For this episode, Olivia Laing, author of Everybody: A Book About Freedom and Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, selected her old friend and documentarian Matt Wolf (Spaceship Earth) as the artist she most wanted to speak with. They discuss their abhorrence of the word “storytelling,” mining cultural history for inspiration, and the queerness of living unconventionally—in Olivia’s case, living in a tree.
Olivia Laing is the author of To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring, The Lonely City, and Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency. She was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction in 2018. Her latest book, Everybody: A Book About Freedom, is an investigation into the body and its discontents.
Matt Wolf is a filmmaker whose critically acclaimed and award-winning documentaries include Wild Combination, Teenage and Recorder. His newest film, Spaceship Earth premiered at Sundance and is now streaming on Hulu. Wolf has also made many short films about artists and queer history, including The Face of AIDS and HBO’s It’s Me, Hilary. Wolf is a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient and a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.