Dirt is Quiet, Don’t Make Noise: Lilith Stangenberg

April 30, 2023

As the landscape freezes and the last leaf drops, Lilith Stangenberg bears witness to the enigma of nature — the skeleton that lush green often hides is revealed. The German actress, who began by working in the Volksbühne theater, had her first breakout role with the 2016 film Wild, which told the story of a woman who escapes societal confines and runs away into the wilderness with a wolf — untethering herself from the mundaneness of pre-fab housing and working in IT. This urge to strip herself from convention feeds into the character’s ultimate attraction to the rabid beast — and is, at its core, a testament to Strangenberg’s intent as an artist overall. Using her practice as a vessel, Strangenberg explores the relationship between suffering and joy, sexual freedom, naturalism, and materialism, begging questions that only art can answer.

Published in office Issue 19. Get your copy here.

Photography VITALI GELWICH
Styling + Creative Direction NASTYA KLYCHKOVA
Interview PAUL MCCARTHY
Introduction MICHAEL ANTHONY HALL
Talent LILITH STANGENBERG
Casting EGO CASTING
Hair DUSHAN PETROVICH
Makeup LYNSKI
Nails LISA MÅRD
Set Design EMILIA MARGULIES
1st Photo Assistant MINA AICHHORN
2nd Photo Assistant LEONIE-SOPHIE RIEDEL
Photo Intern SEBASTIAN BASK
Fashion Assistants EKATERINA KACHAVINA, LINDA TERNER
Hair Assistant REIYA YAMAOKA
Makeup Assistant NIKOLAS PAROUTIS
Set Design Assistants VINI DE QUEIROZ, JULIETTE CATELLE
Executive Production FILIZ SERINYEL
Production SERINYL+SER.VCS
Production Assistant ISABEL HERZOG

Nearly eight years ago, Strangenberg found common ground in her creative pursuit upon meeting and collaborating with Paul McCarthy, a multidisciplinary artist whose decades of work largely interrogates American influence, including mass media and consumerism. Over the years, the two have continued to share artistic understandings, pursuing the question of provocation versus existentialism. Which one holds greater value? Captured through an often absurdist lens, their art centers on stomach-turning scenes of smeared blood and human shit, backdropped by nude intimacy and experiential sound.

Beginning with their loose adaptation of The Night Porter, an erotic psychological thriller of an ex-Nazi SS officer whose past haunts him while entangled with his newfound love, Night Vater is McCarthy and Strangenberg’s take on the cult classic, in which they transform the narrative to reflect the darkness that lies in Hollywood. After years of on-and-off production, Night Vater crystallized the attempt at understanding the infliction of existence, later seeping into their A&E characters, Adam and Eve, interchangeably, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. Titled, The Drawing Sessions, McCarthy paints Strangenberg, both in the A&E characters, for hours on end, delving deeper into the psyche of the subjects. These intense sessions evoked the artists to create a film of the Garden of Eden, where McCarthy adorns the infamous two-inch stache and Strangenberg bears a slight resemblance to Eva. However, this film subverts the known context and is set in the Los Angeles desert.

LILITH wears FULL LOOK by MIU MIU

Strangenberg attests to art acting as a door into the inner part of oneself, where the true self lives. While her early readings of Dostoyevsky have complicated these understandings, the German artist continues onward, unraveling the thread that is life. Experiencing Strangenberg and McCarthy’s collective art feels like a dream where all senses are heightened, and the limits of what a person can visually take are pushed. Over Zoom, both artists indulge in conversation about how they met, the attempt at making an image, and the ultimate question of provocation versus existentialism.

While drawing, we kind of went deep inside the psyche of those characters.

Lilith wears FULL LOOK by MIU MIU

Lilith Strangenberg— It was 2015. I was part of the Berlin Volksbühne theatre. Paul was invited to do a sort of show there, and decided to work with some actors from the company, so this is how I came in. We kind of reshot some already existing scenes from the exhibition Paul showed there, some videos which we reenacted. This is how we met, but only for a couple of days. The work was pretty interesting for both of us, and we decided to talk about a film project, The Night Porter, the film by Liliana Cavani; we thought about doing a sort of re-imagination of that film.

Paul McCarthy— We came up with the idea to do a remake of The Night Porter while we were rehearsing a scene in the bathtub. The bathroom had tile on the walls, and somebody said, “it reminds me of The Night Porter,” then I jokingly said, I think it was a joke, “we should remake the film.” It took how many years before we did it?

