Fondazione Federico Fellini

If dreams are a window into the unconscious, then Federico Fellini left the keys to his locked in a Roman bank vault. His Book of Dreams, a surreal record of the stories revolving around his head at night, has been tied up in legal red tape since the Italian director’s death in 1993. Now, freed at last, it displays all the fireworks of Fellini’s overactive imagination on paper and feels more personal than any straight diary could. ”When I was six,” Fellini once said, “I was convinced we had two lives, one with our eyes open and another with them closed. I baptized the four corners of my bed with the names of movie theatres and the show started as soon as I shut my eyes.” Recent studies have shown that on average, just one percent of our dreams relate to sexual satisfaction. In that, Fellini must have been an exception to the rule. (more…)

The songs of the spheres in the palm of your hand

“Is celebrational a word?” asks Matthew Stone. Not officially, but it’s a good fit for the maverick ringleader of !WOWOW!, south London’s notorious art-squat collective. The self-supporting community of writers, artists, filmmakers, and musicians stage word-of-mouth gatherings that deliver equal amounts of creativity and decadence. Their complex “happenings” exude the aura of secret initiation rituals, and can involve anything from single individuals to thousands of people. “We stand/lie here united in infinite possibility,” Stone explained in an invitation to a one-off “pirate” view in a dilapidated Peckham warehouse last year. The 25-year-old self-styled “art shaman” puts his co-conspirators at the center of his own epically disheveled photographs. (more…)

gusto.it

It’s easy to find good food in Rome, but try finding an eatery with a slick bar and atmosphere, too. Enter Gusto, the two-story emporium in the Piazza Augusto Imperatore, which began as a bar/restaurant but now holds a pizzeria, an enoteca, an osteria, a cheese shop, a wine bar, a cooking store, and a school. Dinner caters to a vibrant, young crowd of Romans and visiting hipsters who know that good food and ambiance are not mutually exclusive. The decor is minimalist, stylish, and distinctly Italian; exposed brickwork, marble-top tables, and industrial light give the joint an elegant, inviting look. And the food isn’t just celestial southern Italian pastas and pizzas; Gusto serves up Asian-influenced dishes as well, like spaghetti stir-fried in a wok with prawns and tempura-battered baby vegetables. The tables outside (facing Richard Meier’s redone Ara Pacis pavilion) are the most sought after for indulging in long meals under the Roman night.

Piazza Augusto Imperatore, 7    +3906323.6363

Yayoi Kusama

Plagued with hallucinations and an unnatural obsession with tiny circles since childhood, avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama started painting dot motifs at the age of 10. Instead of seeing her fixation as a setback, she embraced it, painting trees, furniture, and sometimes even the people around her in brightly colored polka dots. Then, in 1957, she moved to New York City, where she joined scores of other creative types in spearheading crazy art events in Brooklyn, anti-war demonstrations, and body painting festivals in studios across town. She shared exhibits with the likes of Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenberg, and represented Japan at the Venice Bienniale several times throughout the 1990s. Since 2000, she’s had solo exhibitions in France, Denmark, Korea, Hong Kong, and her native Japan, where she has received numerous awards. (more…)

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Molo

Less is more. How can three abusively clichéd words be used as a conceptual premise for everything from sustainable architecture to avant-garde design? For the last four years, Canada’s Stephanie Forsythe, Todd MacAllen, and Robert Pasut have been illuminating the downstage of modern design with their Vancouver-based lovechild, Molo Design, proving that minimalism and conceptuality can play nice. Molo, a multidisciplinary design platform with a concentration on materials and creative space-manipulation, is a workshop of “critique and compromise”. Since 2003, the Molo trio has been delivering the goods by constantly fluxing and fusing the designers’ perspectives. From tubular champagne flutes that make cocktails look like they’re floating in midair to sculptural rock formations made with industrial byproducts, their award-winning designs have made significant ripples on a sea of minimalism. (more…)

