https://jothompson.work Jo Thompson Thu, 02 Apr 2026 11:48:33 +0000 https://jothompson.work en https://jothompson.work/Home Sun, 29 Sep 2019 11:42:22 +0000 Jo Thompson https://jothompson.work/Home https://jothompson.work/ANN-LEE Thu, 02 Apr 2026 11:48:33 +0000 Jo Thompson https://jothompson.work/ANN-LEE HOW CELIA ROWLSON-HALL BECAME HOLLYWOOD’S GO-TO CHOREOGRAPHERANOTHER 20.02.26<img width="1244" height="700" width_o="1244" height_o="700" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d188cd151fbfb2b3f5b7ead1ddca9e5b0ce30b51a45924d3cb1b857de8ee44ea/469817.jpeg" data-mid="246785915" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d188cd151fbfb2b3f5b7ead1ddca9e5b0ce30b51a45924d3cb1b857de8ee44ea/469817.jpeg" /> In less than a decade, Celia Rowlson-Hall has become cinema’s go-to choreographer for contemporary dance. Here, she talks about making herself a receiver for God in Mona Fastvold’s wild period musical. Full article linked above. https://jothompson.work/TASTE-OF-CHERRY Mon, 22 Sep 2025 21:56:20 +0000 Jo Thompson https://jothompson.work/TASTE-OF-CHERRY TASTE OF CHERRYINTERVALS 17.09.25<img width="1400" height="788" width_o="1400" height_o="788" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3cfdf9d2580490da089844e9c1b04b1bc22d9e408247f02ae40ed8a990a953a4/cherry.jpeg" data-mid="238532039" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3cfdf9d2580490da089844e9c1b04b1bc22d9e408247f02ae40ed8a990a953a4/cherry.jpeg" /> An exploration of ascent and descent in Abbas Kiarostami's meditation on death and dying. Full article linked above. https://jothompson.work/SUNBURN Thu, 18 Feb 2021 18:06:04 +0000 Jo Thompson https://jothompson.work/SUNBURN THE BIG HEAT: WHAT ‘SUNBURN CINEMA’ TELLS US ABOUT THE GREAT BRITISH HOLIDAYTHE GUARDIAN 28.08.25<img width="1600" height="900" width_o="1600" height_o="900" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e5755be8d64c7a90410c3733fdc780a240aad652a2310399308fad4eb33f30d3/morvern-17-feature-1600x900-c-default.jpg" data-mid="237770892" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e5755be8d64c7a90410c3733fdc780a240aad652a2310399308fad4eb33f30d3/morvern-17-feature-1600x900-c-default.jpg" /> Hot Milk’s mother-daughter meltdown or losers on the lash in The Inbetweeners Movie, some films leave us feeling as foolish as their protagonists for trying to escape reality. Full article linked above. https://jothompson.work/VIDEO-ART-WOMEN Wed, 03 Sep 2025 11:19:18 +0000 Jo Thompson https://jothompson.work/VIDEO-ART-WOMEN THE WOMEN MAKING VIDEO ART UNDER LOCKDOWNELEPHANT ART 15.02.21<img width="2560" height="1473" width_o="2560" height_o="1473" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e812faaaca78b0491bde840d39dc442809bca52f337ba4a6c37797e9da1da687/Quarantine-Stroma-Cairns3-scaled.jpg" data-mid="237771038" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e812faaaca78b0491bde840d39dc442809bca52f337ba4a6c37797e9da1da687/Quarantine-Stroma-Cairns3-scaled.jpg" /> The intimate films of these artists, based in Lagos, New York and London, document the strange, liminal experience of life under lockdown. Full article linked above. https://jothompson.work/DAZED-BARBICAN-MASCULINITIES-copy Wed, 06 Jan 2021 15:47:02 +0000 Jo Thompson https://jothompson.work/DAZED-BARBICAN-MASCULINITIES-copy REVIEW: BARBICAN MASCULINITIES DAZED DIGITAL 20.02.20<img width="1280" height="849" width_o="1280" height_o="849" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7632f17a09827c88a84ffdc16e4ea3b14034ac5b1013009bfbeaac10e875eeec/1285750.jpg" data-mid="94159245" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7632f17a09827c88a84ffdc16e4ea3b14034ac5b1013009bfbeaac10e875eeec/1285750.jpg" /> The Barbican’s new photography show celebrates unfixed ideas of masculinity From Catherine Opie to Collier Schorr, Laurie Anderson, and many more, we survey the photographers featured in the new exhibition and their infinite depictions of masculinity. Full article linked above. https://jothompson.work/FVU-FEED-ME Wed, 06 Jan 2021 16:17:00 +0000 Jo Thompson https://jothompson.work/FVU-FEED-ME RACHEL MACLEAN: FEED MEFILM AND VIDEO UMBRELLA 18.12.20<img width="1200" height="675" width_o="1200" height_o="675" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6bbd598429c7b6042b6148cd2b0a1c9bb13120f78fe215a295ee313cdd0cf8c0/Rachel_Maclean_Feed_Me_FVU_1_1200_675.jpg" data-mid="94163231" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6bbd598429c7b6042b6148cd2b0a1c9bb13120f78fe215a295ee313cdd0cf8c0/Rachel_Maclean_Feed_Me_FVU_1_1200_675.jpg" /> Writer Jo Thompson explores Rachel Maclean's Feed Me within the context of surveillance capitalism, highlighting traces of the fairytale narrative in our online behaviours. How do i no ur not false? I’m increasingly convinced that my phone is listening to me. I say that not as a sort of gimmicky intro, but as a sincere reaction to the number of occasions in which it feeds me adverts for things I just said aloud. Most people probably feel the same way; the more dependent we become on tech the more paranoid we’re all becoming about it. How many of us are sitting at this very moment with tape over our webcams? Most of us have spent more time aware of being watched than normal since the pandemic began, sitting for hours a day on video calls where peers and managers can see not just our faces but a sliver of the realities of our home lives too. Some companies have even mandated that their employees spend all day on camera, literally surveilling them to ensure they are deskside for all of their working hours. For those of us who live in cities though, this sense of a change is mostly false – the UK has more CCTV cameras per person than any other European country. In pre-Covid times, Londoners were captured by an average of 300 cameras a day. So, it feels