Ten world renowned architects give their advice on the role of the architect in the 21st century. Renzo Piano, Tatiana Bilbao, Alejandro Aravena, Bjarke Ingels, Anupama Kundoo, Anna Heringer, Anne Lacaton, Norman Foster, and Frank Gehry was interviewed and produced by Marc-Christoph Wagner. Kengo Kuma was interviewed by Mette Holm and produced by Christian Lund.
Get into the creative mind of film director Lars von Trier and learn how reading in his world is connected with writing. Trier calls literature his “basic medium” and reveals his inspiration from writers as Thomas Mann, Leo Tolstoy, and Marcel Proust. He refers to dramaturgy as his “toothache” connected to his reading of Donald Duck, but writing is “the greatest kick you can get,” he says. Lars von Trier (b.1956) is a Danish film director and screenwriter, whose prolific career spans almost four decades. His pivotal work is known for its technical innovation and examination of existential, social, and political issues. Lars von Trier was interviewed by Christian Lund at his home outside Copenhagen in November 2020.
“Advice is fine, but don’t listen to everything,” says the pioneering and award-winning Japanese photographer Ishiuchi Miyako. Miyako argues that the road to success for a photographer is about improving your cultural knowledge and “to do your best, and then you will see the result.” Ishiuchi Miyako (b. 1947) is a Japanese photographer. In 2005, Miyako represented Japan at the 51st Venice Biennale with her work ‘Mother’s’ (2000-2005). She has been the subject of solo retrospectives at the J. Paul Getty Museum (2015) and the Yokohama Museum of Art (2017), among others, and her work is held in the collections of MoMA in New York and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Miyako’s accolades include the Kimura Ihei Memorial Photographic Award (1979), and the 2014 Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography. Ishiuchi Miyako was interviewed by Mette Holm in her home in Kiryu in March 2020.
“I can’t capture the past, but the things in front of me are an extension of the past.” Meet one of the most prominent figures in contemporary photography, award-winning Japanese photographer Ishiuchi Miyako. In this video, Miyako shares the story behind some of her most pivotal and pioneering works. When she began taking photographs, Miyako enjoyed developing the pictures in the darkroom: “The darkroom was like a womb for me.” Inside it, she explains, she was cut off from the rest of the world: “And from there, a new world was born.” She was commissioned to photograph clothing worn by people during the Hiroshima nuclear bombing of 1945 (‘ひろしま / hiroshima’, 2007-2010): “The things in front of us contain the passage of time. They make you think about the meaning of time gone by. That is what I do with my photos,” she explains, adding that she has never subscribed to all the different photographic theories: “I just thought that photos would make history. I wanted to be someone who makes history.” Ishiuchi Miyako was interviewed by Mette Holm in her home in Kiryu, Japan in March 2020.
“It’s in between sculpture and architecture,” French artist Jean-Marc Bustamante says of a site-specific brick monument by the lauded Danish artist Per Kirkeby (1938-2018). Watch him reflect on the mesmerizing sculpture, which at first sight looks “like the house next door,” in this short video. Per Kirkeby (1938-2018) is one of the great, international Danish artists, having exhibited at museums all over the world, and is considered one of the most important painters in the second half of 20th-century Danish art. In the video, Bustamante talks about ‘Brick Sculpture’ (1994) by Per Kirkeby (1938-2018), situated at – and intended for – Humlebæk Station in Humlebæk, Denmark. The sculpture was erected in collaboration with the Danish Railways and belongs to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Jean-Marc Bustamante was interviewed by Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen at Humlebæk Station in Humlebæk, Denmark in October 2017.
When reading the book ‘The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind’ (1976) by Julian Jaynes, Cheng was fascinated by its theory that people in ancient times didn’t make conscious, reflected decisions, and that it wasn’t until recently that we got what Cheng refers to as “the app of consciousness.” This inspired Cheng to make the Emissary works: “I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s certainly weird, and it definitely captured my imagination for making these works called ‘Emissaries’.” “Technology is maybe the one underlying force that forces us as human beings to consider what the container of a human being really is and how much it can stretch or where it will break.” Cheng has always been very interested in artificial intelligence, and the live simulations were his opportunity to create his own model of the composition of the mind. The look of ‘Emissaries’ is inspired by the Japanese film director Hayao Miyazaki, where everything in the background, such as nature, is unique: “I wanted to fuse the disciplines of procedural generation with traditional 3D animation to make unique motion capture, to make unique 3D models, to make unique rocks, plants and animals as a way of replicating this sort of cartoonish nature.” Ian Cheng (b. 1984) is an American artist known for his live simulations, which explore the nature of mutation and human behaviour. His simulations, commonly understood as “virtual ecosystems”, are less about the wonders of new technologies than about the potential for these tools to realize ways of relating to a chaotic existence. Ian Cheng was interviewed by Kasper Bech Dyg at his studio in New York City in September 2017. The Emissary works was filmed at MoMA PS1.