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    Live: Stockholm
    Age: 22 
    Web: https://www.facebook.com/yemibas/?fref­ts
    Instagram: Neoyemi

    An interview with Yemi

    Written by Robin Douglas Westling by Arda Sarper

    When Yemi was 12 years old he started to make his own music. He downloaded a free FL-studio-demo and had to finish his tracks in one sitting since the demo verion wouldn’t let him save projects. Yemi has earlier released a number of great and greatly celebrated singles and today, the 12th of May, the rapper and producer releases his first album via Universal/Ledighetsmaskinen. 

    The album took two years to make and include collaborations with some of Sweden’s most interesting and innovative producers and artists. 

    Big congratulations to your first album! Tell us about Neostockholm, and what has the creative process been like behind the album? 

    – Thanks a lot! The process and the development of this record have occurred very naturally. About two years ago I started to have a vision of how the album would work. I think the entire album in a sense orbits around a world of ideas which I have created, and how I’m more or less trying to reach this world in real life. 

    Who have you been working with to create Neostockholm? 

    – The album is entirely produced Yung Gud and Teo Sweden and I. The process is as important as the result and it is crucial to have a good relationship with the people I collaborate with. Both Teo Sweden and Yung Gud are close friends and I'm grateful for the fact that we work extremely well together in the creative process. Busu and Cherrie are guesting the album. I think both of them are some of the most interesting and innovative artists in Sweden. Busu and Teo are my oldest friends. We are identical in many ways, I think our thoughts are interwoven in a really nice way when we are doing music. The same applies to the photographer and director Natan Gullström. We started doing things together around 2011, 2012 and I could say that we have both progressed in the same pace.    

    What are you the most satisfied with regarding Neostockholm? 

    – I’m very happy about how coherent the final product became. Many different thoughts have flowed into the creation of the album, and it wasn’t until I first listened to the final product that I could leave the process and see a very clear red thread.  

    What does a creative process look like to you? 

    – It’s very different. Usually a creative process begins with a simple idea. It can be that I'm super excited for having found a new, cool or special sound. Play around and make something out of it, or maybe I’ve thought of a word that sounds cool and then try to create something from that one word. When I’m planning videos and artwork for covers the creative process is the same. I often think of tracks in colors, and usually have a certain color pretty strongly connected to the tune. In my videos it’s usually quite obvious what color I’ve been influenced by. Fenix, for example, feels very red to me. 

    Yemi tells me that he has always had aesthetic interests and as a child he used to draw a lot of comic strips and cartoon characters. 

    But, at what age did you discover your love for music? 

    – Music has always been important to me. My parents are music enthusiasts and they probably lay the foundation for my interest in music. When I was 12 I started to listen to a lot of music, and that’s when I started to do my own music for the first time. I downloaded a FL-studio-demo and finished tracks in one sitting since you couldn’t save projects for later in the demo-version. I think this technical limitation affected how I go about making tracks today since I still make the main part of the track during the first sitting. 

    How involved with the work are you when you collaborate with other producers, directors and artists? 

    – It’s a given for me to always be a hundred percent in on the processes behind something which I am about to put my name on. I always want to talk about an idea for a video with the director and I’m always a part of the production before someone else is producing.  

    Why do you think it is so rare today that artists make their own music? 

    – It probably has to do with the fact that people want to sell as much as possible. I don’t think that singers or rappers see themselves as artists in the same sense, maybe they only see it as if they’re just doing their thing but I think, unfortunately, that they don’t have a real interest for the creative process. 

    I read an interview with you a while back where you question if you actually belong to the Swedish hip hop-scene, why is that? 

    – I don’t listen to Swedish hip hop. Except for the music that my friends do which is categorized as hip hop. Swedish hip hop is more of a genre than actual hip hop from Sweden. I don’t really have an appreciation of the genre, it’s a very shallow notion I possess. But I wouldn’t place myself in that genre. 

    What genre would you place yourself in? 

    –Hip hop.

    What does the Swedish music-industry need to work on? 

    – It can feel very stiff in many ways, and above all very divided. It’s like Swedish hip hop is a “camp” and it consists of “these artists” and they sound “like this” and if you don’t sound “like this” then you don’t fit in.

    It’s the same with other genres as well. It appears as if it comprises a lot of routine and that more artists could be applied to the entire industry. People who are not musicians could think bigger and the musicians in turn could also think bigger. 

