In this episode of The Art Bystander, Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar enters a conversation with Michèle Lamy and Scarlett Rouge.

Michèle Lamy is often introduced in relation to Rick Owens, but that has always felt like an incomplete way of understanding her.

Born in France’s Jura region in 1944, into a family shaped by the Resistance, Lamy studied law in Lyon, attended the philosophy lectures of Gilles Deleuze and worked as a criminal defence lawyer while also performing striptease and cabaret.

In 1979, she moved to Los Angeles without having visited the city. There she established her clothing line, created Café des Artistes and Les Deux Cafés, and treated hospitality as a form of theatre.

Around 1990, she hired a pattern cutter named Rick Owens. Their working relationship became a partnership in life, and by 2003 they had moved to Paris and were building Owenscorp together. Lamy’s work has since moved through furniture, jewellery, music, film, performance and boxing. She has variously described herself as a storyteller, performer and entrepreneur, resisting any single professional title.

Joining her is her daughter, Scarlett Rouge, an interdisciplinary artist raised between California and France. The daughter of Lamy and experimental filmmaker Richard Newton, and Owens’s stepdaughter, Rouge trained in photography at CalArts before developing a practice across painting, installation, sculpture, video, textiles and performance.

Her work draws on myth, symbolic language, Jungian thought and ritual, asking how art might reconnect spirit and matter. Mother and daughter have also performed together in LAVASCAR alongside Nico Vascellari.

In this episode, we speak about resistance and freedom, Los Angeles, family and artistic inheritance, collaboration, ritual, commerce and the making of spaces in which outsiders can belong.

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In today's episode Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar meets with design legend Michele De Lucchi.

Born an identical twin, he grew up being treated, as he remembers it, almost as half of the same child. At 18, the brothers chose different disciplines, different cities and different appearances. His brother shaved; Michele grew the beard that has stayed with him ever since.

“When you design something, you have to create an identity.”

It is a wonderfully disarming beginning to a conversation with someone whose career runs through more than five decades of Italian architecture and design: Alchimia, Memphis, Olivetti, the Tolomeo lamp, major buildings, interiors, furniture, drawing, painting and sculpture. Yet I became less interested in making him recite that history than in understanding the person who has continued to question what design is for.

De Lucchi speaks about objects as carriers of memory. His father appeared able to “listen” to a glass, a watch or a building and understand who made it, where and when. Function was never the whole story. Materials could hold a narrative; architecture could shape the life unfolding inside it.

When I told him that his work makes me happy, he answered that it was the most beautiful compliment I could give him.

“We don’t need pessimistic architects and designers because we don’t need a pessimistic future.”

That may be the key to Michele De Lucchi. Radicalism, for him, is not a colour palette or a historical style. It is the courage to resist convention, grasp the energy of one’s own time and give form to a future worth entering.

In the full episode, we travel from 1970s Florence to Olivetti and the beginnings of Memphis, but also into far more personal territory: his twin brother, Ettore Sottsass, a journey around the world, fashion, serendipity, meditation, AI and the unknown. Some stories are far better heard in his own voice, and I will not give them away here.

Several of his designs will also appear in Radical Rooms, the exhibition I am curating for Mankovsky Gallery in Stockholm this August, bringing radical Italian design into conversation with contemporary painting.

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In this episode of The Art Bystander Podcast, I speak with Jérôme Pantalacci, founder and director of Art-o-rama in Marseille.

At the end of August, I will travel to Marseille for Art-o-rama, a fair that has developed one of the most distinctive identities on the European art calendar. Founded by Jérôme in 2007, Art-o-rama has become known for its concentrated scale, its commitment to emerging galleries and artists, and its willingness to give space to presentations that are more experimental, specific and ambitious than the conventional art-fair booth.

Held at La Friche la Belle de Mai, a former tobacco factory transformed into a major cultural complex, the fair is deeply connected to Marseille itself. The city’s position between Europe, North Africa and the wider Mediterranean gives it a cultural intensity that feels markedly different from the established art capitals. Marseille is layered, contradictory, international and resistant to easy definition, and Art-o-rama has grown from that context rather than attempting to impose a standardised global model upon it.

In our conversation, Jérôme and I discuss how the fair began, what it means to build an international contemporary-art platform outside the traditional centres of market power, and how Art-o-rama has maintained its independence and curatorial character as it has grown.

We also speak about the challenges facing younger galleries, the changing expectations placed on art fairs, the importance of discovery, and the tension between experimentation and commercial reality. What does a smaller fair make possible that a larger one cannot? How can a fair remain relevant without becoming predictable? And what can Marseille teach us about the future geography of the art world?

As I prepare to visit Art-o-rama later this month, this conversation offers an introduction not only to the fair, but to the ideas, relationships and local conditions that have shaped it over almost two decades.

This is a conversation about Marseille, independence, risk, discovery and the future of the contemporary art fair.

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