aylaangelos

Really honoured to have a piece in the debut issue of @useless.fighters, a new magazine about mountains. I went on a deep dive into the topic of who can own the copyright to mountains, those using rocky landscapes to create long lasting, recognisable logo identities (Patagonia, Toblerone etc) and why ultimately we should be seeking to preserve nature instead. Big thanks to @roughversion for the commission and @leonardvernhet @ramdanetouhami for having me! 🏔

Last August, I spoke to Larry Fink in what would be his final interview before his passing a few months later. He shed some wisdom about ageing, a changing America; he scatted, riffed melodies on the harmonica, flirted and laughed with me on cam for a good hour or so. Feel very honoured to have written this for the third edition of @epoch.review, thanks to the wonderful @roughversion for the commission ❣️

For my latest on @dazed, I asked @kavi_pujara, @elaine_constantine, @pesovisuals, @_serenabrown and @eddie_otchere what being working class means to them, and how this transpires in their work, which is currently on show at @hayward.gallery’s After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1986-2024, curated by @johnymodern. Thanks for the insightful interviews and @ohnoitsemilyd for the commission ❣️ “Being working class is about choices – or lack of them – as well as how much confidence you have as you move through the world. This is even more evident now, as the gap between those who have and those who haven’t has widened.” – Kavi Pujara “[Working class] means my childhood, my teens and my twenties, my friends and family, my culture and everyone I knew. It puts a label on a life that, as I look back, came to an end when I moved to London and started to work in a different world and meet people from all walks of life.” – Elaine Constantine “A lot of contemporary depictions of Black life in and or around council estates are fairly sensationalised. I find that these types of representations exist in dissonance with the everyday realities Black people may actually experience living and working in these types of areas. So for me, it’s important to create ordinary and fairly mundane depictions of Black life, rather than hyped-up or romanticised representations.” – Nathaniel Télémaque “Being working class can feel like starting life five steps behind other people, but it’s also taught me the value of having your village, your community to lean on and to support those around you.” – Serena Brown “There are entire worlds they have not told you about. These worlds are hidden to protect the scornful gaze of others. If young people, mixed shades of people all dancing with hardcore junglist energy are to be feared, it’s because it’s beautiful and spiritually correct. We must be free to dance, to create high times and ride bass lines as our divine right.” – Eddie Otchere

Bit late with this but @port_magazine issue 35 is officially out and in ya postbox! I joined the team to send this one off and loved facilitating this gorg interview between @daisyedgarjones and Andrew Garfield, with an equally gorg cover to boot (1/6). Photography @lizcollinsphotographer Styling @millernaomi Production @theproductionfactory Grooming @emmadaymakeupartist at The Wall Group using Officine Universelle Buly 1803 Editor-in-Chief Dan Crowe Associate Publisher Andrew Chidgey-Nakazono @andrewchidgey Creative Director Matt Curtis @uncommon_london Deputy Editor moi 💅 Fashion Director @mitchellbelk Photography Director @hols_hay Art Director @dxn_shxn Special Projects Manager @carlyrgray Talent/Casting Director @tommacklinstudio Garfield wears @loropiana throughout

I recently wrote a piece for @1granary’s Substack all about the downsides of agent representation, and what happens when things go wrong. Thanks to all my anon interviewees for trusting me with their spicy and important stories, and @ryandgwhite for the commission 💚

I spoke to Marina Abramovic about her iconic Great Wall Walk performance - perhaps one of the most romantic gestures in contemporary art - which has gone on to inspire a new body of work and exhibition at @modernartmuseum_sh. Read all about it on @dazed! Thanks as always @ohnoitsemilyd 💕

In a recent one for @dazed, I wrote about the revival of golden era Tumblr aesthetics, the dark side of girlhood, and @elsa.rouy’s glossy, pastel painting Obsidian Upskirt (pictured here) - all of which are part of Obsidian Upset, an exhibition and film, written and directed by Lucia Farrow and Mila Rowyszyn, reflecting a generation of women who grew up online. The show is open at @des.bains until Sunday! Thanks @luciafarrow @mila_rowyszyn @kollektiv_collective @ohnoitsemilyd “The ‘online girl’ is a part of art history: our whole generation of girls endlessly repeat their own image, blending together into one artefact duplicating each other’s posts and thoughts. Our film exists now on Tumblr forever, released into the abyss of spam and self-repeated images, it will stay there, immortalised like the girls in our film and like the girls in Rouy’s paintings or Farrow’s ceramic tablets. Our film exists, we made it, and it captured our coming-of-age and our minds at the time. It will forever act as an archive for us, and hopefully other women will see themselves and that as well.”

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When you imagine an Italian summer, the tranquil, sun-drenched style of Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name might spring to mind. An unflinching portrayal of queer love in the heat of Lombardy’s countryside, the film explores the heady romance between its two protagonists, Elio and Oliver, captured in the director’s signature immersive style. This aesthetic is echoed in the work of Italy-born and London-based @giovannirombaldoni, whose project In Vacanza – which translates to “on holiday” in Italian – documents a dreamy summer escape with his friends to Torre del Greco, a coastal town located on the Bay of Naples. “Growing up in a coastal town myself [Pesaro], I definitely look at Italian summers through rose-tinted glasses. The dreamlike tones of my pictures carry a sense of nostalgia of the classic ‘dolce far niente’ [sweet doing nothing] that shaped the Augusts of my youth.” Full piece on @dazed today! Thanks to @ohnoitsemilyd for the commission ☀️🍑

I spoke to @naomiwongo about her beautiful new book 後生仔 (meaning ‘young man’), which attempts to “fill in the blanks of the absent Chinese male in British culture”. Full piece on @dazed! Thanks as always to @ohnoitsemilyd for the commission 💛 “[The project] is a love letter to the Chinese community in Britain, particularly those who are still in the process of navigating themselves – their sense of identity – in this country. I would really love the series to encourage more stories to be told from our community because storytelling is always what brings people closer and together. I also hope it may even open up conversations with our parents and older family members about their experiences, stories and maybe even secrets they won’t tell unless we ask them.”

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Sharing some bits from the latest issue of @anima__magazine - first up is an interview I did with @design.by.samuelross about his evolution over the years. What struck me the most was how he thought of his career/life as chunks of time that should be renewed every decade or so. He’s currently onto the next chapter having sold @acoldwall and you can read all about it at my bio! We’re also releasing a podcast episode with the full conversation soon, stay tuned 🍊 Art direction and design @hondo.studio Photo editor @maxxibop Photo editor at large @hols_hay “I look at it from the concept of time and how I’ve spent a third of my life building out one particular perspective. You may only get eight to nine decades if you're lucky, and I've had one of those decades allocated to A-COLD-WALL*. There always needs to be this threshold of newness. For me, you should have a renewal every eight to 10 years.”