ERWAN SENE
ERWAN SENE
INTERVIEW BY DARIA MIRICOLA
PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRIS LENSZ
OUT NOW
ISSUE 43 FW23
KALEIDOSCOPE's Fall/Winter 2023 issue launches with a set of six covers. Featuring Sampha, Alex Katz, Harmony Korine, a report into the metamorphosis of denim, a photo reportage by Dexter Navy, and a limited-edition cover by Isa Genzken.
Also featured in this issue: London-based band Bar Italia (photography by Jessica Madavo and interview by Conor McTernan), the archives of Hysteric Glamour (photography by Lorenzo Dalbosco and interview by Akio Kunisawa), Japanese underground illustrator Yoshitaka Amano (words by Alex Shulan), Marseille-based artist Sara Sadik (photography by Nicolas Poillot and interview by Daria Miricola), a survey about Japan’s new hip-hop scene starring Tohji (photography by Taito Itateyama and words by Ashley Ogawa Clarke), Richard Prince’s new book “The Entertainers” (words by Brad Phillips), “New Art: London” (featuring Adam Farah-Saad, Lenard Giller, Charlie Osborne, R.I.P. Germain, and Olukemi Ljiadu photographed by Bolade Banjo and interviewed by Ben Broome).
FROM THE CURRENT ISSUE: ISA GENZKEN
FROM THE PREVIOUS ISSUE
MANIFESTO
From June 22 to June 24 during Men’s Fashion Week in Paris, KALEIDOSCOPE and GOAT presented the new edition of our annual arts and culture festival, MANIFESTO. Against the unique setting of the French Communist Party building, a modern architectural landmark designed by legendary Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, the festival will bring together visionary creators from different areas of culture across three days of art, fashion and sound.
FROM THE SHOP
CAPSULE PLAZA
In April 2023, a year after the launch of the magazine, Capsule introduced Capsule Plaza, a new initiative that infuses new energy into Milan Design Week by redefining the design showcase format. A hybrid between a fair and a collective exhibition, Capsule Plaza brings together designers and companies from various creative fields, bridging industry and culture with a bold curation that spans interiors and architecture, beauty and technology, ecology and craft.
MARK FLOOD
1017 ALYX 9SM
In January 2023, KALEIDOSCOPE presented a solo exhibition by Houston-based artist Mark Flood (b. 1957), curated by Alessio Ascari, at Spazio Maiocchi in Milan. In his paintings, Flood deploys the detritus of contemporary culture—slogans, celebrities, logos, and memes—to mock American society and the elitist art world. The exhibition also provided the scenography for the runway presentation of the 1017 ALYX 9SM Fall/Winter 2023 collection.
FROM THE ARCHIVE
Working as both an artist and a musician, Erwan Sene combines sculptures made of the detritus of everyday life with compositions that throb under the rhythmic weight of abstracted techno. Underpinning both practices is the idea of world building and the impenetrability of language.
DARIA MIRICOLA
I’m curious about your relationship with Paris and how it has changed over the years. Which are the places you have felt particularly attached to while living in the city?
ERWAN SENE
I’m particularly interested in the city as a receptacle for information and human flow, like a sort of indestructible machine that is constantly making and unmaking history with its dreamers, the disillusioned, and its cement trucks. On the one hand, Paris has this ability to really remain frozen in time but, on the other, to brutally build neighborhoods from scratch in the span of a few years, like they are doing for next summer’s Olympic Games. For me, personally, it is important to wander, get lost, and get out of the cold objectivity of town planning and urbanism, as if in the imaginary Situationist city of New Babylon for example.
DM
Your work relies a lot on found objects, which convey a sense of derelicts or ghosts. What fascinates you about the city of Paris at the beginning of the past century, and how do those objects from a bygone era speak to you?
ES
These found objects always have their own story but, at some point, they are suddenly abandoned or shelved. For example, the lettering of a restaurant is taken down and sold on eBay. The meaning of its name no longer exists, but each sign, and their shape and design, can say a lot about their communication with the public space and the era that they are from. I’m interested not only in the genealogy of an object, but more in their relationship with other objects, old or recent, banal or sophisticated. I really want to erase any hierarchy between them to create a sort of dance of bastard materiality.
DM
Which feelings do those objects unleash towards the belief systems and realities our society erected over the last century?
ES
I think it’s now easy to observe that our consumption of design is increasingly standardized. A specific screw from a vacuum cleaner might easily adapt to that of an electric bike or a dental prosthetic. I like to play with this phenomena in an opportunistic way.
DM
Another analogy between music, architecture, and technology is they all implicate human bodies’ interactions. Is there a feeling of embodiment somehow implicated in your sculptures? If yes, how would you describe it?
