Jan Smith has worked as a businessman and entrepreneur for much of his life. After selling his company five years ago, he committed himself to what he had long considered just a hobby: photography. His recent project captures the shells of abandoned ships in the world’s largest “ship cemetery”, in Nouadhibou, Mauritania. Smith spoke to PLANET about his body of work and the rugged journey that led him to Nouadhibou.

How would you characterize your work?
I’m really drawn to things that are overlooked, what most people don’t seem to pay attention to. If you pay attention to what I’m taking a picture of, you’ll see the story behind it. But I don’t really want to tell you that story up front.

Can you explain the story behind the approximately 500 abandoned ships?
In the 1980s, the fishing industry was nationalized. And rather than turning in some of the ships to the government, some of the smaller companies simply left them languishing there. When the government took over the boats they realized they didn’t really have the expertise to maintain them. And so when eventually they’d break down, or they’d need an overhaul, and they ended up being abandoned in the bay as well. That made it into an ideal place to then cover up abandoning other ships [for] insurance fraud. Rather than recycling the boat or bringing it all the way back to the waters of Europe or China, it was easier to write them off as sunk or unusable and claim the insurance.
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Chris Stafford was ten years old when Feufollet formed and the dusty troubadour has returned thirteen years later with the well-seasoned and magnetic En Couleurs. Navigating the waters from childhood musicianship to that of maturing adult is treacherous, but add to that critical acclaim for 2008’s Cow Island Hop and the result could be lackluster. However, the Lafayette, Louisiana-based band geared up to color outside the lines and freed their creative gusto on a slew of original songs. For a band with a reputation rooted in traditional Cajun music, there is nothing staid about En Couleurs with its breezy blend of folk, country, and indie rock. Feufollet, literally translates to “crazy fire” but the band prefers the colloquial “will o’ the wisp” for its amorphous meaning.

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Suspended above the river Elbe, a simple wooden cube hangs from an abandoned bridge. The structure, executed by H3T architects, was crafted hastily from cheap and recycled materials, but this cube is not intended to remain intact for more than a couple of weeks. While it stands, visitors are encouraged to gather firewood from the surrounding wilderness, hoist themselves through a trap door accessible only by boat, and enjoy the pleasures of an aerial sauna.
     Called the Flying Sauna, H3T warns potential visitors to proceed with caution when attempting to use it, noting that the underlying river’s current is strong. Indeed, the bridge that it hangs from marks the site of a weir that was dismantled during the mid-1970s. The sauna is meant to serve as a way of calling attention to the abandoned structure.
     The Flying Sauna is the Czech studio’s second public sauna project. In 2009, H3T erected Sauna on the Water, a four-day construction project that produced a floating steel and plywood cube with a cast iron stove installed for heat. H3T advises using the saunas by moonlight in order to emphasize the contrast between the “beautiful lantern light” and the glistening lake. Both projects are a certainly a far cry from the glossy, tiled saunas that accompany many modern gyms and swimming pools. Instead, the humble cubes are reminiscent of traditional saunas that interact with their natural settings, whether they were burrowed into an earthen pit or built entirely from stone and wood. By reclaiming the origins of the sauna, H3T has managed to celebrate the natural and the manmade simultaneously.
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To host this year’s FIFA World Cup, the first ever held on its continent, South Africa spent almost 1.5 billion dollars to build five new stadiums and refurbish five others. In a country where many live without adequate housing, water, and medical care, the decision provoked criticism that the government cared more about its international image than problems in its own backyard. But after looking through photographer Thomas Hoeffgen’s new book African Arenas, which documents soccer fields in South Africa as well as Namibia, Nigeria, Botswana, Zambia, and Mali, one can’t help but feel that the expense is commensurate with the country’s deep love for the game.
     There are all sorts of playing fields here, from the immense, ultramodern stadiums built for the World Cup, to shabby schoolyard pitches and sandy lots with goals fashioned from scrap wood. The boys and young men pictured play joyfully, without proper uniforms and often without shirts and shoes. Hoeffgen’s photographs, which are low and flat and have a slightly faded-out finish, capture a broad, dusty, sun-drenched landscape. And in their sparse, uncluttered compositions they suggest that soccer is the most elemental of sports. It can be played anywhere: on concrete, artificial turf, sand, or grass. All that’s needed is a bit of space, a ball, and a way to mark the goals.
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Mike Stilkey’s home is full of books. And though he most certainly collects them, it’s not a habit that stems from reading frenzies. The thousands upon thousands of hardcover books he obtains from libraries, garage sales, and publisher’s back stocks are used to paint on. But hold on, it’s not as simple as it sounds. Before he even thinks of dipping his brush in paint, Stilkey arranges the books (spines out) into tall, free-standing stacks, which he then uses as the most moveable canvas in the world.
     Hot off the success of a seminal installation at the Corey Helford show in the U.K., Art from the New World, his new show, Reminiscent is a series of book sculptures for the inaugural exhibition at the new Hurley’s )( Space Gallery in Costa Mesa, California. For the show, Stilkey created two 10 x 12-foot murals, one painted with the image of a wan man playing the piano, the other a portrait of a woman. Each mural took roughly 5,000 recycled books to construct.
     True bibliophiles may cringe at the notion of wasting a good read for artistic purposes, but Stilkey’s reverence for the written word is evident. By meticulously collecting, stacking, and eventually painting down the spines of these lost books Stilkey is saving them from the dubious fate of a sealed cardboard box or library dumpster.
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With their wild combinations of dance music, hip-hop, 8-bit sounds, and clever conflations, the Pinker Tones produce a globetrotting soundtrack for modern life. Whether kitschy, serious, or fun loving, Modular is a pastiche of perspectives and moods. But nothing is ever totally straightforward with the Barcelona-based trio, who welcome drummer Robert Guibiaqui on their fourth studio album. The surprisingly strong voices of Profesor Manso and Mr. Furia belie their respective backgrounds as producers, while riotous chant-a-long choruses balance the melancholia of long flights and the ecstasy of mixing things up.