We actually shot the film and did it in 2019.

Yeah. I wrote a script and we performed in a large set called “The Maze” that we had built in my studio. The performances took place over 30 days.

When the idea came up, it was a pretty magical moment because we were in this little bathroom in the theater. I had a short wig, and I kind of looked like the character [Charlotte Rampling in The Night Porter]. And then, as you mentioned, there was this architecture of the room that reminded us of The Night Porter.

The collaboration between the two of us has been going on since 2015. Drawings and sculptures came out of Night Porter, or NV (Night Vater) and A&E. Lilith said in the bathroom that Night Porter was one of her favorite films, and I said it was one of my favorite films. It took a long time to get it together to do Night Vater – four years.

The narrative of Night Vater is similar to Night Porter, but shifted. In NV, Max is a Hollywood slimy predator producer living in Los Angeles, not a Nazi officer. Lucia is a young girl coming from Germany to meet Max to audition for a film. She is not a young girl in a concentration camp. Towards the end of shooting, we were trying to resolve how and where the suicide of Max and Lucia would take place. We thought we could do the suicide scene in the woods outside of LA. Being in the woods brought up the subject of Adam and Eve, A&E or Adolf and Eva. And then it was a question: "Do we really take on that subject of Adolf and Eva?” Once the doors opened, once Pandora's box opened, what were we going to do? Also, at the end of shooting The Night Porter, we changed the name to Night Vater, or Night Father, which had to do with me being much older than Max in Night Porter, which we thought was interesting. It disrupted the expectation of a love story and introduced the subject of incest. You're not really sure if I am Lucia’s father, or I'm not. It's confusing as to who these characters of Max and Lucia are. Is it a love story of a father and a daughter, or not? Is it part of their erotic buffoon play?

I was just thinking that, the first time that we went into those A&E characters, was during those long drawing sessions we did, which is an interesting way to learn something about a new character, and over a period of two years, we just did drawings as Adolf and Eva, before we even started to shoot the actual film, the A&E film. So when we started filming, we had already practiced a lot, so we knew so much in a very primal way. While drawing, we kind of went deep inside the psyche of those characters.

I understand it as a sort of door or an entrance relieving this inner animal – the silent secret nocturnal part inside of us.

LILITH wears HAT by J.KIM, DRESS and SHOES by JW ANDERSON, UNDERPANTS by EKATERINA ZELENTSOVA

That's also part of trying to understand what it is that we've been doing, because there was The Night Porter, then there are the drawings. The drawing actions are titled The Drawing Sessions. The sessions sometimes lasted eight to twelve hours. It's always been hard for me to explain how or why it works – it’s a subconscious dive. The six-by-ten feet drawings are always done on a large table. The drawings become like a stage or an arena. The characters develop there. There is no script. It is an improvisation.

I understand the drawings and also the films as windows or doors, and I think it's inside of all of us, inside of all human beings. There are certain parts that we always try to hide or repress, certain parts that we never reveal to the outside, in society, or normality or reality. I feel like maybe it's an inner animal. I think the drawings, and what we did in the drawing sessions, [speaks to] what art is; I understand it as a sort of door or an entrance relieving this inner animal – the silent secret nocturnal part inside of us. It's a realm where reason is not guiding anymore, more like an endless dream — a delirious state.

It's easier to some degree to talk about the films; these video productions are conceived as a series, or a long feature which is five to eight hours. I think of them as a continuum. We repeat certain actions, scenes over and over. They change each time. It’s part of an attempt to dig deeper. There is a structure, a skeleton that has been mapped out in the script that helps move the narrative. It is the improvisation that is critical. In the drawing sessions, there's this thing that whatever Lilith is doing as a character, it's almost as if what she's doing manifests itself in the drawing, but not literally. I think we both lose ourselves. It flows in a circle. Delirium. After we shot The Night Porter, we couldn't begin to shoot A&E because Covid happened. I don't know exactly what happened in the woods that day, but Lillith improvised with what was there. And whatever the environment was, whatever the ground was, she entered a kind of zone. When someone says action? She can go into it, a free zone, free in the sense of creativity making art, free to make a language. It's an attempt. If there's anything that is about the two of us, it's the agreement to attempt to make this language that is poetics – it's about art and the importance of art. There’s a freedom that has to exist within it.

