Club Chat: Can you tell me about CACTUS DIGITALE’s structure as a creative agency, magazine, and production house? How do these aspects blend with one another, and how do you draw lines between them?
Simone: We were born 10 years ago as a fashion magazine. So that creative part, the editorial part, was a key feature at the beginning. The agency came after as it was necessary to sustain our research. So in a way, everything is about researching and exploring visual languages through different and always new contributors for both the magazine and all our digital and material projects. The agency sustained, and we developed the CGI department after COVID. There was a lot of request and demand, so we just followed the flux and the rhythm of creative culture and our industry. I think that image is what has driven us since the beginning, and the study and exploration of images as an unwritten language. –– We always try to go deeper in very different directions, with CGI, with real photography, and with all kinds of experimentation that visual culture has developed so far. This occasion is our way to bring together what we have done in these past ten years, and this issue capitalized and epitomizes our work. You’ll see tonight that all the artists who are involved in this activation in LA are featured within the pages of the magazine. That’s the idea of expanded publishing that we want to discover and go deeper with.
"I think that image is what has driven us since the beginning, and the study and exploration of images as an unwritten language."
That leads to my next question, you described expanded publishing as “where form is fluid and the printed page becomes a point of departure for audiovisual storytelling”. What about Now Instant felt like the right place to bring this idea to life for the LA activation?
Now Instant is perfect because it's really weird for it to be in LA. It's not your typical LA style, but it's like a David Lynch one. It can be whatever, its kind of a magic world that you to completely merge with it. –– Now Instant is cute, it's tiny, it's transversal. You have the bookstore, the cinema, the downstairs bar that is kind of a speakeasy; so you can activate in many different ways, and we are always looking for that with expanded publishing, different media all together activated all at once. That’s why we chose Now Instant. Before this, we did this really incredible activation in Seoul. It was the same concept, but on a bigger scale. It was in this cultural center in downtown Seoul, called Platform L, Contemporary Art Center. It's a white cube that we completely took over with music, installations, bookstores – we always try to adapt to the venue.
You’re doing activations in Paris, LA, New York, Milan, London, Tokyo -– Why did you want to do global activations? What principles we’re guiding you as you navigated these different cities? They all have such different relationships to arts and visuals culture.
We think of visual culture as a universal vibe. Images can speak to everybody in different ways, and they can reach everybody. We are Milan-based, but our goal isn’t to speak solely to the Italian fan base, but to people around the world. Our community is wider than Italy; we are much more connected with Seoul, LA, New York, London, and Paris than with Milan. This is the reason why when we started thinking about how to activate this tenth anniversary issue, we said, ‘if we’re gonna do this, we have to do it wild and wide.’ So we chose the cities we were most attached to. I lived here in LA, Luca, our founder and creative director of CACTUS spent a lot of time in Seoul and in Paris where our other partner Hugo lives. These were the cities were more involved in, thats the reason why we chose them.
How to you utilize visual and imagery as language across all your different projects?
The main thing to consider is that CACTUS is between fields. We speak to a fashion audience, a contemporary art audience, a design audience. Our idea since the beginning was to see if there were boundaries we could run over, to connect and speak broadly to every one of these disciplines without misunderstanding while at the same time making fun of it. When you start studying and growing, everybody says that everything is interdisciplinary and that are no boundaries between fields and you can connect with mood boards all the visual aspects and disciples; but when you start being in the industry, you realize that design, art and fashion have their own language. It’s really hard to connect them without being misunderstood. We try to do that, playing with strict rules and boundaries that divide the disciplines, while at the same time, trying to bring some reflection on this point.
Can you speak on your collaboration with Teebs and the Dublab? How did they find their way into the program?
Like we did in Seoul, the idea was to have local partners. I think that one of the most contemporary forms of media that visual and contemporary art are trying to discover during the last year, has been sound. So the idea was to collaborate with local radios, DJ’s and artists that make sound their key way of expression. Teebs is a mixed artist; he paints and in the magazine, we have some of his drawings and at the same time, he's really good at DJ’ing and performing with electronic equipment. So it was the perfect match we were looking for.
In tonight’s program, the word experimental comes up a lot. In your own words, how would you describe experimental? What do you think it means to be experimental with visual, sound, anything?
To me, experimental can be the same if you’re thinking about politics, culture, or society. Its not adhering to the status quo, but trying different paths without losing the rules that dictate the overall ways we behave, the way we control things, and the way we produce. So every experimentation, and the video art we will screen tonight, is really about that. Its trying to push the boundaries of how you should do that, following the rules and trying to get rid of those rules to get something that is maybe not better, maybe its just a draft, but there’s a possibility of change. So I think that experimentation is exploring the possibility of seeing something in a different way, to see it from a different point of view.
