Shana Chandra

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	<title>Shana Chandra</title>
	<link>https://shanachandra.com</link>
	<description>Shana Chandra</description>
	<pubDate>Mon, 06 Jan 2025 17:17:12 +0000</pubDate>
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		<title>Valley of the Moon  </title>
				
		<link>https://shanachandra.com/Valley-of-the-Moon</link>

		<pubDate>Mon, 06 Jan 2025 17:17:02 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Shana Chandra</dc:creator>

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		<description>Valley of the Moon
Source
essay by shana chandra As seen in photographer Chris Mann’s Artist Book
&#60;img width="1388" height="1266" width_o="1388" height_o="1266" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b46305423082e9bd8fd0e274db3c4f3e9fde43a335b8b9dc478e45c319624cb2/Screen-Shot-2025-01-04-at-20.14.28.png" data-mid="224234436" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b46305423082e9bd8fd0e274db3c4f3e9fde43a335b8b9dc478e45c319624cb2/Screen-Shot-2025-01-04-at-20.14.28.png" /&#62;

In Bedouin traditions, when a baby is born, the father hunts a scorpion then burns and crushes it, mixes it with olive oil and applies it to the child’s body out of the belief the treatment will protect the infant from scorpions during their life.
These photographs are the scorpion for the desert. The image is catpured and swayed in chemicals, then applied to her mind’s eye, out of the belief that the treatment will protect her from the wandering soles of humans throughout her life.
As talismans of her psychic realm, they rupture forth from the true place of our collective dreams but are just as ephemeral in their shape-shifting layers, holding all that is light and dark in the delicate folds of the burning afternoon sun.
Within the red seams of the earth, leaves bloom to the eternal secrets the dust holds buried. Ears blister in her rock, haunted by the shadow of a sandalled man. The shadow will be gone, but the sand will stay, until it too shifts, across the desert’s spine.&#60;img width="1232" height="780" width_o="1232" height_o="780" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2d3dd6725290f5daa2fbe26e245f89e3551b3d46ebb073f6ab4b691f28aee970/Screen-Shot-2025-01-04-at-20.15.08.png" data-mid="224234437" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2d3dd6725290f5daa2fbe26e245f89e3551b3d46ebb073f6ab4b691f28aee970/Screen-Shot-2025-01-04-at-20.15.08.png" /&#62;&#38;nbsp;&#60;img width="990" height="946" width_o="990" height_o="946" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f39ae24471a434cd99378b219cc12bdf6f300ee79c1de86e0eb1f4585d09e539/Screen-Shot-2025-01-04-at-20.15.15.png" data-mid="224234439" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/990/i/f39ae24471a434cd99378b219cc12bdf6f300ee79c1de86e0eb1f4585d09e539/Screen-Shot-2025-01-04-at-20.15.15.png" /&#62;
Tags: Art Book</description>
		
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		<title>This Surfer Is Helping To Change the World</title>
				
		<link>https://shanachandra.com/This-Surfer-Is-Helping-To-Change-the-World</link>

		<pubDate>Mon, 06 Jan 2025 17:17:03 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Shana Chandra</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://shanachandra.com/This-Surfer-Is-Helping-To-Change-the-World</guid>

		<description>This Surfer Is Helping To Change the World
Published here
As seen in Monster Children, june 15 2024When I lived in Sydney, it wasn’t Bondi’s grassy knoll, but the rocks at Tama where I’d always while away my weekend, watching ‘blow ins’ get cursed out of sets via the local hierarchy. But it was on those rocks, more than anywhere, that it’d hit home to me who in this pecking order of ‘first rights’ laid claim to Huey’s pulses.&#38;nbsp; 

Not too far from where I sat, around 2,000 years ago, a whale shark had been engraved onto its rocks by indigenous hands. This was a place where a dreamtime story related to the site, told the arrival of the Dharawal people, and where this area’s original inhabitants fished and foraged for seafood from. Nowadays, of course, it’s a different story. 

It’s something Mario Ordoñez-Calderon, a surfer, Navy veteran, physical therapist, and director of the non-profit Un Mar De Colores (An Ocean of Colours) has noticed too in his local San Diego, where it was the Kumeyaay who first lived off and recreated on that sea, embedding the ocean into their histories. 
But Mario is actually doing something about the current state of socio-emotional and economic inequality in our oceans. His organisation allows local BIPOC kids the opportunity to not only get into the water for a surf but to also nurture and protect it. Recently, this has culminated in the Tijuana River project, which is helping to gain notoriety for a river whose pollution causes 30% of San Diego’s beaches to be closed, endangering the BIPOC and lower socioeconomic communities who live around them.

&#60;img src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6398e5b4b3dd441ead33860a/b1abd730-9a19-43e1-af64-1492b55d34f5/UnMar-22.jpg" width="3130" height="2075" style="width: 451.516px; height: 299.328px;"&#62;
I know that you were a medic in the Navy for five years, and I can’t help but feel that what you’re doing now with Un Mar de Colores is making people better in a different way. Tell me about your path from the Navy to now.

Oh boy! Okay, here are the Cliff Notes [laughs]. I really appreciate you making that connection because earlier this year, I started thinking about how [these roles] fed into each other, whether it be physical health or social-emotional health, especially considering the physical therapy background I had in the Navy.

I was stationed at Camp Pendleton but living in Oceanside, and my best friend, who had moved to San Diego, took me out surfing. That catalysed the connection to the water for me. Oceanside is a great wave, it’s pretty heavy, and learning there rocked me, but there’s something about it that kept calling me back. It’s what kept me in San Diego after I got out [of the Navy], and I was really connected to the community and surfing, so I decided to stay. 

I had started to go to school at San Diego State, and that was around the time George Floyd was murdered, which led to reflections around the inequity that surrounded me in this coastal community. Living in Encinitas, in this little Latino pocket that is overshadowed in a white suburbia, there were still kids in that community that had never been to the beach, didn’t feel comfortable going to the beach, and weren’t connected to the beach.

I was kind of witnessing my upbringing before my eyes because I came from Thousand Oaks California, which is predominantly white and affluent. But even within that, my family was living in Thousand Oaks as the help. My dad is a cook, my mum is a house cleaner, and we were that forgotten low-income family in a lot of ways because there weren’t those programs that were helping students like myself. So, I didn’t want those kids in the Encinitas community to have to wait till they were adults or till they had that white best friend who invited them to surf to make that connection.

I decided to use the resources that I had within my immediate circle of being a surfer, having surf friends, and recognising the disparity in the surf. It’s not a direct approach to police brutality, but it was my step in trying to create a more equitable world. I think Un Mar de Colores is a huge reflection of all my values of physical and social-emotional well-being but also a cultural connection to nature and the environment. 

Tell me about Un Mar de Colores.

It’s a surf program, but that’s essentially just the hook. We have ten activations centred around surfing throughout the year, but we have twenty that are all about environmental education. We front as a surf program; it’s our little ploy to get the kids and the families curious and involved and helps us stand out amongst other environmental and education non-profits. Once they’re there, we say, ‘You’re going to learn to love and protect the environment.’

I know that learning and the way we learn can be such a cultural thing too, and I think that learning through nature hasn’t always been inherent to our Western education systems. 

For me, nature is integrated into my identity and integrated into my being. The more that I started aligning that connection with nature, whether it be with hiking in the mountains or surfing a wave on the coastline, I felt myself cement my identity and be a better person through that. Every time I was in nature—working to protect nature, or connecting people with nature—the world opened up for me. 

I’m just continuing to follow that path and that calling, and a lot of it goes back to my upbringing. My family is an immigrant family from México, but they’re Mexican Indigenous, they’re Yucatec Maya. They are really connected to their family in México, so every summer I’d spend it with my grandparents, and I’d witness their relationship to the land: having farm animals in the backyard and having a ceremony every six months to give thanks to the four cardinal winds. Things that you would never see in Thousand Oaks. It really widened my understanding of what is out there and what it means to be connected to nature outside of a recreational sense. 

We try to expose our students to diverse relationships with our ancestors and diverse relationships with the elements. Essentially, you’re fomenting that cultural identity for the students or trying to foster that in them. What did it look like for the people that were here before you—that could be in your direct lineage—or for anyone for that matter? What is your relationship with the water, and what do you choose to identify with? I think that for us as native communities, you can be viewed as relics of the past really quickly—like you should have a conch shell in your hand—whereas a present-day relationship with water, it’s this hybridisation of ‘Here I am, I don’t have the cenotes or the Caribbean coast near me, but I do have the Californian coastline which has shaped me, so I’m balancing both.’
&#60;img src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6398e5b4b3dd441ead33860a/8279ef0d-49ba-4cae-98db-a4882a387dc3/Group+Photo+2022.jpg" width="2048" height="1365" style="width: 451.516px; height: 300.937px;"&#62;
The way we view water is so cultural too, and it feels so ironic that there are Indigenous ways that have such spiritual traditions and reverence for the water, yet they don’t necessarily have as much access to the water anymore compared to some higher socioeconomic groups, and that feels like such a mind fuck. 

Absolutely. Here in California, there’s such a geographical displacement of black and brown bodies from the coastline, from red-lining, restrictive housing loans, and from Spanish colonial missions to the American westward expansion, all of which pushed people who are native to the coastline inland onto reservations. So there’s a complete severance of coastal connection. It’s really sad to see, because specifically where we operate out of Kumeyaay territory, they have ‘people of the bluff’ in their name. That’s what Kumeyaay translates to. Yet because of all these issues, they have to overcome so many obstacles to connect to their cultural heritage sites. Just in general here in the United States, we don’t have rituals in our everyday life, so it translates over to how people move a little quicker, and then those on the coast tend to be of higher socioeconomic status, which tends to lean towards a certain demographic, and that bleeds into the coastal culture. You see it’s more of a take, take, take [mentality].

‘You see it in surfing too, where people get in, and have this aggressive ‘My wave, my wave, my wave’ localism approach.’
You see it in surfing too, where people get in, and have this aggressive ‘My wave, my wave, my wave’ localism approach. I don’t think it necessarily has to be that way because the ocean is an indefinite resource. In the grand scheme of things they waves are going to be here long after us and they’ve been here long before us. Maybe that’s a cosmic perspective to take on when you’re just scrambling to get a session in before work or something, but I tend to enter most spaces like that, and I invite people to think bigger than an ‘our’ mindset.

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So, I understand that your most recent project through Un Mar De Colores, the Tijuana River project, came about because of the way the river was polluted, which meant some of the surrounding San Diego beaches were closed. Is that right?

Essentially, we were working out of North County San Diego: Encintas, Oceanside, Vista, and Escondido. Then we wanted to reach kids from southern San Diego, and in doing so we faced the issue of 30% of San Diego’s beaches being closed down due to water pollution issues, with oceans that are public health risks. There is bacteria and heavy metals leading to people getting sick from getting into the water. So it felt so wrong to take students from the affected beaches like Imperial Beach, which predominantly serves Latinx communities, all the way to La Jolla Shores, which is predominantly white communities, for them to be able to get to the water. 

As an organisation, we couldn’t stand by transporting kids outside of their community for them to get to the water, because of pollution. We slowly started to get involved by plugging ourselves in with everyone who has ongoing efforts in cleaning up the river. This is an issue that has been going on for decades, and people have been advocating for clean water in a myriad of different ways. We were trying to figure out where we were going to land in all of that, and what we did was educate our youth and their families about the issues that were happening, because not everyone in San Diego knew. We’re also educating the greater public about what is happening, because this is a great environmental injustice that’s affecting BIPOC communities and it’s being ignored. 

With the Tijuana River crisis closing 30% of San Diego’s beaches for over 900 consecutive days and counting, that would not be acceptable anywhere else in California. If it was La Jolla to Del Mar, which are affluent communities, a sewage spill wouldn’t last a day yet this has been going on for over ten years. 

What we’ve done is that we’ve recently partnered up with Surfrider and nominated the Tijuana River to be designated endangered. That was really monumental because American Rivers is a Washington DC-based not-for-profit, and every year they release national media campaigns centred around America’s most endangered rivers. Because of the work that Un Mar de Colores and Surfrider did, we were able to get the Tijuana River on that list, which got it on the radar of nationwide environmentalists and nationwide river people. That’s been our efforts thus far, and we’re going to continue to educate our supporters, and to continue to advocate for it at the state capital and beyond.

I can imagine being the director of a non-for profit can get pretty hectic, but is there a story or advice that you go back to that helps pull you through?

I want to talk about one story specifically, where I went to the start of the summer season and I thought that I’d just be there for the intro not for the following sessions. And there was this one little girl, called Iko, who took a long time to get into the water. All of the students went in and she didn’t want to, so I stayed on land with her. We started picking rocks. She said, ‘Go find a purple rock,’ and I’d find one, and then she’d say, ‘Now go find an orange one,’ and I’d lay it down. All of a sudden she looks up at me, with the rocks in her hand and she says, ‘Okay, I’m ready to go in now.’ I couldn’t put my wetsuit on fast enough. We get in the water, she has a great time, and [after that] I’ve gone into the water with her every single time since.
 
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		<title>Khruangbin Is The Sweet Spot of a Venn Diagram we all want to live within</title>
				
		<link>https://shanachandra.com/Khruangbin-Is-The-Sweet-Spot-of-a-Venn-Diagram-we-all-want-to-live</link>

		<pubDate>Mon, 06 Jan 2025 17:17:03 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Shana Chandra</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://shanachandra.com/Khruangbin-Is-The-Sweet-Spot-of-a-Venn-Diagram-we-all-want-to-live</guid>

		<description>Khruangbin Is The Sweet Spot of a Venn Diagram we all want to live withinPublished Here
As seen in Monster Children, April 4, 2024
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When a frazzled interviewer (me) hopped onto a Zoom call with our interviewee— DJ (Donald Johnson) the smooth, sun-glassed drummer of Khruangbin to talk about the band’s latest release, A la Sala, within a few minutes of speaking to him, my flooding cortisol levels had instantly dropped. He’s the kind of person whose soothing lilt not only immediately calms, but in true gentleman fashion reflectively pauses before he speaks, giving you space to completely finish your own sentence before he thoughtfully launches into his. The effect is startling in its rarity and one that lets you know that he really is absorbing what you’re saying, even though, that’s meant to be your job here. 

It’s a quality that he’s known for in Khruangbin too. His signature drumming, rather than taking the lead, is the atmospheric backdrop that supports his bandmates’ psychedelic and funk-forward grooves—Mark Speer on guitar, and Laura-Lee on bass—complementing their intricate melodies and basslines and laying a deep foundation for them to bounce and glide off. And yet Kharaghubin’s music as a whole, implores you to listen a little harder too. Low on lyrics, it lets you tune into the subtle instrumental shifts that dance, collide, and head-tap between genres, textures, and global musical traditions.

And now, after two collaborative albums with two different artists—Leon Bridges and Vieux Farka Touré—A la Sala is Khruangbin’s coming home, family album, the first one since the collabs that reunites just the three of them, the first recorded outside of their mythical barn space, but one whose dreamy hypnotic grooves, immerses you across cultures and landscapes, from the laidback environs of your living room. With it, they’ve hit the band’s ultimate sweet spot, a Venn diagram of sound that encapsulates the longing for home with the thrill of the journey.


Hey DJ, congratulations on the new album!

Thanks so much!

