My essentials: Leo Chircop’s cultural picks

I’m Leo. I’ve always loved looking at images to understand the way the world is informed and works. I love reading about the topics I adjacently discover via the images that represent a subject of my interest. This fascination has shaped me in wanting to discover more on the process of image making.

Book

I’m currently reading Anti-portraiture: Challenging the Limits of Portraiture by Fiona Johnstone and Kirstie Imber (2020). It is a collection of essays that illustrate works of different artists across varied media. I’m interested in understanding the liminality and process related to the boundary of making, or even the unmaking of the so-called portrait genre, and how one can create an inside-out image of themselves or others.

Film 

Sally Potter’s Orlando from 1992. At the core, I was mesmerised by Tilda Swinton’s shapeshifting performance. You never really know where it can take you.

Internet and TV 

I was looking at images of Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (1925-1929). The project consists of photographic reproductions of paintings across time in the ambition to trace visual patterns in the visual language of art history. It is a crash course.

Music 

Enigma’s MCMXC a.D. (1990) or Single Gun Theory’s Flow River of My Soul (1994) are my go-to albums if I feel like having an out of body experience.

Place

Pompeii. I’d love to see frescoes and mosaics.