AnOther Magazine

At its most noble, every aspect of culture - be that film, music, literature, art or fashion - is a mirror of its time, a lasting testimony to the moment in which it was created. Of course, that mirror is never a true reflection. Rather it is a refraction, an edit, a fusion of the interior lives of the creatives behind any work, informed by the epoch they were born to work in. We hope that every issue of AnOther Magazine is a mirror of its time and thank all the contributors who help us to achieve that. Tár, the multiple-award-winning him directed by Todd Field, is an epic character study, a deliberately ambiguous mirror of a complex persona - that of the maestro conductor Lydia Tár, at first lionised,…

How would you describe your conversation with Cate Blanchett? I really appreciated the depth of Cate's interest in the topics we discussed, and the wide range of experiences she drew upon in our musing together. Should art mirror society? I try to avoid putting ‘should' and ‘art' in the same sentence. In fact, one of my favourite quotes of all time is from the British poet Douglas Oliver, who once wrote, “Each narrowing of what contemporary poetry is supposed to do bears with it an equivalent narrowing in the definition of a human being.” I believe in that sentiment wholeheartedly. What do you find most striking about Daido Moriyama's work? I find the sense of movement in his images extraordinary - it's physical and also a question of sensibility, the…

“In Africa, people are not afraid of using colour. You see it everywhere and it's based on what you can find plastic bottles that are vibrant, loud. It doesn't matter whether it goes together, people do it and somehow it just pops. My fascination with colour came later on in my life, when I was beginning to experiment with how I create as an artist - how I tell a story, piecing together my culture and experiences, everything that I had gone through before, including being surrounded by crazy clashes of colour, of people. I like to use colours that might not work together. To embrace the clashes. For me, it shouldn't feel too controlled. There's that element of surprise. I hope my work opens people's minds to the fact…

“Thick slabs of biography are less appealing to me these days - what I've been looking for lately is particularity, a book where someone cuts off a thin slice of a life and applies their own sensibility to it. Difficult Women by David Plante makes you realise how impossible most attempts to encapsulate the whole of a person are. The book comprises short accounts of three of Plante's relationships - with Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell and Germaine Greer. They're all ‘difficult' in some ways, but Plante isn't easy himself. It's not a kind book, and the sadness of life is held up mercilessly, almost triumphantly. His portrait of Rhys most famous for Wide Sargasso Sea, though Good Morning, Midnight might be my favourite - is the most memorably grim. She's…

“My mum passed away in 2020, and we were very close. My sister found this cassette tape where she had recorded her voice to send to the immigration office in Stockholm. I have a memory of her sitting with the tape recorder, likening herself to a cockroach, saying, ‘I'm not an insect you can step on,' I think about it all the time - why is one life worth more than another? It's heartbreaking because she's pleading for our asylum. She speaks of waiting. If you're undocumented, waiting can mean years. We would wait for the post every day, hoping to be approved. But we were denied based on my mum's inability to prove that she was my mum. She said, ‘Who are you to tell me who I am?…

“I gave one of my first performances at [east London's] Cocoa Butter Club. I used to write poems and put them over beats and take my clothes offit was bad but people loved it. There's something beautiful about letting anyone onto the stage to figure it out up there. We talk about how theatre and performance should be accessible to everyone but they're enshrined by standards of education. The kind of cabaret that is performed at the Cocoa Butter Club opens the doors. I wanted to honour that, so I put Sadie Sinner in my Royal Court show, Sound of the Underground. She changed the ecosystem in performance. Before Cocoa Butter I was often the only person of colour on a line-up. For a long time it was my only…