So, I know that A la Sala is touted as a coming home for you guys and that Laura [Lee, Khurangbin’s bass player] said it’s a ‘remembering of who you are and a kind of album that can only be made with family’. I was wondering what felt so right about making this album now.

I think this album at this time came naturally for us to do it the way that we did it. I’ll often speak of albums being of where you are, and where we are, at the moment that it’s made. So, we couldn’t have made anything else at this time, I believe. At least not honestly. If you’re making honest art and you’re being true to yourself and who you are, whatever that may be at any given time that you’re making it, you make what you feel in the moment.

How has your perspective changed from when you were making A la Sala to now when you have had a chance to look back?

The last couple of releases we had were collaborations with other very talented artists, one being Leon Bridges and the other being Vieux Farka Touré. When you collaborate with any group project, there are a lot of other thoughts and opinions you have to take into consideration. We were just kind of longing to get back to working in an intimate fashion with just the three of us, not because the collaborations were bad, we had a great time working with Vieux and working with Leon—it was amazing. But it just gave us a longing to get back to square one in the fashion that we made music when we first started.

The theme and idea of this album is so much about ‘home’. Even the artwork, which has seven different covers all taken from a living room but with windows that offer a look into different dreamscapes. I know for me that when I travel a lot and then go back home, it enables me to reassess and gauge where I’m at that moment. It must be exciting too to return to this touchstone of the three of you, having learned from those collaborations and potentially experimenting with that.

Yeah, I mean I know specifically working with Vieux—his recording process was different to the way we were accustomed to working. He works very fast. He’ll record, he’ll do one or two takes, and then he’ll do the next song. We are very contemplative, we beat ourselves inside the head asking, ‘Is this really good?’, ‘What do we need to change?’, ‘Is this okay?’ He's very free, he’ll say ‘Oh that sounds great, let’s move on.’ I remember in the moment us being like, ‘Really is that it?’, ‘Is that good?’ – just doing the thing that we always do. Lo and behold it was okay, we did okay. So that’s something that you learn along the way.

Also speaking of home being a touchstone, I think this is an album you can only make at home. Being that Mordechai [Khurangbin’s last album with just the three of them] was recorded in 2019 we were touring extensively and the sound of that record sounds like we were on tour, specifically speaking to how polished it is. Because as a musician when you’re playing and you’re touring night to night for audiences, you become this well-oiled machine and there’s a special cohesiveness you develop as a band because you’re playing all the time. That’s kind of where we were at when we recorded Mordechai, we were just a well-oiled machine at that point, just playing a tonne of shows. 

But 2023 [the year A la Sala was recorded] happened to be a year off the road for us, a year at home, and I think this was sonically the appropriate thing to make during an off year with us not being on the road. Granted, we weren’t as well-oiled as we had been in the past because I think when we went into the studio in March, we hadn’t played a show since early December in New Zealand and Australia. We took a few months off and of course, during those few months the rust starts to reveal itself and once you get back together, you realise, ‘Oh we haven’t been playing every night,’ and it sounds like it. Eventually, you get back into it and the writing process starts to happen, and things start to flow. 

I’m low-key obsessed with the barn where you guys usually record your albums because I’ve heard so many stories about it. I think the reason why I love this notion of it is that it feels like the band’s own private universe because only you record there, so I imagine that it sonically holds all your secrets. Was it important because this was a homecoming album for you to record there and is it important for you to have a space like that since the three of you live in different areas now too?

So strangely enough this was the first record we’ve recorded outside of the barn. It’s the first album we made that weren’t able to go to there, specifically because the barn is a bit of a mission to get to, so strategically and logistically it didn’t make sense for us to go there, as it would’ve taken a week out of our schedule. 

But speaking of things we learned from the collaborations, we learned that we could make music together outside of the barn because those [albums] were recorded at our engineer’s studio in Huston. So, we were confident that we could get the sound that we wanted. The barn had very much so become a crutch for us, almost like the fourth member of the band—we had to have it. And it’s still that special place to us, but we were confident we could sound like us without being in that location. And what we learned, throughout the collaborations and recording is that we sound like us no matter where we are. The barn is home, but home is really wherever the three of us gather to play. That’s the sweet spot.
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I know that when you first started with Khruangbin, you hadn’t played the drums too much even though it was the first instrument you ever played so the kind of drumming that you did has so often been referred to as one of ‘restraint’. Now that you’re a well-oiled machine is it hard for you to keep that level of restraint when you play?

I’m not a busy drummer by default. I’m not a flashy, lots of chops, technical guy. I tend to play bass more on feel and I’m always attentive to how things feel. I consider myself a listener. I actually learned this concept through playing basketball. A wise basketball player once told me you have to be on the court and also watch the game at the same time. So, when you’re on the court, visualise looking at the game from a camera’s perspective and see everything that’s happening at the same time. 

To translate that thought process to making music, I also have that same top-down listening perspective as a drummer playing in a band with other band members. So not only am I a part of the game so to speak, but I’m also a spectator. And as a spectator when someone does something that’s clearly out of line, you can call someone out and say, ‘Why’d you do that, you shouldn’t have done that.’ And if you keep that perspective, it tells you where you should be going, and defines the moves you should be making. It may be a restraint to some people because there are people who have a large drumming vocabulary and know how to do a tonne of tricks, but I just didn’t chase after that stuff. I don’t think it’s minimalistic at all to me, I don’t think I’m showing restraint, I’m just doing what I do.

I think what is interesting about the way you collaborate is that it reminds me of those drawings where someone draws the head, and you fold the piece of paper and someone draws the middle, and they fold the piece of paper and someone else draws the feet, but together they all make a whole. You’ve got that as a band where you each go away and add your personal style and touch to the music in your own space and time. To me, that’s so unique. What do you think this allows for in your music, that process?

In a way it allows for our diversity because our three unique styles and approaches to making music are completely different. But we always like to say that Khruangbin in itself is the Venn diagram of our three unique tastes and perspectives. It’s why it lends itself to being universal because it keeps things from being one note and just one way. When everyone’s involved and everyone’s input is put into consideration, I do believe it makes for a better end product because it’s not so one note. We often have this thing to say, ‘The best idea wins no matter where it comes from.’ So, if I have an idea, and someone else comes up with a clearly better idea, the best idea wins. It’s a way for us to curate ourselves internally and ensure that we’re always doing the right thing.

I love the way you talk about your drumsticks, that after you’ve used them for a long time the combination of your sweat and the wood oil helps to mould them into the perfect shape which is hard to let go of, but you still give them away to fans. And I was wondering whose perfectly moulded drumsticks would you like to have.

I would say Ed Greene. He holds a special place for me because when I was younger, my mum listened to a lot of Barry White &#38;amp; Love Unlimited Orchestra records. And my mum would sit me down on my kid’s drum set and I’d play along to those records, and Ed Greene was the drummer on those records. He’s very influential to my playing. I still listen to a lot of Ed Greene even to this day.


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		<title>Sarah Piantadosi Celebrates Our Bodies The Way We Should</title>
				
		<link>https://shanachandra.com/Sarah-Piantadosi-Celebrates-Our-Bodies-The-Way-We-Should</link>

		<pubDate>Mon, 06 Jan 2025 17:17:03 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Shana Chandra</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://shanachandra.com/Sarah-Piantadosi-Celebrates-Our-Bodies-The-Way-We-Should</guid>

		<description>Sarah Piantadosi Celebrates Our Bodies The Way We Should
Sarah Piandatosi’s nude photography is a vibe shift in the way we celebrate our bodies.
Published hereAs seen in Monster Children,&#38;nbsp;Dec 20, 2023
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In an era that birthed the phrase ‘send nudes’, our propensity to see images of bare bodies has never been greater. Yet the authorship and even embodiment of our corporeal vessels can at times feel hijacked as they are simultaneously fetishized, politicised and policed.
 London-based photographer Sarah Piantadosi’s book, Bone, is a clapback and critique to this long-established patriarchal co-opting. Her collection of nude portraits is revelatory, not by what they expose, but in the defiant way in which they capture the vibe shift within a new generation of artists, writers and culture makers, who refuse to wear their bodies through any lens of exploitation.
 Piantadosi captures her sitters with a tender eye, in monochromatic full frontals and gently lit portraits, all the while displaying each individual in their raw, vital, and vulnerable power. &#38;nbsp;Sometimes bearing intimate talismans that hint at their story, they proudly proclaim their selfhood to the viewer, daring them to interrogate theirs. And although the book is named after the one thing that’s left of us when our bodies decay, the images speak to the essence of what makes them uniquely ours in the flesh for the brief time that we have them.

When I began to research you and your collection of images for Bone, I read that as a teenager studying photography in your native Winnipeg, your high school assignment wasn’t accepted to be marked because you had documented life of your high school culture around you, including students partying, taking drugs and making out. I understand that now times are so different, but it’s amazing to think of this refusal to see life as it is. I was wondering if you see Bone as coming full circle to this moment. And whether your impetus to photograph has changed since then?

I’m interested in the idea of the ‘other’. Growing up I didn’t find the same things weird as other people did. The strange things in life are violence, subjugation, and lies. Not sexuality, gender or the way one chooses to present themselves to the world. My point of view as a photographer and person has become more informed over time but the same impetus is there. Which I think is a desire to both legitimize and canonize the ‘other’ through photography. 

I love that among other things this collection of images is almost an homage to a younger generation who are willing to (in your words) ‘be seen’ and ‘be heard’, and you wanted to capture this refusal of be silenced. I was wondering what it was that made you notice this because being older it’s definitely something I’ve noticed and deeply admire as well.

I just turned 40 and most of the people in Bone are in their 20s. I feel like my age group tolerated too much, and we didn’t really understand our power. Social media brought power to a younger generation (though it’s a double-edged sword that brings both accountability and endless scrutiny). The democratization of the voice through social media that powered both the #MeToo and the Black Lives Matter movements was a huge turning point in the world. The dialogue around the representation of gender, race, class, and sexual identity is so strong right now. It’s incredibly inspiring and essential, and I wanted to capture this moment.

Within these photographs, there is such a feeling of intimacy you’ve helped portray. In a way we’re so used to seeing naked bodies now, but often it’s in a context that has been devoid of this intimacy. I know this was important to you to build with these images and you chatted with your subjects for half an hour beforehand to help create it. I was wondering if throughout the process you were surprised by how the images turned out, or something you weren’t expecting came out in the end result?

Thank you, I’m glad I was able to achieve this feeling of intimacy in the photos, it was really important to me. Towards the end of shooting Bone, I had a really strange experience taking photos in Paris. My subjects there were incredibly open and ready to be vulnerable in front of the camera, more so than in London. After a day or two of shooting, something strange began to happen… I felt like I could read their minds, and I could understand a lot about them just by looking at them. The experience was quite psychedelic, as I felt I was watching their inside character and emotions emerge on the surface in real-time. It was sometimes scary. I have never experienced anything like this before or since.

Wow. That’s such an amazing thing to experience, and I can see now how it's reflected in the photos too, some of them are so raw and vulnerable and yet powerful because of that. For me they’re also like maps to the universe that each person holds within them. The way each body is shaped, the scars, the piercings, the tattoos, the stretch marks, the hair or lack of it, as well as each of their personal talismans. Because of the range of people you chose to photograph, it’s been such a reaffirming way for me to look at other people’s bodies as well as my own. I was wondering what it was like for you? How did it change or reaffirm the way you looked at others and yourself?

I’m really happy to hear you say that the images were reaffirming for you. I wanted people to look at the images and not feel intimidated but rather welcomed to observe. Seeing only one body type in the media (white, thin, tall) is damaging for our collective self-esteem. It was refreshing and meaningful to photograph—and by photographing, promote—a variety of body shapes. And it did have an impact on the way I saw myself. In the past if I was unhappy with my body shape I used to call myself ‘fat’ as an insult. Even though I would never see others in this way I somehow felt it was ok to weaponize this language against myself. I now challenge myself on the language I use to think about my own body.
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That’s so funny, I’ve been trying to be watchful about the language I use towards my body too, and to be honest, seeing the range of body types in Bone and the way that they’re celebrated has helped me to do so as well, so thank you. I know that some of these photos were more of a collaboration and because you shot on digital you were able to show your subjects your photos and do reshoots. What was one shoot that changed in this process, that sticks out in your mind?

The image of Yasmin El Yassini with the lit match in her mouth was a reshoot. The first round of images were nice but we got to know each other a lot better after the shoot, and I felt we could go deeper. The second time around there was already a friendship and a trust there, and as a result, more openness.

You’ve said before that this project was a way for you to interrogate your own discomfort with the power dynamic involved in shooting nude photography, and I wanted to talk about whether you did manage to get rid of this discomfort and how?

I thought a lot about the #MeToo movement and in particular Emily Ratajkowski’s shocking story of a male photographer that raped her and then made a book of his images of her. Also, Kate Moss coming forward about her uncomfortable experience modelling nude (and underage) for Calvin Klein in the nineties. I thought a lot about the structure of a nude shoot and how I could run a shoot in a responsible and respectful way. Through sheer experience of photographing over 50 people nude, I just learned a lot as well. I feel really confident running a nude set now. I think photographers need to really consider the subject's point of view and give them autonomy to decide their own boundaries and the power to veto images that make them feel uncomfortable. I think a lot of photographers don’t want to share this power with their subjects, but this process felt right for me. I did have a few people who decided after the shoot that they didn’t want to have images of themselves nude in the world after all, and I respected that decision, as I didn’t feel it was my decision to make.

I love that Ryan Skelton’s poem that prefaces the book ends with a single word of ‘home’ because that’s essentially what these bodies in Bone are. I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about why you chose Ryan’s poem?

Thank you for asking me about the poem, as interviewers rarely do. Ryan Skelton’s poem is so beautiful. It really captures what it’s like to be young, to experiment, and to get things wrong. To live and lust and chase love, but also to be violated and hurt. I feel like the poem is an ode to recovery, a promise to oneself to learn and move forward after trauma. Ryan is actually in the book. He features twice on the last 2 pages of photography, so he bookends the project with his poetry at the beginning and image at the end.

I guess nude portraiture to some extent requires a certain vulnerability of the subject, and yet each photo of yours feels so empowered—at times your sitters wear their bodies so proudly it feels like they’re wearing clothes. I was wondering how you managed to hold and create this contradiction in your photos?

I really like your observation that the body is worn as proudly as clothes. I’m always thinking about power dynamics, and how visual signifiers affect perception. I play with these signifiers to harmonize moments of both strength and vulnerability.

I was also wondering if you’d had any feedback from your subjects in terms of how the process of sitting for you awoken an awareness in them?

I was very touched by the people who showed up with hesitation but took the opportunity to push themselves out of their comfort zone. I had an assumption that only people who were very comfortable with their bodies would be interested in posing nude. I was so wrong. So many people showed up with fears and insecurities but wanted to be a part of the project regardless. To be part of that awakening process was special to me.