perfectly natural that so many scenes in Rachel Maclean’s Feed Me are filtered through the grainy lens of a watchful CCTV camera. There is nowhere safe from prying eyes, home or away. Feed Me is a twisted sort of tale that is as grotesque and morbid as the best fairytales always were. So many of our old folk stories culminate in children taking their revenge on predatory grownups - see Hansel and Gretel incinerating that wicked old witch without hesitation - that it’s surprising we let children read them at all. Fairytales, like horror, deal with our anxieties over boundaries and control: the city and the wilderness, the innocent and the evil, the child and the man. We’re told that the villain of Little Red Riding Hood is the wolf, but its biggest fears are about children leaving the realm of the home, and women venturing beyond the boundaries (and watchful eyes) of society. Barbara Creed’s theory of the Monstrous Feminine [1] points to culture’s recurring desire to narrativise women as victims in horror films, and fairy tales often do just the same. When we read or hear fairytales, more often than not we inhabit the leering perspective of the villain: we stalk Little Red Riding Hood as she traipses through the woods just as the Big Bad Wolf would. Feed Me thinks a lot about watching and being watched, and, in an age of surveillance capitalism [2], makes explicit our fears about technology and the multiplying ways we are monitored. We look expectantly over the shoulder of a young Lolita as she hides from Granny to chat with an anonymous stranger on a ‘dangerous websIt’, making naive plans to meet up even though they seem ‘2 Good 2 be true!’ The Beast character manipulates the incomprehensible text-speak of the young girl’s peers to entice her into trusting him, dropping ambiguous breadcrumbs that encourage her to sneak out of Granny’s flat. A lot of fears around what children and teens get up to online really come from a place of frustration – young people inhabit idiomatic worlds so completely outside of most adults’ frames of reference that they start to look like darkened, dangerous woods. Maclean has spoken of a fascination with a ‘childhood of the mind’ as represented in the carefully manicured bounds of utopic children’s programmes, which she inverts in a film that depicts an almost barren urban wilderness; a visual mirror to the Badlands of an internet that is always expanding and often toxic. The chatroom scene plays out under the cutesy eyes of an emoji-like free gift the Little Girl has brought over: it is awake and watching, sending a livestream to its rapacious creators at Smile Inc. &nbsp;In Tiqquin’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, [3] the Young-Girl is the logical conclusion of capitalism’s valorisation of youth and femininity to the point of ideological imperialism. The Young-Girl’s twin pursuits of happiness and beauty as outlined by Tiqquin are foundational to the world of Feed Me, where eternal youth is valued above all else, and constant professions of being ‘too happy’ ring out. Tiqquin’s Young-Girl is emptily ecstatic, just like Maclean’s characters, but threatening too&nbsp; –&nbsp; ‘TOO CUTE’ while at the same time ‘a beast’. The film is a deliberately tricky (and sticky) piece of commentary though, pushing against neatly defined conclusions like these. Feed Me is a distorted mirror, with plotting that twists and refracts itself, leaving the viewer confused about what was real or imagined, what happened when. After being tricked into the Beast’s bed Maclean’s Little Girl is whimpering and upset at the betrayal… and then suddenly monstrous. Bearing spiky fangs as hideous as his, snarling mad, she holds the beast at (finger) gun-point and chastises him for his transgressions: ‘admit it, you’re TOO happy!’ In a world where everyone is striving for 110% but never given the means to reach it, the Beast’s delirium at successfully ensnaring the child is an injury greater than the kidnapping itself. Maclean dials the tension up and down as the scene progresses: a squawking toy startles the Little Girl back into a playful mood, but in the next moment she’s stony-faced, and her play-gun works. This is in some ways the fairytale ending we expect&nbsp; –&nbsp; Little Red Riding Hood realising that’s not grandma in her bed and enacting a bloody revenge. Except Maclean pulls a troubling bait and switch, and instead of the beast lying dead we see poor Granny in her bedsit, brains splattered against the wall. When it comes to truth, we tend to see video as one of the more irrefutable mediums&nbsp; –&nbsp; we watch a clip on the news and take it at face value that it happened. Except, truth is much stickier than that. Truth, more often than not, is socially determined. Stickiness feels like the right kind of word for Rachel Maclean’s work too; it’s sweet and sickly and hard to get away from, clinging to you after you watch it and clinging to all the other things flying around in your head. Feed Me is set in a world controlled by a company that manufactures sweetness so cloying it makes your teeth ache, sugar-coating everything they do to obscure the truth. It’s a gingerbread world built to hide a bubbling, voracious cauldron. Scenes like the shooting leave us bewildered, unsure whether to trust what we saw actually happened, reeling from perspective to perspective. The moment that stuck to me most after watching Feed Me comes towards the end, when the Little Girl and Old Man from Smile Inc meet for a sort of showdown in the street. In a twist that would feel magical in another setting, they begin to speak in one another’s voice. It’s impossible to tell whose dialogue is whose, each one spouting lines the other could easily have spoken, and the scene is wholly disorienting. Maclean is playing both characters, but their voices are dubbed over by actors, the film shot on green-screen, with the backgrounds artificially filled out later. Watching the scene play out in its cascades of artifice and performance, I kept thinking about deepfakes. The idea that our eyes can’t trust what they see anymore is a deeply poisonous one, that will further erode our ability to come to a consensus on literally anything. The scene has echoes of Gillian Wearing’s 10-16 [4], digging into what feels like the supreme wrongness of adults inhabiting children’s minds and vice versa.