Wipe Your Eyes

Where are you from?

I’m originally from Tunisia, but I was born and raised in France, so I’m French-Tunisian, Tunisian-French.

Do you want to talk about the project at MoMa?

Perception is a project I did two years ago, in 2016, and actually was an artwork located inside the Cairo garbage-collector neighborhood, and the first idea when I decided to go there was to go and beautify this ugly, dirty neighborhood—but I had no idea what it was, actually. I heard about them in 2009, because Mubarak slaughtered 300,000 pigs using the H1-N1 virus and the garbage collectors used their pigs to recycle organic human waste. So, this was in the front of my mind and in 2015, I just decided to go—and I had no idea, I thought these people were kind of dirty, I thought they were living in the garbage, but they were actually living from the garbage. After a few days, my perception had changed already. You realize that the people who are bringing the garbage to the neighborhood, they come with trash, so the garbage comes from another place—and speaking with people, you realize that it’s the garbage of all of Cairo. In Cairo, they call them ‘the garbage people,’ and I kept calling them that for almost a year until we did the project, and I realized that was not their real name. The real garbage people are the ones in Cairo who produce the garbage.

It was a kind of organic project—we went, we didn’t know anyone but we connected with one guy. It’s a Christian Coptic neighborhood, so the first place that I went was the church, and it’s this crazy church that they carved into the mountain. It’s a 20,000-seat church that they built in the seventies, so when you see it you think, 'This is impossible in this place'—it’s inside Garbage City. It’s amazing, when you see it, it blows you away.

So, the people live off the garbage?

Right, so people bring glass, paper, plastic, and each family specializes in one thing. Some people, they collect everything, some people they just collect plastic, some people take care of another specific area. So, each one is allocated one area.

What do they do with it all?

They resell it and recycle it. They recycle more than 80% of what they collect—it’s the most powerful recycling system in the world.

And they just did it because they’re poor?

That’s what it was in the beginning, yes—it started like 60 years ago. There’s 70,000 people living in this neighborhood working together now.

So, you went in and painted the roofs?

No, it’s an anamorphic piece on the sides of the buildings that you have to go on top of the mountain to see, so it goes over 52 facades and covers 258 meters, something like that. But they’re not poor people, that’s the thing. They’re not poor. Some of them are super rich, that’s your perception—because they work with garbage you already think that they’re poor. There’s a disgust.

So, they do well?

Some of them, they do super well. Some guys have a jacuzzi in the house, huge American kitchen, a flatscreen tv—they’re living the life! And they tell you, 'This is our income, we work from this, we make our money off of this.'

It’s business.

It is business, and you know, when they’re done with work and change, they’re like regular people. And they’re working from something that no one really wants. And some of them have contracts with big brands—some families have contracts with L’Oreal, brands like that—because they collect their shampoo bottles and then sell them back to them.

Above: 'Perception' and the artist surveying his work.

So, what drew you to this?

I don’t know—the first idea was to challenge myself. The first thing was an artistic challenge. Then I said, 'I’m going to go there, I’m going to beautify this place.' Then I realized, I don’t need to beautify anything—the place is beautiful by itself. For me, it was one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen. It smells bad, and it’s kind of dirty from the garbage, but there’s beauty despite that.

It’s kind of a beautiful concept, as well.

It’s the idea—the way people welcomed us. It’s kind of a segregated place, nobody will go there. The cops won’t go there, the government won’t go there. So, we spent a year going back and forth, and we spent one month to make the project, and then when you leave you have a kind of family there—when you leave you’re a part of the neighborhood. We’re going back on the tenth of November for a wedding there. It was a really powerful experience—beyond the artistic challenge, and everything that surrounds that, it’s what we lived through with them, and that, for me, is the most important thing. That’s why I took the time to write this book. It’s not just pictures of poor people—I made an artistic choice with the guy filming. I told him not to take pictures of people working in the garbage, because instantly you will have the wrong image. When you see someone with their hands in garbage, you think, 'This guy is looking for his food in there,' when actually he’s just working—the same way you’re working as a journalist, or a guy works in a bank.

So, the book is all about this project?

