🌍 THE WINTER TRAVEL ISSUE IS OUT NOW  🌎 not content with criss-crossing the globe, the TANK travel issue also goes deep beneath the bedrock in Lascaux and high above the clouds in Switzerland. Featuring Renzo Piano's new Istanbul Modern, Kathryn Scanlan in Plan C, Alejandro Aravena’s incremental housing, Lauren Aimee Curtis on island time, Cici Peng on 300,000-year-old handprints, TASAKI's pearl farms off the coast of Kyushu Island, Esmé Hogeveen at Fogo Inn and much, much more –  find out more by buying your copy today. 

Kathryn Scanlan reads from her slim, sensational book Kick the Latch (Daunt, 2022) – the real-life story of Sonia, a horse-trainer and groom, told to Kathryn in long conversations. As she told TANK in an interview in the winter issue, “It’s a disturbing book but I think it’s also a funny and hopeful book. I wanted the narrative to mimic the energy and exhilaration of a race.”

Pick up the winter issue today.

Experimental-club producer Stolen Velour brings some much-needed “jestery energy” to the dancefloor. Read our feature on the DJs defining the post-lockdown rave experience in the new issue of TANK, and check out Stolen Velour’s exclusive TANK Mix on our SoundCloud.

Dior brings a collection of infinitely intricate detail, created and informed by Mexican craft traditions, to the dripping streets of Venice. As featured in the winter travel issue, pick it up today.

In the Lascaux caves of France, Cici Peng finds instances of connection across centuries. The films of Marguerite Duras and French theory give form to these otherwise impossible encounters.

Find out more in the winter travel issue. Click here to buy your copy today. 

Take a long winsome window drive with Cartier.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s fiction imagined fantasy landscapes that held up a warped mirror to society. In Oregon, Kinza Shenn sees those landscapes come to life.

Find out more in the winter travel issue. Click here to buy your copy today. 

Suit up with the Fendi Winter 2023-24 Collection, as curated by Stefano Pilati.

Anahid Nersessian reads from Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse, her collection of six finely-tuned essays on the poetry and politics of some of the greatest poems in English – John Keats’ Great Odes.

TANK speaks to Giovanni Fassina, director of the ELSC, which provides legal advice and support for anyone threatened with legal action for advocating for Palestinian rights in Europe and the UK.

Find out more about the centre here.

An interview with Eva Jospin, the latest artist to collaborate with Ruinart on their Carte Blanche program.

The War in Afghanistan formally ended in 2021, but warfare represents an ongoing psychic and geographic disruption. This short documentary from London-based director and cinematographer Frank Eli Martin, Five Scenes from the War in Afghanistan as They Appear in East Sussex, examines former soldier Clement Boland’s subjective experience of conflict, following his damaged imagination as it imposes a fragmented chronology onto the idyllic landscape of his native corner of England.

This beautiful and melancholy short film from London-based director and cinematographer Frank Eli Martin charts the decline of the oil rig industry in the Scottish Highlands. The film takes a pilgrimage to the Kishorn fabrication yard and the derelict Cromarty Firth, with the future of the region and its energy-dependent infrastructure finally expressed in the otherworldly beauty of the wind farming now dominant in the area.

Ali Eslami is a senior scientist at Google Deep Mind. Here he talks to Tank's Caroline Issa about different kinds of Artificial Inteligence, specially LLM's (Large Language Models) and tells us what  we should be  excited about what we should worry about.

In April, the Science Gallery hosted As Above, So Below, a two-day programme celebrating Gaia Theory and the life of biologist Lynn Margulis. In this discussion hosted by Gary Zhexi Zhang, Sougwen Chung and Asad Raza discuss synthetic intelligence and how technology inevitably decentres the human.

We invited two of the world’s foremost literary translators and authors, Anton Hur and Bryan Karetnyk, to discuss the art and graft of the craft. They talked about how they find their projects, the importance of retaining difficulty and how it feels to live half-inside a language. 

Oxford historian Faisal Devji specialises in studies of Islam, globalisation, violence and ethics. In this episode, Professor Devji considers the place of Palestine in the global context of resistance and struggle, and against wider recent global transformations, arguing that these recent events are likely to have a longer-lasting historical impact than many have so far considered. 

Faisal Devji is a historian and professor at the University of Oxford, specialising in the political thought and contemporary history of the Indian subcontinent and the Muslim world. In the light of the recent rebellion by the Wagner group in Russia, he reflects on the trend for and the perils of using contractors and merceneries.

Faisal Devji is a historian and professor at the University of Oxford, specialising in the political thought and contemporary history of the Indian subcontinent and the Muslim world. Here he discusses civil war as a historical theme, why it has made a return and how we could break out of its destructive cycle. 