    /////

    I have always created partial goals for myself in order to reach the end goal eventually. To reach a partial goal is supposed to entail this really sick feeling in my opinion, but most often I don’t feel what I thought I would feel. What does it feel like for you? When you reach a goal or partial goal in life?  

    – Yes, sometimes I think back and I’m like “shit” now I'm doing this, the thing I dreamed of doing as a child. But I think I’d like to feel more than I actually do. I talked to Busu about this a couple of days ago. You reach partial goals all the time but if you’d jump two, three, four steps forward immediately it would feel a lot sicker I think. But it’s just that, that it’s a process that makes it really easy for you to get used to being the one you are at the moment and it suddenly feels all natural and not as strong as you had imagined. But you get used to it so very quickly, or I at least get used to the position I'm in at the moment very quickly. It’s nice, then you always have something to look forward to, the next step in your career or your next step in life. But I tend to forget to a certain extent to look around me and see where I am, in relation to where I was just a year ago or even half a year ago. 

    There was this other interview where I read about you where it said “Yemi hasn’t even turned 20 but is already living the dream”. Were you living the dream back then? 

    – I’m not even sure there is a dream. (Haha) I can’t remember if they just wrote that or why they wrote precisely that. But, I didn’t think I was living my dream back then and I cant say that I'm living any dream right now either. I don’t even know if there is a dream to be lived, but maybe it was for the fact that I tried to appreciate the progress that I had achieved by that point. 

    But, what is your dream? 

    – My dream is to have the tools and conditions to be able to work creatively all my life, and to feel good about it. It’s truly a privilege to be able to do that and I can’t say that I'm there just yet. You’re not offered a privilege, or yes some people certainly are, but it feels like this is something I’ve been working towards and it feels goddamn nice. To be able to reach there by yourself. 

    Your debut album is released today, so what are your plans for the summer? 

    – Yeah, today my debut album is released. I’ll see where this album lets me land during the summer and so I’ve kept my schedule pretty open. I want to have the time to rest though, but also start to work on some new music.  

    photography by CLAUDIA FRIED
    stylist ROBIN DOUGLAS WESTLING
    grooming MICHAELA MYHRBERG
    stylist's assistant RL PEARSALL
    photographer's assistant BEA HOLMBERG

     

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  • Le Lait Miraculeux, Bettina Rheims

    An interview with Bettina Rheims

    Written by Felicia Eriksson

    Bettina Rheims knows exactly what she wants and talks about her work with great passion and warmth. During her career as a photographer she has explored the place of women in society, the beauty in the imperfection, the intimate and the floating identity.

    It’s a clear and windy day when Odalisque Magazine had the honor to meet with the French iconic photographer during her visit Stockholm for the opening of her exhibition “I’ll be your mirror” at the Fotografiska Museet (Museum of Photography).

    FE: The exhibition is called “I'll Be Your Mirror” what do we see in the reflection?

    BR: Maybe a self portrait, among all these people at the same time. Maybe a conversation between women.

    FE: How did you become a photographer?

    BR: By chance. I started out as many things, and nothing. I didn't have much talent for what I was doing, you know. I was doing little jobs that you do when you don't know where you place is yet. And one day I remembered about photography that I was doing as a teenager in school, and I remembered the pleasure of being in the darkroom, and the smell and the red light. More than anything else I remembered how I loved to be alone in there and nobody would disturb me and ask me things and look at me. I didn't want anyone to look at me. So, I gave it up for ten years or so and then I went back to it. The man I was living with at that time got me a camera and I looked through the camera and figured.. yeah I'm home.

    FE: The darkroom was your own little space?

    BR: My camera was my own little space. The viewer and the viewing. At that time I had a camera where you looked in to it from above and I looked through that square and figured that I could get rid of everything that I didn't wanted to look at. I could focus on what I wanted to focus on. Which I didn't know what it was but I knew the minute I would find what to put in my square then that would be it. There was no plan of a career. I never thought I would have a pleasure to say one day I'm a photographer. I remembered the first time a said it. I was so proud of that word.

    Bettina Rheims started out by shooting a series of acrobats and striptease artists and continued her career by questioning the gender representation and rising the awareness about androgyny and transsexuality in the series “Gender Studies”. These questions have followed her throughout her work, even in her campaigns for influential fashion houses and in her portraits of musicians and actors.

    FE: Some of your recurrent topics in your work is gender, identity and the gaze. What is it that fascinates you about this?