If you’re in the US and Canada you can purchase Bone from here and if you’re in Europe or anywhere else in the world, find it here.
Images by Sarah Piandatosi</description>
		
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		<title>LOVE LETTER TO LIMOGES: the refuge of the white space</title>
				
		<link>https://shanachandra.com/LOVE-LETTER-TO-LIMOGES-the-refuge-of-the-white-space</link>

		<pubDate>Mon, 06 Jan 2025 17:17:04 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Shana Chandra</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://shanachandra.com/LOVE-LETTER-TO-LIMOGES-the-refuge-of-the-white-space</guid>

		<description>LOVE LETTER TO LIMOGES: the refuge of the white spaceSource
As seen in Jane Magazine Issue 14
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There’s a face that French people do, an expression, that involves them turning down their mouth in an inverted smile and simultaneously jutting their chin out. Though its meaning largely depends on the context of what has been said to prompt it, in general it’s a look that ranges from shooting you a polite “I don’t know, but I definitely don’t agree with you” to a slightly more dismissive “That’s crazy, you’re crazy, and there’s nothing I can do about it.” It’s certainly not the most flattering of expressions, but French people are so damn cute it’s lucky they can pull it off. And thoughit’s not the most flattering of expressions, it has of course become one of my favourite discoveries since living in France—an expression that I’ve taken on and wield profusely.
It’s a reaction that I’ve never encountered more, however, than when I tell people—the denizens of Paris, Bordeaux, and Biarritz—where in France I live. When I say I live in Limoges, at first they fire me a pained expressionof squinty eyes as if they haven’t quite understood what I’ve said. But when it dawns on them that my place of residence actually is this little medievaltown in the Haute-Vienne, their chin jut quickly indicates that I’ve not made a good choice. As one delicate beehived blonde asked me through a swirl of cigarette smoke and a voice full of husk, ‘Are you lost?’
When asking locals why Limoges has such a bad rep, one declared definitively (and almost proudly) with a pump of their index finger that it is ‘The most boring place in all of France.’ They explained that it’s located smack bang in the middle of the “empty diagonal”—a region of France nicknamed the white space or France’s subconscious due to it being the most sparsely populated area in the country. The tones in which this white space was relayed to me conjured up some sort of land-bound Bermuda Triangle, as if the people who lived here were in danger of being swallowed up by the abyss of countryside that surrounded them, never to be seen again. And yet another local explained to me that comedians often interchange the word “banish” for being “limoger,” due to a famous general sending senior staff he considered useless here during World War I as it was as far away from the front as possible. To be limoger means to be put out to pasture.
But despite this, or maybe because of it, I have become a diehard Limougaudes. Sure, this isn’t Leonard’s Hydra, Beauvoir’s Paris, Smith’s NewYork, Bowles’ Tangier, or Baldwin’s Provence—a destination you pilgrimage to so as to nestle in their footprints or sip coffee in their cafés in the hope of imbibing the hallowed air where they became great—but there is an aura in Limoges that tells you, if you sit quietly enough and are willing to hear it, that great things happened here too. They just happened before greater things happened after them... usually somewhere else.
It’s an hour out of Limoges, for example, in the countryside of the Limousin, where a young Simone de Beauvoir spent her formative summer years holidaying at her grandparent’s vine-covered home. Relishing her freedom and savouring the solitude so hard to come by in Pairs, she got blissfully ‘drunk from reading,’ and it was here too, in 1929, during one of her last visits to the region, that Sartre visited her in secret, their clandestine meeting in the woods kickstarting their relationship at a time when Beauvoir’smother was still opening her letters.
Limoges was where a young Serge Gainsbourg escaped to, travelling here with his Jewish family under false papers in occupied France. The Resistance burgeoned around him due to the strong leftist leanings of the city’sinhabitants and because the surrounding forests offered refuge for guerrilla groups if hiding was necessary. It was here that a young conductor and violinist friend of the Gainsbourg family found a furnished hotel for them to stay in and even obtained for Serge’s two sisters the protection of the nuns at the school of the Sacred Heart, who, in something straight out ofTheSound of Music, gave the two high school students the key to the garden there, into which they could flee to in case of a roundup.
At 14, Gainsbourg attended a boarding school twenty-one kilometres from Limoges, in the village of Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat, where even as a teenager he cut an elegant figure, drawing pencil sketches of the female form in his notebook and describing his more country-leaning classmates in letters to his parents as ‘hicks.’ At this boarding school, though, he was protected. His principal, upon learning of an upcoming raid by the militia, told Serge to go to the forest with an axe and tell any Germans he might come across that he was the son of a lumberjack.
It’s a region that has offered refuge to others in more ancient times too. As I go on my run each day over the Roman bridge that crosses the river Vienne and through the city’s botanical garden that houses over 1200 species ofmedicinal and aromatic plants, along with others used for food and dyes, I pass metallic gold scallop shells paved into the cobblestone pathways. These mark the trail for pilgrims on their way to the Spanish city of San-tiago de Compostela. Since the Middle Ages, these pilgrims would—and still do—rest their heads in the abbeys, albergues, and now Airbnbs of the region after a long day of travelling by foot.
 
It’s this kind of hospitable conviviality that is still alive in Limoges. It’s a place where neighbours invite you into their homes to eat saucisson and drink red wine, to view their antiques while you get allergies from their ancient cat, to tell you stories of the region because they’re proud of it too. Where antique store owners will give you the free rosary beads or spiky seashells you’ve been eyeing up, simply saying with a smile, ‘Cadeau.’ Or where the owners of your favourite Syrian Café will add handmade desserts of dates and pistachio to your Uber Eats order, with a handwritten notethanking you for yo
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It’s where you can still find drinking holes that haven’t changed since the1950s, run by a buxom older woman who knows all the secrets of those who set down their glasses on her bar. Where people still say ‘Bonjour messieurset mesdams’ to everyone as they enter, and if you’re new to the bar, having stumbled upon it after a coldwave gig at the city’s one music hall, people will even come up to you, shake your hand, and introduce themselves be-cause it’s exactly like Cheers&#38;nbsp;in an alternative universe. Even in one of the city’s trendier cafés, where ristretto and cold brews can be sipped, a patron will still say ‘Bon appetit!’ to you with a smile as you try to eat your salad gracefully despite wayward stems protruding from your mouth.
One of the city’s famed festivals is born out of this feeling of community. In 994, when rotten rye was consumed by large numbers of the population—with many growing nauseous and hallucinating as a result, and some even having their hands and feet turn black before falling off—those suffering from the “burning” epidemic congregated at the city’s churches. To implore God for his protection, a great gathering was organised around the relics of Saint Martial, the city’s first bishop and patron saint. These relics were raised and transported to a local hill as crowds followed, after which the epidemic is said to have ceased. To this day, a golden shrine containing the bones of this saint and a golden cup adorned with fish that contains his skull are paraded through the city’s streets, with crowds following and surging in thanks.
It’s a place where even the soil offers a sort of refuge too. Filled with kaolin that alchemises into the whitest porcelain teacups that fine folks sip from at Claridge’s, this mineral found in the dirt created the city’s economy and provided the livelihood of many of its inhabitants—and it still does today, as witnessed by the many porcelain shops that line the city centre. It’s also where the first union in France was created, on the cobblestone street parallel to the one where I live, to help the many workers who laboured in the porcelain factories earn their rights.
The city’s working-class roots hold strong here. It’s a place where huge displays of wealth are looked down upon, and when you pop down to a local canteen near the river—its mint green walls proudly displaying black-and-white photos of Serge, Jane, Catherine, Alain, and Romy—you’ll find local road workers resplendent in their fluoro orange vests, older retirees, and the well-heeled all sharing pitches of wine and cheese platters, and dining on local specialties cooked by a chef who dons a puffy white hat and who, before the lunch rush, shares a meal with the proprietor. And in the quartierde la Boucherie (the butcher’s quarters) in the old town, where the region’s famed rust-coloured cattle were once transformed into prime cuts of Limousin beef, the local chapel features a statue of Mary and Joseph holding Jesus as a baby. The child himself holds a kidney for nourishment—an odeto the neighbourhood’s working-class vocation.
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It’s a rebellious attitude, too, that coats its inhabitants, which is perhaps why punk music thrives here. Housed in one of the historic buildings, with exposed beams in diagonal patterns that look like Roman numerals, is a favoured punk bar that has managed to survive the pandemic. Here, amongst paper plates of crisps and nuts put out for patrons to snack on, I watch the American garage punk band Paint Fumes unleash on the tiny dance floor, and when the grungy guitarist looks into the largely French-speaking crowd to ask how old the building they’re performing in is, the crowd, too busy swaying and swilling their beers, don’t answer him. But at that moment, it’s as if I can hear the ghosts of the building whisper back ‘old’ to him through the cracks of each of the hand-laid bricks that make up its ancient walls. And during the interval, when the whole bar goes outside to have a cigarette, a local high school teacher and radio DJ who also owns a second-hand record store in the city centre tells me that back in the 1970s and ’80s, when conscription to the army was still mandatory in France, some young men, refusing to join up, would break their own arms so they wouldn’t have to fight in wars they didn’t believe in.
It’s a city that sits upon many tunnels and cavities that were once used to store produce, as well as being the crypts of monks and saints. As if by sitting above these ancient routes, Limoges knows it is a transitory space, just as its famed river Vienne was once a route for Atlantic salmon and sea trout to travel along. One of the city’s more modern claims to fame is thefact that its train station was the backdrop of a Chanel N°5 ad. In it, the Parisian-pixie Audrey Tatou, with drops of the perfume at her wrists, only meets her lover when she leaves Limoges, the romance of their tryst blossoming elsewhere. It’s where national treasure and famed author Honoréde Balzac stayed for a while, drawing inspiration for his novel The Village Priest from the neighbourhood’s eccentric characters, porcelain factories, and bucolic surroundings, and it is in this region that the main character, Véronique, finds atonement through her devotion to fertilising the aridlands of the Limousin countryside.
This is the countryside about which someone—I can’t find who—once declared ‘that one life will not be enough to know all the greens of Limousin,’ and I wonder if Renoir ever drew inspiration for his greens from here,nbecause he was born in Limoges. There is a house that I walk past on theway to get my morning coffee that bears a plaque stating it as his birthplace before he became the famous artist of Montmartre. And down by the river, there’s a sign proclaiming that Molière once stayed at a house there, at 7 place Sainte-Félicité, when he was on tour with his theatre troupe in 1649. I wonder what sketches of Limoges and its people or which phrases may have come to him during his brief visit that he later embedded into one ofhis plays—a mannerism from a local, snatched and reproduced on stage.
It’s as if this is a place where seeds are dropped, and though you don’t often watch them bloom to fullness here, it’s a place where beginnings burgeon and start to transform into something else. It’s like the practice of the peasants in the hills of the surrounding areas who, to finish off their dregs ofsoup, pour wine in it to mop it up, the wine/soup mixture transforming into a new, in-between thing. 
It’s an almost nascent atmosphere that speaks of magic, because you feel you are on the precipice that something is about to happen... even if it doesn’t. And maybe that’s the biggest reason why I love this place. When an American jazz singer stumbled upon the white space—albeit not near Limogesbut in a district called Lozère—she said, ‘It’s a place to which I reacted in a totally spiritual way, a place where nature bursts into you, where you can hear the rustling of the stars. I was pregnant when we got there, and I told myself: This is where I want my child to be born.’ It’s the rustling of the stars that I hear in Limoges and its surrounding countryside too, and it’s where I want my own stories to be born. And where they already have,
Images by Harriet Davidson</description>
		
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		<title>Exploring The Spectacular Chaos Of Mutiny In Heaven: The Birthday Partyd Page</title>
				
		<link>https://shanachandra.com/Exploring-The-Spectacular-Chaos-Of-Mutiny-In-Heaven-The-Birthday</link>

		<pubDate>Mon, 06 Jan 2025 17:17:06 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Shana Chandra</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://shanachandra.com/Exploring-The-Spectacular-Chaos-Of-Mutiny-In-Heaven-The-Birthday</guid>

		<description>Exploring The Spectacular Chaos Of Mutiny In Heaven: The Birthday PartyPublished Here
As seen in Monster Children, Nov 29, 2023.
&#60;img src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6398e5b4b3dd441ead33860a/2357c7b2-7289-4bd6-8539-c85a9d9d2b0d/Monster_Children_Mutiny_In_Heaven+%283+of+15%29.jpg" width="1000" height="771" style="width: 451.516px; height: 348.119px;"&#62;

No band’s legacy hovers as menacingly over the Aussie music scene, in a more incendiary or frenetic fashion than The Birthday Party, the cult Melbourne-born, post-punk noise band that savaged crowds during its explosive tenure between 1977 and 1983.
 
A young wiry Nick Cave was the band’s frontman, spewing out surrealist lyrics drenched in existentialism and despair or punctuated with violence and biblical imagery, which were married with the dissonant and distorted chords of the late-great legendary guitarist Roland S. Howard, who was credited with spearheading the band’s sound. Joining them was the deranged cowboy Tracey Pew’s propulsive and rhythmic bass, the raw and primal energy of multi-instrumentalist Mick Harvey and drummer Phil Calvert's experimental sonic palette, culminating in deranged performances that not only nauseated the audience but also ravaged the band members too. 

More than forty years later, Ian White has directed the first official doco of the band, bottling its messy chaos and musical ingenuity into gritty, glitchy textures of film alongside never-before-seen footage of band interviews, notebook entries, music videos, and live recordings unearthed from archival boxes, dusty hard drives and forgotten 16mm canisters left loitering in garages. White is the award-winning, UN-commissioned documentary filmmaker who was studying art at RMIT when he first saw The Birthday Party in all their fury, and he takes you on the band’s trajectory from their humble beginnings playing at The Crystal Ballroom in St Kilda, and malnourishment and disillusionment in their London bed-sit, to their infamous tour of the US, their last days in Berlin and their final performance to fans back in their hometown. We sit down with White, to chat about those halcyon days, and how he created a visual time capsule capturing the blaring, pulsating energy of the ‘demented, dystopian boyband.’


Hey Ian, how are you? 

I’m well - thanks for your interest in the film!

Of course! It’s amazing – congratulations!

Oh thank you. 

I wanted to ask you, I feel like the doco is a culmination not only of your documentary filmmaking but also the music side of your career too, as an art director at Mushroom and Polydor.

I used to see The Birthday Party when I was young, so for me, making the documentary was really revisiting a period of my life. A lot of people, the band included, allowed me access to a lot of old archival material, so I’m opening boxes of people’s stuff, and there’s this smell in the box, you know that smell of old stuff? There were all these textures in there—things that had been lost to us— like aerograms, contact sheets, photocopies and postcards. There were also things like tracing paper overlays on photographs with markup instructions written on them.&#38;nbsp; So a lot of this visual archive I was looking at, really informed the visual palette of the film. 

Another thing was that I didn’t want the film to be a nostalgic look back. I wanted to try and capture some of the energy of the time and bottle some of that madness that I remember from seeing the band. A lot of film today has a really generic aesthetic, everything has to look very polished, very slick, and very commercial and I have issues with this because a film can look like anything. If you write a novel, you can write in any number of styles. But when people make a film, it always seems to fall into this very generic aesthetic. I thought, ‘To hell with that’, we’ll just make the film this way; really textured and dirty. I wanted it to have a handmade look.
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That really comes through, because intermingled within the scenes you can see these lyrics and journal entries that are all layered throughout it – and so that’s all archival stuff from the band?

Yeah, it’s all [from the] original archive. When I was looking through the old material, there were things like VHS squelch and the leader of Super 8 film. This was all really wonderful to me because we don’t have that anymore and it really reminded me of the time the band was in existence. So, all this went into the way the film was assembled.

The film is so beautiful to look at. The animation too is done so well - was it hard to find an animator whose drawings fit the aesthetic of the film?