&nbsp; Wearing has already begun to play with deepfakes in her work, and it’s easy to imagine that Maclean might soon react to them in her own practice&nbsp; –&nbsp; they are a cynical form of digital puppeteering that seem primed for the worlds Maclean builds. Feed Me ends in a flurry of violence&nbsp; –&nbsp; one Little Girl shoots a patronising talent show judge live on air, and an army of hooded ‘thugs’ break into Smile Inc’s headquarters led by another Little Girl to, apparently, eat the Old Man CEO. What a thrill! the revolution is here! If you won’t feed them they’ll feed on you! Underestimate the Young-Girl at your peril! Except, it’s all watched over by the eyes of the Beast, hiding in an air vent, biding his time. Endnotes 1. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine, Routledge (1993) 2. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Profile Books (2019) 3. Tiqquin, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, Semiotext(e) (2012) 4. Gillian Wearing, 10-16 (1997) https://jothompson.work/THE-INGENUE-BAT-FOR-LASHES Fri, 03 Jan 2020 11:46:52 +0000 Jo Thompson https://jothompson.work/THE-INGENUE-BAT-FOR-LASHES INTERVIEW: BAT FOR LASHES THE INGENUE MAGAZINE &nbsp; 16.12.19<img width="1132" height="1600" width_o="1132" height_o="1600" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d4d29e1879f52f7bac49dbe0dab2a16b4df13816d965ea2982fa86aff34b83e3/issue-8-interview-with-a-vampire-2_0006_TOL141_190830000000010012_F1_RGB.jpg" data-mid="57619686" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d4d29e1879f52f7bac49dbe0dab2a16b4df13816d965ea2982fa86aff34b83e3/issue-8-interview-with-a-vampire-2_0006_TOL141_190830000000010012_F1_RGB.jpg" /> Interview With the Vampire &nbsp;People move to Los Angeles all the time in pursuit of a sense of self or of place that they might never find. The City of Angels is so full of fancy it’s easy to paste whatever dream you have over its hazy skyline and tell yourself what you hold in your mind is really found there. But, as with any metropolis, in the end LA cares only about itself, and not at all about any human desires or needs. And yet people are succeeding all the time in Hollywood, moving West like new-age pioneers and finding exactly as much there as they can will into being. After ten years and four albums under a major label, British-born Natasha Khan, AKA Bat For Lashes, has struck out on her own and made her fifth under the California sun. Steeped in nostalgia for her childhood cinematic loves (The Goonies, ET, The Lost Boys) and rich with the language of cinema, Lost Girls is a woozy, synth filled journey through Natasha Khan’s technicolour mind. The album follows Nikki – the ‘mischievous younger sister’ to her previous album’s The Bride – and is a dark tale of female bikers, Hollywood vampires, and young love in all its horror and splendour. The striking landscape of the city and its surrounding desert wind through Khan’s lyrics, imbuing them with an atmospheric sense of place. On the opener Kids in the Dark, Khan sets the scene with breathy adoration and a nod to the album’s fantastical leanings. ‘Lying next to you,’ she muses, ‘we could be on the moon.’ Ten tracks later, all littered with longing, body bags, hauntings and chase scenes, the album’s final lines embrace a circular longing for the magic and mystery of a new love: ‘Like it was at the start / Sing to me in the dark’. All of which speaks to the album’s title, and all the rich symbolism therein: a loss of innocence, a longing for eternal youth, the potency of female energy, and at the same time the knowledge you can never turn back the clocks. Fittingly, Lost Girls feels like a panoramic expansion of the feelings captured so well in one of her best-known early singles, Daniel. There she translated the childhood longing for a movie-screen crush into the same cinematic language, where ‘under wild blue skies, Marble movie skies, I found home in your eyes’. With Lost Girls Khan has somehow made an album in an entirely new city that still feels like a homecoming. I phoned Natasha the day the album launched for a conversation about its inspirations and outcomes. Speaking to her I got sense that her remarkably undimmed passion and wonder made her conquest of LA inevitable. Congratulations on the album launch!&nbsp;How does it feel finally having it out in the world? It’s good it feels really nice, I’ve had lots of messages from friends and family. It’s really exciting and sweet. You’re back in LA now, how long have you been living there?I’ve been here for three and half years now. I feel like the cliché is that people go to Hollywood maybe searching for something, or a part of themselves.