    BR: I don't know what fascinates me so much. Probably the intimacy of the relationship that I manage to establish with each one of the characters. Whether they are women, transsexual, teenagers or unsure of their sex. It's always the quality of the relationship, of this dance that

    we dance together. Every time somebody walks in my studio or on set and I've never seen them before, and probably will never see them afterwards, we have to live that very brief and intense relationship. It has to be passionate and it has to be all the feelings in such a short amount of time. We give each other the pleasure and the pain and it becomes great and then it becomes nothing and then it’s great again. It’s like when you dance a tango with someone for the first time and you don’t know the person and you start tripping over each others feet and you’re not in the same rhythm. And then slowly the music comes and it becomes like a flow. It becomes smooth and harmonious. That’s what happens every time. It’s more like a performance than a photo session. I mean, we almost could do it without a camera.

    FE: So the process is like a dance to you?

    BR: I talk and they answer to me with their bodies and it goes on like that until the perfect moment. Which could take some time. It’s never very long. It's very intense. It just happens.

    FE: Even though you pictures can be very sexual, they never become objectifying. It seems like the models trust you and your vision to 100%. Is this the outcome of the female gaze?

    BR: It’s because of that, of course. And it’s because they know I'm not gonna betray them. They immediately know by instinct and I know by instinct that they will trust me. Sometimes I stop people on the street to photograph them and I look at them and I see that she's gonna understand the name of the game. I would never do something to someone that I never would do to myself and they know that. It’s a pact, it’s a contact. I never cheat, I never not say the truth. It’s very straightforward. Plus they know my work so people who don't want to be in it they just don't come.

    FE: This exhibition represent your work from the past 35 years or so, what are you most proud of in your career so far?

    BR: I'm proud when somebody comes up to me and says I've learned something about myself. You've helped me. I'm proud when I help people to come out of their rooms, of their closets, of their dark corridors. I'm proud that throughout those years I've helped some people understand and look at things that they never might have looked at. To better understand the differences and what it is to be a woman and also what it is to feel that you don’t belong in the right body. All these questions that people want to avoid because it’s scary. Mybe when they look at my work they’re a bit less scared and a little bit less afraid of the differences. Because differences are beautiful and important.

    FE: Do you feel like you’ve put some light on the transsexual community by telling their story in your pictures?

    BR: You know, I'm just a little drop in a huge sea of water. But yeah, I've put some attention to that question. I am proud of that. It's a strange feeling because I have seen these pictures so many times, in so many different contexts. It seems like I could set up my mattress here and my bed. Everywhere I go is like my home because I'm surrounded by my people, they are my people.

    FE: Have you made friendships with these people?

    BR: Of course we've made friendships, but it doesn't mean that we talk every day. They come by the studio and we have a coffee maybe years later and catch up. They become family, so familiar. I mean look at this picture of Karen Elson, she might be 15 years or so. It’s not that we see each other often, but she will always remember that picture and I will always remember that moment. They’re my people.


    “I’ll Be Your Mirror” will be on display at Fotografiska 15 april to 12 june 2016.

    Milla Jovovitch, 2005, Bettina Rheims
    Kate. Décembre 1989, Londres
    Kael TB

  • COS x Snarkitecture

    Written by Weronika Pérez Borjas by Michaela Widergren

    Looking for a shopping experience curated as carefully as an art gallery? COS invites you for a journey through a landscape full of lightness and fashion in their new collaboration with Snarkitecture. The brand has sought inventive architects to create a bridge between their spring collection, the store space and an art installation. Odalisque talks to the COS head of designers Karin Gustafsson and Martin Andersson as well as Daniel Arsham and Alex Mustonen from NY based Snarkitecture about the details of their creative collaboration.

    WPB: How did you collaborate with Snarkitecture?

    KG: We often look to the world of art and design for inspiration when creating our seasonal collections and believe that our customers share our interest. Because of our relationship with the world of art and architecture we value the opportunity to give something back and share with our customers through creative collaborations. Both Martin and I were drawn to the work of Snarkitecture while designing the Spring Summer 15 collection. We felt their ethos of “removing anything non-essential and focusing the viewer’s experience” resonated with us and the opportunity to work on an installation in Milan during the Salone del Mobile art fair felt like a natural partnership.