What I mostly experienced when we did the drawings and when we filmed is that creation, it's very unpredictable and chaotic, and you cannot really control it . It’s like desires: they just appear, and then they are gone. With creation, that's the same thing; it’s more like with dreams, the minute you wake up or want to control or understand it, it's already gone. Just escapes. For the magazine shoot, I felt that the forest was also a form of a gate, a door into the subconscious, or into the realm of fantasies, dreams, or psyche. The opposite of what we experience in a city or in a town.

LILITH wears COAT and SHOES by BOTTEGA VENETA, UNDERPANTS are TALENT’S OWN / LILITH wears DRESS by ANTON BELINSKIY

It's also that a forest is a living thing. It is something that's of the ground, the Earth. There’s something about going back into nature and back into something primal and the association that we have to the forest, the animal coinciding with nature. Even at some point, I like referring to ourselves as certain animals, a cat, a pig, or a hog.

What interested me about the nature we filmed in was that it was so dry over there, and there were all those dead trees lying on the ground and they looked like skeletons. Not a very lush version of the Garden of Eden, a cruel and violent dystopian version. It’s winter here in Germany, and it's cold and endlessly gray. It’s January, and the trees have no leaves; they are naked. You look at them, and you understand so much about each tree; why he bent to one side, or torn, or why is he strangely so positioned. As if it reveals the whole story of its life. You see the tree's skeleton. Its soul. I believe they have their own personalities.

What’s happening now is it’s been raining so much in California that the landscape will change in the spring. The area that we shot A&E, the area that we shot A&E in was quite dry — harsh. This year it will be green with more flowers.

Deleuze [Gilles Deleuze] did an interview like this once. He did an interview on ABC, where someone would give him a letter, and he would give them a word.

He goes right down the list. Yeah. There are way more words, but here we go. Oh, one thing that’s interesting – I counted the number of days that we've actually performed, and it's 100 days right on the dot. Not counting Berlin, it's 100 days.

Oh, wow.

Okay. Erotic, scripts, improvisation, desire, father, daughter, Adolf, Adam, Eva, Eve, Marilyn Monroe, Lillith, Paul, fascism, America, Germany, acting, art, erotic, transgression, provocation versus existentialism, sex, shit, shitting, shitting on the face, shifting shitting on the face, shit smearing, peeing on the face, peeing on the dick, sandwich, ketchup, champagne, blood, butter, dick, biting, biting ears, biting tongue, bashing head, stabbing, shooting, nature, architecture, prosthetic, a series of words which is much longer.

You give me one, and I give you one.

A&E.

America and Europe.

Bursts.

Birth. Mickey Mouse.

Death.

Over and over, again and again.

Purity.

Language.

Aggressivity.

Erotic.

Innocence.

Love.

Scream.

Mouth.

Dick.

Cunt.

Soul. Goddess.

Female.

Mother.

Nipple. Father.

Dick.

LILITH wears COAT and SHOES by BOTTEGA VENETA, UNDERPANTS are TALENT’S OWN

I think art is often always about those two energies; purity and aggressivity, beauty and Beastiality.

Hey Paul, you know what, I was reading a book about masochism. It's the book I showed you, and there are three books, actually. The one I read is about 1,000 pages big. It's mostly about the writer of Venus in Furs, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. And a lot of different writers write an essay on masochism. I wish you could read it. It's super interesting.

It’s only in German?

Yes, it’s only in German. It doesn't exist in English. But it's a very interesting collection. Also, in the other book, there are so many images, so interesting and so profound. I'm still very occupied with the same sort of questions. When I was very young, around 16, I discovered Dostoyevsky, and since then, I never really recovered. I always end up going back to Dostoyevsky.

In the book about masochism, they end up with Dostoyevsky, too. With his essence that the way to the highest, purest form of virtue mostly leads through the darkest, most difficult way of sin. And I really understand Marquis De Sade in the same form of spirit. He often positions the innocence next to the aggressivity, and I think art is often always about those two energies; purity and aggressivity, beauty and Beastiality.

The physicality within masochism, the essence of the body.

Pain.

A&E and Night Vater are connected, they’re a diptych.

I think A&E is more innocent.

It's a form, but there's something more innocent in the characters, right?

Not just the characters, but as a whole piece of art, the whole thought is higher than The Night Porter; it’s its own creation.