&nbsp;I don’t know if you can relate to that?I think, when I moved, I had just finished a ten–year album contract with a mainstream label and I had just finished The Bride, which is a very deep, sort of dark record. And I think it wasn’t so much to find myself, but I just wanted a clean break and to connect with some of my creative community, and fellow artists andmusicians that I knew were living here. So, I guess I was trying to find a part of myself that was the writer–director, a sort of more film–based aspect of me. When I first got here, I went to the desert and I did a lot of painting and photography, and just travelling around all the landscapes. And I do, between each album I will go somewhere and kind of fill up the creative well a bit. But I think I did sort of make a decision just to move here because I knew that there was a bit of a scene happening here with music and film and dance, and things seemed to be bubbling up in LA, and it seemed a good place to be. Do you find that the film community is very different to the music world? Yeah the film community here is hard in a way because of all of the agents and the companies that affect it. Like you have to get permits to shoot everywhere, it’s such a movie–making town thateverything that you do officially really goes through a rigorous process. But on the flipside of that there’s a lot of opportunity for guerrilla–style indie filmmaking, and so many collaborators and cinematographers, actors, actresses, you know, people that just want to help and be involved. So it’s been really nice because there’s just a lot of positivity around getting together and just making stuff for the fun of it, or trying things out. I think in England, like when I was doing my short film, that went through quite a rigorous process. It took a long time to make it and a long time to prepare it, and then we had two, three days to shoot everything for the fifteen minute short I made, and suddenly everything’s over really fast. Whereas here I’ve just been doing loads of stuff on my phone, and doing all the Instagram rollout videos, and like building this narrative just by myself with my friends and collaborators.And the light is always beautiful here, so everything looks better (laughs)! Sunsets look great! So, it’s just a lot more, you can really do stuff off your own back here and just really create what you want. I know you’ve put out two videos and also some teasers on Instagram as you mentioned – are you planning to make a lot more videos? Is that going to be a continuing process?I would love to do that, but at the moment we don’t have a huge budget. I mean music’s sort of different than it used to be when I first started and so, we got to make two sort of proper videos with production companies and all that stuff, but now that’s kind of used up. I would love to carry on making more videos if I could, but I think at the moment, I have to… you know I can still make them off my own back like the Instagram–style that we’ve been doing, but I need to focus on the tour, and pulling that together. Do you know your plans for touring the album yet? Well we’ve released information about a tour in England in November, so I’ll be doing major cities in England at the end of November. With each album obviously being such a different world, do you feel like you recalibrate how you perform your live show? I think it’s different, the last album we did just in churches, with no mobile phones, and like I came down the aisle singing the first song and stuff. So it was very theatrical and based a lot around that bride concept. And then obviously when you do big festivals and stuff I have a big band and we have a big sound. For this tour I’m going to strip it right back and just do voice and synths, so it’s still lush and epic but very minimal, just two of us on stage. It’s nice to switch it up as well, after doing it for so long, to put yourself out of your comfort zone and be doing something different. I can imagine! And you’ve spoken about how this album is inspired by films you watched growing up, I wondered, did you go back and re–watch those films, or was it drawn more from memories? I mean I never really stopped watching those films I have revisited all sorts of films over and over again since my childhood, I think. I watched ET just recently, they were projecting it at the Hollywood Forever cemetery with fireworks, and everyone went down and we re-watched ET. And I watched The Lost Boys on the beach, and whenever I see showings of any of my classic films that I love I will always make an effort to see them. So they’ve always sort of remained in my consciousness, and obviously there’s a whole bunch of new films too that have been very inspiring. But I do think cinema and films are some of my greatest inspiration for music. You can definitely see that. And I think you’ve also spoken a bit about horror and I wondered if that’s a genre that you’re drawn to in particular? I feel like there’s a new appreciation that we’re seeing for horror now. Definitely, that makes a lot of sense, the types of horror films I’ve always liked are sort of psychological horror, and things that kind of delve into our shadow. You know, like The Shining is a meditation on an alcoholic man going cold turkey and going mad in his isolation. I love reading beneath the gore and the scary symbolism and the archetypes and the metaphors that I think horror uses similarly to fairy tales, or old myths and stories. I kind of love, I’ve always loved that, sort of using quite shocking, intense, almost Greek mythological tales, you know in the way that they explore the darker aspects of our psyche.Like Hereditary I really liked recently, and then there’s that film The Babadook which came out a few years ago, an Australian indie film, and very much about mental health and grief. I think there’s so much anxiety and mental health issues in our society that get overlooked, and I think sophisticated horror is a really interesting way of creating catharsis for those darker aspects of our society, without being too preachy or blatant. And I love genre films too, so I love the idea of vampires and zombies, and you know extra terrestrials and all those things But again, I like the idea of using them in a way that brings our human struggles to the surface. Yeah