JOAQUIM DE ABREU
JOAQUIM DE ABREU, Founder / Creative Director
Interview by GEIR HARALDSETH
Film still from Jumana Manna's video 7 Men on a Vault.
two-channel projection, 4 mins.
Joaquim de Abreu founded Abreu in Stockholm in 2016, a studio working across architecture, interiors, lighting and lighting design. He did not arrive by the usual route. He began as a DJ and a club manager, reading rooms from behind a booth, and only later moved into work with interior designers and architects. What he noticed there became the argument the studio is built on: lighting is brought in too late, treated as a service run after the decisions have been made, when it should have been part of them. His method is the right light in the right place. Not a carpet of light laid evenly across a room and burning energy to do it, but accentuated zones, each with its own detail and its own atmosphere, composed the way a scene is composed. Light is the material. The fitting is only what carries it. He is unsentimental about how that understanding is acquired. Only when working with light is it possible to comprehend how it works, he says, and trying things out and making errors is indispensable in order to develop a feeling for it. The Nordic condition sits underneath all of it. Long dark winters make daylight something to compensate for, and evenings something to build: the campfire atmosphere, low and warm and gathered. The studio's work runs from hotels and restaurants to offices, clubs, a historic pharmacy and showrooms lit with video mapping. He has collaborated with Söder Design for many years, going back to their work together at Nordic Light Hotel.
Ava Gardner & Marilyn Monroe
BYJoyce Carol OatesWhat a sleek hot-skinned little rat-beauty she was. No one like her in all of Hollywood. Ohhh, God. The Blond Actress got high staring at, rating. Envious of the Brunette. No need to bleach her pubic hair, oh! The Blond Actress's dark roots.
Yet in her presence, the Blond Actress was shy. It was the Brunette who approached looking at seductive. Both women had come to the party (at a Venetian palace or a house overlooking a Bel Air canyon) in the near distance mirroring as of Shangri-La without male escorts. Yet both women were married. Or were they? The hot-skinned little rat-beauty from rural North Carolina. The LA-born Okie marriage-hungry.
They were on a balcony. Night air and mist. The Brunette was saying, “Why is she so serious?” — smiling.
Had they been discussing this subject? What subject? The Blond Actress was confused.
The Brunette had soared to fame at notoriety years before the ascension of Marilyn Monroe, and yet was not much her elder.
Saying, “Nothing, the movies, it's mostly that.” As the Blond Actress protested, “Oh, but — it's my life,” in the Brunette's soft drawling, “Bullshit, Marilyn. Only life is your life. Marilyn.”
Their stage millionaire producer host had seated the Blond Actress at the Brunette at opposite end of the table, as a conversation. Everyone says the Brunette is beautiful. Is that fair, she's not. Oh, God.
It was said of the Brunette beauty that she walked through her films only performing scene after scene in a trance while the directors directed, with few retakes. She had a perfect body, not so heavy as the Blond Actress, not with the Blond Actress's billowy rear. You saw that face and thought of Botticelli.