I think that they are related to one another in a number of ways, subjects. Both give out. You are constantly moving the moment into something. I see myself watching at times simply stunned. There are two of us. What comes out of us as we do it, and what we feel as we do it – what we become. There’s an addiction to doing it, a drug and a release. It is a state of mind. And also the infliction of existence. That's the attempt to go into that and to somehow make an image of that. It's making the image of existence and the confliction of it, which is why the discussion of masochism or suffering is in there.

And there lies the addiction? When I was inside that tree for the photoshoot the other night, it was very dark and super cold and raining, and we had already shot the whole day — then it came to the last picture, me naked inside that big oak tree. I was a little scared because it was so cold, but all of sudden, I felt so protected and so sublime. It was interesting. Maybe everything that we do, and what a lot of art deals with, is the attempt to return inside the mother’s body. Maybe death is the only moment where we kind of realize that? When we become raw material.

When I saw the image of you in the tree, I thought Lilith is making an image, the attempt, the effort at the image, using what is there.

... the very big emotion has no words, no language.

LILITH wears COAT and SHOES by BOTTEGA VENETA, UNDERPANTS are TALENT’S OWN

You mentioned this form of addiction, looking for delirium. We are looking for it in the scenes, and I think I always have the form of longing inside myself – to transcend the personal.

I think, in some ways, that’s the dissolving. Inn a very clichéd way, it's the dissolving of some sort of logic or ego. There are a couple of times in the drawing session where we've been on top of the drawings for several hours, and you're lying on your back, and you have your hand, your fingers in your mouth and you're rocking back and forth. The body is a kind of a vibrating sack; even if you're saying a word, over and over again the word becomes abstracted.

The word loses its meaning, or the meaning becomes less important than the emotion of the word. The sound.

It may be when the word turns to the poetic. That's how I was thinking the other day. You can define a word like “poetics” in different ways. In some ways, that's when the word, when the action, becomes? There's a poetics to the action.

I think the poetic power lies in the emotion. I think the very big emotion has no words, no language.

Our language, there's a transmitting, transgression, a form of poetics, the art transmits to the other without the verbal. In A&E, you're not sure what it is? There are these two characters, one is referred to as Adolf Hitler, but he definitely is an American. He's not German. And the female. Who is she? Is she his daughter, or is she supposed to be Eva Braun, but a blond Eva Braun. Who's the female? Why are these two together? They don’t make sense. What is being said or what is being felt, transmitted. It is love, erotic play that is buffoonery. As a viewer, you're caught in this thing that takes you through this very primal path. There's something so sad and humorous about both characters. It is delirium. It's an image of delirium. It's an artifice. I think it’s poetry.

I never thought about what an audience, spectators, would think when they watch this. I never thought about that. But when you just described it, I started thinking about them. How would they feel?

I think they’d be confused. They’d get caught. It's like a fish on a hook. They're caught in a dream, right? A kind of dream.

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After 30 years and over 100 cult fragrances, COMME DES GARÇONS PARFUMS 1994–2025 BY SIMONETT & BAER launches this month

December 17, 2024

“I have to add that the topic is, of course, an irrational one, because it's not art and it's not fashion. It has to do with scent, which is something in the air,” explains Dino Simonett, renowned art-book maker and designer/publisher of the new COMME des GARÇONS x SIMONETT & BAER book, which details 30 years of CDG perfumes.

“The moment you smell something is irrational,” he continues. “This book transports you and brings you to the idea behind the perfumes. People have gotten thousands of art catalogues from me, but this fucking perfume thing really drives people a little bit crazy, you know? Because everybody has this bottle; and that bottle smells like this on them; and this bottle I need; and all the memories and everything. I like it a lot that we made this.”

As fans and family of the world’s coolest brand prepared to gather at Dover Street Parfums Market in Paris to celebrate the launch of the book, our Editor-At-Large Paige Silveria shared some coffee and cigarettes with Simonett to discuss his wild trajectory, making books with Joseph Beuys and Tilda Swinton early on, and the importance of nonconformal thinking.

By Paige Silveria

This fucking perfume thing really drives people a little bit crazy.

Paige Silveria: Tell me about yourself. You make books.

Dino Simonett: My books are my art. Each book might be a painting or sculpture. And you should not do the same sculpture all the time. When you hike somewhere, you never should go the same way back home — this is something my mother taught me when I was young. In the same way, it's boring to make the same stuff all the time. So I try to find a way to invent my own language.