I think the way people treat something that’s Other is always very revealing, and so things like zombies or vampires are great tools for that kind of insight. Thinking along a similar line about the title of Lost Girls, which is a play on lot of things – the film The Lost Boys, Peter Pan – it speaks to that idea of an eternal youth, but also all of those texts reference a loss of innocence, and I don’t know if that’s a duality that interests you?I think there’s definitely that aspect of childhood nostalgia, or innocence, and the first time you fall in love or the first time there’s romance, and you know, like a lot of those heady, intoxicating feelings. But I think Lost Girls is also a nod to the lost aspects of Nikki the protagonist, I guess me or the main girl in there, the Lost Girls are haunting, well she hunts them but in the end they start hunting her. And it’s about integration for me of like, she’s trying to love someone, she’s trying to live in the world, but the Lost Girls come to hunt her because they’re lost aspects of herpsyche. And each of them has their own wound to work through, or beauty to them, or whatever sort of dark, beautiful magic they hold as a group. I think once she integrates with them and lets them in, she becomes a more complete person, and is more able to love. And I think that we all, you know if I was a boy I might have called it Lost Boys if the film didn’t exist already! I think it’s the same for everyone, that you know, especially when you really love people or you’re in a relationship, I think a lot of demons can come up, and they look like demons, or vampires, or dark things, but when you actually get to know them they just need love and integration and healing, and to be taken in. And I think that’s an interesting microcosmic story that could work on a bigger level, for everything that’s going on in the media and news and the world right now. There’s a lot of fragmentation and splitting off of factions, and right and wrong, and black and white, and finger pointing.And I just think that integrating your own whatever you’re pointing your finger at is something that you can’t accept in yourself. Or is you know a shadow side to something that’s scary. And I think that if we all spent a bit more time in our dark side, or in the shadows, healing those parts of ourselves, we’d just be more loving and accepting. I think that’s a very powerful message. Did you feel like you were doing lots of your own introspection while making it, or was it after a period of doing that that you felt able to make it?I think I’m always in a period of introspection at some level (laughs). Because that’s where I mine my thoughts and my creative ideas. So I go down in to that dark place a lot to mine those thoughts and feelings, and a lot of the time they’re quite difficult or scary or I don’t want to go there. But I try to transmute them, you know into stories or storytelling structures to make sense of them.And there’s a lot of songs on there that do talk about dark things or being hunted, or power dynamics, or being vulnerable and feeling joy and feeling fear, and all the spectrum of everything. But, that is just a document of what I go through day-today over the year and a half of making a record. It’s not always one feeling or another, there’s nuances and shadowy bits that I can’t, you know, I guess if you listen to a whole album the whole album does take you between all these different spectrums. I could also see echoes in the lyrics to some of your much earlier songs as well, and I thought that was a nice circularity in the idea of youth and maybe escaping it or gaining it. I don’t know if you ever keep your old work in mind when you’re creating new work? I definitely wasn’t thinking about the first album or anything, I think I was… I’m sure that there’s threads back to all the albums just because they’ve all come through me and my creative brainworks a certain way and is attracted to certain chords or certain combinations of instruments and melodies, or stories that I’ve known for years or whatever. But I do very much, I’m very much in the moment with each album trying to sort of just channel what wants to come through and feels very much like a document of that time. And when you’ve toured this album and you feel like you’ve put it to bed – maybe you never really do – do you think that you’ll go back to filmmaking? Is a full feature film something that you hope is on the table? Yeah, that’s definitely something I’m pursuing and working on. It’s nice to have a project like that for me, because now that the album’s done I sort of panic that I’m not creating anything! I love playing live, but obviously that’s sort of communicating what you’ve already made, and it’s lovely and it’s got its ownfeeling, but I like to be studying and learning and creating stories as much as I can. So, that’s definitely, having directed the two videos and been doing so much camerawork and reading other film scripts, and you know just thinking about it and for a long time having lived here, I’d definitely like to pour some energy in to making my first feature film. That’s an exciting prospect.I think it will be really fun! Would you write and direct, or is it just directing for now? Well, I write the stories, and then I would probably find a scriptwriter that’s much better than me at scriptwriting to collaborate with, because I know that’s not one of my major skills. It’s a definite skill, but I would definitely provide the chapters of the story and the characters, and I have a very strong idea of a narrative I’d like to do. I feel like I’ve seen comments recently from showrunners, who say that they like to think of their series as albums, in the conceptual way that an album flows and creates a whole So, I think that