The book is about this whole journey, how I started this whole adventure from an idea. These people are a pretext to talk about the subject of perception, there are so many people who misjudge because of a stereotype, and for me, this is a way to push people to think about their perceptions of others. As an artist, it was important for me to question that—what is it to be a minority? To be misjudged? Marginalized? Segregated? Because of nothing, actually. They’re doing something really useful.

So, the work itself is Arabic script, is that correct?

Yes.

What does it say?

I work with Arabic calligraphy, so all my work uses words. I write messages, so every time I go to a place, I try to write something that is relevant to the place where I’m creating the artwork. So, in Egypt I used a quote from a Coptic bishop from the 4th century, St. Athanasius of Alexandria. And using this Coptic bishop was a way of convincing the neighborhood—and to convince the neighborhood I needed to convince one guy, and that was the priest. So, when the priest said, 'Okay, you can do it,' it opened the door to the entire neighborhood. People said, 'If the priest said ok, then go ahead, paint on our houses.' So, St. Athanasius said, 'Whoever wants to see the sunlight clearly needs to wipe his eyes first.' That’s the quote.

Whoever wants to see the sunlight clearly needs to wipe his eyes first.

So, the cover of the book mimics the piece?

Yes, I handpainted over 500 book covers to recreate the piece from Egypt. We used recycled paper from the neighborhood to make the book that we bought from them. The paint that we used was blacklight-reactive, so at the end of the project we lit up the whole neighborhood with a blacklight—all the garbage kind of disappeared, and it was just the message coming out. And we have a similar piece in the book that will glow under a blacklight, as well.

Was it difficult to get the priest in the neighborhood to agree?

The priest is a kind of celebrity, he’s like the Justin Beiber of Christianity. He’s a super star. When I saw him the first time, I thought it was a fight—people were jumping to get closer, it was crazy. He accepted to meet me because I’m an artist, and I met him twice. He was actually super open. It’s interesting to see how one guy can have so much influence over 70,000 people. And they welcomed us—we’re not Christian—but they welcomed me like I was their brother. It was amazing.

For me, this whole thing was breaking this kind of propaganda we see right now, that there’s always a conflict between Christians and Muslims, conflict between Muslims and Jews—and here, there was none of that, not at all. The funny thing was there was this one Christian guy who asked us to repaint a mosque—5% of the neighborhood was Muslim and there’s this tiny little mosque—so, the guy was like, 'When you finish, I want to you to repaint the mosque,' because his house was touching the mosque, and because his door was blue, he asked us to paint the mosque in blue to match. So, now when you’re in that part of the neighborhood, you see this blue mosque, and it was asked by a Christian guy. We did it with leftover paint from the project.

What shade of blue?

Like a royal blue.

And he was just being neighborly?

He just wanted the mosque to match his door. But it was interesting to interact with these people and see how they treated things like education, too: one guy, he couldn’t read, but his son was getting a degree in business management. So, now they can take their business to another level. And that’s what's interesting. And there was Wifi everywhere in the neighborhood—it was better than New York in that way. It’s an incredible place.

Above: The artist recreating the work across the covers of his book, and a local boy viewing 'Perception.'

Interested in a book? Visit the launch page here.

Culture

The Club Is Coming to the Stage

We enter and make our way to what is approximately front left of the DJ booth, where we’re accustomed to dancing at clubs in New York. “So is this a techno club or a dance performance?” yells an uncertain participant in my boyfriend’s ear. He laughs, bouncing along to Ben UFO, and yells back, “It’s both!” The club has long been a hot topic in European contemporary dance but it is only now making its way into New York performance venues, largely through transatlantic tours. R.O.S.E. follows recent examples like Michele Rizzo’s HIGHER xtn. at MoMA PS1 (May 2024), (LA)HORDE’s Room with a View at NYU Skirball (October 2023), and Gisèle Vienne’s Crowd at BAM (October 2022).

Do these performances compromise the club’s spirit — a space idealized for its anonymity, dark lighting, and thundering music? The notion of the club as a utopian escape is admittedly just that — an ideal — because of how its intense conditions can create barriers to entry. Still, the club remains sacred for many, a place to forge connections and embrace an alternative state of being. Looking at how performances transfer this spirit to new settings reveals what aspects of the club are essential and those that aren’t.

Sharon Eyal, R.O.S.E. 2024. Photography by Stephanie Berger, courtesy of Park Avenue Armory.

