Photos: Matthew Stone

Matthew Stone and friends interview Katsunobu Yaguchi: 

Matthew Stone:  Do you hope to be remembered and what for?

Katsunobu Yaguchi: I don’t know, but if I so, I think I become an American president then people remember me.

MS:  What do you have faith in?

KY: I do faith in myself but I strongly do not faith in myself same time. I think this is a rule of belief for surviving in this world.

Ebe Oke : What unique gifts do you have to offer to this world?

KY: For today. Cancellation of a cellular phone and an internet.
If it’s possible I want to experience the world without a cellular phone and an internet once more.

Todd Hart :  What is the best example of art really changing the world for the better?

KY: I do not know. maybe love, maybe carry on delivery child.

Norman Rosenthal :  Why are we alive at all? It is after all a very strange state to find ourselves in.

KY: I think this is because, we are living in society, not living in the earth.

MS: What question should be added to this list?

KY: How and where do you want to get your death?

Photo: Matthew Stone for Dazed&Confused.

Matthew Stone and friends interview Rafael Rosendahl.

Matthew Stone:  What do you have faith in?

Rafael Rosendahl: I think I am a very calculating person. So faith is not something I am concerned with. I look at something’s past and then i try to think what direction that could go to. I don’t think that’s faith. When it’s about me, I don’t know if my fate is decided or if i have a say. I try to spin it for the good. Sometimes my good intentions backfire, but overall I feel blessed. Knowing that things worked out in the past makes it logical to assume that things will work out in the future.

Catherine Borra : Out of all the possible languages (English, Latin, Spanish, visual, sign, irony, empathy, facial expressions, music, archetypes etc.) available on this earth, which one do you feel you express/would express yourself better in, and why? 

RR: I have not yet really found something. I’m not very good at expressing myself. My work has nothing to do with expression. And when i talk to people I usually dont do a good job at translating my own feelings to words. I start talking too much and wrong things come out that hit much harder than the right things. Language is a world of its own which has nothing to do with my feelings. Thats hard, because there are a lot of things inside that want to find their way out.

Scottee : Solitary or Collaboration?

RR: I like making the decisions. And I love never having to explain a single anything. That happens when you work alone. Sometimes it is scary being confronted with the boundaries of your own imagination, but still I love working alone.

Susanne Oberbeck : What is your vision for a future society, I mean in terms of political system, families, human relations, architecture, reproduction and so on?

RR: I calculated the following: If we have ultimate communication tools in the future, it does not matter if you are right next to someone or if they are on the other side of the earth. If you divide 6 billion people equally over the earth’s land surface, we are all 160 meters away from our closest neighbor.
 
Iphgenia Baal : What is the one thing about you that undermines all the opinions you have made above?

RR: Language is a very primitive technology desperately in need of improvement. I feel very limited because of it. Only a few times in my life have I succeeded to feel free from language and that involved a lot of drugs.

Matthew Stone and friends interview Catherine Borra.

Matthew Stone: What is most important to you?

I don’t know, it depends on what level you are asking! I think there is no one single thing but big groups (or symbols) of values/objects/behaviours and people reflecting into each other that I put together and love. Among these, I think the most important for me is blood.

MS: What do you have faith in?

I believe that people will always go forwards, and even if sometimes it seems that all energy has gone and that this is “the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution” (Francis Fukuyama), I have faith in cycles and I know that it is going to change again.

One kind (I don’t know if it’s the BEST example) of art that I think can change the world is Jiri Kovanda’s series of slight and persevering actions, aimed to reach that space in between invisibility, memory and oddness - or everyday surrealism, and Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit book as well as other of her works. This is because it’s important to me to revive faith, even just for the sake of it, and creativity as a consequence of it; because faith is an extremely important factor of life although currently tends to be discarded.

Norman Rosenthal : Why are we alive at all? It is after all a very strange state to find ourselves in.

I’ve just finished reading a book by J.G. Ballard, one of his catastrophe series about a drowned world (The Drowned World, so to reference it). Time and space after it, seem to be an even more relative set of dimensions to rely upon, because being alive involves an immediacy between past and future that can just not be grasped (by me, at least). In his book, he depicts these human beings that are undergoing the process of rotating their memory so that, because of the environment they are living in, their immediate recollections - or their most recent past, is the revival of their biological memory from millions of years ago, leading to face regression as a prospective and almost as an acknowledged aim. This crashes the present time of subjectivity to something totally irrelevant in the face of the universe and of the infinity of misperception - I highly doubt that we can state with precision that we are alive at all!

Iphgenia Baal : What is the one thing about you that undermines all the opinions you have made above?

They aren’t opinions, it’s true! All, apart from the question regarding the best example of Art really changing the world for the better, and the one about being alive (that is a confusing subject anyway).

MS: What question should be added to this list?

Matthew Stone and friends interview Ebe Oke.

• Matthew Stone: What do you have faith in?

Ebe Oke: Love, friendship, the overriding benevolence of the universe and the inherent goodness of every human being no matter how wounded or flawed - also, we can heal ourselves of illnesses great and small, I’ve done it!