coming from your background you’re very well equipped to make something very contemporary and relevant. I look forward to that whenever it materialises! Oh really, that’s funny! Thank you! I think that’s all from me, thank you so much for your time. Lovely to talk to you! Hopefully you’ll go to the cinema and watch a film of mine soon! You can let me know what you think! Yes, fingers crossed! I can interview you about that when it comes out! Lost Girls is out now via AWAL Recordings Ltd. https://jothompson.work/10-MAG-BARBICAN Fri, 04 Oct 2019 10:27:52 +0000 Jo Thompson https://jothompson.work/10-MAG-BARBICAN REVIEW: INTO THE NIGHT 10MAGAZINE.COM &nbsp; 04.10.19<img width="1000" height="667" width_o="1000" height_o="667" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/413b3a0e00e135f835e7a016fbe5b9495e1214c0e76eac67197388b588b3f281/Into-the-Night_Cabarets-and-Clubs-in-Modern-Art-Barbican-Art-Gallery_Getty-Images-photo-by-Tristan-Fewings-7-min.jpg" data-mid="51982241" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/413b3a0e00e135f835e7a016fbe5b9495e1214c0e76eac67197388b588b3f281/Into-the-Night_Cabarets-and-Clubs-in-Modern-Art-Barbican-Art-Gallery_Getty-Images-photo-by-Tristan-Fewings-7-min.jpg" /> Ten’s To See: ‘Into The Night: Cabarets And Clubs In Modern Art’ At The Barbican Where we go after hours – what we do there, who we do it with, and what we listen to while we do it – is of the ways we enact ideas about who we are. Some people go clubbing out of pure love for a certain genre of music, others simply because they vibe off the feeling of sweating to the same beat as a room full of strangers. Some are on the pull and others are just trying to make friends. Subcultures spill out of night clubs and into the real-world as they become homogenised. Political and artistic movements are nourished by the communities found there, and then end up either smothered or galvanised when those spaces are shut down. It’s no surprise then, that there has been a lot of interest in examining the recent history of clubbing of late, looking back at yesterday’s scenes to try and understand what they can tell us about today. The Saatchi Gallery just closed their mammoth show on the history of British rave culture, and Jeremy Deller’s seminal Everybody in the Place documentary about the UK’s Acid House scene is currently streaming on iPlayer. At a time when the country is frothing with division, it’s tempting to try to find answers about where it all went wrong by looking back at these mini moments of dance floor utopia. The Barbican has gone a little further back in time with their latest show, Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art. Spanning from 1880 to 1960, the exhibition looks at specific cabarets, cafes and clubs from around the world, and through them presents an alternative history of modern art that focuses on collaboration and inspiration. Rooms are dedicated to the hotspots – from Vienna to Mexico City, Ibadan to Osogbo, Harlem to Tehran. Each one is shown to have defined its own era and birthed its own cultural movement. Recognisable artworks are displayed alongside posters, programmes, manifestos, photographs, interior designs, furniture, libraries and endless other fascinating pieces of ephemera. The litany of names that are associated with each club is overwhelming in its familiarity. Here are Degas, Monet and Toulouse-Lautrec gathered on the shadowy walls of the Chat Noir Theatre in Paris, there are Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka amongst writers, artists and Yoruba opera performers in the Mbari clubs of Nigeria. Over in Harlem, poet Langston Hughes is inspired by the same jazz clubs that Zora Neale Hurston writes about with intoxication. Meanwhile in Mexico the seeds of the Stridentist movement are sewn, and Dadaism is born in the midst of WWI at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. These were hybrid spaces where revolutionary minds met to eat, drink, dance and be entertained. Spinning out from these spaces came literary movements, art forms and political statements. Inspiration seems to be fizzing and bouncing between the displays like an electric current. Fittingly huge murals and installations covered the walls of these clubs: seven thousand tiles plastered Vienna’s Cabaret Fledermaus in fantastical motifs, while Rome’s Cabaret del Divolo was painted floor to ceiling with representations of Dante’s Inferno, split across three rooms representing Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. These were spaces created by and for artists, not club promoters or venue chains, every element of which had been deliberately designed, from plant-pots and lapel pins to chairs and ashtrays. In this way their audience became self-selecting – hedonists or intellectuals, like attracted like within a creative orbit. Rather than enforce strict door policies these spaces tossed out tongue-in-cheek advice to their patrons. Le Chat Noir coyly asked visitors to “be modern”, while the Cabaret del Divolo simply declared “Everyone to hell!!!”