Faisal Devji is a historian and professor at the University of Oxford, specialising in the political thought and contemporary history of the Indian subcontinent and the Muslim world. Here he sets out how neutrality as a mode of international relations is making a most welcomed return. As the historical moment of a unipolar world order passes and with it the need for international law and institutions becomes self evident, neutrality is once again seen as a highly useful position from which to appeal for peace.

Olivia Erlanger reads her piece from the Spring Issue of TANK on the ethical landscape of young adult fiction.

Ha-Joon Chang reads from his sixteenth book, Edible Economics: A Hungry Economist Explains the World, (Penguin, 2022). An alternative to neoliberal economic thinking, his work explores globalisation, climate change, immigration, austerity, automation and much more - in its most digestible form. 

Writer and artist Sophia Giovannitti reads from her book Working Girl (Verso, 2023), an examination of the twin worlds of sex work and the art marketplace. These incredibly lucrative yet shadowy industries are built on the commodification of creativity and desire, authenticity and intimacy – yet, as Sophia argues, accepting rather than refuting this taboo might lead to a more genuine freedom.

All of us at TANK were devastated to learn of the death of Gboyega Odubanjo, who has passed away aged 27. A Barbican Young Poet and previously a Roundhouse Resident Artist, Odubanjo was the author of two poetry pamphlets, While I Yet Live (Bad Betty Press, 2019) and Aunty Uncle Poems (The Poetry Business, 2021). In the early summer, Gboyega came to the studio to record readings of three poems from his forthcoming collection Adam. Here, he reads “A Potted History of East”.

Gboyega’s family are fundraising to establish the Gboyega Odubanjo Foundation for low-income Black writers in his memory – donate here.

Published: 13/07/2023

Prolific and polemic journalist Fintan O’Toole reads from his book We Don’t Know Ourselves, a first-person history of Ireland in the second half of the 20th century.

As read by Heloisa Serafim.

Gary reads an extract from his latest book, Dispatches from the Diaspora (Faber, 2023), a broad and unflaggingly perceptive collection of his journalism since 1994 and further proof of his standing as one of Britain’s few true public intellectuals. Gary has just been awarded the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2023.

TANK’s Caroline Issa reads from the editor's letter of our Education issue. Is a certain monstrousness required in the achievement of creative vision?

Caroline Issa reads the editor’s letter from the Summer Issue 2023: on learning how, not what, to read.

Paul Franz reads from his piece "Yesterday this day's madness did prepare", which investigates the representation of time, memory and research in Terry Gilliam's 1995 sci-fi noir 12 Monkeys.

Philippa Snow reads from her book Which as You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment (Repeater, 2022), about Harmony Korine’s violent excursion into beat-up TV and the king of the spectacular stunt, Buster Keaton.

Fabulations is a journey into a variety of speculative scenarios where drastic experiments in narrative temporality, subjects, and styles both reflect the uncanniness of our time and carve out a space for imagining alternatives. The films involved traverse QTBIPOC sanctuary projects; tree spirits opening up about ecocidal generational trauma; queer auto-ethnographic found footage; migrating bodies swimming in an infinite blue; ancestral connections reactivating Taíno culture; a displaced community recovering from a giant monster attack; a transformative encounter with light-based beings residing on the moon; the nightmarish mutation of a Cherub; and a virtual ecosystem of digital entities trapped in a back-and-forth of small talk and existential angst. Click through to take a trip into a fabulous futurism. 

Curated by Matilde Manicardi 

A cinépoem and Surrealist détournement of found footage, Dreaming in Aspect Ratio borrows and appropriates queer childhood memories and film diaries in a brazen and alchemical manner to disrupt straight models of self-portraiture and auto-ethnography.

A connection to a mother in the spirit world reactivates Taíno culture and presence, revealing a realm unseen. Meanwhile, amidst a backdrop of flowers, an ancestral act of sovereignty extends into the future. Filmed on Super 8 and developed by hand with plant medicines and botanicals, Spirit Emulsion evokes a language for Taíno filmmaking in relationship to the earth and cosmos, breathing an ancestral connection into new form. 

Earthbody(s) Biome(trics) is an immersive journey about being stripped from ancestral lands and pushed into cities suffering from COVID-19, food apartheid, the police state, and environmental racism; it’s a prayer on restoring in sacred lands, regenerative farms, community gardens, and QTBIPOC sanctuary projects.

In Unbonded On A Bonded Domain, Gabriel Massan enacts speculative scenarios to investigate how queer club culture, systemic violence, and virtual identities can help us map out the material world and our relationships with it—trapped in a Beckettian back-and-forth of drug-induced small talk and existential angst, a group of digital entities questions the nature of their environment and place within it.

