being discarded and sold for almost nothing. I found this piece of extremely dirty, turquoise blue Formica that had this magnetic pull. It was just this beautiful sheet of colour, so I took it to the studio and started playing with it. That became my thesis piece, and my sculptures went on from there. So that was material first. But then there’s the idea of that sculpture somehow encapsulating a gesture or action, of it being expressive. I’d been obsessed with the Abstract Expressionists. But also the Minimalists, even though I didn’t believe in the purity of their perfectionism. So I came up with this idea of dirty minimalism; I didn’t wipe any of the dirt off. 
 Oh okay, so literally dirty. Yeah, exactly. If it’s just material, it’s not interesting. If it’s just concept, it doesn’t need to be an artwork, it could be something else. So maybe I lead with material first and find the concept through it? I’m not sure! I guess it’s very specific to what I’m making at any moment. Public art has to be concept-first, which I struggled with when I started making it. I love to work alone, but in the public realm you can’t, you have to work with a team. So I learned to do concept-first art-making, but it’s not my preferred method. Okay, so maybe I am material first! I’ve never articulated that. Thank you for that question! Of course! [Both laughing] The above text was written by Emily Zuberec, a poet living in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Editorial support by Hannah Bullock. Cover image: Julia Dault, Primary Information, 2026, Exhibition view, Bradley Ertaskiran. Photo by: Jean-Michael Seminaro.