If you are following our Instagram feed, you will have seen that we spent a week in Bogotá for a workshop at the impressive Utadeo university. Now that we’re slowly recovering from our Colombian hangover, it’s time to send a quick thank you towards the design department for inviting us in the first place, to the girls at our new favourite bookstore Nada for making it all happen, and to the students for introducing us to their personal Bogotá. If you would like to see the results of the workshop, they are up on their own Instagram account migracion.es.

As the holiday season is coming to an end, we are still looking for reasons to stay or even to go back to some of our favorite spots this summer. Cyprus for instance has not only a multilayered history, but also an eclectic contemporary art scene. Part of it is Neoterismoi Toumazou, a former novelty shop turned into an artist-run space in 2013 by artist and curator Maria Toumazou. Besides the curation of a diverse exhibition programme, she also produces artist editions and multiples. We are not surprised that the upcoming solo presentation of New York based artist Marysia Gacek looks just as promising!

Marysia Gacek’s work is known for its suggestive personal symbolism, using memory and arcane cultural references that assert the transcendent possibilities of the banal. Gacek works in a variety of materials from painting, clay, to textiles and video. By starting with a place, an image, a specific memory, or an object, she creates structures and narratives using personal symbolism and different modes of representation. For her exhibition, titled Same Goals, Gacek will display a collection of sculptures and assemblages testing the elusive nature of the forms depicted and the retraining of narratives. Elements of the exhibition allude to display strategies encountered during the artist’s stay in Cyprus.

Marysia Gacek – Same Goals
03 Septmeber – 25 September 2015
Neoterismoi Toumazou
69A Odos Aischylou
1011 Nicosia / Cyprus

Who knows how long those lovely little pieces of graphic design called stamps are still going to be around for, so to preserve their legacy for the future, creative director Blair Thomson has started a wonderful Instagram account called Graphilately showcasing the weird and the wonderful from the world of stamp design. Read more over at It’s Nice That.

Photography by Ryan McGinley

Photography by Christian Frey

Andrei Tarkovsky

Andrei Tarkovsky

Andrei Tarkovsky’s intense films, though numbering only seven across his almost quarter decade career, have cemented his place as one of cinema’s master craftsmen. Meditative, intimate, and often opaque, the films lack nothing in compelling narrative nor symbolic density.  Those not fond of slower films can still wonder at his meticulous composition, baptized by light.  While Tarkovsky’s films are all available for free online, the beauty of his measured images tempt pause, both on the remote and in their absorption by the eye.  For his acolytes, cinephiles, and photophiles then,  Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids collects sixty of his Polaroids, set in Russia and his exile in Italy.
Clear from the onset is the compatibility between the filmmaker and the equally illustrious instant film, which encourages spontaneity while optimizing light’s texture and radiance.  Memory and the vicarious representation of life reoccur as themes Tarkovsky explored in his films, so it is not surprising that the photos put in sharper relief the artistic numen present in the films.  Frozen, the images exude atmosphere and, in the frank affection for its subjects, melancholy.

Here’s the first video for Heatsick’s latest release Re-Engineering. The track ‘Mimosa’ in combination with Hanne Lippard’s tropical visuals is truly a weekend starter, and a pleasant contrasting change to the onset of winter..

There were times when Angela Merkel had problems with maps, too . Considering that, one should not be harsh on the others. No more comments…

Bomba Estero | A Take Away Show | Part 1 from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

To those who live to scour Berlin’s soundscape, teeming with many a diamond in the rough, Petite Planètes will stand as the ultimate lovesong (excuse the cliché) to music’s overlooked, obscure, or near obliterated.  Uniting documentary, music video, and art film,  Vincent Moon began his series in 2008 when he left his successful career in music film for wanderlust.  On the road with a backpack and camera, he found a sleeping giant–Tom Zé, in the late 1960s one of the leaders of Brazil’s Tropicália’s musical arm but whose fame political suppression had then stifled–resulting in the first Petite Planète.   Since then, Moon continues to roam, having plotted a trail through six continents and a constellation of artists: Singapore’s One Man Nation, Colombia’s Bomba Estéreo (see above), and Russia’s Retuses to name a few.  A staunch supporter of local, DIY aesthetic, Moon crafts films that are austere yet starkly intimate, striking a tone of melancholy suitable for performances that are both debuts and swansongs.  At times he follows the subjects casually crooning in their homes while the camera meanders between their knicknacks and their spellbound faces.

On a more socio-anthropological level, his present focus on documenting traditional and spiritual music amplifies certain questions that have percolated since Petite Planètes’ inception.  How does tradition be comfortably transition into ephemera?  Does the archival of sacred song, which usually draws power from secrecy, signal the performers resignation to their disappearing lifestyles?  As a European project, does Moon’s ‘experimental ethnography’ and similar works ex. Ron Fricke’s Baraka ultimately engender exoticism and narcissistic Occidental feedback?

Hard to say, but freeze the central image of Tom Zé’s chapter and you can forgive Moon for not struggling more with P.P.’s complexes.  On the rooftop the man is a solitary crack in the São Paulo sky–a powerful frame of sheer beauty and emotion.  With the series title, the image echoes Le Petite Prince. Its universe buzzes with innumerable microcosms ruled by strange and wonderful personalities, but only a few are imparted to stranded pilot by the eponymous prince, stirring the reader’s curiosity into restlessness.  Here, Moon acts the prince, we the pilot, and these musicians all kings, perhaps wise, perhaps doomed, but kings of their locales, their small planets.