There are two animation styles, two categories of animation. One is the comic book, graphic novel style, and that comes from a graphic novelist in Berlin called Reinhard Kleist. The band and I were big fans of his, he did a great graphic novel on Johnny Cash, and he did another one on The Birthday Party and The Bad Seeds called Mercy on Me. We contacted him and asked if we could use his drawings as the basis for animation in this comic book style. He was really gracious and said, ‘By all means, go ahead, use what you like.’ I really liked that cartoon style because in some ways I saw The Birthday Party as being some sort of demented, dystopian boyband [laughs]. And so the comic book approach seemed to fit really well with that in my thinking. 

The other style of animation, the more fluid, textured style is a guy called Adam [Thomas] of Kingdom of Ludd in Sydney. His work is fantastic and so we came up with the other things, that were more atmospheric like the drug sequences, and we also animated some live concert sequences as well. He used bits from Nick’s notebooks and photos and put those together. 

I still can’t get over you opening that box, it would’ve felt like Christmas, just going through it all.

It was a joy. It was also a joy to be given lots of live recordings that had never been heard before and to go through those. And to be given live performance footage. The live footage we found, a lot of it had never been seen before—it had either been lost or forgotten. And that ranged from third-generation VHS dubs to pristine 16 mm film that we scanned. It ran the whole range of quality to beautiful to really fucked up and we used it all. It worked into the visual tapestry of the film.

Those gritty, glitchy textures you put in there not only reflect the sound of the band, but you’re so right, it also represents that time period. I can’t believe some of this footage has never been seen considering that the band is so cult. And in that way, I’m surprised this is the first time that there’s been a documentary about them. 

I believe the band had been previously approached [to do a documentary] but they’d always declined. I was asking Mick about that recently actually and he couldn’t remember who’d approached them. But regarding the footage being lost, the band was surrounded by spectacularly chaotic people [laughs]. There was actually a lot more footage filmed of them back in the day that has never been seen again. There was a concert in Melbourne at the Astor that was recorded on multitrack tape and recorded with three 16 mm cameras, including one in the crowd as well as backstage footage, and which apparently looked stunning. That’s disappeared. Hours of video were shot of them as well, but none of them survived, because people lived very disrupted lives—they moved a lot—so things inevitably went missing. It’s been forty years, so it’s been quite a period of time [since then]. But we did find a lot of other stuff. Someone a few years ago found cans of 16 mm film in their garage and someone found a videotape. Stuff turned up. 

What was the process and the time that it took you to collate and create?

The film had its inception during the pandemic. I guess part of the creative intent of the film was to make it using found footage and archival footage, not to go out and shoot a lot, and this may have been informed by the fact that its genesis was during the pandemic when we weren’t sure what was practical to shoot or how much we could shoot. But again, I didn’t want the film to be a look back, I wanted to try and get the feeling of being there at the time, so I was quite happy to make it archival-based.

There were eighteen months to two years of lockdown which we also used to secure financing, which was also more problematic at that time because everyone was unsure about what was going to eventuate. After that, it came together quite quickly, once we had everything lined up. The film was finished six months before it was released but licensing all the music and the material took time. This might sound bizarre, but some of the deals the band had, which they’d had since the early 1980’s were handshake agreements, they didn’t have any paperwork. And they’d always honour those agreements, which is a testament to what kind of people they are - so that all had to be sorted out once the film was completed.
 
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In terms of other people outside of the band that have a bit of airtime in the film, there’s only really Thurston Moore and Lydia Lunch who would’ve seen the band at the time.

I find it odd when you have a lot of third parties—critics, or DJs, or journalists—talking about an artist. With The Birthday Party when the material’s that strong you don’t need somebody telling you that it’s good. The band are also very articulate, and they’ve never really opened up that much about that period of their lives, so I found it really interesting for them to talk about something they very rarely talk about. None of them are very nostalgic or sentimental people. They’re all really creatively engaged and busy with what they’re doing in the here and now. So, it’s not usual for them to spend time reminiscing, and&#38;nbsp; I wanted to take advantage of that.

Some of the footage of Nick, Mick, and of course Rowland talking seems to be older.

Yeah, so part of the genesis of this film goes back to the early to mid-2000s.&#38;nbsp; Rowland S. Howard and his producer Lindsay Gravina had the idea to make a film, and they’d started collecting and doing interviews. But Roland fell ill and subsequently passed away, so that project was put on hold and the material just sat on a hard drive in a drawer for fifteen or more years until it was picked up for this project. So that was really invaluable, in that we had around three hours of interview footage with Rowland. When we do see the band talking, we use the interviews from that period.
 
The band has such a cult following that even when I lived in Melbourne ten years ago, you could feel the band’s presence hovering over the music scene there. It’s such an important band to so many and I was wondering whether it was hard for you to choose what was included in the film?

That was quite instinctive. I will say one thing—you see a lot of band documentaries these days which are clearly heavily curated by the band or their management. This couldn’t have been further from the case. I don’t think I was ever told, ‘You can’t say that’ or ‘You can’t go there’ or ‘You can’t put that in.’ The band was really understanding and respectful of the creative process and chipped in when they thought something could go in [at a particular point]. But I was never given directives from the band. 

Very early on we established this creative direction that the film would be archival-based and be told in the band’s words, we weren’t going to analyse the band or have other people talking about their vision of it, and it all came together quite quickly - it was just smooth, and fluid and it just flowed. In the film, the band says that they never had a band meeting or discussed their creative direction and the film was the same really. It was all done very intuitively 

Do you think they trusted you and wanted you to do direct because you had been there originally? Was that a big thing for them?

I don’t know whether it was a big thing or just that we had a lot of common references. They’re a little older than me, but essentially we come from the same place and the same era, so there are a lot of common reference points and ideals from that time. I can’t speak for all of the band but for a number of them, I’d say the ideals of that time are still with them, and probably with myself too.

Photo by Alison Lea

One of my favourite parts of the film is you showing the full video of ‘Nick the Stripper’, and the band talking about how they went about filming it – setting a chemical filled pond alight in a rubbish dump, bussing people in from a local psychiatric hospital…

It’s out of control. That band was a trip. They really were. They were unique and unlike almost any other band. You can see bands that are louder, or harder, but you’ll rarely find a band that has that kind of creative intensity. There was something alchemical about that band. It was remarkable.

I also found it so interesting that so many people described that being at one of their gigs was like being ‘annihilated’. That word came up again and again and I think that’s such an incredible feeling to be able to transmit to an audience.

Their shows were phenomenal. Many people have come up to me and spoken about their experience of seeing the band since the film’s release. People have said they’ve never been to shows where they’ve felt physically afraid, or physically sick, or they felt terrified or nauseated from the sound. They felt this palpable sense of fear in the room when the band was playing, or even before the band went on. Mick Harvey says that before he’d go on stage, he couldn’t speak to anyone for thirty minutes. They really channelled something. At best their performances were almost transcendent.

Did the tempo of the music dictate how the film was cut?

Absolutely. Another thing that’s interesting about that film is that we were working off really good, multitrack live recordings. Some of the live footage was 16 mm recorded without sound, so we were striping sound from multitrack live tapes onto the 16mm film, marrying up visions and recordings.

After you finished the film, or during the process of creating it, did it change your perspective on the band in any way?

It brought back to me how good they were and what phenomenal musicians they were. It’s really easy to look at the chaos, , the performances are clearly intense and chaotic, but if you look beyond that, the band never loses track of where they are, they’re super tight, and they’re often juggling really complex time signatures. Phil Calvert the drummer said to me once, that no matter what was going on, how crazy it was, they always knew exactly where they were at any point in a song. That really came home to me when I was working with the footage, just what a phenomenal band they were musically, which is often overlooked with all the mayhem. 

The other thing I guess was that a lot of music from that time has really dated, but The Birthday Party’s music hasn’t dated at all. It really sounds as fresh now as it did forty years ago and that’s a testament to how timeless they are as a band.

&#60;img src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6398e5b4b3dd441ead33860a/ee3ce505-638f-4b58-8c6c-7a8b917adbc2/Monster_Children_Mutiny_In_Heaven+%284+of+15%29.jpg" width="1000" height="674" style="width: 451.516px; height: 304.322px;"&#62;
Images by Davide Corio and Rainer Berson
</description>
		
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	<item>
		<title>Too Good Not to Tell the World About</title>
				
		<link>https://shanachandra.com/Too-Good-Not-to-Tell-the-World-About</link>

		<pubDate>Mon, 06 Jan 2025 17:17:07 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Shana Chandra</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://shanachandra.com/Too-Good-Not-to-Tell-the-World-About</guid>

		<description>Too Good Not to Tell the World AboutIn conversation with artists and creative visionaries Steven John Clark and Lars Stoten of DenHolm
Source
As seen in Jane Magazine Issue 14
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DenHolm’s furniture is unlike anything you’ve ever seen. Using traditional tools that have remained unchanged for thousands of years, the company’s artisans tap into boundless energy, playfulness, and a sense of humour to manipulate solid stone into part Gaudí, part Brâncuși, and part Willy Wonka forms marked with their own irreverent signature stamp. These pieces bounce, grin, and wink at you, transmuting into different shapes depending on the angle you view them from, eschewing any uniformity, as if refusing to be constrained. It’s a contagious energy that’s reflected in the team of artists at DenHolm, the studio, that has grown around founder Steven JohnClark’s dynamic practice. 
And now, as DenHolm is being pulled towards new and exciting endeavours, Steven is joining forces with fellow designer and director Lars Stoten, whose fashion background, expertise, and design milleu involves some of the industry’s most innovative names, includinghis roles as head of new design at Givenchy in Paris and designer at Proenza Schouler in New York. With the pair helming DenHolm together, their artistic collaboration will help sculpt a new multidisciplinary approach, providing a larger platform from which the studio can evolve, an opportunity to showcase and collaborate with other creative visionaries, and avenues to further explore their own artistic expressions.
Steven, I was thinking about DenHolm, and obviously with you being the founder, it’s almost like the studio is an au-tobiography of you. The name of the company is the small town whereyou were born and grew up in Scotland, but it also reflects your background in stonemasonry and fashion with the way you utilise different materials and textures. Tell me about your new partnership with Lars.
STEVEN JOHN CLARK: In an easy nutshell, the overall growth and place we’re at and want DenHolm to be, or where I would like it to get to ethically, I don’t think it’s possible to get to that point [without him]. I feel pretty lucky to have come across Lars when I did. It was a while back now, a couple of years ago, and it’s quite strange. Our two paths weren’t very in sync right from the moment we caught up with each other; it bounced in and out. In the end, we’ve come across each other right at the perfect time because Lars was looking for a change, and whether or not he thought it was going to be at DenHolm, I’m not particularly sure. 
I looked back on what I was doing, and I realised I wasn’t actually doing anything forward-thinking. I wasn’t utilising my main skill set. It kind ofhappens, doesn’t it, when you break into a scene. The idea is that you need growth or it’ll just die. That’s kind of where I’m at right now.
This is super exciting.
Steven: Yeah, totally exciting.Lars, I was wondering what led you to DenHolm?
LARS STOTEN: I bounced about in the fashion industry for years, living in New York, and then moved to Paris for work. It’s funny, because I think mine and Steve’s paths were together, potentially, and then went apart and now have come back. We discovered a few weeks ago we both got accepted to Central Saint Martins in London, and neither of us stuck with it, which is quite funny. 
A bit like Steve said, we’d talked about it on and off, about doing different projects or potential collaborations, with both of us coming from Europe and also having a creative industry output and career. But we strangely met via football. We just started chatting about similar interests and what we were doing, and I think the idea probably danced around for a while. I was curious because I like him, but then obviously the brand is phenomenal and the product is incredible, but it wasn’t really an area that I’d particularly worked in before. My focus has always been garment and fashion-related, really. We had a good chat, and it happened.
Steve often pulls my head in a bit. He’s a bit more grounded than I am—aren’t you, mate? We were sitting in a café, and I was in two minds about whether to stay in Australia. I was frustrated, I think, being in Australia, and he said, ‘Maybe that is the reason that you’re here.’ And I thought, Ah, fuck! I can take all that I’ve done, all that skill set I’ve acquired, and I can apply it to DenHolm, and it can be my baby too. What he said switched something [in me], and it really clicked over. I often tell that story to people when they ask about DenHolm.&#38;nbsp;

That mind shift can be such a change, can’t it? Just one sentence thatcompletely changes your perspective.
Lars: Yeah, Steve’s a bit of a guru.
Steven: A snake-oil salesman.
Lars: You should see him after a couple of drinks. He’s everybody’s therapist, everybody’s life coach. 
I’ve got your email address now, Steve, so I may have to utilise that! So, for both of you, it feels like a bit of a fork-in-the-road moment. In what way is DenHolm going to evolve from the way it was practised previously?
Lars: Well, I think from my perspective, DenHolm’s product—what it is and what Steve is in regards to what he’s built to this point: his talent, skill,and craftsmanship—is insane. Were we in a perfect world where you could just sell to the village, we’d probably do extremely well and pay a lot ofrent. But I think the difference is twofold: potential is just a missed opportunity if you don’t do it; and the other is that with social media the way it is, we get these inquiries that are pulling us into this scaling. We’re not really pushing; we’re being pulled. 
For us, we had to come together on quite a unified vision to make sure that whenever that question was asked, whether we do something or not, we can both just look at each other and we always pretty much 100% agree. I think we both have different practices and different ways that we approach collaboration, but the vision for the studio is the same—and that is that it’s too good not to tell the world about it, and it’s a unique story in itself. There’s a magic to what’s being done. It’s an archaic process of man–hand–stone, but it hasn’t changed. We’re still doing the same thing, using some of the same tools that [humans] used thousands of years ago. 
I look at Steve—and even myself when I’m on the tools with the otherguys—and I think it’s strange and it’s a cliché, but it hasn’t changed. And when you’re learning a craft, as I’ve sort of been taking on a bit lately, it’s like ‘Wow.’ All the little intricacies Steven knows because he’s had that stonemasonry background that I’m taking on, I’m looking at how you can apply it. It’s the same way I would create a pattern or machine something. It’s a practice that evolves once there’s an application to it. 
We’re ultimately an art studio. We are an art studio. We’re a studio of creatives, we’re a cooperative, we’ve got a bunch of other young creatives working with us. We lead them, but they’re all in that shell. The vision isnow feeling tangible.
What do you think, Steve?
Steven: When I started working in stone, there was no desire to work instone. I just made a plinth for one of Bobby’s friends [artist Bobby Clark, Steven’s wife]. I still had my work prior to that, but we all use our skill sets across the years that we’ve been involved in these types of industries and apply them to these types of materials. And I apply it to different scenarios as well, not necessarily just making a product, but who’s to say we don’t get involved in architecture or set design, do you know what I mean? I really don’t want to put any boundaries on what’s possible in terms of that type of collaboration.
The overall growth we’re trying to produce is with GAZZETTE and DENMART. That’s just the beginning of something quite special, I think. It needs a fair bit of work, and it’s going to need a fair bit of energy, but where that came about was that we were kind of tired of being hellbent stuck in the world of Instagram and the structure of Instagram, and felt there was just nowhere to go to scroll. Because sometimes you’re scrolling on Instagram, and you come across something, and you want more from that particular scroll, but then you just get stuck back into it. The idea behind the GAZZETTE was to obviously give ourselves a platform but then suck in other creatives and build this organic platform for cool shit. Stuff we can do to promote ourselves and promote other people.
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I really love DENMART. I live in France and go to brocante everyweekend, and to me, DENMART really has that feel of vintage pieces alongside newer, current pieces. It’s a mismatch, but a good one, with an emphasis on well thought-out products, no matter where or what time period they come from.
Steven: That’s good feedback.
Lars: Yeah, this is exactly what we wanted, so basically, you’re stating our mission statement of when we started it. I go to France three or four months a year, so we do the same thing, we go rummaging. Last summer, coming back in October from when I was there, when I came back I made a box [filled with all the stuff I’d found], and DHL was picking it up, but they were a day late and I had to catch my flight. And I said to the super in my apartment in Paris I was going to leave it outside his door, and within forty minutes, between me leaving it and DHL coming to pick it up, someone managed to steal a box that was forty-odd kilograms.
That’s devastating!
Lars: I not only lost a lot of my personal clothes but also all of these really cool finds.
I also love how with the older finds on DENMART you’ve dated them, so it gives them an origin point and a backstory. Can I ask who found the Michael Jordan signed baseball and the story behind that?
Lars: That was given to me as payment [for something] that someone owed me money for. True story. Basically, I was owed money when I lived int he States, and this guy and his boyfriend had all of these little collectibles from his father, who was really into major league baseball and particularly Michael Jordan’s time when he left basketball to play baseball. I’ve got the original photo of the ball being signed, I’ve got all the certificates of authenticity, and I got it checked before I took it, because it was either take it or not get paid. 
To me, DENMART was about us and about our heads, about curation and our gift shop, in a sense, so it had to go up on there. The GAZZETTE’s just the same thing; the GAZZETTE’s just an extension of the studio. Another creative output, another way to collaborate and put fingers in other pies. Like Steve said, it’s not just about materials and what we can sculpt—whether it’s steel or putty or, obviously, the limestone and glass—it’s any type of creative output: literature, writing, photography... We’re fortunate enough to have the ability to have an economic foundation to play with. And we want to play a shit ton more, so we need to grow thebusiness to do it. 
You mentioned previously that you’ve got a partnership but you’requite different from each other. I wanted to reflect, personality-wise, on what your differences are and how you come together?
Steven: This is like a joint therapy session coming here right now! Who’s going to go first? Who’s going to say something? You might end this partnership now!&#38;nbsp;