Eyal’s dancers make their entrance. The lighting shifts from roving blue to yellow spotlights as Ben UFO’s tracks transition to more melodic beats. Clad in deconstructed lace Dior lingerie with dark red tears painted on their faces, the dancers move cautiously in a tightly maintained pack, slicing paths through the horde with hoof-like steps and jerky leg extensions. After around ten minutes of this controlled choreography, the dancers vanish as the lighting shifts back to blue and Ben UFO picks up his dubby beats. The club, as we knew it, resumes. This cycle of tightly executed movements and free-flowing club-goers repeats several times, each time emboldening the dancers to plunge further into the crowd.

Clubbing in a building once built for the U.S. Army National Guard on Manhattan’s Upper East Side turns out to be surprisingly successful — at least for the audience. What starts as an awkward, scattered group searching for their non existent seats gradually gels into an engaged, bouncing crowd that erupts in cheers each time the dancers enter and exit. Performance patrons who might never step foot in a club find themselves swept up in its potential for communion, moving in unison with fellow ticket holders. But it isn’t until the very end of R.O.S.E. that the dancers finally break free from Eyal’s choreography and join the fired-up audience in a brief moment of improvisatory movement with the music. By keeping her dancers at arm’s length, Eyal seems more interested in the club as a backdrop for her signature movement style than wholly as a space with meaningful stories to be told.

Michele Rizzo, HIGHER xtn. 2024. Photography by Cameron Kelly courtesy of MoMA PS1.

Back in May, I attended Wire Festival, a multiday electronic music event at Knockdown Center that had no shortage of organically united dancefloors. It attracted a crowd of seasoned ravers who were eager to celebrate the start of spring as they danced alongside DJs who played well into the daylight. I left Wire in an afternoon daze to see Michele Rizzo’s HIGHER xtn. at MoMA PS1. My sleepless euphoria only deepened as the performance unfolded, starting with a lone dancer who looked plucked out of the festival.

The dancer, dressed in sneakers, baggy jeans, and a tight tank top, shuffled slowly into the gallery, perfectly in sync with the looping bars of an understated electronic melody. Soon, other dancers, clad in the same staple rave uniform, joined him — each having traveled from Europe for the U.S. museum debut of HIGHER xtn., which premiered at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam in 2018 and quickly became a fixture at kunsthalles and festivals across the continent. As the score’s tempo climbed, the choreography locked into a 16-count sequence, which the dancers executed with precise synchrony. They remained intensely focused, never making eye contact with each other, as they sought release in the endless repetition of synthesized beats. Once the dancers reached their limit, they stopped the sequence and exited the gallery, one by one.

HIGHER xtn. used the focused daylight of the gallery to highlight the meditative release found in the repetitive movements that dominate dark dancefloors. The performance’s restraint brought more consistency and intentionality than Eyal’s all-encompassing club construction in R.O.S.E. Yet both performances offer enticing entry points into club culture for those who may not frequent raves. Rizzo’s ecstatic, hypnotic repetitions reveal how the club can mirror other meditative practices, while Eyal’s interpolation of performance and clubbing helped hesitant audience members blossom by the end. Still, both works overlook one of the most underappreciated aspects of clubbing — its potential for individual expression. HIGHER xtn.’s pristine uniformity especially risks promoting the outdated techno trope that there’s a “right” way to dance to electronic music.

Maybe this shortcoming is, in fact, a benefit. For habitual ravers jaded by one too many sunrise sets, it’s a reminder to return to the club with more intention. If you pause and peer through the darkness, you’ll see hundreds of people moving to the same beat, each with their own subtle variations. This collective choreography is a ready-made spectacle that doesn’t need validation in a theater or museum. And when the music shifts slightly, you can watch the ripple effect sweep through the crowd while feeling the new beat in your body. Maybe this small bit of magic is best left on the dance floor.

Culture

Real Slick, Jack: Psyche Organic Arrives in New York

Shop Psyche Organic at Happier Grocery and Dimes. Coming soon to @citarellagourmetmarket @unionmarket @gourmetgarage @deciccos @fairwaymarket plus many more.