PS: This book you’ve made is really beautiful.

DS: It’s hyperrealistic larger-than-life images of boxes and flacons in an endless row presented on paper the thickness of a children’s book.

PS: I loved how it said in the press release that you woke up one Sunday morning and the idea for the book suddenly came to you.

DS: The backstory is that Remo Hallauer [COO of COMME des GARÇONS International] is a true book lover. We met at the Offprint book fair in Paris. And one day, shortly after peak COVID, this email came from him asking if I’d think about a possible collaboration with one of the young stars here — and no hard feelings, but it didn’t work out. So then, as it is in life, which is the essential thing, you have to have an idea. And most of the time, they’re not good enough. You have to have another and another and then you go, Ah ha! Perfume.

PS: And you’d already been pretty familiar with their fragrances?

DS: I’ve known this stuff since the beginning. I wore the first perfume they created. It was part of my life all the time, and I thought, It's so funny. There’s a connection with how I make the books: like two, three books a year, all collaborations and each is different. Just like their perfumes. So I immediately texted Remo.

PS: And what perfect timing, with the 30-year anniversary.

DS: Yes, but this was two years ago or so. I hadn’t had the jubilee in mind. It might not look like much, but there was a lot of work to do.

PS: Many of the advertisements and images weren’t archived, physically or digitally, right? You had to search all over for a good portion of the material?

DS: Well we also had to wait for the official deal to go through in the beginning. Adrian Joffe [President of COMME des GARÇONS International and Dover Street Market International] wanted to do it but he didn’t have the mind space at the time; they were about to open the Dover Street Market here in Paris. So we were on our own for a bit, developing the project from zero. We looked all over the Internet and tried to create the chronology. I had a young guy helping me. He kept reminding me to be patient and to continue to work on growing the book. The door was open, but we had to wait in front of the next room. So we took little steps to prepare ourselves. And stuff slowly worked out.

PS: And thank God for the Internet.

DS: Yes, because as you mentioned, there was no archive. We thought surely they’d have something in the basement. But no, that didn’t exist. At one point they sent us a list of all the perfumes so we had a clear checklist to manage. I had to become an expert.

PS: There are so many, over 100?

DS: Yeah, and at one point the CDG team was activated. It was like a machine and in the spring suddenly a load of stuff was coming. First we had to grow the grapes, then make the wine and then the grappa. And at the end, it's a really strong grappa. And so things came together, and then one day Adrian said, “All is fine, but Rei [Kawakubo] must now also approve it. This is how the system works.” But nobody had told me! So Remo met with Rei to show her the book.

PS: That’s a bit of pressure!

DS: She could have said no and we’d have to throw everything in the garbage, two years of work. There was indeed a little bit of pressure. But it was fine. She liked the book. Then at the end of this summer we met again and they asked if they could have some of the finished copies on 20 November in Tokyo. I said, “I’m sorry, what?” He was thinking that the book was finished, you know? I told him we still needed a lot of material to finish it. Sometimes it's nice though to have this pressure. It's motivating and thrilling when you finally accomplish it all.

PS: Let’s go back. How did your upbringing inform who you are?

DS: It has to do with nonconformal thinking. Most people think the same. And we’re constantly pressured as well, by everything around us to conform. You have to really fight to keep your head and so I had this upbringing with this rather eccentric mother who was absolutely nonconformistic in every way. She was resolute. Why should we follow the path of the masses? It was never my thing. Voilà.

PS: How were you in school?

DS: I was not so good at school. I was only skateboarding at that time. I was on the Swiss National Team. I even was here in Paris at a European championship when I was 15 at the Trocadero. And my mother said, “You are not going to school anymore. You need an apprenticeship. It makes no sense to send you to school any longer.” I was independent and had my first salary at 16.

PS: What were you doing?

DS: I was a carpenter making tables, chairs, all that stuff. All my friends went to high school with like 16-week holidays, while I had only four. And so it was really, really tough shit for a 16 year old. But I learned two important things. The first one was discipline; seven o'clock each day it started and lasted nine hours. And the second thing was precision; you have to do things right. People always said to me that the apprenticeship was good as I’d really use it for the rest of my life. And I always thought that was such bullshit. But actually, it's kind of true. And so anyways, the moment I finished my apprenticeship, the very last day of the last test, I went on the Interrail for one month and never went back to a carpenter shop.

PS: What’d you do after?

