Dendrophilia

Photography by Laura Hanifin Night Garden © 2014

The word “Phytophilia” has now been adopted by some in the sexology field to refer to those who have a fetishist or paraphilic interest in plants (i.e., individuals who derive sexual pleasure and sexual arousal from flora). It is an extension of dendrophilia, which is literally a love of trees. Both of these may involve actual sexual contact with trees and plants and their veneration as phallic symbols. Continue reading “Dendrophilia”

Dapper Dan 11

Dapper Dan is back with its 11th issue, in which Andreas Kronthaler talks about being Vivienne Westwood’s right hand man, Katerina Kana delves into the mysterious world of writer and curator Valentinas Klimašauskas, and shoe fetishist photographer Jacopo Benassi lets us in on his passion for slippers. There’s also an essay by Nuno Coelho exploring psychogeography and the urban environments of the future and a look at the work of controversial architect Dimitris Pikionis. Added to this are an article by Lisa Rovner on the trickery and fakery of the art world and an interview with Vasilis Toufexis, the pioneer behind Greece’s boundary-pushing comic magazine, Kolumbra.

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Ettore Guatelli Museum – Create Wonder from the Obvious

Photography by Luca Campri

There is such a thing as magnificent obsession, in which passion and endless work, free from the restrictions of time, can create incredible expressions that are unlike anything known.

The Museo Ettore Guatelli is a perfect expression of magnificent obsession. Just a few kilometres from Parma, in the heart of the Italian food valley, surrounded by a bucolic landscape, is the museum house of Ettore Guatelli, a rural teacher who built his encyclopedia on the walls of his farmhouse, spending years collecting all kinds of objects whose common value is the stories they tell of the lives of the people who used them. Guatelli collected tangible objects of social life in order to save a fast disappearing civilization from oblivion, at a point in the 20th century that saw interest in material culture spreading in Italy, to create an archive that is completely unlike any other folklore, rural or ethnographic museum. Continue reading “Ettore Guatelli Museum – Create Wonder from the Obvious”

Exit Sanity And Insanity

In Dapper Dan’s seventh issue, the legendary couturier Romeo Gigli emerges from self-imposed exile to share an intimate history of his roller-coaster career; the photographer Harry Peccinotti revisits the heady days around the founding of the iconic 1960s magazine Nova; Angelo Flaccavento peeks inside the personal archive of the pioneering tailoring and textiles master Nino Cerruti; and the Brazilian designer Paula Gerbase explores a utopian future with her new label 1205. We also open our ears to the abrasive, transcendent sounds of Michael Gira’s venerable art-porn-noise collective Swans and Scott Soriano’s underground punk and archival releases as S.S. Records; and our eyes to the existential angst of Aristomenis Theodoropoulos’ acrylics and the glacial beauty of Henning Bock’s landscapes.

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