The nightmarish Il Cherubino Crudo (the raw cherubine) follows the journey of a Cherub, an angel symbol of beauty and childhood for the Christian-Italian imaginary, watching his body disfigure and mutate into a grotesque undefined form.

Osupa follows a modern-day Earth traveller who receives a cryptic proximity call from the depths of space, setting off a transformative voyage of a lifetime. Their odyssey takes an awe-inspiring turn as they encounter a group of humanoid, light-based beings residing on the dark side of the moon.

In collaboration with ecologist Dr Nalini Nadkarni, artist-filmmaker April Lin 林森’s speculative documentary TR333 imagines a new species of tree evolved to survive the ecological crisis starting from the scientific literature on plants and climate hardiness.

Set in the fictional town of Bad City, five years after a giant monster attack levelled the city’s east side neighbourhood, the pseudo-documentary Before I Let Go follows a filmmaker’s experience reporting the community’s efforts to recover from the forced displacement.

Sarah Burton's final show for Alexander McQueen was perfection. A fitting tribute to the brand's founder and a testament to Burton's vision.

A triumphant return to form for creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri, who has delivered a collection that was both stylish and wearable. The background art for the Dior SS24 fashion show was created by Italian artist Elena Bellantoni and featured a series of neon-pink and yellow images of women, juxtaposed with feminist slogans such as "I Don't Belong To Anyone Else," "My Body Is Not A Product" and "I Am Not Your Doll." And so say all of us!!

Miuccia Prada and Raf Simmons are on a roll. As underlined by the viscous slime-fall that formed the runway architecture at the SS24 show, this is a show all about fluidity and expansion. Miuccia Prada and Raf Simmons are focusing on the clothing with incredible research on new fabrics, and metallic fringe, soft, dusty chiffon, and a new iteration of the brand’s archetypal blazer elegantly affirm the supremacy of craft over concept.

In the build-up to London Fashion Week, Burberry took over the city, plastering galloping knight logos on the streets from Clapton to Notting Hill and even giving Bond Street underground station a Burberry Street rebrand. Albeit a little confusing for London tourists, the campaign was effective enough to instill anticipation ahead of Daniel Lee’s first Spring/Summer collection for the heritage house. After his Best of British debut show last season, this time around the fashion crowd journeyed to North London’s Highbury Fields, Lee’s own neighbourhood, for a collection that celebrated the English country garden.

Drawing parallels between the essence of Caribbean and Italian styles, Maximilian Davis seems to have embarked on his third show as creative director with confidence. Without sacrificing any of the brand’s trademark luxury, Ferragamo’s SS24 collection feels organic, understated and wearable: as he explained, “I wanted things to feel a lot lighter, both in terms of fabric and construction but also in terms of how people want to dress”. Aided by a sense of playfulness, instilled through sculpted leather, wooden beads, or venus-fly trap, Ferragamo has seamlessly blended two different cultures through the assertion of their mutual understanding: personal ease. “The idea of doing everything at your own pace, on your own time.”

TANK invited four writers to respond to the idea of “close encounters” for the Summer Books Issue.
Four new Flash Fictions from Tice Cin, Caleb Femi, Joanna Biggs and Momtaza Mehri, powered by Montblanc.

TANK invited four writers to respond to the idea of “close encounters” for the Summer Books Issue.
Four new Flash Fictions from Tice Cin, Caleb Femi, Joanna Biggs and Momtaza Mehri, powered by Montblanc.

TANK invited four writers to respond to the idea of “close encounters” for the Summer Books Issue. Four new Flash Fictions from Tice Cin, Caleb Femi, Joanna Biggs and Momtaza Mehri, powered by Montblanc.

TANK invited four writers to respond to the idea of “close encounters” for the Summer Books Issue.
Four new Flash Fictions from Tice Cin, Caleb Femi, Joanna Biggs and Momtaza Mehri, powered by Montblanc.

Inspired by Paweł Pawlikowski's My Summer of Love, bunny hoova and itsnatevendahk muse on summer flings and wander around Manchester.

Poet Older Brother teams up with producer Metrist and filmmaker Tom Butler to watch the world burn from the titular South London park.

Film composer Justin Hurwitz is known for his close relationship with director Damien Chazelle, scoring each of his films: Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, Whiplash, La La Land, First Man, and Babylon. He speaks to TANK about the pain, pleasure, perfectionism and play involved in finishing a score.

Arnaud is the international marketing and communications director at the French luxury house Cartier, the headline sponsors of the Venice Film Festival. We joined the festivities to discover more about the longtime relationship between Cartier and the silver screen.

Basma Khalifa is a screenwriter and filmmaker. She tells us about the power of stories and the place of film in connecting and crossing worlds.

Rising star talent, poet, actress and model Greta Bellamacina has just finished shooting her first feature film. She tells us how this London girl who loves books found her way into the Italian film industry.