We are friends. Like family. Pharrell calls me Sis. I call him Lil Bro. We know each other’s friends and family. We share the same sick humor. We both have a fascination with pop culture, good and bad.
Text RONNIE COOKE NEWHOUSE, Photography MAX FARAGO
In late 2019, 032c magazine published BLACK HOLE CATALOG. At the time, an estimated four million people, many of them children and students, had participated in climate strikes unifying more than 150 countries worldwide against environmental destruction. This movement coalesced around an emotional vocabulary of fear. “Our house is on fire, and I want you to panic,” 16-year-old climate strike figurehead Greta Thunberg told the 2019 World Economic Forum. Responding to this crisis psychology, the introduction to BLACK HOLE CATALOG posited: “We can scream ‘fire!’ and call for help, but we can’t evacuate when the burning house is planet Earth. We’re stuck inside, even when we’re out striking.”
In the first quarter of 2020, the metaphor turned literal – amid COVID-19, to be politically and socially engaged was to #StayHome. Then, following the murder of George Floyd in May, we were called to go outside again – masked and gloved – to join protests on every continent against the old and most deadly pandemic of systemic racism. What the BLACK WHOLE CATALOG posits is ever clearer: familiar infrastructure and design, established jurisdiction and modes of consumption, do not provide solutions to what contaminates our inner selves or the architecture of our surroundings. Traditional images don’t adequately represent this world, the usual blueprints and drawings can’t outline it, and accepted aesthetic convention won’t enhance it.
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