. On the other end of the spectrum, London’s The Golden Cow was snootily egalitarian: “Art will be welcomed by us, provided it brings with it, from whatever milieu it comes, either life or beauty”. While it would be impossible to recapture the feeling of these clubs outside of their political and cultural climates, looking through all of their history does make you long to visit them. Happily, the final section of the exhibition is made up of full-scale recreations of some of these spaces, including the incredible Cine-Dancing room designed by Theo van Doesburg for L’Aubette in Strasbourg, and the shadow-theatre of the iconic Chat Noir. A soundscape has been designed for the exhibition by acclaimed artist Haroon Mirza, but crucially it will also be the site of some actual after-hours activities. Exploring these club spaces in a well-lit gallery empty of people and noise gives you an appreciation for the way they were designed, but can feel eerily soulless. Recognising this, the Barbican has programmed a series live musical evenings to give a better sense of the atmosphere of the recreated clubs, curated by Jazz trumpeter Mark Kavuma. The speakeasies of Harlem, which broke prohibition laws, are perhaps the most daring spaces mentioned. They were places where African Americans could celebrate their art away from the mainstream jazz clubs which they could only perform in, being barred from entering as patrons. Looking over these rooms it feels like a second exhibition should be running parallel to this one, highlighting the truly counter-cultural spaces these aggressively marginalised groups had to make for themselves. Into the Night: Cabarets and Clubs in Modern Art runs 4 October 2019 – 19 January 2020 at the Barbican. Image courtesy of Tristan Fewings / Getty Images. barbican.org.uk https://jothompson.work/TWIN-MARIA-KOCH Sun, 29 Sep 2019 11:42:22 +0000 Jo Thompson https://jothompson.work/TWIN-MARIA-KOCH INTERVIEW: MARIA KOCH&nbsp; TWINFACTORY.CO.UK &nbsp; 06.09.19 <img width="1964" height="1462" width_o="1964" height_o="1462" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/eaaf9c96205ac80ab36f0e62e485fd0a1a47d94eb98b5143d5c6ddc067e027d4/Screenshot-2019-09-27-at-17.26.29.png" data-mid="51613318" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/eaaf9c96205ac80ab36f0e62e485fd0a1a47d94eb98b5143d5c6ddc067e027d4/Screenshot-2019-09-27-at-17.26.29.png" /> A Chat with 032C Creative Director Maria Koch amidst the launch of Buffalo London by 032C at Browns East032c is more than just a magazine, it’s an entire solar system, and the constellation of projects that make 032c so special revolve around Joerg and Maria Koch. The husband and wife team are Editor-in-Chief and Creative Director respectively, and alongside Fashion Director Marc Goehring are the living, breathing embodiment of the 032c sensibility. A magazine that eschews the zeitgeist and charges directly at its own interests, 032c manages to be both genuinely counter-cultural and also extremely current. Their latest issues features both a Kristen Stewart fanzine and a call-to-arms in praise of solidarity from German sociologist Heinz Bude, a characteristically surprising and delicious mixture. Alongside their bi-annual print publication, 032c also mount exhibitions, run large-scale events, co-own the ultra-cool 24hr REFERENCE festival, and consult with any number of big-name brands. Each member of the team also takes on a myriad of projects individually, and its hard to imagine how they find enough time and energy to fit it all in. In some ways it all seems to work because of the real sense they give off of truly practicing what they preach – somehow Maria and Joerg embody the ethos of the 032c workshop without ever feeling self-important or cliched. Every decision they make and each idea they bring to life feels like a natural and organic progression from the one before, adding to the dense and rich world they have created. 032c have dabbled in apparel for a long time, ever since they started noticing that fans were bootlegging their own merch featuring the iconic logo (the name 032c is the pantone reference for the virulent red of the magazine’s cover). In the early days they simply put out small drops of tees and other basic pieces, produced in black or white with a bold logo as the only adornment. Unsurprisingly collaborations soon followed with everyone from Stüssy to Sade, to more recent hyped launches like their limited-edition adidas GSG-9 boot. The 032c brand alone is enough to shift a huge number of units, never mind the fact that the pieces they collaborate on have always exemplified their innate style, and intuitive understanding of what their audience wants. A fully-fledged 032c Workshop Ready-to-Wear line launched at Pitti Uomo in early 2018, followed by a London showcase last November entitled COSMIC WORKSHOP, which saw the launch of their first ever womenswear pieces. Maria oversees the RTW arm of 032c, drawing on her experience working with brands like Jil Sander and Marios Schwab to lead a team of around 20 that includes patter-makers who are also experts in craftsmanship. Having worked on unisex pieces before AW19, Maria felt like womenswear was the natural progression of their ever-expanding output. Alongside the womenswear, a special collaboration with fellow German style icons Buffalo Boots was also previewed at the COSMIC WORKSHOP presentation. The collaboration sees the iconic Buffalo platform integrated with “archetypal elements of classic luxury footwear”. For one style the weighty buffalo sole elevates a riding-inspired jodhpur boot, complete with leather uppers and traditional fastenings. Another look sees thigh-highs that reference fetish and club-wear realised in the materials of heritage leather labels. According to the brand statement: “It’s streetwear on steroids meets old world craftsmanship, because more is more, contradiction is beautiful, and we didn’t grow up to leave our youth behind.” Today this collaboration launches alongside an exclusive capsule of the COSMIC WORKSHOP womenswear with a special installation and event at Browns East. The RTW collection hangs above a floor-level vitrine in which the boots are encased, almost like relics in an archaeological site. Translucent white plastic curtains hang in bands around the space, making it feel like the inner sanctum of the kind of Berlin club you would never make it in to. After a preview of the installation and the pieces, we sat down with Maria at Browns Eeast yesterday to talk about