(Laughs) Should I retract the question?

Lars: The thing that brought us together initially is that we’re very similar in certain ways. I think, in terms of domestic ideals and domestic ethics and how we raise our kids, that sort of stuff, funnily enough, is quite similar. But the differences in terms of creative approach [are that] I like to plan—I think because I’ve worked in the industry where there needs to be far more structure, especially running teams of merchants and designers. I think [with] Steve coming from a building site and a trade background, there’s alittle more license. It’s a balance, and sometimes he’ll say, ‘Lars, pull your head in. Let’s just do it.’ And I’ll say, ‘Let’s plan and do it systematically.’ Like I said to him last week, we probably should just get married and buy each other rings because we get on with each other almost better than we do our own wives.
Steven: I prefer a “Let’s just do it and see what happens on the other end” kind of approach, which can have terrible consequences sometimes. I’m the type of person that genuinely may have tried a new sealer on a finished table for the first time rather than on a sample. I’ve done that multiple times.The biggest change that’s happened to DenHolm up until this point was me coming out of [needing to finish] a product. I don’t finish anything. I don’t think in lines, which is really silly sometimes.
Lars: I love it. I think it brings an energy to the studio, and you can’t tap it. We’re in there, we’re all working away, and sometimes I’ll look around, and Steve will be hacking away at one thing, and George or Hayden or Joel [are doing something else], and we’re all at the tools doing something: someone’s pigment dyeing, Katie’s taking photos... I just feel that [it]wouldn’t be that way if Steve wasn’t the person that he is. If it was more structured, that would be reflected in the product, and it wouldn’t have the life that it breeds. You’d be taking something like stone and adding a structure to it, but it’s already fucking stone. It’s the fact that we can add that joyand playfulness to it.
Steven: I think we might have to get married after that! It’s so true. It’s just so dynamic.&#60;img width="1370" height="916.3367129163233" src="https://ucd155510391967d52551006bb5e.previews.dropboxusercontent.com/p/pdf_img/ACg6BRB6Y09FK8fB9WrxNZPyaBW8QA1oLFBB6FBBNJCSh6Cv2u8LIG04y634NJ4GAC-qLQ5caO3lyLOF43tn5Cpcgk7UpJ2e89QEHIQ-i5RvP-wrCNDC9b3Q4Sw9GqToJ15A9StHzHh9yRyay-SI81-B7jv-ZvkOBWMT8J6WdtNdtmAk2TOCkn74elhDLzAFJQ8sMdmvhsAq-uI5I06fHoWEYyzJmXLm4zmSVoVcdOqA4uAeavLQuX4tqju5PvQbzoVC91S75EfNvpMH4WUP5YaSGhmOIDFbUvwmKu16nKrB2vj4tf7V4iD-Yyvw8D4hqsrdZl1SJ0tk7pputvDPsrazwH7KdU8Khju840xVUOcM5Axrl_o3iGXKf0XallPUFdh6xT3znFK5SlLBczDfC1DuGzfGMOz-MAtMhoA7KQZqE-pdyQex4zNqq3JKV3QaD0ZwHNrF4uGfa_caLXglj0dp/p.png?page=2" style="width: 451.516px; height: 301.89px;"&#62;
 
When you see your pieces, you can see the energy of it encased into this solid matter. You really feel it.
Lars: I agree. Our design meetings are fucking mental.
Steven: (Laughs)
Lars: I love it. We throw ideas at each other, and we barely finish an idea before we’ve just solved all the world’s problems and Third World hunger, and then we go back to things that we can actually design together. I’ve never really worked in that situation before. I can take it home and breathe it a little bit and come back and have that conversation, and I know we’ll make the change on the day. (To Steven) I made some changes with that thing on that table I was working on today. (Laughs) You’ll see it tomorrow morning.
I just wanted to talk about the GAZZETTE a little bit because I feel like the people you feature embody the DenHolm spirit, even though they’re not necessarily part of the studio per se. Tell me who’s inspiring you at the moment? Who would you love to feature, and who have you got your eye on?
Steven: That’s definitely [one for] you, Lars.
Lars: The GAZZETTE’s a funny one for me, and this is going to sound really trite, but it’s like a sculpture; it’s a visual thing. The words are important, but the words are only important because they’re helping out with the sculpture, and that includes the people we have involved with it as well. I don’t want it ever to feel stifled. I have a lot of friends and colleagues that work in fashion, the press game, and a lot of fashion journalists and journalism involves those who are paying for your wages, basically. And I just wanted a medium where we could collaborate and talk openly to friends that happen to be creatives, and their friends and friends of friends, and have it structured in a way that felt like it could change depending on whomever we fucking decide it to be that month. 
As you can see, there’s very little trend-driven design on it. We use different fonts because I think fonts and typefaces are as important as what’s written there itself. Why have a brand book when it comes to a magazine? It’s part of the art, it’s part of the concept, so the fonts are everything and everywhere. The people that we’re working with in it are generally people that I’ve worked with throughout the years. One of the articles is with Juan[Pozo], who is the casual footwear designer at Prada now. He was my intern at Proenza Schouler. And Siri [Johansen, former head of knitwear design for Kenzo] I’ve known for years. Others are just friends of friends. We did reach out to a couple of people, but to be honest with you, there doesn’t have to be too much reaching because of the networks we have. And when that dries up, hopefully it’ll just be a trickle-down effect when we do reachout. In terms of who I’d like on there, I don’t really look at it like that. I don’t really care, neither does Steve, about stars.
Steven: We were talking about putting a mechanic in it.
Lars: This is what we said: that if someone’s really good at fucking pooltiling, I want to know about what they do! I’m interested about the craft of what you do and the head behind it. A lot of the stuff we’ve got in thecurrent issue, we’ve gone a lot harder with a more intimate conversation with people.
Steve, in regards to what Lars said before, you’re moving into doing more of the beautiful sculpture under your own name. Tell me more about that. How are you feeling, and what are you excited about?
Steven: It’s actually what we’re both going to do. So, the idea behindDENMART and GAZZETTE is that we wanted to produce DenHolm but also our own work inside it so that you’ve got these constant loops that are happening. It’s going to give me a little bit more room to produce stuff that I can’t find at the moment. It’s all pretty bleak stuff out there because the world’s on fire, really. I just see it as a way to get stuff out. I don’t have a particular grand plan other than that. In the past, my artwork’s just fed backi nto DenHolm, so it’s just going to be the ability to keep things a little bit more separate and not worry about it. I can go off and do really different stuff that isn’t going to affect the brand per se, that’s totally randomly different, and now I’ve got the opportunity to go and do that.
Is there anything DenHolm hasn’t done that you’d like to see it evolveto do?
Steven: I’d love to build a building. I nearly have a couple of times, actu-lly, but that’s the type of work that I’d be interested in doing, or full-scalefit-outs of stores end to end, from everything that you touch, from the doorsto the door handles to the tiles to the mirrors to everything. Just Willy Won-ka stuff.
It reminds me of Le Corbusier in Chandigarh in India, where he even designed the potholes, which people are now ripping up and trying to sell.
Steven: And Gaudí’s work in Barcelona. [Doing something like that] would be insane.
Images by Odin Wilde

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	<item>
		<title>The Lennox Head Mal Queen Who Won Big In Biarritz</title>
				
		<link>https://shanachandra.com/The-Lennox-Head-Mal-Queen-Who-Won-Big-In-Biarritz</link>

		<pubDate>Mon, 06 Jan 2025 17:17:09 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Shana Chandra</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://shanachandra.com/The-Lennox-Head-Mal-Queen-Who-Won-Big-In-Biarritz</guid>

		<description>The Lennox Head Mal Queen Who Won Big In Biarritz
Published Here
As seen in Monster Children, october 18, 2023.
&#60;img width="1452" height="1448" width_o="1452" height_o="1448" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7fc45fad9a907c75a8ba3d8927d17fc87dd6f055eeb9a7c3e802890f92ed1df7/Screen-Shot-2025-01-03-at-12.13.23.png" data-mid="224234459" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7fc45fad9a907c75a8ba3d8927d17fc87dd6f055eeb9a7c3e802890f92ed1df7/Screen-Shot-2025-01-03-at-12.13.23.png" /&#62;I first met Aussie longboarder Mia Francis over dinner at a touristy bistro in Biarritz, a day after she won the Vans Queen Classic Surf festival, and knew she was a champion after she smoothly ordered steak frites—well done—from the French waiter who was trying to convince otherwise.
 
It's this combo of knowing what she wants, a rollicking sense of humour, and down-to-earth fun that’s reflected in her surfing - she’s just there to have a good time. You can tell when she’s got her toes to the nose, and her mega-watt smile not only lights up her face, but everyone’s around her, that she is. Her elegant form and calm on the waves bely her young years but having grown up at the beach and been a lifesaver as a mere teenager, you know this Lennox Head native has her head screwed on. This is why seeing her take the title of the competition and being crowned to ABBA’s Dancing Queen in Basque Country felt so right. 

Despite the bougie-ness of Biarritz—this is where chateaus dot the coastline, and the well-heeled have always come to play (Napoleon’s imperial residence still stands at the end of La Grand Plage), when the Queen Classic Surf Festival takes over the town, late August or early September, it’s always a vibe. Complete with music gigs, art tents, skate ramps, discussions on pertinent issues affecting the female surf scene, and of course the best female longboarders from all over the world hanging ten and hanging out, it’s clear with her win, that Mia is now well on her way to being one of them.

&#60;img src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6398e5b4b3dd441ead33860a/5c86041b-dc73-40c3-bd9c-9d5e8a444f7d/Credit%2C+Mitchell+Lyne-9.jpg" width="1206" height="1507" style="width: 451.516px; height: 564.208px;"&#62;

Hey Mia. Welcome back from Biarritz and congratulations again!

Thank you!

So before we get into your win, give me a little bit of your background with longboarding - tell me how long you’ve been doing it for and how you got into it.

My childhood was beachside. We grew up three streets up from Lennox Beach. I used to ride my bike with my longboard down to the point or the boat channel and surf there before I had my driver’s license. I think my Dad has been my role model in surfing because surfing with him is home. That’s my childhood. As I’ve had Instagram and YouTube, being able to watch people like Devon Howard, Steph Gilmore, and Karina Rozunko, all those surfers and longboarders with style from all over the world, it’s just fast paced and made my surfing so much more important to me because I love them, and I love surfing. Being a part of surfing feels like just the right place for me.

Was your Dad a longboarder too?

My dad grew up on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria. He surfs long boards, short boards, twin fins and quads, everything. In the water, my dad is relaxed and at a young age that helped me enjoy the water. I see him having a good time with his friends and that’s what surfing is. 

And that’s the most important thing, if you’re not having fun why are you even doing it?

 Totally. For me surfing is not just standing up on a board. That’s not the best part of surfing. Paddling out in the morning when the sun’s rising and there are dolphins and fish and you’re with someone that’s family, or someone that you love or going on holidays and experiencing the ocean in different parts of the world—that’s surfing for me. It’s not just standing up on a board, killing it, and looking amazing.

What’s the best thing about surfing in Oz and your favourite spots there, compared to surfing in Biarritz? Was it your first time surfing overseas?

Growing up, the majority of my overseas travel whether it was intentional or not have always been surf holidays. I’ve been to Fiji, Canada, Samoa, Bali, New Zealand, the Mentawais, and now France. The drive to go on these holidays hasn’t always been surfing but it always is the experience I love, because I am drawn to the ocean.

My favourite thing about surfing in a new country is the adventure. At home, I know where to go on certain conditions but that is all thrown out the window when you’re on the other side of the world. I really love the stories from the 70’s Bob Mctavish era and I dream of that simplicity in my lifestyle, waking up, driving up or down the coast in search of waves, and no need for any high-tech equipment, just a board and good company. 

While in Biarritz, the waves at Cote des Basques were similar to Lennox's main beach, although the long tides are different, the waves are similar. Don’t get me wrong I love point breaks, but I also love floating between peaks at a beach break. Seeing swell on the horizon I know where I want to be sitting, which wave of the set I want, and how I can gain speed or stall on the wave to get the most out of it. I was a little bit nervous at the Queens surf comp, I was on a borrowed board from Clovis and it was my second day surfing on it but I still felt connected with the waves, ocean, and the break.

&#60;img src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6398e5b4b3dd441ead33860a/4728061d-7bae-47e4-a922-29b9c6e98c1d/Credit%2C+Mitchell+Lyne-11.jpg" width="1908" height="1272" style="width: 451.516px; height: 301.011px;"&#62;

What’s been your favourite place to surf in your travels? 

