Issue link: https://www.balharbourdigital.com/i/1461738
The line is called Arpa, by my talented friend Barnabé Fillion, who is also a nose for Aesop and Le Labo, among others. One of the Arpa fragrances has lots of green but also a hint of crumbling plaster, which is a scent I associate with my husband and a certain solitude and privacy, the speckled sunbeam in a room with no one else in it. We named a perfume for shy people. 9JCVCURGEVQH[QWTYQTMFQ[QWƂPF OQUVHWNƂNNKPI!Being a curator is a very good excuse to invite yourself over to studios, to stare at an artist's things and to ask personal and probing questions about a life and what matters. I have loved starting conversations in the middle and letting my eyes dart everywhere. 9JCVEQNQTFQ[QWOQUVCUUQEKCVGYKVJ /GZKEQ%KV[! The color I look for not only in Mexico City, and not least of all because I associate it with someone I dearly love, is new-bud green, the bright reaching ends and unfurling tips of life. 9JCVoU[QWTRTQEGUUHQTƂPFKPICPF TGETWKVKPICTVKUVUQTCTVKUCPUVQYQTMYKVJ! So much of beauty is timing and luck, the story goes, and I try to be as ready as I can for luck and let timing take care of itself. Like there was a chipped vase I once saw in an QRGPCKTTGUVCWTCPVCPF+YCPVGFVQƂIWTG out what I could, then years later, by chance, I was introduced to the late artisan's son, with whom I now work. My shop's name is Casa Ahorita, which means "little now," but also crucially the forever imminent and the maybe never. But I am very not ad-hoc when it comes to compensating artists—for this, I have a simple formula. I believe, somewhat romantically, that the person whose hands made the work should make the most, and that has led me to lasting working relationships with artisans. 9JCVoUVJGQPGVGZVQTRQGO[QWJQNF ENQUGUVVQ[QWTJGCTV!"Berryman" by W .S. Merwin—I am a bit of a sucker for advice. Like I related so much to the interview the brilliant Hanya Yanagihara just gave, in which she laments a therapist who wanted to probe her childhood, when all she wants is just to be told what she should do. Merwin recalling Berryman is, for me, the ultimate advice poem, even as what I've needed has changed over the years: on rejection, on the muse—on how you should like, for real, get down on your knees and beg the muse for help. And most of all the last stanzas, with Merwin asking Berryman, who had not yet gone to drink, how you can know if your writing is any good, and the older poet's hands quivering with the "vehemence of his views:" you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write —Fanny Singer Clockwise from left: Su Wu with her son, Octavio; Alma Allen's "Poco Util" exhibition at AGO Projects in Mexico City; artist Trine Ellitsgaard's pochote tree from which Wu was gifted an offshoot; one of Wu's Navajo rugs. BAL HARBOUR 133