Still Life, Auntie's Kitchen
About the work
Still Life, Auntie's Kitchen starts from one herbarium sheet: Laserpitium latifolium, collected at Val de Mercy in Burgundy for Pierre Populus's herbarium in 1895, a place drawn on sheet 47 of the Cassini map. The plant grows on limestone. DARA, the oak that became this paper, grew on the acid sandstone of Normandy. The two would never have met in the ground. In the Auntieverse, they do.
The plant's flower head is an umbel, thin rays from a single point, the same form as the Chinese circus act of plate spinning. The aunties take that shape into their bodies through dance until plant and figure merge. Around them is a kitchen full of curious objects from a voyage to Val de Mercy in an alternate reality, tiles made after the art nouveau of Brussels, and an auntie watching from the edge.
Each element is made separately and composited by hand across digital tools, assisted by real-time AI rendering and custom LoRAs trained on three years of Auntieverse material. The Auntieverse is an ongoing world built to examine ageing, identity, care work and cultural expectation.
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On 6 April, at the close of the inaugural Classic Cello International Competition in London, a 14-year-old Korean cellist named Jung A Kim walked onto the stage at the Royal College of Music and received a prize that no competition had ever offered before.
€50,000. And the loan of an 18th-century Italian cello worth half a million dollars.
Jung A Kim is, in Nathan’s own words, “one of the most amazing talents I have ever heard.” The cello she received, crafted circa 1770 and believed to have been commissioned by the Medici, will be hers for a minimum of two years, maintained and insured throughout her tenure by world-renowned luthier Florian Leonhard MBE.
Nathan, who was himself the youngest Principal Cello of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra at 19, has spent more than 40 years with this instrument. Hearing it pass to Jung A Kim, he said simply:
“It is in great hands.”
This is what OCTARR was built for.
Become a co-owner
If you’d like to be part of this, shares are still available.
100 tokenised shares at €3,770 each. Co-owners receive a 1/1 signed photographic print of the cello, produced on our proprietary handmade paper crafted from 350-year-old French oak, as well as access to private concerts and priority in future OCTARR projects. Shares are freely transferable.
The 350-year-old “Arbre Remarquable” French oak from the Forêt d’Écouves, planted by order of the Sun King, Louis XIV, and which we have named Dara, will officially launch later this year, in October in London.
Her first children are equally remarkable: beautiful pre-industrial, non-chemically treated, handmade sheets of 50 x 70 cm paper from the brilliant and creative papetier Frédéric Gironde of Ruscombe Paper Mill in Bordeaux.
Her first grandchild was unveiled at a private dinner at the Kunstmuseum, which houses the world’s oldest public art collection, dating back to the same time as Dara herself.
Harto and the Sigg Art Foundation
The Sigg Art Foundation, a wonderful initiative by the Swiss entrepreneur and philanthropist Pierre Sigg, aided by his daughter Maurine, supports and promotes a number of cutting-edge artists. One of them is the Barcelona-based Harto, with whom OCTARR is developing a close and deep working relationship.
On a night which also unveiled a massive sculpture by someone extremely well known, but who must for the time being remain a secret, Harto presented the first work in a ten-work series, Memoria Viva, entitled Latent Memory.
It is printed on OCTARR’s Dara paper.
The concert itself was an all-French affair, drawn from the late 19th and early 20th centuries: a repertoire as demanding as it is luminous.
We open with Maurice Ravel’s Tzigane (Gypsy), written a century ago for the great female violin virtuoso Jelly d’Aranyi, and fiendishly difficult. Transposed to cello, it edges toward the unplayable. And yet Jung A Kim, our pocket-rocket prodigy, plays it as though it were written for her all along.
This first excerpt puts the spotlight on the cello’s G string. On a violin, the G is the lowest string in the instrument’s register. But the cello goes deeper: a C string, tuned a fifth below the G. In fact, every string on the cello sits a full octave below its violin counterpart, which is precisely why hearing Tzigane reborn down here, in this deeper register, feels like meeting an old piece for the first time.
In 1669, Colbert designed a French silviculture system to reorganise and improve French forestry, especially oak for the navy: a programme so patient it is still shaping forests today. The Chêne de Morat, one of France’s protected “Arbres Remarquables”, was one of those trees, left standing for over three centuries so the French National Forestry Office could study how oaks behave over time.
When it was reaching the end of its life, Jean-Luc bought it, and did something that had never been done before: he made wine barrels from a single, almost four-centuries-old tree.
“A 350-year-old oak doesn’t just look different. It ages wine differently.”
Softer tannins, a silkier texture, and aromas no younger tree can produce.
Where our own project begins
OCTARR’s O.A.K. Projects take the roughly 80% of a felled Arbre Remarquable that the cooperage industry can’t use, and turn it into handmade paper and artworks, starting with a tree named Dara.
The goal: give these ancient oaks another 300 years of life. It’s this paper that DARArtNouveau in Brussels is built around.