Culture

Porsche SCOPES Brings Art, Music, and Design to Toronto

The festival was a full immersion into Toronto’s dynamic creative energy. Day one set the tone with DJ collective Living Room, followed by an experimental performance by Claire Rousay that captivated the crowd. Jewelry designer Steff Eleoff unveiled her Porsche Taycan 4S art car installation—a bold fusion of automotive and wearable art inspired by her Sedona ring—while OVO Sound’s Naomi Sharon and DVSN wrapped up the night with powerful, genre-defying performances.

We witnessed SCOPES Toronto bridging underground and mainstream with day two’s lineup. DJ Korea Town Acid’s set paved the way for Angelphroot and Dameer’s debut of BASSMATI, a track blending South Asian influences with bass-driven sounds. Chippy Nonstop’s return to Toronto and Richie Hawtin’s extended set were milestones of the evening, proving that the city’s underground scene has a global resonance.

The final day featured standout performances from local pianist Harrison, Indigenous artist Tia Wood, and hip-hop visionary Sean Leon, who elevated his set with a live choir. Moonshine Collective’s film and musical performance explored themes of African utopia, showcasing art’s power to bridge culture and technology. Rising Toronto star SadBoi, who paused her tour to perform at SCOPES, further underscored the festival’s commitment to nurturing local talent.

Throughout the weekend, we experienced installations from artists like Mitsu Mitsu and culinary creations from Bar Mordecai, capturing the multifaceted creativity Porsche SCOPES brought to Toronto. This milestone 10th edition, open to all, allowed Toronto’s vibrant arts scene to thrive, underscoring SCOPES’ mission to celebrate local talent while connecting it to a global audience.

office had the chance to connect with rising star SadBoi ahead of the event. In our conversation, she shared insights into her creative journey and reflected on what performing and growing up in Toronto means to her and her work.

How are you, and where are you at right now? You told me you were traveling.

Um, I’m good, I’m feeling really good right now. I’m traveling back to Salt Lake City. I had a show yesterday in Seattle. I’m on tour right now with Coco and Claire.

How is touring life treating you? Do you like it?

I love being on the road. To be honest, I feel like I don’t know—like I’ve had good experiences and bad ones—but this time it’s really fun, especially with the people I’m surrounded by. It’s also the longest tour I’ve been on; I have about four more weeks to go. I’m trying not to think about how many days I have left.

Do you feel homesick?

Yes, because when I start thinking about how many days are left, I start to miss my dogs. I’ve just been trying to stay in the moment—I don’t even know what day of the week it is, to be honest with you.

Oh, sweet! What are your dogs’ names?

Jillian and Winston. I know, they’re crazy names.

You’ll be performing at SCOPES in Toronto, which is where you grew up. Do you feel like the crowd is different when you perform in Toronto compared to other cities?

Yes, I mean, Toronto just feels different because it’s home. Every time I come back to perform, something in my career has changed. The last time I performed in Toronto, people just wanted to have a good time, and I’m excited to perform back home again to see everyone’s reactions. I know it’s going to be different from the last time. It’s exciting to see your own growth. Toronto is a tough crowd, though. If we’re with you, we’re really with you.

So, they’re super picky? You have to gain their respect, or what is it?

I think Toronto people are in their own world, but when something really connects with them, they’ll lose themselves in the moment. But it takes something to bring them out of that. Toronto crowds are tough because even if they like you, they won’t show it outright until they’re really vibing with you.

It’s like a vibe check, right?

Exactly. They’ll enjoy your performance, but it’s hard to explain. When people visit Toronto, they often say, “Oh, you guys are so nice,” and I’m like, “I don’t think we’re that nice, we’re just polite.” Like, you can walk down the street, and no one will say anything, but it’s just our mannerisms.

You mentioned Toronto can have a moody energy, especially at night, and that the underground night scene there really inspires you. Can you talk more about what makes Toronto's nightlife so influential for you?

Absolutely, Toronto has this unique energy that comes alive at night. Similar to New York, there are the popular clubs everyone knows, but you need to find your niche—the people who know where the real parties are. I remember going to raves in high school yards, sneaking in because I wasn’t old enough. Events like Baby, Jerk!, and Yes Yes Y’all were pivotal, exposing me to DJs blending dancehall with EDM—something I hadn’t seen before. Toronto nightlife is moody and intense, but when everyone’s out, it’s like the whole city is alive.