Photography by Árni Torfason

Forget partying like a rock star…get your ass to Iceland where rock stars go for lessons in serious excess at the Iceland Airwaves music festival. What began in an airplane hangar nine years ago as a poorly funded underground showcase event for local DJs has metamorphosed into one of the coolest international music festivals this side of the Arctic Circle. Each year, during the third week of October, bands and fans, DJs and dance crowds, press and promoters from across Europe, the US, and Canada, migrate en masse, like so many music-obsessed party puffins, to join their Icelandic counterparts in the city of Reykjavik, which hosts the hell-bent four-day extravaganza. With more than 140 bands and DJs expected to play at ten official show venues and fourteen or so unofficial ones, this year’s event guarantees nonstop all-night show hopping punctuated with the kind of compulsory communal substance abuse one would expect from any civilization that goes from the never-ending daylight of summer to the winter’s endless months of perpetual night, with only art, music, sex, and alcohol to stave off the madness. (Give up on sleep altogether and get over to a neighborhood bar to see how the locals do their best late-night hardcore gettin’ down.) The musical mayhem culminates with the Blue Lagoon after-party, wherein a caravan of buses hauls the festival’s survivors sixty miles out to the country’s most famous geothermal spa and deposits the delirious revelers in the silica-rich waters for a serious detox. You gotta’ love this country. What other music festival offers you the opportunity to rock yourself half to death and still return home spa-fresh with silky smooth skin?

hotelonrivington.com

Redesigned, renamed, and reopened under the aegis of Henri, Eric, and Stephane, three French nightlife impresarios who, between them, have been responsible for Cielo, Purple, and the sexiest half of last year’s 205 Chrystie craze, 105 Riv is their latest venue. Ostensibly part the of the Rivington Hotel but no longer accessible through it, the newly reincarnated lounge leans more toward cozy and convivial than the all-out debauchery that typified their earlier spots. There’s a glowing, horseshoe bar, a raised lounge area with comfy black leather banquettes, and just enough open space for dancing when the beats hit the mark. In attendance is an eclectic international crowd taking refuge from the overdone tourist-hipster scene swirling on the streets outside. 105 puts its best foot forward on the weekends when DJ Neil and occasionally local favorite Alex from Tokyo spin soulful house music in this low-key but sultry environment. It’s the closest to Europe you can get on the Lower East Side.

105 Rivington Street    +212.475.2600

Photography by João Canziani

Leaning over his laptop, Brady Corbet is busy downloading a movie. It’s not what you think. The film is a self-written-and-directed 11-minute short called Protect You and Me — one edit of it anyway. He’s “screening” it for me in a living room on a 17-inch screen and laptop speakers. The first of a series of short films he’s planning to make, themed around protection, this one takes place at a New York restaurant, where a man meeting his mother for dinner grows increasingly uneasy about a stranger lurking in the window. From there, the story takes a surreal, manic turn and then ends abruptly. It’s not done yet, he explains, and illustrates this at one point by making L’s with his fingers to indicate where the camera needs to push closer into the frame. Another scene needs to be re-cut, and so on…
     A feature film director? Someday, Corbet supposes. As for now, the young actor has managed to land one of the lead roles in acclaimed Austrian director Michael Haneke’s first (and possibly only) American film — a close remake of his own 1997 drama, Funny Games — opposite Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, and Michael Pitt. Haneke’s last film, Caché, won him Best Director honors at Cannes in 2005, along with a formidable array of other awards.
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YOSHITAKA AZUMA created the Earth By for Issue 18 of PLANETº, which is our ongoing series of personal interpretations of Earth by some of today’s top international artists. Azuma, a Kyoto-based artist who has been generating international buzz since his debut in New York in late 2005, and then again in 2006 at a group show at Dietch Projects, is best known for his layered silhouettes of young girls whose insides are made up of a kaleidoscope of associative imagery – including snakes and forests and animals and car crashes – that provokes a profound sensory and psychological experience in the viewer. We are honored to feature his mysterious, symbolic vision.