the collection and the collaboration. Maria is full of energy and an un-sentimental kind of nostalgia when she talks about how the Buffalo project came about. “It really felt very natural […] because when I was in my teenage days I was like a rave kid, like a classic Berlin hardcore rave kid, and everybody would wear Buffalos and my parents never, ever would support that ugly shoe, so it wasn’t possible! But at the same time I was very much in to dressage riding, and so somehow this is actually really these two worlds of my teenager times.” Maria herself is wearing the short jodhpur boot and is clearly delighted with the end product, which she manages to make look at once very tough and very elegant. In person the shoes very much embody the contemporary mood, where cross-pollination of subcultures is becoming the norm. Yesterday’s Horse Girl is today’s Party Girl. Elaborating more on the idea of the Browns East installation as a club space she notes the parallel design elements like the hanging plastic and flashing lights, which mirror the AW19 Cosmic Workshop presentation. “I really always liked this club-feel where you get lost and have a warm feeling and at the same time an idea of melancholia. You know this is a very, very interesting feeling, and we tried to achieve this a little bit downstairs [in Browns].” This carries through to the fabrication of the clothes and boots – when asked about their almost protective feel, she counters: “You know, I feel at the same time they’re very, I think, tender and soft and translucent. Or like, transparent you could say. And then yes you have the strong leather pieces, so there’s really this mixture, it’s really this club vibe.” This emotive approach to the design process is highly captivating, and speaks to the sense that everything 032c creates lives inside a very real world. The person who will actually wear these pieces, and how and where thy will wear them, has been truly understood and catered for. Emotional connections aside Maria is pragmatic as well as creative, and that is what makes the whole enterprise so viable. She understands that you can create art as a fashion designer, but, “to describe fashion as art is a weird scenario because it’s produced, it’s produced to fulfil this certain product requirement, and to sustain in a commercial market, and this is not where art is coming from.” The workshop and the rest of the team clearly think carefully about how they approach their projects; how to make them thrive in a truly practical sense that still retains the artistic vision. 032c describes itself as a ‘Manual for Freedom, Research and Creativity’ and this triad ethos is as much a part of the RTW as it is the magazine, “this magazine is really like a huge research lab […] when I have the freedom and the proper research, [creativity] is then somehow the outcome.” This is the wholistic approach to everything they create; the editorial, fashion, research and consultancy teams all co-exist in the same space. The end-product for each team has been adapted through exposure to the others, and this results in something robust and sustainable. Commerce is not the only end-goal, but its key role is acknowledged. In a pressurised industry undergoing a huge amount of change, working from this three-pronged foundation seems to be key to keeping 032c ahead of the curve. When asked about how the RTW collection will develop Maria is very candid about how they are grappling with the traditional seasonal model. “This is the big question […] I’m not really interested in the full collections, I feel, maybe the stores will tell you this, first of all it’s boring and it’s not really sustainable to do a 120-piece collection that nobody needs. And we felt it’s good to have strong, a very strong classic collection every half a year and then do what we do with the apparel as well, some drops.” Maria wants these collections to be not just desirable but also necessary, and wanted, and it’s a savvy way to keep them from ever feeling superfluous to the other 032c outputs. She is insistent that conversations with Browns and their other retail partners are a vital part of their process, allowing them to be flexible and reactive to practical elements like budget changes as well as her own inspiration. Putting the time in to researching what the market needs leaves more freedom to create, outside of the rigors of showing and selling on-schedule in an endless loop. Crucially though, all of this careful consideration allows her to sustain her motivation in the face of the punishing fashion calendar. “This newness, makes me somehow not sad, but a little bit, it feels heavy. I don’t think wow the new collections I feel, phew!” – everyone is exhausted right? – “Yes! But I’m not at all exhausted from fashion, I’m exhausted by the rhythm, and by what it is now. So, I feel, we’re in to just figuring out what the answer should be to that.” If anyone is capable of figuring out the answer to the big questions, it seems more than likely that it’s Maria and the rest of the 032c team. As we say goodbye Maria reveals yet another undertaking, as if all of this wasn’t enough for one woman. She and Joerg have recently moved out of the much-envied brutalist church they rented for years and bought a place of their own for the first time. With the new house comes a garden. “I really started to study what these plants want from me”, she ponders, “what do I have to do to make them happy?!” It’s comforting to think of this incredibly prolific woman taking the time to ponder the needs of her vegetable patch, even after all the demands that her work must place on her. Something so grounding and elemental seems like exactly the right tonic to working in a world driven by ideas and innovation. “It’s very rewarding.”