All the tropical places are my favourite. But when I lived in Canada, I lived there for six months when I did a ski season, which is what I went over there for. But after a month of being there, I ended up being on Vancouver Island on the west coast of Canada and lived in Tofino. I worked there for $12 an hour doing surf instructing. It was a bad time of year because it was so cold, so I was getting no tips, and people were so cold they’d just leave, but it was incredible because it was so different for me. As I said, all my childhood holidays were tropical. So Canada was insane, even being out in the water and seeing bears on the beach and eagles flying over you – it was so raw.&#38;nbsp;
I can’t describe it enough, it felt like I was in a David Attenborough documentary. I’d think, ‘Where the heck am I?’ I love those moments when I’m on a surf holiday and it’s so out of the normal, but it’s still normal because I’m surfing. I’ve still got a board under my arm, but the whole surroundings are completely torn away and are replaced by something so different.

You got invited to the Vans Queen Classic Surf Festival this year. Tell me what it was like getting invited and how it all came about.

For the past two years, I had seen the event and I knew friends who had been there and raved about it. They all said it was so much fun, and that the girls were awesome. I don’t love competing but that’s something that I wanted to do – go and hang out and surf over there and be part of the festival. I messaged them on Instagram and said that I was hoping to come to Biarritz. I didn’t know the dates and was all really inquiring. They said, ‘Yeah we have one spot left,’ so I got the last spot out of the twenty girls. That was it and that night we booked flights.

The whole thing seems so fated. What I love about the comp is the vibe that the festival brought to Biarritz. 

The festival has character. 

And what’s so interesting is that it also provided an open space where people openly discussed topics currently affecting the surf world, such as homophobia, the hypersexualisation of surf marketing, violence against females… Are some of these issues things you’ve come across since you’ve been on the board, or are there others that have frustrated you since you’ve been surfing?

There’s a really amazing Transgender woman named Sasha (Jane Lowerson) that I was l was lucky enough to compete with, in an Australian surf festival a couple of years back now. Out of everyone she stood out in terms of how nice she was, how big her heart was, and just how stoked she was to be there. 

Sasha had travelled from Western Australia but got backlash for being a transgender woman competing in the competition. It was before Bethany Hamilton had spoken out about her view on transgender females competing in surfing, and that sparked up a lot of conversation online and on social media. But all I know is that the most stoked person out there on the water that day was her. And at the end of the day, who cares about your skill — she was just so lovely and so nice.

I feel like the Queens Classic Surf Festival is so needed this year, especially. By promoting equality and support and everything that the Queens is about, it really just sums up and promotes what surfing is actually like for a lot of people in 2023. When I was there, all weekend, everyone was dressed amazing, had incredible views and I had the best conversations with people. I think for the majority of people, that’s how we see the world. At the end of the day, we all are just supporting each other, no matter who you are, I feel like we should be supporting them even if the festival is Queens or not.

With it being your first time surfing in France, is there anything that stuck out to you in terms of the way things are done differently over there? Any crazy stories?

The big difference is the leg rope legal situation. For us in Lennox, it’s a safety measure. Over there, having a leg rope attached is the law, and if you lose your board, the lifeguards will come to take your board and take it to the cop shop. Then you have to go and pay 20 euros to get your board back, which was news to us. Before starting the comp we had to sign a waiver to agree with the law which was that we would wear the leg rope while in competition and any surfs around the comp site. 

I get that they’re looking out for the safety of the people in the water, and there’s probably five times the number of people at Cote des Basques that there is in Lennox, so I get that they’re trying to monitor and crack down on it. But people will still paddle and throw their boards whether they have a leash or not. 

Another huge difference is the landscape. The landscape is incredible. Every building looks like a chateau, so when you’re in the water, you turn around to look back at that. When I was in the Finals, there was a lower tide so there were slower waves and a longer time in between the sets. I was sitting out there, and I kept on trying to stay in line with a certain landmark, so I’d turn around to look at that, but then I’d see a crowd of people, all these beautiful, coloured flags, these chateaus behind the beach, and it was so surreal that I was there. I couldn’t care less about the outcome of that twenty minutes because I was so in the moment.

&#60;img width="2808" height="1560" width_o="2808" height_o="1560" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e13692852caa84583c5a0af9abc7dfe6c48634e3607087415b25e2b2441f87f3/Screen-Shot-2025-01-03-at-12.09.45.png" data-mid="224234458" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e13692852caa84583c5a0af9abc7dfe6c48634e3607087415b25e2b2441f87f3/Screen-Shot-2025-01-03-at-12.09.45.png" /&#62;
You ended up winning the competition. When you were out there did you have an inkling that you might’ve won?

Not at all. I thought I came fourth and I was so happy with that. I was stoked to have made the semi-final because, at that point, all I could think was, ‘This is awesome, I can surf twice with only three other girls on this bank.’ That was my goal - to surf, and get that opportunity as many times, so I could sit wherever I wanted, get the waves I wanted, and just enjoy the ocean without the normal crowd on the bank.

But I ended up winning my heat, I won the semi, and I won the quarterfinals. There were four times that I surfed, and I won each one. Each time, Mitch [her boyfriend] and I were laughing, because I don’t have a coach or have any tactics. But I didn’t feel like any of the other girls were doing that either. I’ve been at comps where some girls are really gnarly, and it gets really tactical, but this festival was different. It felt like the social side of the comp was set in 2023, but the comp side felt like it could’ve been set many years ago because it was so friendly, the girls were super chill, and no one was out there to make money. 

Do you think it was the culture of the competition that created that atmosphere? Because it’s more a celebration of surfing and its lifestyle as opposed to a competition?

For sure. I didn’t go into the event knowing there was prize money, I wasn’t there to get anything out of it. I just wanted the experience because I’d seen that it was so much fun. They have dance parties at night, and it’s this fun, be-who-you-are vibe that the Queens is all about. I think it’s different for comps to not to be competitive and I love that they call it a festival because it does really feel like one.

How did you celebrate the win, and how were you feeling?

We surfed the final and there was a five-hour window that afternoon where they didn’t tell anyone the results, and then we came back that night for the presentation. Of course, I was going to go, but I was in no rush to get there! 

They called us behind the stage, and I went to go behind the stage, but I didn’t have a band on because I didn’t go to the party the night before, so the security guard wouldn’t let me in. And I was like, ‘It’s all good, I’ll just watch.’ Then one of the girls came running up and said, ‘No you have to let her in, she was in the surfing competition, she surfed in the final.’ And obviously, he’s a security guard, and that’s not one of his priorities, but anyway, they let me in. Then we went on the stage, and I just couldn’t believe how many people were there. It was beautiful. From the stage I could see a sea of people, then the skate ramp that was still set up in the distance, and then that castle on the cliff. I could see my boyfriend in the crowd, and I was smiling and laughing at him because I just kept thinking, ‘What am I doing up here?’

I never thought, ‘Yes I’m going to win this.’ Maybe I thought that at comps when I was younger, but I’d done so many comps and lost. I’m so good at losing that I never expected to win. 

Now having won the competition have you had more interest?

Yeah, I got a noticeable bit of traction straight away from the comp. When I put my story post up that I won, I got over 400 messages on my phone. It was kind of overwhelming because I was processing in my head whether I cared about it or not. I’ve gotten comfortable with not winning or falling short of where I’d like to finish, and always thought ‘Oh well, who cares?’. I don’t need my results to tell me that I enjoyed my day surfing. So, I’ve never justified winning a surf comp as doing well, but then all of a sudden, this thing happened, and it was so fun, and I had everyone patting me on the back. But then again, it was nice to have the next day to myself, just me and my boyfriend at the beach, having a picnic in the sun, and just kind of getting back to reality. I want my projects that I love, and to work with brands when it’s aligned and when it’s for a good cause and after travelling I feel really inspired to pursue those. 

I admire your social presence because it feels so authentic to you, and you’ve managed to avoid that overt sexiness.

I think my parents, growing up, they’d just hand me my pink wetsuit and say, ‘Go and do your thing’. I really wasn’t running around in bikinis trying to get a tan, I was coming in from the surf with hair all over my face, covered in seaweed, saying, ‘Oh my god I just got barrelled!’ I didn’t really care about that stuff. I feel like there hasn’t been any stage of my life where I’ve gone, ‘I don’t want to be beautiful’, or ‘I don’t want to wear bikinis’, it’s just that I’m just comfortable with doing what I do, that’s just who I am. 
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	</item>
		
		
	<item>
		<title>SOULS THAT WHISPER COURAGE IN YOUR EAR</title>
				
		<link>https://shanachandra.com/SOULS-THAT-WHISPER-COURAGE-IN-YOUR-EAR</link>

		<pubDate>Mon, 06 Jan 2025 17:17:11 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Shana Chandra</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://shanachandra.com/SOULS-THAT-WHISPER-COURAGE-IN-YOUR-EAR</guid>

		<description>Souls that whisper courage in your earA conversation between author and musical artist Adele Bertei and writer Shana Chandra

Source

As seen in Jane Issue 13
&#60;img width="1140" height="1452" width_o="1140" height_o="1452" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/90c163a60aef1c11b4cf304c9d6ae7ac8563eaf8f6f253f66088353ec1e3171f/Screen-Shot-2025-01-03-at-11.33.59.png" data-mid="224234461" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/90c163a60aef1c11b4cf304c9d6ae7ac8563eaf8f6f253f66088353ec1e3171f/Screen-Shot-2025-01-03-at-11.33.59.png" /&#62;

A few weeks after my interview with Adele Bertei, she posts an Instagram
story quoting these words from the famed English novelist Hilary Mantel:
‘The question is not who influences you, but which people give you courage.’

It is a fortuitous post, because in speaking to Bertei, you can hear in her
velvet voice an empathy that is only earned from a life battered by adversity
but with a willingness to wink at it anyway. She can’t help but become one
of those people of Mantel’s quote for me—a courage-giver—because her
story is one that will have you holding on to it tight-fisted when your own
courage is just a faint scratch at the door.

Bertei’s life has been one of courage not so much because of the events
that triumph it: her pivotal friendships with Peter Laughner and Nan Goldin, which she so lovingly documents in her book Peter and the Wolves;
major contributions as a musician in New York’s No Wave scene by being
a founding member of The Contortions and The Bloods, and starring in
movies by Scott and Beth B and Vivienne Dick; and a long career of adding
her vocals to the likes of Tears for Fears, Whitney Houston, and Culture
Club, and penning lyrics to songs for Lydia Lunch and The Pointer Sisters
(among others).

Rather, her courage is largely marked by her ability to survive circumstances that would derail the best of us, and yet she still wakes up each day
believing in people. It isn’t the kind of courage that we usually think of,
because we tend to think of the trait only arising with bold leaps of faith,
a precursor to doing something extraordinary—the Joan of Arc type of
courage. And though Bertei has exhibited this type of courage too, it’s the
quieter mode that’s most remarkable, because it’s an alchemical fortitude
that has you enduring painful events and scraping as much good as you can
from what’s left, transforming those past hurts into poetry.

And that’s what Bertei does with her forthcoming book, Twist: An American Girl. It’s a memoir forty-four years in the making that chronicles the
extraordinary life of an impish puck with carloads of swagger who has seen
more than most of us ever will by becoming part of many of her country’s
major cultural events. A girl who has transformed into the woman with the
velvet voice that kisses you with courage each time you hear her speak.

Even just reading the description of the book, it’s
clear that you’ve been through so much. I wanted to ask, what was it
like to revisit that? I know both Peter and the Wolves and Why Labelle
Matters have memoirist aspects to them, but I was just wondering what
made you ready to go back now?

Great question. This book [Twist] has been in the works since
probably 1979, when I would write in fits and starts, and it was such a difficult
journey. There were moments when I would write a few chapters and stick
them in a drawer because there was a lot of trauma involved in my childhood.

Trying to find the voice of the book was really interesting. I didn’t know
whether to write it in third person or fictionalise it, then finally I decided,
probably about eight years ago, that I would create a character. Even though
all the events in the book are true, I needed a character, kind of like a Trojan
horse, or armour to go through those war zones of my childhood so that
I could have a somewhat objective look at how I survived certain things.

I thought about how much I loved Dickens as a child, and Oliver Twist
was a big figure, and the Artful Dodger, so I decided on calling it Twist:
An American Girl, because Oliver Twist, my mother’s schizophrenia,
and my imagination were all very important to my becoming an adult.

I love that it’s called American Girl as well, because what I love about
your life, apart from the seminal moments of being part of the music
scene with Peter Laughner in Cleveland or the No Wave scene in New
York, are some of the jobs you’ve had. I read that you were an assistant
occupational therapist for Vietnam War vets, and you also worked at
the Ford Motor Factory. Even those seem important markers of American history that you were part of. What did you learn from them, and
how did they affect you?
Sometimes I feel like the lesbian Zelig in Woody Allen’s film. It took me so
many decades to filter and transmute and assimilate all those experiences
into my view of humanity because I’ve seen so much. But what I’m still
learning—and, you know, we’re all still learning, and I feel like I have so
much to learn in terms of my journey here on the Earth plane—but I’m still
learning to parse judgement from discernment.

Judgement is more from an egoistic point of view, and discernment is trying
to view people in a more 360-degree light, because we all have dark and
light within our souls and psyches. 
I had to really understand cruelty, which
is a really difficult subject, and you have to face your shadow side and the
part of humanity that is within us all, and to forgive people for being human
and not being able to ascend out of cruelty. I’m still learning about this;
it’s quite a journey. To have worked with veterans who were emotionally
disturbed, and to work in a Ford Motors company—I was one of the first
women to work on the line in Lorain, Ohio, which was one of the biggest
Ford Motors Company [factories] of that era. And I learnt a lot, being a
working-class person and being part of a union. What an incredible union
we had [back then]; the UAW (United Auto Workers) really took care of us,
and so many unions have been busted up. So, there’s so much there, and I
could write memoir forever, but I need to move on to fiction at this point.

It’s very interesting because what is fate and what is free will? We think
about that. But trigger warning: I was raped by a Vietnam vet and held
captive for three days, and it was a very brutal experience. But then, when I
was emancipated from a reformatory, I was placed into a veterans’ hospital
to work with them.

I had read about that horrific incident, but I didn’t realise. So, that
rape actually happened beforehand?

Yup, the rape happened before my job working with art, with veterans,
which was an extremely illuminating experience. I really had to think about
all the biggest issues. What is war about? Why do men become violent? I
think the strongest part of my vocation is speaking about women and what
women have gone through in the generations: my mother’s generation, my
grandmother’s generation. But I’ve learnt a lot about men and how that
gender is pressured in ungodly, cruel ways to be a certain way.

It’s interesting when women have to repress so much—their hurt or their
repression goes inward. They hurt themselves or they dissolve into insanity and madness, whereas men hurt other people. It becomes a violent act
towards others, more so than women. And it’s not that men suffer any less
than women when it comes to a more spiritual aspect.

I was watching the film Women Talking. There was a moment where one of
the characters turns to the young man who’s taking notes for the women and
says [spoiler alert here], ‘How would you feel if no one ever cared about
your thoughts or what you were thinking. How would you feel?’
That was my mother’s generation, and that was my grandmother’s generation. They were working-class women trapped in a society that didn’t care
about what they thought, and they were supposed to play specific roles. My
mother chose schizophrenia—and I think it was a choice, I really do—and
her mother chose music but suffered because of it. And that’s written about
in the book. So, it’s so interesting, all of these issues about men and women
and what I came to see through my own experiences and also [through my]
ancestors. I’m really into ghosts. I learn a lot from ghosts. If you’re willing
to listen, they have a lot to teach.

With what your mum experienced, did that give you a determination or
a path that made you sure you weren’t going to follow in her footsteps?

