These are a few of the

THINGS

                                                    that move us most

Petra Fagerström studio visit

A balm from the edge of all there is

Munching chocolate

Charwomen on the Stairs (1906) by Edvard Munch

In the early 1920s, during a period of social unrest, Edvard Munch was commissioned to decorate the women’s canteen at Freia, a chocolate factory in Oslo. The resulting Freia Frieze (1923) comprises 12 canvases, each a bucolic scene: women in gauzy dresses, dancing and lounging by the sea. Titled Fertility or Dance on the Beach, the works’ haphazard brushstrokes suggest a similar looseness, as if painted on a seaside jaunt; in each, the coastline bisects the background, like a pulse. The frieze is currently on display at MUNCH, Oslo, as part of the exhibition, Edvard Munch and the Chocolate Factory.

These seemingly pastoral paintings are mired in a more complex history. Commissioned by Johan Throne Holst, Freia’s industrialist, the frieze was a meeting of minds between two of Norway’s greatest exports. When staff complained that some hastily painted houses lacked chimneys, doors and windows, Munch refused to return unless his chauffeur waited outside; otherwise, he said, Throne Holst would have to paint them himself.

Curated by Ana María Bresciani, the exhibition marks the paintings’ third move: the first in 1934, when the factory relocated to a modernist building, the second in 1968 for a Stockholm show. Asked whether Munch was a politically engaged painter, Bresciani hesitated: the painter never joined a party nor took a stance during the Nazi occupation. Yet she was adamant that neither was he guilty of an aestheticised, detached view of the working classes.

Throne Holst used his company as a workshop for improving conditions in the name of “hygiene”. In 1913 the “chocolate girls”, as Munch christened them, were granted a weekly in-house bath, and hours cut from 60 to 50. In 1914, a salon offered biweekly manicures; that year, Freia was named the country’s most exemplary business. Adorning the canteen with works by Norway’s most famous artist was the apex of these changes, the first time art had been commissioned for factory walls.

Perhaps the most significant addition is Chipo Dendere’s text on the commission’s hidden context: the global chocolate trade. For all the era’s “progressive” reforms, a 1925 factory film, From the Gold Coast to Freia, reveals their racial and geographic limits. Chocolate is a colonial product, native to Central and South America but largely grown on plantations in West Africa. Its status as a health food owed to American traditions, yet Munch and his peers gave almost no thought to the trade’s global reach, beyond this exotifying, racist documentary, which Dendere rediscovered and studied here.

The exhibition is strongest in its attempts to recontextualise the commission. Though the frieze lacks the richness of Munch’s famous works, this becomes less a disadvantage than a point of intrigue: it tells the story of a commerically successful, questionably apolitical painter at the peak of his career, of a society undergoing radical change, and of a long-neglected history of colonialism and trade.

Text by Amelia McGarvey

Tice Cin maps an unseen London in musical prose

The walls have ears

Stills from The Stone Tape (1972)

The finger hovers over the play button, then a groan as the rotations jolt into gear. All the while, a splenetic hiss signals the presence of history. Through the mechanics of rotational media, animation is breathed into the brittle plastic and sepia strips of magnetised tape. Time is happening again. As William S. Burroughs once said, “Playback is the essential ingredient.” For him, the universe was made of recordings, and reality could be subverted by the interleaving of sound into space. With chaos magic pinned to the apparatus of a reel-to-reel tape recorder, material hardware could be an agent not just of time, but divination.

1970s popular horror television was preoccupied with the idea that contemporary recording technology could act as an eerie interface with the ancient past and its rituals. Emblematic of this epochal theme was the 1972 teleplay The Stone Tape, by sci-fi screenwriter Nigel Kneale. Broadcast on BBC Two as a Christmas ghost story on 25 December 1972 and directed by Peter Sasdy, it follows a research team from an electronics company Ryan Electrics who move into a renovated Victorian mansion to develop a new recording medium that might supersede magnetic tape. When team member Jill Greeley (Jane Asher) witnesses a screaming apparition on a worn staircase in an old stone room, the ambitious director Peter Brock (Michael Bryant) refuses to treat it as superstition. Instead, a team of electronic engineers conduct experiments to deduce that the spectre is a form of “recording” engrained in the walls, the “stone tape” of the title. The ghostly servant girl is akin to a video game’s non-playable character, eternally projecting the moment of her death on the ominous “staircase to nowhere”. Yet the harder they push their instruments and their exorcising experiments, the more they reveal a recording far older and more malevolent than the Victorian death they first detected. Instead of mastering the medium, Brock’s ambition has simply dragged everyone back into the same deathly spiral.

What makes the teleplay so resonant is how uncannily its premise folds back onto the technology telling the story. When the scientists appear to “wipe the tape” during their experiments, the TV artefact recursively references its own existence as a BBC recording, many of which shared the same fate as that of the ghost: the corporation’s habit of repeatedly “wiping” tape as a recycling and cost-cutting exercise has led to many shows being “lost.” The very nature of tape’s layering and editable mechanics, the rewind, play, record button of rotational media, rewrites memory, even in absentia, embedding erasure’s numinous power.

Behind this lies a longer lineage. For a seemingly secular age, the twentieth century’s refinement of sound recording proffers a realm of mystical speculation. Sound recording, which originated in the spinning phonographs and gramophones of the 1870s, was steeped in the spiritualist dictum of telecommunion with the dead. Who or what is returning? Those physical traces, the “material ghost” of the event, are measured onto the tiny ontological space of the recording material. The dead return, reanimated through resurrective apparatus, incanting the unreachable past back to sight and sound. In Kneale’s hands, the stone room becomes exactly this: a mantic fold in space-time, read like tea leaves at the bottom of a cup.