    MA: We believe the COS seasonal collections are reflective of the store design and equally the store design reflects collection. The interior design of the stores is created to reflect and communicate the brand ethos to our customer; modern, timeless, functional and tactile, while creating an atmosphere that is both dynamic and calm. Like the collection, our stores are functional, such as fitting rooms designed with adjustable mirrors- while at the same time reflective of our inspirations; for example, the lounge areas for customers to relax are furnished with furniture designed by the inspiring designers: Eames, Wegner and Finn Juhl.

    WPB: What are the trends and inspirations for this season at COS?

    KG: The Spring Summer 2015 collection is very sharp and graphic, minimal with a reduced and sculpted silhouette. We’ve done much research into traditional techniques; then turned it onto its head and used new technical finishes, such as laser cutting, bonding, and finding new ways of constructing.

    MA: It’s almost like a laboratory, experimenting and finding new ways of working, like the ultimate utility wear. As well as that, there’s something about the sporty lifestyle that we liked.

    KG: It’s sportiness as ready-to-wear. We also felt for lightness, technical transparency and technical finishes. There’s also an interest in mixed media, and a playful use of proportion.

    WPB: How does a successful COS design attract the customers in the high- street store context?

    MA: We aim to offer an inspiring collection comprised of wardrobe staples as well as re-invented classics that last beyond the season - the white shirt, contemporary chinos and tailored suiting - reinterpreted to fit the modern wardrobe and lifestyle. We look to offer understated fashionable pieces; nothing is overly fussy and details have a functional purpose.

    KG: When we think of our customer we think of a group of like-minded people who are interested in current issues - cultural as well as financial and political, and of course, fashion. This group of friends tend to be confident, style conscious, have a big-city mind-set and also appreciate exceptional quality and value in every element of their lives. In essence what they share is their sense of style, confidence and personality.

    WPB: How do you apply your motto “impossible voyage of an improbable crew to find an inconceivable creature” to your collaboration with COS?

    DA & AM: We created Snarkitecture with the goal of making architecture perform the unexpected. Our name is drawn from Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of The Snark, a poem which describes an “impossible voyage of improbable crew to find an inconceivable create”. In the same way, Snarkitecture is a search for the unknown between architecture and art - the indefinable moments created by manipulating and reinterpreting existing materials, structures and programs. This can be seen in our collaboration with COS, taking architecture and pushing further than others - rather than creating a building, we altered the interior to create an architectural atmosphere.

    WPB: What kind of voyage can COS’ customers expect when they enter the installation at Salone?

    DA & AM: We were interested in creating a space of calmness and interaction starting with the concept of a cavern as a primal form typically associated with darkness and the solidity of stone. We instead created something light and ephemeral, made from tens of thousands of white, translucent fabric strips. The resulting spaces and passageways invite visitors to explore as they navigate their way into the installation, and to discover secret moments concealed with the density of the surrounding enclosure.

    WPB: Why did you choose the cave as the main construction of your installation?

    DA & AM: In some ways, the quality of the material - the lightness and translucency - came first. The feel of the space was the initial brief, thinking about the qualities and creating a quiet space to evoke a reaction from the visitors. When we saw the collection, we knew we wanted to bring the perforation of translucency to the installation, shifting visual quality and architectural elements. We wanted to fill the space with fabric, playing between the lightness of the fabric and the lightness of the space to create a heavy architecture. The cave element came after, through reduction.

    WPB: I saw that you had collaborated with other fashion projects, such as the “Inverted Chukka” shoe before. How important is the connection between architecture and fashion for you?

    DA & AM: For us, fashion and architecture are different disciplines which last for different amount of times. We wanted to create a link and merge both worlds through creating work that is both architectural in terms of scale, but also fits with the short timescale of the fashion world. Whereas a building can take a month or years to produce, we build an installation, creating a temporary form of architecture.

    WPB: What do you personally like with COS?

    DA & AM: When we saw the COS SS15 collection we were definitely drawn to some of the materials and concepts that involved layering and transparency. We knew we wanted to create an environment that spoke to the clean lines, ambiguity of translucency, and layering that was so strong in the collection. We definitely see familiarities between Snarkitecture and COS’ design process. I think both of us take the existing or expected and transform it into something new.

    WPB: What are you working on now and what are your dreams and plans?

    DA & AM: We want to take the existing or expected and transform it into something new. We’ve been very fortunate to work on a number of great projects with amazing clients and collaborators. We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished but, of course, we are always looking forward. We do have dream projects such as the idea of a playground for children - a play city.

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