My personal style signifier is vintage band T-shirts. I’ve worn them since I was a teenager. It started with the Sex Pistols. Now I buy them at flea markets or gigs whenever I can. I have about 80, including Joy Division, Dead Kennedys and Alan Vega. I especially love my New Order T-shirts, for the Peter Saville graphics. I like what these bands represent in English culture. Music is one of the reasons I moved to London from Mexico City in 1997.
The last thing I bought and loved was 3,000 Eremophila nivea plants to fill the garden I’m cultivating at my home in Ibiza. They have this silken texture and purple flowers. They contrast beautifully with the concrete blocks of my brutalist-style house, and the landscape of red Ibizan earth and dark-green pines. I want them to dominate so that it feels like you’re inside a cloud.
And on my wishlist is land. I’d love to buy a plot so I can experiment with farming and work on outdoor sculpture. I have my eye on a finca in Sant Mateu d’Albarca.
The best souvenir I’ve brought home is an escapulario – a silver chain with Catholic iconography from a religious store next to the Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral. It reminds me of home.
The best book I’ve read in the past year is Intelligence for Dummies, a collection of essays and writing by the late American journalist and editor Glenn O’Brien. He was a friend. He wrote the text for one of my exhibition catalogues, and reading this is like hearing his voice again.
A recent “find” is the San Miguel Chapultepec neighbourhood in Mexico City. It’s a new creative area filled with galleries, art and design studios, close to Bosque de Chapultepec, the biggest urban park in Latin America. It’s where all the artists are living. There’s no real food scene, but it has a very traditional canteen, Cantina el Mirador, which has a male-only drinking area with the atmosphere of an old-school pub, and a restaurant that’s frequented by artists and politicians. I’m going to start work on a project to build a studio house there with my neighbour, the architect José Juan Rivera Río of JJRR Arquitectura.
My favourite room in my house is my brutalist living room in Ibiza. The house was the first European project of the Mexican architect Alberto Kalach and he designed this room with lots of little windows that connect it to the pine forest and the environment outside. It’s a site-specific art installation, featuring the words from my poems inscribed in gold leaf onto the walls, and played over speakers in a recording voiced by Iggy Pop. The gold is reactive to any shifts in light; even a cloud passing by. At night, the space glows like a metallic fire. The more you look, the more it reveals. It’s a place of contemplation.
My style icon is Iggy Pop. He’s provocative, innovative and disruptive. I find the idea of someone who has navigated multiple disciplines across art, music, architecture and politics so inspiring. In 2019, I asked him to read all 45 of my poems and aphorisms. Sometimes singing, sometimes speaking and then screaming, he’s unmistakably Iggy.
The best gift I’ve given recently is one of my paintings from a new series called Untitled View. Every birthday my girlfriend, Fabiola Quiroz, gets an artwork. The work is in gold leaf, with a dark void-like rectangle at the centre in super-matte black. It’s like a view to infinity; an escape portal.
And the best gift I’ve received recently is a pair of Birkenstocks from Rick Owens, of his own design. They have black and silver straps with a cork-latex sole. I’ve never had a pair before. I love that they don’t look like I’m a boring German nature lover – they’re avant-garde, challenging and super-comfortable.
The last music I bought was “Sweetest Chill” by Siouxsie and the Banshees. I’ve always loved that band and I’ve heard they’re going to release a new album soon. I hadn’t heard that song in so long. It transported me to when I was working very hard to try to get to London so that I could come and explore this new idea that was the punk movement.
I have a collection of tables. I can live without a sofa or even a bed, but I have to have a big table to sit at and work. The one in my Ibizan home offers all these functions and is also a sculpture in itself. I had it made for the space by the architecture and interior design studio Habitación 116. It’s 6m long, forged from sandblasted stone and weighs half a tonne. It took 30 people to get it inside the house. I love that it’s not a fragile antique. I also have one by the Italian architect Carlo Scarpa that sits outside on the terrace, and I’m eyeing up another by Donald Judd.
In my fridge you’ll always find probiotics. You have to keep switching them up but I use Bio-Kult a lot. Also lemons – my morning routine in Ibiza is to go into the garden, pick a lemon, then drink the juice before breakfast. We always keep fresh chipotle sauce from the local Mercado Medellín market in the Roma district of Mexico City. We have it with everything from scrambled eggs to tacos to rice.
I’ve recently discovered Mostyn, a contemporary gallery and arts centre in the seaside town of Llandudno in north Wales. I have a solo survey of my work there at the moment titled Not Black, Not White, Silver until 17 June. The gallery space is filled with beautiful natural light – and it’s been wonderful to discover the wild nature of that part of the world.
An indulgence I would never forgo is my cats. They’re wild cats that would hang around when the Ibizan house was still a construction site; the builders fed them. Now they’re part of the family. One of them recently had kittens that we’ve named Warhol and Basquiat.
The last item of clothing I added to my wardrobe was a pair of Vivienne Westwood’s “Drunken” trousers in denim. I love their lopsided cut. I’ve worn her trousers for years. They’re radical but comfortable; traditional yet alternative at the same time.
The grooming staple I’m never without is Mad et Len Graphite scent, which I always carry when I travel. It’s such a deep, intense smell. For me, it’s the olfactory visualisation of grey concrete. And a friend of mine from Cyprus recently gave me a big bottle of pure Ayurvedic oil, which I use on my body and my beard. It leaves me feeling relaxed but energised. €140 for 50ml EDP
An object I would never part with is a pair of midcentury armchairs by French designer Pierre Chapo that sit in my studio. They’re very desirable. I picked them up from the 20th-century design dealer Galeria Tambien in Santa Gertrudis de Fruitera in Ibiza.
The one artist whose work I would collect if I could is El Greco. His paintings have an aura very few artists can produce. The works are so full of luminosity and mysticism. If I could take a few from the Prado, I would.
The gadget I couldn’t do without is my Apple Watch, which I use to track my sleep. I also play a lot of tennis so it tells me how I’ve performed physically. Otherwise, my main tech is the Staedtler HB, and pure graphite pencils I use to write my poems, and sketch out project ideas. I prefer the looseness and independence of a sheet of white A4 paper, rather than a notebook. Then I just start scribbling.
My wellbeing gurus depend on where I am. In Ibiza, it’s acupuncturist Rebecca Garcia at Ca’n Oliver in Santa Gertrudis de Fruteira. I was very suspicious about acupuncture at first, but she’s great and it makes me feel really good. In London, I have one-to-one Reformer Pilates sessions with Carmela Besso at her house in Notting Hill. It’s like being a car that’s just come back from being serviced. My girlfriend cuts my hair. We’ll put a chair out on the terrace, and I’ll contemplate how next to develop the garden, while she chops.
My favourite app is NTS Radio. It’s a great mix of recorded and live sessions and diverse musical styles. I like to listen to it while I’m working. Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of the late British producer and DJ Andrew Weatherall. I used to go to watch him play at The Blue Note on Hoxton Square in the late 1990s, when I first moved to London. He was one of the pioneers who mixed electronic music with punk and rock. nts.live
If I weren’t doing what I do, I would be an architect. As a kid I dreamt of working in architecture, but I soon realised it involved a lot of compromises and restrictions. My parents were both archaeologists and I was raised looking at churches and pyramids across Mexico. I find that marriage in architecture between space, society and politics fascinating – it embraces the whole story of humankind.
—————————————————-
Source link