Most definitely. In the 1950s and 1960s—and this is pre-second-wave feminism—women were wives and mothers and weren’t really encouraged to
do anything but. And to be the perfect wife and mother, in the sense of the
Donna Reed [figure], which was a TV show about a woman who was the
perfect housewife and mother, and who dressed in a specific way—all of
the detrimental things that women were caged into. My mother was not
that. She had grown up with a mother who was incredibly creative but also
suffered because of her creativity.

My mother also had a very abusive husband who beat her and was a very ignorant man, and she cracked. It’s just kind of like all of the oppression she
felt just exploded, and her imagination took over as schizophrenia, helped
along by the drugs the psychiatrists were giving her—speed, primarily, because speed psychosis can bring on mental illness. On one hand, my mum
was very abusive to me and her other children, and on the other hand, she
was extremely, creatively imaginative.

I could’ve chosen to concentrate on the abuse and allow myself to be perpetually damaged by it, or to choose the imagination and the creativity,
which was her legacy for me. And it gave me the courage to say, ‘I’m never
going to be the part of her that inherited the abuse from man and from
society. I’m going to be the part of her that was brave and courageous and
reached for imagination.’ And I was able to take risks because of that. I
had a tremendous amount of courage. And I see that as her legacy and my
grandmother’s legacy to me.
Thank you for using the word “courage”, because for this edition of
JANE, our editor, Annika, chose certain words, emotions, or values,
and then we personified those for our pieces. And the word that I chose
for you was courage. Because that’s your story. I watched your Women
of Rock oral history, and I know you spoke a lot about your life in that,
and I was just astounded by the way you spoke about certain things.
To be honest, I had to pause sometimes, to take in what had happened
to you. But the way that you spoke about it, you were saying it with so
much love to yourself but also with so much love and understanding to
the people who were cruel to you. There wasn’t any bitterness, and I
kept thinking how did you do that?

I think my sobriety has a lot to do with that. I mean, I was a mess. As soon
as I was emancipated, I started drinking and drugging to kind of repress
everything because I couldn’t parse the good from the bad. I didn’t have
emotional intelligence, so I would just cover it up with the drinking and
the drugs. I didn’t get sober until I was in my thirties, and that’s when the
process of healing began. I met other people in the [Twelve Step] program.
I had felt very isolated and solitary in the way that I had grown up, that no
one would ever understand me, or I would never meet anyone who had
gone through an inch of what I experienced, and that became very egoistic,
like ‘The world owes me because I’ve gone through this,’ and I was kind of
a reprobate in a lot of ways.

It was sobriety that put me on the path of healing to go to therapy, to work
a spiritual program. I wouldn’t be alive today if I hadn’t stopped drinking,
I can tell you that much. And it also really affected my music career, but
that’s a whole other memoir.

It feels like you hit New York at a time when you were ready to explode
creatively, and then New York exploded creatively too at the same time.
I mean, I have such a romantic view of that period, which I know a lot
of people do, but I’d love for you to talk about it.

It was such an amazing period and place, and people are still so provoked
about what was going on. I’m writing about it now. Because my mother was
schizophrenic and some of the situations I was in [when I was in] reformatory school were so odd and different than most people, when I got to New
York and saw what was going on there, it was like a reflection of everything
I had already experienced. It was so different from the conservative lifestyles that people were living at the time and so many women [were living
at the time]. And I attest this to Patti Smith.

Patti Smith came out with Horses in 1975, and it really changed the paradigm for women and creativity. Because not only was she a writer, writing
poetry books and making drawings, but when she did Horses, it was kind
of like a clarion call for women to be themselves. She was so androgynous,
she was so brilliant, and it created a movement in Europe and in America of
women moving to New York City to explore their own creativity, unfettered
by any gender norms or expectations or oppressions.

When I got there, so many women [were] doing things. Nan Goldin I had
met in Cleveland, but there was Nan Goldin and Kathy Acker and Barbara Kruger, people from all these different artistic pursuits. Lizzie Borden
the filmmaker. We were all there, making music, making art, making film,
making poetry. There were women coming from Berlin, there was the band
Malaria! and the Au Pairs in England, and Lizzy Mercier [Descloux] from
Paris. We were all together making art, and we just adamantly refused to be
anything but free.

But because of that, I think it also inspired the men in the scene to take
risks because they had us to compete with, and we were doing so much and
with such wild imaginings, and they had to keep up. We were feminists by
proxy. We didn’t call ourselves feminists. We didn’t call ourselves gay or
straight or anything, we just moved in a very fluid, organic way in terms of
our sexuality. I can’t speak for everyone, of course, but that’s the way the
scene developed. Everybody was mixing with everyone, and there wasn’t
the divisiveness you feel today in terms of all the different camps and labels and brands we seem to fit into, which to me is conformity, really. We
compartmentalise, and capitalist corporations can take advantage of us by
putting [us] into these little boxes in order to sell to us. It’s a type of commodification. I’m not judging anyone—people do what they want to do—
but there is a big groupthink involved in all of this. That was the furthest
from our minds in New York in the late ’70s and early ’80s. It was very free.

And part of that was that we could afford apartments for, like, 50 bucks,
100 bucks a month in these really broken-down apartment buildings that
the landlords were eager to give to us for that amount of money. We didn’t
have to work corporate jobs like young artists do today, so we were very,
very free. Economics had a lot to do with it as well.

I also want to talk about your time at your reformatory school, where
you got into gospel singing, and what that gave you.

Marycrest School for Girls was a type of reformatory on a convent with
the Sisters of Good Shepherd, which was one offshoot of three orders that
originated in France, and some went to Ireland and some came to America,
and I’m sure their tentacles went all over. I know that Sinead O’Connor
was at a similar convent school—I don’t know [for] how long, but she did
spend time in what they call Magdalene Laundries. Some of them were far
more draconian than others. The school that I was in was semi-draconian.
We were locked down, we did live in dormitories, and we were supervised
24/7, but there wasn’t any physical cruelty going on as you hear [about] in
some of the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland.

Then Blossom Hill was a higher security reformatory, and that was probably 80% black girls to white. And Cleveland was a very—still is a very—
segregated city. In those days, blacks and whites did not mix at all. I came
from a very working-class family, and my mother was not a racist at all. She
idolised black people. My father was an Italian working-class racist. So, I
grew up hearing craziness from him, and my mother being beaten for it, basically. And then I end up in this reformatory. I was the odd person out. No
other white kid I knew would have any exposure to anyone black. The way
we bonded was through music. We had a choice to go to Catholic services
on Sundays or Baptist services, and, of course, I chose Baptist, because of
the music, you know. And really, I think it was my voice that allowed me
to assimilate into that culture and that school. They accepted me because
of my voice.

Gospel music was really a bridge [for me] from my grandmother’s music.
She was a honky-tonk and stride piano player. Singing with her was what
started me on the musical path, and then being in Blossom Hill, gospel music was just revelatory, because there’s nothing like twenty girls and women
singing harmonies together. I think God is music, I really do. I mean, that
music would raise the hair off the back of my neck. And it made me feel so
close to whatever the power is that’s out there. I connected with it through
gospel music, and we had a ball.

We played “the game”—that’s what homosexuality was called in reformatory school. You know, you had the stud, which meant you were butch or a
boy, or [if you were] a lady, you were a femme. And we acted out the most
macho, egregious states of men. We acted like little pimps, macking on the
ladies. It was us modelling what we saw on the outside—“the outs,” we
called it. But we had so much fun. We created our own families and created
our own society, and the people who ran the school knew what was going
on, but they kind of turned their heads a bit. And probably, maybe only 20%
of the girls in there ended up being gay on the “outs,” but inside, almost all
were playing the game. We were teenagers, and we were coming into our
sexuality, and we were locked up, and of course you’re going to want to
romance other women. It was just very accepted there.
There’s a performance of yours at the Peppermint Lounge with The
Bloods, and you have so much swagger, you’re mesmerising, so I can
see you being the little pimp there. With The Bloods, they came out of
the No Wave scene, and they were billed as the all-queer rock group.
And the No Wave scene didn’t really have any labels, as you said before, so I was wondering if things had started to change by then?
In terms of sexuality, we were all gay, but we weren’t really outed until a
journalist in the New York Rocker outed us in the paper. It was really hard
on my guitar player because her family didn’t know she was gay, and he
basically outed her, and they found out, so she had to deal with the whole
struggle of coming out to her family due to this journalist.

It’s so interesting, because I recently posted a few clips of us playing at
this festival called the Venus Weltklang Festival in Berlin, and it was mostly women bands and women-led bands like The Slits, the Au Pairs, The
Bloods. We were a really good band musically. We weren’t just punk; we
were very rock’n’roll. Of course, we couldn’t get touched with a barge pole
because we were known as “the little gay hellions.” We did a little mini tour
of Europe where we played in Holland—a few times in Amsterdam—Berlin, London, and Birmingham. We fancied ourselves as the female Rolling
Stones—groupies and drugs and the whole shebang. We had a reputation as
the girls who said ‘No,’ because we wouldn’t compromise. There was one
record company man that wanted to sign us and wanted us to give away
50% of our career to him, and we said no, and he was furious, livid!

It was really, really hard for us being gay at that time in 1979–80. We had a
rough road, and eventually we broke up because we couldn’t really go any
further than where we were. In terms of the scene, we opened for The Clash
and so did Bush Tetras, who are still together to this day, and I admire them
to this day. But it was still pretty casual in terms of who was gay and who
was not, in terms of branding and labels and all of that. Although, there was
a very strong lesbian scene starting up in New York City at the time too,
where women were going to certain clubs and workshops.
I remember you also mentioned in the Women in Rock podcast all the
homophobic backlash with Sophie B. Hawkins too, when you were a
backing singer for her. [Sony wanted to drop Hawkins when she said in
an interview she was ‘omnisexual.’]

That was just horrible. They put so much pressure on Sophie, and I don’t
want to talk about her journey so much, because that’s for her to tell. But
for me, it was my bowing out of the commercial music business at that
point. I just couldn’t take the homophobia anymore. And I decided I was
going to stop doing music, and I moved down to LA and started working
on my writing skills. But yeah, the homophobia was rife, and it was also
rife in England.

I mean, my friend Helen Terry, the singer for Culture Club, who had a
brilliant voice, was a brilliant singer, she happened to be chubby and gay.
The male journalists in England tore her apart, they called her names, it was
awful the way they treated her, and they basically ruined her career. And it
was such a tragedy because she was such a great singer. She ended up being
a producer for the BBC, of music programs. She ended up doing well, of
course, but the tragedy is we lost her voice. 
We could say the same for you, and everything that happened to you in
your commercial career. Each time you came so close…

It was such a dichotomy of being a woman in the No Wave and post-punk
scene and then entering the commercial music business, which was all
about the control of women. And it was really hard to navigate that.
In a sense, I got signed to Geffen because they saw something about my
authenticity as a singer and an artist that they thought they could work with.
But the moment that I got signed, they said, ‘You have to fire your manager’—Jane Friedman, who was Patti Smith’s manager, whom I adored—and
it was just [about] all these controls. ‘You can’t say this, you can’t do this,
write some hits, do this, that’s not a hit, dress like this.’ It was relentless,
and I kept coming up against that and how to navigate it and not wanting
to navigate it.

So, a part of me is responsible for “self-sabotaging” a commercial music
career because I had to start saying no at a certain point. There was also a
Me Too moment in there, and it was really tough, so I just decided that for
a while being a backing singer was fine because I liked the people I was
singing with, and it was pressure off of me being controlled. But then after
Sophie, I just said, ‘I’m out.’

With your writing, did you see it more as an extension of writing songs,
or was writing something you always did? Your words are so visceral.
When I read them, I feel them, and they’re so beautiful.
Thank you. That’s so generous and sweet of you to say. I started writing stories as a young kid, but because I was taken out of the home and everything
was disrupted, I got taken out of that path. And I loved poetry. My favourite
poet was Percy Bysshe Shelley—not only because he was a brilliant poet
but because there was activism and anarchy in his poetry, a political force,
that I felt very akin to.

It’s in Twist [that] I had a really cruel foster sister destroy my writing once,
and one of the first drafts of Twist: An American Girl I lost in an apartment
that was taken over by someone in the late 1970s when I started writing
the book. And as courageous as I am, Shana, a couple of blows like that
made me shut down my writing self. I was very hurt; I was very wounded
by those instances. So, I wrote songs for a long time, but then finally came
back to writing again in the early 1990s, writing stories and working on the
book again.

It’s amazing to me that you’re self-taught in music and writing and
you’re so proficient at them. What would be your advice to new writers
who are starting out?

I don’t know about that, I’ve got a long way to go! My advice would be:
don’t follow any academic prompts. Academia is the death of writing, to
me. Yet at the same time, if you look at The New York Times bestseller list,
there are no working-class writers there. They’re either from a writing program or MFAs, and I think personally, that’s really hurting our society. If
you cut people out, if they don’t have a mirror for their authentic lives and
voices, they’re going to get pissed off culturally.

I would say: be authentic, and don’t follow any writing program—even
grammar. To me, that’s not even important if it’s somehow repressing what
you need to say from more of a heart-based place as opposed to more of an
intellectual space where the language becomes so dry nobody cares, except
for that elite group of academics and writers. It’s a very insular world. I had
to be really courageous to try and get these books published because people
don’t want to hear voices like mine in that specific world. It denies the fact
they’ve put all this time and money into academia.

If I could give any advice, pay such close attention to your heart when
you’re writing, and [write] in a voice that feels real to you. Never play to
the crowd. Because when you play to the crowd, you might as well give up.
Art comes from a very singular place in us, and we have to stay true to that.Adele Bertei
by Zoe Leonard, New York, mid-1980's
© zoe leonard
courtesy the artist, galerie gisela capitain,
cologne and hauser &#38;amp; wirth</description>
		
	</item>
		
		
	<item>
		<title>Soul Strangers, Alone Together</title>
				
		<link>https://shanachandra.com/Soul-Strangers-Alone-Together</link>

		<pubDate>Mon, 06 Jan 2025 17:17:12 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>Shana Chandra</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://shanachandra.com/Soul-Strangers-Alone-Together</guid>

		<description>Soul Strangers, Alone Together
Writer Shana Chandra in conversation with artist peggy kuiper
Source
As seen in Jane Issue 12
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Surrounded by faces and hands in bright colours.

It’s always uncomfortable to meet new people.

There are so many of them here, but nobody makes contact.

Nobody is watching us, watching them.

Who are they? They are all me. Or maybe they’re you.

They could be anybody who has ever felt unseen and unacknowledged.

All the people from my paintings come from the same place.

They have so much to say, but they won’t dare to speak up.

They just sit there, quietly, staring off into space.

You can tell they have so much love to give by the warmth of their hands.

But their faces remain absent.

There were not born like that; I think the world raised them to be so.

The easy road never felt rightful for me.

I am quite comfortable walking alone.

It shows in my paintings, where faces remain absent
even when surrounded by many others.

Always in search of something.