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One mile north of Edinburgh’s city center, a composting shed has garnered a great deal of international attention. Boasting two Scottish Design Awards and an Excellence in Design Award from the American Institute of Architects, the seven-month construction project was conceived and executed by Scotland’s Groves-Raines Architects. Made from Corten steel and rebar — the steel used in reinforced concrete — the shed has the potential to strike a jarring contrast with the surrounding greenery. Yet the industrial materials are manipulated with traditional techniques, creating a structure that emerges strikingly naturally from its surroundings.
     Because the rods that make up the shed are inserted directly into the ground, the garden remains unaffected by any invasive building foundations. To create the dual-purpose composting shed and garden store, the architects relied on “a technique similar to traditional willow weaving” to make the steely walls more conducive to its earthy setting. Bent into smooth curves, the rods lose much of the harsh quality often associated with industrial building materials and begin to blend seamlessly with the adjacent wooded area. The woven rods allow air and light to stream into the shed, a benefit both practical and aesthetic. Lastly, the roof is made with weather-resistant EPDM lined steel and planted with grass, reinforcing “the connection with the wooded context” that the architects rightfully claim. By re-purposing the typical building blocks of urban architecture to create an “organic form” structure, Groves-Raines Architects successfully reimagines our uses for man-made materials.
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Portuguese novelist José Saramago died last Friday on the Spanish island of Lanzarote. He was 87. Saramago is known for his poignant parables on humanity and politics. Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998, his works have since been translated into more than twenty-five languages. A vocal leftist, Saramago worked for years at various odd jobs before losing his job as a newspaper reporter after the downfall of Portugal’s incipient Communist revolution in 1975. He decided then to become a novelist. His strange, beautiful writing is perhaps best memorialized by these haunting words from his perhaps most famous novel, Blindness: ‘Why did we become blind, I don’t know, perhaps one day we’ll find out, Do you want me to tell you what I think, Yes, do, I don’t think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.”

Saramago strived his whole life to help the rest of us to see.

If you’ve walked through Union Square recently, you’ve likely come across Miranda July’s Eleven Heavy Things. The cast fiber-glass, steel-lined sculptural works (although July herself rarely refers to them as sculptures) invite viewer participation: a series of pedestals in ascending height read The Guilty One, The Guiltier One, and the Guiltiest One; an otherwordly hanging shape made of lace creates an intricate, alien headdress; a series of tablets with holes invite the insertion of arms, legs, and a finger (which reads, “This is not the first hole my finger has been in, nor will it be the last”). Another pedestal built for two people reads, “We don’t know each other, we’re just hugging for the picture.”
     July seeks here to bring organic performance on the part of the viewer, rather than simply display works of art. And the beauty of these pieces lies in the interactions that they successfully create: tourists and native New Yorkers alike can be seen at all hours of the day posing for pictures as the Guiltier One, poking limbs through bizarre holes, and hugging strangers “for the picture”. A simple search through Flickr for “eleven heavy things” is enough to reveal how extensive public participation has already been in this project.
     Originally created for the Venice Biennale, Eleven Heavy Things is presented in New York by Deitch Projects as its last and final public project. The exhibit will be on display until October 3, 2010 in Union Square.
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When Michael Jackson died last year, and clips of him dangling a baby over a balcony and dancing the moonwalk played in endless loops on cable television, what the media mourned was not a man but a hyper-celebrity, someone whose personal history touched upon every hot topic in American life: family dysfunction, race, fame, money, and sex. Beginning with bubble-gum pop music and ending in accusations of child molestation, his story became one of a heroic rise and a tragic downfall. What was omitted was a consideration of the man himself, whose friends described him as a gifted dancer and musician, and a thoughtful, if troubled, person.
     A movie documenting rehearsals for Jackson’s planned world tour that hit theaters soon after his death, This Is It, showcased his professionalism. The film revealed a breathtaking performer and an ambitious, intelligent, showman. He held himself to high standards and sought the same from those around him, directing his musicians, backup dancers, and technical crew with authority and tenderness.
     In a similar vein photographer Henry Leutwyler’s beautifully-designed book Neverland Lost, which documents objects from Jackson’s estate, reveals some of the performer’s inner life.
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