As a 50-year-old envoy, the teleplay’s message is again hauntingly resonant. Where The Stone Tape’s layers inculcate meaning into matter, the space between now and the past is collapsing in an age of total recall, rendering absence merely a spectacle. Industrialised life’s total immersion in mnemotechnics now extends to the infinite “now” of digitally storable mediated imagery and sound. And still the essential question of all playback presses on: who, or what, is returning?

Text by Sophie Sleigh-Johnson

Ferrarichat.com is the largest community of Ferrari obsessives, who drool over widgets and gaskets. Soon they’ll have something new to obsess about, the super-exclusive Maranello Clutch, a handbag crafted by the same artisans who build Ferrari bodywork. Only nine models appear yearly, each in a never-repeated seasonal shade

Crushing on Coco

Fragrance becomes more personal the further it travels from its creator: it settles into skin, gathers memories and becomes entwined with the life of its wearer. By the time a perfume becomes someone’s signature, it no longer belongs to the perfumer who composed it.

Coco Mademoiselle Crush Absolu is the latest interpretation of Coco Mademoiselle, and surprise sits at its heart. Since its inception in 2001, the fragrance has undergone a remarkable evolution. And yet, in every iteration, the unmistakable architecture of the original, built around the familiar warmth of rose, jasmine and patchouli, is kept intact. Crush Absolu introduces a brighter opening of citric grapefruit and floral lychee before settling into the musky sensuality of vanilla and vetiver. Created by Olivier Polge, the in-house perfumer creator for Chanel, Crush Absolu embraces perhaps more ambiguity. Polge isn’t interested in defining a specific person who should wear his fragrances; instead, he leaves space for possibility: “Everything that surprises me is interesting. I keep a better memory of people’s scent when there’s something unexpected. That’s usually what stays with me.”

Surprisingly, Chanel’s olfactory history is in Olivier Polge’s genes. Fun fact? Coco Mademoiselle, one of Chanel Beauty’s most recognisable fragrances, was created by his father, Jacques Polge, in 2001. For Polge, continuation is deeply personal. His father spent nearly four decades shaping the olfactory identity of Chanel. “It would be strange to say my father had no influence on me,” Polge reflects. Although there was never a formal apprenticeship between the two, Olivier grew up surrounded by the craft of perfumery, developing his own understanding before finding his own voice.

“People often ask whether the weight of Chanel’s history holds me back. It’s completely the opposite. To create something new, you need solid foundations. We’re fortunate to have such a rich history; the challenge isn’t inventing a story, but deciding which one to continue.”

Text by Eve Bailey

Peeling off the layers, cooling as you go, one Prada look takes you to many different places

Model: Anisa at Premier Models

Schiaparelli’s wild kitten heels

They live! Tim Hunkin is a master of satirical automatons: his homemade devices bring joy (twinged with fear) to visitors of his museum, Novelty Automation

Paul Housley, Rare Books (2026). Photo: Cedric Bardawil

Rare books

Salon, curated by Matthew Higgs at Lismore Castle Arts, takes its name from a word that has carried a permanent demotion since 1863, when so many paintings were rejected from the official Paris Salon that Napoleon III authorised a second exhibition for the public to judge them itself. After the Salon des Refusés, a jury’s verdict could no longer pretend to be a neutral sorting of good from bad – it was one taste dressed as an institution. Guest curator Higgs offers his account of what belongs together: a grouping that asks the viewer not to trust a system but an eye.

An arrangement of chairs has been drawn from every corner of the castle and its outbuildings – attics, stable blocks, staff rooms, wings that don't otherwise open to the public. An estate this old contains centuries of furniture, stratified by function – a household’s class system laid out in wood and upholstery, from a carved hall throne to plain, hard-wearing chairs. Displaying such an inventory turns a piece of hospitality theatre into an excavation.

One painting, Paul Housley’s Rare Books (2026), doesn’t picture books so much as the sensation of a bookshop window seen in passing – a dense mosaic of small, thickly worked patches of colour standing in for spines and covers. The paint handling refuses to distinguish, structurally, between the books behind the glass and the ground underfoot. It’s a naive, almost folk-art register: forms built by accumulation rather than drawing, which is exactly the sensibility the show’s own language keeps calling maverick. It is one of the few paintings in the show that reaches, unprompted, for a specifically Irish literary memory – the world of Brendan Behan, of pubs doubling as reading rooms, of a national culture that has always treated its writers as slightly disreputable company worth keeping close. It’s a fitting subject for the room in Lismore Castle in which it hangs. Lismore’s own relationship to rare books is not incidental; the castle has one of its own. The Book of Lismore – a 15th-century manuscript of saints’ lives, translated romances and the travels of Marco Polo – was found in 1814 walled up inside the castle during renovations, hidden there for reasons nobody has fully explained, alongside the ceremonial Lismore Crozier. A painting about the mystique of rare books, hung in a building that once smuggled one inside its own stonework.

That coincidence sharpens what Housley’s picture is doing with the Behan association. Behan is one of Irish literature’s great rebel figures in the sense the exhibition has already claimed for its painters – self-taught in the ways that mattered, a borstal boy turned playwright, lionised as much for his disreputableness as for his verse. A painting that reaches for him isn’t just decorating the show with a literary reference; it’s importing the tension the whole exhibition runs on – the “outsider” who becomes, retroactively, part of the canon he was supposedly outside of. Rare books get their value partly from scarcity and partly from myth; increasingly, so does the idea of the maverick artist. What the show keeps calling “outliers” is a reminder that what gets treated as rare, and what gets treated as dormant, are usually decisions made well after the fact. Housley’s painting, glimpsed from a borrowed chair, is a smaller version of this realm.

Text by Christabel Stewart