• Boo Saville : What do you think happens when we die?

EO: I’m not afraid of dying having come close before - I am in love with and lust for life but death is a comforting thought - I believe my spirit will remain, my intelligence will become a feeble footnote and I will harmonise with friends and loved ones: those of the same frequency or spiritual family - I don’t believe in heaven or hell unless it’s self imposed - the inability to forgive is a surefire anchor to the flames.

• Nicola Lane : What does success mean to you?

EO: Ultimately for me it means to accept myself and to love without reservation or fear - it also means to have the freedom to work with whomever I choose whenever I choose and to have access to great resources for my work in different mediums, be it musical, visual or literary - finally it means to have the financial freedom to travel and explore, homes in a city and isolated countryside of my choosing and being able to share it all with the one I love.

• Jack Brennan : What film fits your vision of the future best and why? (The film needn’t be set in the future)

EO: Orlando: the opening scene! I would like to spend my future writing poetry on a rolling hill under a great oak! Tilda Swinton is the ageless, time traveling, gender bending, noble hero(ine) and I can think of no better ticket to the future than that - exploring your anima and animus with lovers of both sexes as both a man and a woman, possessing an otherworldly beauty and charm and being portrayed through the eyes of a brilliantly poetic female director; you can’t go wrong.

• Iphgenia Baal : What is the one thing about you that undermines all the opinions you have made above?

EO: I have a pronounced dark side that through years of honest investigation I have become more conscious of - I faced a lot of adversity earlier in life which caused me to accumulate fears and insecurities which once seemed insurmountable - simply recognising this dark side and the minions in its thrall is a start but something has to occur which grants you enough perspective to see that you actually have a choice not to act from your shadow but from your shine (so to speak) - having mapped out the terrain of my dark side through poems, songs, visions and the mirror of intimate relationships (etc.. ) and realising I have a choice has freed me immensely to embrace a lighter spirit and personality - It’s been a real blessing to visit such extremes.

• MS: What question should be added to this list?

EO: What unique gifts do you have to offer to this world ?

Photo: Iphgenia Baal

Matthew Stone and friends interview Iphgenia Baal.

• Matthew Stone : How can we change the world and what is there to be done?

Iphgenia Baal: It is impossible not to change the world. But, I reckon you are asking how to change the world for the better which I just have to be mainstream about and relate back to Star Wars. No, I could do Hindis and Christians. Someone once explained Hindi to me (I bet I miss loads of things). Essentially you are reincarnated time after time after time and the purpose of each life is to have as little effect on the world as possible, to change things as little as possible, to focus your energies inside instead of making other’s understand your point of view. Depending on how well you do, your reincarnation makes things more or less easy. If you have hardly any impact on the world, you come back as tree, then an ant, then a gnat, then as an amoeba (I missed out some stages but you get the idea) and then eventually, one day you die and, if the life you have just lived has changed nothing, effected nothing you die and then you cease to exist. Ping! Nirvana. Christians on the other hand have marched all over the world pillaging villages in the attempt to ‘spread enlightenment’. Christians march and conquer and preach. Which essentially means they fight and lie. I think the problem is that, if you want to get noticed in this world, you have to start early, put in the time to promote whatever it is you are doing from a young age when, in fact, that is the time you should be figuring out what it is you mean. But, if you take that time to figure out what it is you mean, by the time you have figured it out you will probably dead. And so, have no time to tell everyone else about it.

I think you just have to trust everyone else. I mean, there are exceptions to these rules. I mean, you need Ghandi. And Kapil. So, you can make exceptions in certain lifetimes based on trust. Change the world for the better one this time round and then make up for it in the next by shutting the fuck up. But screw it, no one needs the Catholic Church.

I guess my answer is, you don’t have to change the world, just make sure you don’t fuck it up anymore. And yes, that includes ridiculous attempts at self-promotion for “the good of the world”.

• MS : Can we ever be truly free?

IB: I don’t think any group of people can ever be truly free. The provisos protecting human rights and freedom which any entity governing a body of people, by their very existence detract from the freedom they are protecting. But, any one individual can indeed be free. Find the middle of yourself, arrange the rest of it in an order which allows you to exist. Congratulations. You are free. Now, what are you gonna do?

• MS : What do you have faith in?

IB: That lies, deceit and bad intentions always reveal themselves. And the learning of a collective consciousness. I mean, that’s not something I believe in, I don’t have to. You can just see it and it’s awesome. Like how people learned to draw. Crazy.

• Nicola Lane : What does success mean to you?

IB: No idea.

• Jack Brennan : What film fits your vision of the future best and why? (The film needn’t be set in the future.)

IB: The future? Or my future? The future - Doom Generation My future, I can’t give you the plot, but the setting (it’s not a film) is described perfectly in The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman by J.P. Donleavy. Only, I hope less lonely.

• MS: What question should be added to this list?

Iphgenia Baal: What is the one thing about you that undermines all the opinions you have made above?