ES
I like to imagine these sculptures as interfaces that have emancipated themselves from their digitalized constraints and attained some form of proper and therefore, yes, human existence. We could imagine that their original programming has long since been replaced by another singular language, a sort of slang that may be found in the sewers of an imaginary city, and that the sound of their blood-flow is like that of the pipes that wind through our buildings, cities, and homes.
DM
Your works’ titles are sometimes very cryptic, with encoded references spanning from video games to obsolete electronic devices, and let the viewer wonder about possible deep-seated narratives. Can you tell me a bit about this?
ES
I’m really interested in seeing all of my objects as tools of a great game that unfold under strategic and linguistic aspects. I’m particularly inspired by fanzines from the early 90s such as Interface or Millennium’s End, which were born from action role-playing games (RPGs), where orbital habitats become independent states, and mega-corporations rise and have to fight amongst themselves for dominance. These fanzines really augmented and played with the rules of these proto–video games through their own delicious and sometimes indigestible vocabulary, to which I of- ten look and reference when titling my work.
DM
Let’s talk briefly about how your modus operandi was consolidated over the years: how you encountered the world of music and art in the first moment. How did you approach them, and how they started intersecting?
ES
Since I was very young, I’ve made music, and then, later, I studied art, which did not at all lead me to link the two practices. It really took me time to digest and gradually put in place my own connections regarding my creative practices. I think maybe cinema led me towards embracing a more narrative and analytic approach to sound and the power of diegesis. Like in the films of Michael Haneke, where the only soundtracks are those composed of the contextual sounds of life— for example, an open window on the street, a television in the living room, a radio from a car passing by. For me, these kinds of nonmusical-musical soundscapes in film are what allow us to close our eyes and really imagine being there ourselves. This really educated and inspired my own approach to sound and its textures, and how to incorporate that in my art.
DM
Your latest project, “JUnQ,” came as an exhibition, a book, an ad hoc designed typeface, and an album release. You seem to be experimenting with different expressive formats and testing the possibilities of remediating and translating messages. Which role do the notions of language and communication play in your work?
ES
I’m intrigued by the notion of language that flows like a stream within families, communities, and societies, with its share of distortions, rumors, and mysteries. I like what Alice Becker-Ho calls the “languages of the dangerous classes,” which speaks to the power of barrier languages, warlike and camouflaged, understood only by those who practice them and totally unintelligible to the general public, the state, and the police. I’m really interested in these kinds of words and their sounds (and even their drawn forms), and, like with Allen Ruppersberg or François Villon, I try to seek the abolition of the literary hierarchy. From rebuses to advertising slogans, from encrypted texts to bar slang, all language must, for me, be captured, sorted, cut up, and then cooked.
DM
The idea of a “Journal of Unsolved Questions,” which is the extended title of the project, is particularly appealing. Which are the questions you wish you could answer? Was the pandemic infusing a sort of anxiety for the unknown into your work?
ES
There are definitely far more unresolved questions in my life than clear ones. But sometimes it’s also nice to have to find or build tools to navigate the fog. When you have no visibility, you use your hands first instead of your eyes and then your other senses. The journal (JUnQ) can be seen as boxes, more or less tidy, with, inside, these kinds of navigation tools and gestures to help see things more clearly.
DM
From a historical and media critique perspective, journals have been seen for a long time as vehicles to drive people’s opinions, cementing the sovereignty of interpretations over facts. Do you feel more comfortable with scientific evidence or with faith and beliefs?
ES
I believe that everything is based on a construction, with its stones, its foundations, its tensions. Beliefs often stem from a reactivity that prevails over reflection. The technological race, which started 30 years ago, has led to a general digital existence that often equates silence and stillness with emptiness, which, for me at least, makes me want to take distance and slow communication, to build a healthier environment and existence.
DM
If you could invent something, even unrealistic, what your dream invention would be?
ES
A god other than money.
DM
The last question is a non-question, so you have to give me an unasked answer.
ES
If your question is unasked, then, even if I believe my response, my thoughts are surely questionable.
Erwan Sene (b. 1991) is a French artist and musician. His composite body of work is led by a sculptural practice that unfolds on several levels–reprising, digesting, and warping the objects that surround him. Part exhibition at Balice Hertling, Paris, part book, and part album, Sene’s latest project “JUnQ” was released in April 2023 by PAN records.
Daria Miricola (b. 1996) is KALEIDOSCOPE’s associate editor and Spazio Maiocchi’s assistant curator.
PHOTOGRAPHY: CHRIS LENSZ