Live Creative

Have you been here for long?
I’ve been here for a year, and I was in Paris, Canada, and Amsterdam before this. I like it, it’s good. It’s a young city, and the creativity is young, so it’s good to be in a growing city.

Best decision I’ve ever made:
Moving to Amsterdam, maybe. Spending a year and a half there is like learning ten years’ worth of things from anywhere else; you go to a party and meet the guys that you look up to on social media. Amsterdam is full of these little pockets of pubs, bars, and experiences, and you realise that this is where all the key creatives in the world are. It really opened me up to the world.

The most interesting person I’ve ever met:
My mentor, a Canadian artist called Robert Chaplin. He made the smallest book in the world for the Guinness World Record. The book fits onto a strand of your hair. He used nanotechnology to carve it out. You can’t see it with the naked eye, and the book is about brussels sprouts, just because.

You travel quite a bit—tell us about your most memorable trip.
Wow, that’s hard, I have a lot. I think it would be my trip to Columbia, which happened in May. I was shooting a commercial documentary about a woman that’s rehabilitating 11-year old pregnant girls from the ghettos. We filmed with seven police officers wearing bulletproof vests, and you go into these houses with girls that are 11 to 15 years old who have their own mothers but also have their own babies. The country itself also has a crazy history of drugs. You get offered drugs at every corner. But at the same time, there is the beauty of the Latin culture, with music playing on the streets. I think it’s a beautiful but raw country.

Three travel essentials:
My camera, and a pair of good black sneakers that can take you from climbing a sand dune in a desert to a restaurant for a meeting. I’d also bring my phone, because social media is so prevalent.