– Peggy Kuiper, notes on her paintings

As a young girl writing, dreaming, and drawing in her private journals,
Peggy Kuiper imagined that one day when she was older, she would either
be a painter or a dancer. A self-described loner and introvert, she would use
dancing as the language to express her wild ways when the words clouding
her throat could not. 
Now as a painter working out of a converted ballet
studio in Amsterdam, amongst barre and mirror-lined walls, she still dances
before she begins to paint. 
With the warm, lush colours of her palette, she
creates characters, her companions, on whose masked faces and elongated
fingers she layers her most vulnerable feelings. They are companions she
finds it hard to part with, but when she does, she is happy for them to dance
through the world into other people’s lives, where they hear the most intimate secrets. 
The theme of this issue of JANE is centred
around community and a togetherness of ideas and spirit, and I was
wondering how you responded to that? As artists and writers, especially, we spend so much time alone. 
 I really relate to the theme of this issue because I’m
a super loner, but at the same time, I move in a crowd of people that are
inspirational to me.

You’ve moved through many crowds. Before you were an artist, you
worked in graphic design, and then after that as a photographer. Each
of those communities are such worlds unto themselves. How did you
find yourself belonging to them and moving from one to the other?

At art school, I did graphic design, and I chose graphic design because
there are so many different disciplines available that you can combine, like
typography, images, and composition. And then I did an internship with Anthon Beeke in Holland. He’s more like an artist than a designer, and I was
very much inspired by him. He’s very autonomous, so people came to him
for his distinct ideas and style. I had such a good internship, but it wasn’t
like real life at all, because after school I worked for a company, and I only
did designs for clients that had very special requests, and I thought, Huh,
this is different! I did that for two years and then quit my job, which is when
I decided to do photography.

I think visually, I don’t think in words. I see details, so I knew I wanted to
work with something visual. But I didn’t know anything about photography, so I watched a lot of YouTube tutorials and just went for it. That was
in 2014. Assignments came, and I always worked within teams, for brands
and for newspapers, as well as doing more commercial photography. But I
always worked within a team and for a client, so I was curious to see what
would happen if I did something on my own. What would I create? As a kid
I loved to draw, so I thought maybe I should do that again. I started and then
I didn’t stop. That was three years ago.

That’s amazing that it was not so long ago that you started, because
your paintings are so striking, and they have such a strong, distinct,
and unique aesthetic—a signature of sorts that seems like it would’ve
taken years to develop.

I think the signature was something I learnt through my years of graphic
design and photography. I think it’s a combination of things I saw and did,
because I can also relate to my photography in my paintings. My soul is in
my paintings; they show what I want to say and how I feel as an introverted
person.

I guess you can layer all that emotion onto the painting, whereas it’s
a lot harder to draw that out from someone else, which is what you
potentially have to do in photography.

Yes. As a kid, I was really dreamy, and when I was around other people,
I would love to be in the middle of them but remain unspoken. I loved to
be there and quietly observe. But people always found that really uncomfortable because they couldn’t reach you, and they felt that. Now that I’m
older, I’m more at ease with that feeling. But I layer the emotions of how I
felt as a child in the faces of all my paintings. They can be there, so I don’t
have to hide.
That’s probably why the paintings are so striking—because they come
from a real emotion that you’re trying to capture and place on them. 
 
I understand that feeling of wanting to be alone but with people. I think
that’s why I love interviewing people, because I can be with them but
the attention isn’t so much on me. Tell me more about your internship
with Anthon Beeke.

Anthon Beeke and his wife, Lidewij Edelkoort, who is a Dutch trend forecaster, were both quite a bit older and really big inspirations for me. I wasn’t
shy, but I was quiet, and Anthon was super provoking, so I needed to be able
to deal with that. At the same time, he accepted me for how I was. We had
beautiful conversations. Sometimes after lunch, I would come and sit down
in his office, and he would tell me stories about how he started and what his
inspirations were. I think he made such a big impression on me as a person
but also in my work, in the way that I see things.
That’s such a beautiful relationship to have. I come from an Indian
heritage where there’s a strong lineage of guru and student that goes
unbroken throughout time, and knowledge gets handed down and
transmuted through each person.

At the moment, I don’t have a gallery, but I do have beautiful conversations
with a big gallery owner, Alex Daniels of Reflex Amsterdam, who has really big artists of different generations. I really value that. It’s important to
have those people around me.
You’ve said that one way that Anthon influenced your photography is
in the way that it can be quite outspoken and playful. In some ways, I
feel those qualities are in your art too. Would you say that?

I think the colours make it playful. I want the colours to be comfortable to
look at so it’s inviting. But then when you look to the paintings themselves,
you perceive more of an inner feeling, like a subtle facial expression that’s
uncomfortable or dreamy. The drawings also have a childish feel to them,
the long fingers and noses, and so it also becomes playful in that way too.

I wanted to ask you about the fingers because I use my hands a lot to
express, and when I speak I always move them or hide behind them. I
think hands can be very expressive parts of our bodies that are often
overlooked and that can say things more than our faces. I was wondering is that why you have the elongated fingers, to draw attention to the
hands, or is it something else?

I think the faces and the hands portray important feelings because the facial
expressions are super vulnerable, so sometimes I put masks on the figures
as well, to cover them up a little. But the hands, for me, are very comforting.
It reminds me of my mum a lot. I lost my mum when I was very young. I
think they’re to comfort myself and people around me. If I see somebody I
really like, I give them touch. And because of the long fingers [in my art], it
becomes more important, as if I really want to reach out.

They are so comforting, aren’t they? I inherited my hand gestures from
my father, and he passed away a few years ago, so I find them comforting too. And it’s so funny, I’m so similar. If I like a person, I’ll touch
them and be affectionate towards them, and if I don’t like a person, I
won’t, which I sometimes worry they will notice.

It’s interesting we’re speaking through a computer but I feel such a connection [with you].

I’m so glad you say that, because I do too.

Maybe because we recognise things in each other.
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It’s interesting how so much of what we are influenced and inspired by
is other people in our community. I know that Freud’s The Uncanny inspired you too—his idea that the uncanny is finding the unusual within
the confines of the comforting, which is what you’ve mentioned you
do with your inviting colours and unusual, subtle facial expressions.
 I was wondering, apart from Anthon and Freud, who else has inspired
you?

I have two people in mind. One is my grandma. I relate to her visual tastes.
If I visualise her house and interiors and the prints that she had hanging—
Paul Klee and Modigliani (not real ones)—I was really intrigued by the
colours in her house and the artists she had there, things that she just ripped
out of magazines.

The other one is Marlene Dumas. She also has the uncanny motif. I don't
want to compare myself with her, and I don’t know if that’s her motive but
more what I read in her art. She always has themes that are hard to look at
or taboo, but the way she paints it is beautiful and tragic at the same time. I
think that’s so powerful. That’s a beautiful way to communicate something
that is a tough subject or things that are around you that are hard to look at.

You’ve said in your photography work that you love to alienate your
character, which I think comes through very strongly in your paintings
too, that element of estrangement. Even when your characters are in
big groups, it doesn’t feel like they’re really relating to each other. Can
you tell me a bit more about that?

One painting with a group of people, they all have exactly the same introverted expressions. I was fantasising what it would be like if I only had
people like me around me. I have a lot of extroverted friends, different
kinds of friends, and it works, it clicks, it’s a good combination because it
takes me out of my comfort zone. What would happen if everybody was
sitting around in their own headspace? Nothing would happen! We need
other people to be different. That’s what I would often wonder when I was
at a party, when I really wanted to relate to somebody. But afterwards I
found out that it’s also important that you can’t relate too, because it makes
the dynamic interesting.

It does. It creates a sort of tension that’s exciting.

And it’s more important that everybody can be themselves. My really extrovert friends throw these really extroverted parties, but sometimes I feel
like ‘I’m here, but now I want to go.’ When I was young, I always made
excuses. But now I say, ‘I don’t feel comfortable anymore, and I want to go
home,’ and everyone says, ‘Okay. That’s okay!’ and now I feel really seen.
That’s amazing!
Just saying what I think or feel is way better.
I was known for the “French exit,” just leaving without telling anybody. But what you’re doing is super powerful because it shows that it’s
okay to feel how you feel, and you shouldn’t be ashamed of it.

Their response was only positive, so I thought, This isn’t so bad!

What do you think being from Amsterdam has given you as an artist?

I’m really in love with Amsterdam. Because I’m a loner, Amsterdam is
more like a big village with beautiful people. It’s small; you can walk from
one side to the other side. That, I already love. I can walk everywhere with
Balou [my dog], and I don’t have to take the subway or anything. I don’t
want to live in the countryside because, especially as a loner, I feel super
comfortable in the city. Even when I wear my pyjamas to the supermarket,
no one looks at you weirdly. It’s a city where you can express yourself a lot.

When I walk from my home to my studio, it’s a half hour walk, and I just
wander on my own. People come by. I think a lot of people notice you and
give you a nod. I really like that; you acknowledge each other with a nod or
a smile. The city gives me a lot of energy. Even when I like to go through it
on my own, I feel the energy of the people in a different way. I also really
appreciate the female connections. You look at each other, and when I see a
beautiful woman, I’ll say what I see out loud to them and appreciate them.
Little things like that can make someone’s day.
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Did you dance at all when you were younger?

I danced from four till when I was seventeen. I was super quiet, but when
I danced I had so much expression. I did ballet, and in our class for the last
ten minutes you could dance freely, and I went crazy. The teacher saw that
and said, ‘We need to put her in a more explosive kind of dance.’ I felt so
comfortable as a kid when I danced. I was in a different world, and everybody thought I was strange because I was so quiet, but I moved like I was
so comfortable. But I didn’t care because it was mine.

You can express through dancing. It’s another language, just like art.

For me, it’s more natural to express by dance or by my body and with feeling rather than with words.

That relates to the visual way in which you learn as well.

The teacher saw it too. And when a few people see things, they give you the
confidence to do [that]. You need those people, to have them around you. I
always felt my intuition was super strong, so I’d just go for it.

Often these people see something in you that you can’t see in yourself;
you need them to show you. I love that you paint in your studio with the
energy of little ballet dancers around you. 
Yes, and it still has all the barres and mirrors. And every day I still dance a
little. It reminds me—me manifesting the ballet studio—that if you really
believe in things, you can make them happen. That’s why I try to seek
things within myself, not externally, because I can create my own narrative.
I can’t put it in someone else’s hands because then I don’t have the control
over it.

You have such a particular palette with the colours in your paintings.
My favourite is of the two women who are in these beautiful bright
colours; you can feel that colour. How do you come to your colours?

Most of my outcomes are defined by the use of colour. They speak out
the truth that sometimes can only be felt, even though I don’t always understand it. It’s almost like I don’t have words for it, but it’s a feeling, or
emotions combined together.

I think that’s what I felt. I can’t even articulate it, and it might not be
the same emotion as what you felt painting them, but when I saw the
colours, I did have a physical, emotional reaction to them. 
I think it’s
quite amazing how it translates.

I don’t even think it’s relevant what my emotion is in the paintings. I think
you’re always attracted to something that you recognise yourself in. I really don’t explain my paintings often to people because they have their
own stories, which they tell me, about what they see. I sometimes want to
write them down because I think, That’s beautiful. I make something, and
you give something to me that’s valuable. Sometimes they’re heavy, intense
stories, and I want to take notes of what people feel when they view those
paintings.

That would be such a wonderful book to read, the painting with people’s stories of how they respond underneath it. Because that’s what
fascinates me about art: how people project their own story onto artworks. Maybe because you’ve painted that vulnerability into the faces
of your figures, people respond to that. 
I also feel really seen. They see the nakedness of my emotion in it, and they
feel the freedom to do the same thing. Then you have a real human connection instead of talking about how the weather is. The connection is deep,
even when you don’t know each other.

I love that your paintings give you so much back. If you have that, then
you’re never going to stop painting.

I’m not sure what it is, but sometimes I have difficulty in letting go of my
paintings. I think it’s because I put emotion into them, I want to keep them
with me. They keep me company in my empty space where I’m alone. It’s
like having people around me. I feel quite sad when they’re leaving.

I can also understand that. When I write drafts of stories, I don’t want
to finish them or hand them in because it feels like home. What will I
do without my characters?

It’s become a part of you.
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You have such a deep relationship with your characters, but it’s also
exciting to think that if they do go into another home, I can imagine
they’d have a deep relationship with their new owner too.

I also think it’s a nice idea that pieces of me are moving around the world
when I’m here in my own bubble. I’m putting a piece of me over there and
a piece of me over here.
And what are they doing? They have all these different lives now! 
Your
paintings must see all sorts of things within people’s homes. If the characters could come back to you, they’d tell you the secrets they’ve learnt.
I love that idea.

I remember a story that you saw a calligraphy brush in a market in
Hong Kong, and you saw it as a sign to prompt you to start painting.
Do you have another talisman that’s important to you?

I was cleaning up my house and I found this drawing that I did when I was
seven. It’s like a Modigliani painting. I thought, This is something that I
really love to do. I was searching for a long time, after photography, to do
something on my own, but I couldn’t figure out what it was, so these things
were important to open my eyes—that kind of childlike curiosity or things
that you love as a kid when you don’t think about whether other people
think it’s good enough; you just love to do something you love to do.
When I was going to high school, as an argument I would say, ‘I do it because I like to do it,’ [and] people would say, ‘No. You have to give a better
argument for doing it.’ 
Now that I’m older, I think doing something because
you really love to do it is the most beautiful argument there is.

It’s so funny, I found little books I had written when I was a kid too—
pieces of paper stapled together. It’s like we always knew what we
wanted to do but lost it along the way. How do you think your artworks
have evolved? Do you think they have in any way?

That’s also an anxiety of mine. I want to develop. That’s the only pressure
I feel. I don’t want to make the same things, so I don’t do commissions. I
don’t make another version of the same painting because I want to evolve. I
think the colours change; that has to do with the seasons, but it’s also about
where I’m at. I also did some monochrome paintings because everybody
was saying, ‘Your colours are so beautiful!’ and I was curious to see what
would happen if I skipped colours. 
I loved the paintings, but I also discovered that the colours have an emotional depth that it isn’t always clear what
it is. It’s not a distraction; it adds to it. It’s an important part of the painting
for me. 
I’ve been trying to paint more loosely. I hope to evolve in a childish way.
The fingers are a good example. They don’t look like real fingers but more
like branches. I really like that; it gives it more of a fantasy element. The
emotions speak out more, so I hope to make my paintings more abstract as
I evolve.

You’re right, because when we’re younger, we don’t think as much
about proportion. We are drawing from and for emotion as opposed to
drawing to make it realistic.

There’s a beautiful TED Talk about how schools kill creativity by Sir Ken
Robinson, and I think that’s spot on. You’re conditioned to see in a way that
grown-ups expect you to see things. That’s so sad because it totally kills
creativity.

Maybe that’s why it took us so long to go back to that childhood desire:
for you, drawing, and for me, writing stories. We became layered with
adulthood and forgot to go back to that original thing that we loved
doing.

I think a lot of big painters have found their inner child. They’re like big
kids because they’ve found their inner freedom to explore it and not think
about what other people think. 
With your faces, they have this beautiful geometry to them, and I was
wondering if that was more of an aesthetic idea or more because of a
concept that you were trying to realise?

I work intuitively; it just happens that way. The face actually remains a little
bit the same through each of the paintings, so I’m also curious how that’s
going to change eventually. That’s something I don’t want to think too
much about. A lot of accidents happen, which I find interesting and go with.
I’m not usually frustrated with my paintings because I don’t have an idea of
what they should look like; I just go with it. The more layers, the more life
that’s in it. It’s a gift when something happens that isn’t intentional.</description>
		
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