DS: I wrote a letter to this very super famous music guy, Claude Nobs who was organizing the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, telling him I’d like to work there that summer. I mentioned that I’d just finished my apprenticeship for carpentry. He phoned me back immediately after getting the letter. He said, “Oh you’re a carpenter? You can come right now.” He was renovating his apartment in Montreux. So I stayed and worked there alone while he was up at his chalet. I felt like Kevin McCallister from Home Alone in this completely furnished apartment. And then the festival started, and there was this guy from New York doing a large mural painting. It was Keith Haring. I had no idea who he was. We became friends. Then I met George Benson and Herbie Hancock. It started from nothing and then one thing comes, another thing comes, another thing comes. This is how I started, which is maybe not the natural way. But I was following my intuition and taking chances and putting myself out there.

PS: And you're going after what you have a passion for.

DS: I think that’s the best way to live one's life. It was like my own private art school. I met all the guys I was totally hot about. I met Joseph Beuys and told him I wanted to do an art project with him. I got his number and he told me to ask for his assistant. But I took everything for granted, what people said to me. So I had this phone number in Berlin. And I called the guy 20 times until this fucking meeting with Beuys finally happened. And we met and made a small collaboration art magazine called “Quer.” You just have to stick to the stuff.

PS: Wow. You don't still have one of those copies around, do you?

DS: I had one and I brought it to Remo at one of our meetings. Adrian saw it and immediately took it … I hope he gave it back to Remo. Adrian has a pile of my stuff that he wanted to see, so that’s good.

PS: Yeah, of any coffee table in the world for it to be displayed, his is probably in the top 10.

DS: So then I decided my dream was to be a film director. There was a film school in Berlin that I applied to. They only took about 18 people from 600. We waited all week to see this list on the wall for the final call back meeting. And my name wasn’t there. I was like, “Shit!” And then a week later, I received a letter saying I’d been accepted. Later the director told me it was clear enough with my application and the art magazine I’d sent that I’d be accepted. I don’t say this to brag. I say this to tell you that every young person that wants to go somewhere, all they have to do is fight. You have to get out of your house and your small town and your comfort zone and all that shit.

PS: I agree. So you’ve made films?

DS: I made a feature movie and went to the film festival. It was really amazing and everything, but I was not Tarantino, you know? So it’s the last semester and Tilda Swinton is supposed to teach a seminar. I really wanted to attend it. It would be the cherry on top of the cake. Then she postponed it once, then twice. The third time, I’m on the tube and there’s a woman in front of me with a newspaper that says that Tilda’s super mentor, Derek Jarman, had passed away. It’s the very Monday morning that her seminar is set to begin. And I thought, Oh shit. She’s not going to be there. But then she was there after all and it was a fantastic week. There were only five of us students and we all fell in love with her. And she fell in love with us. I’ve known her since.

PS: I can only imagine. How’d you make the transition into books?

DS: You have to find out what you're really good at. I had long discussions with this guru, an old guy who was a very diligent, very bright guy. I was really miserable, feeling directionless. He asked me why I wasn’t continuing with filmmaking. And I couldn't give him an answer. Then he said right into my face, “Probably it’s because you’re not good enough.” The message was one-hundred percent received. It was a relief; I'm not a bad person. This guy told me the truth, and I could accept it. And when you can do this, you can figure out what you actually want to do, what you’re actually good at. I started making books. I made one with another film director. And we visited Tilda at her hotel, bringing one to her as a present. As we’re knocking, I thought to myself, If I did another book focused on people in this business, it’d have to be her. And she opens the door, looks at the book and says, “Oh, I would like to have a book like this on me.”

PS: These situations seem unreal.

DS: I spent five years on her book, which was an enormous success. It included stills from all her films and launched it in different cities. Fantastic shit.

PS: And now you’ve just released this soon-to-be iconic CDG book.

DS: I've learned to be patient; things can take you years. This book with Adrian and Remo took two years and I didn’t even know if it was going to be approved! Follow your dreams as much as you can. It's not so important which dream it is exactly. If I see a step in front of me, I try to take each chance I get. This is what I wish for everybody, in whatever situation you find yourself, start to do something with nothing. This book started with just a simple idea. You can not find anything like this on the Internet, this compilation, this narrative. It’s something we had to bring together with enormous work. And here we are. I think in our digital, splattered times sometimes you have to make something which is real. That you can sit with and focus on in silence and really take time alone with it.