DESIGN
Different Drum
Street Ware
Tamino may have a strong
musical heritage, but his songs
transcend any specific era.
A couple of days after
releasing his piercingly
melancholic single “Persephone,”
Tamino-Amir Moharam Fouad
got an Instagram message from
a certain @LanadelRey. “She
said she thought my voice was
beautiful,” he explains, sounding
astonished still. “I couldn’t believe
it.” Months later, the 22-year-old
was onstage opening for del
Rey at Malahide Castle in Dublin.
The singer, who performs as
Tamino, tends to have that effect
on people, turning them into
rabid fans upon their first listen.
Though the attention from
the platinum-album artist took
him by surprise, a certain
worldliness runs in his genes.
Tamino—named after the
hero of The Magic Flute—is the
grandson of iconic singer and
actor Moharam Fouad, perhaps
the man who most defined
Egypt’s golden age of cinema in
the 1960s. But Tamino, who
grew up in Antwerp (his Belgian
mother and Egyptian father
divorced when he was a young
child), says that he didn’t really
BOWLED OVER
A HAND-PAINTED BOWL
FROM ROBERTO LUGO’S NEW
STUNTIN’ COLLECTION.
TRUE COLORS
THE DISTINCTIVE
SINGER IS
CURRENTLY
ON TOUR.
MUSIC feel the weight of this legacy:
“Where I was raised he wasn’t
famous.” In September, the
singer—who speaks Dutch, French,
and English—kicked off a North
American tour, showcasing new
music, a deluxe, expanded version
of his debut album, Amir, which
came out last year. That tour will
eventually take him to Egypt,
where he will perform for the first
time. (Reading keeps him
grounded during times of constant
travel; he’s just finished the first
volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s
My Struggle.) Influenced by
Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan,
the music marries undulating,
drawn-out vocals with a vulnerable
ethereality. “I don’t really look
around me at what is hip,” he says.
“If I were to add in some trap
hi-hats, maybe I’d make more
money. But that’s just not how
I write.” His new music samples
some of his grandfather’s old
tapes. “They’re not recognizable
anymore,” he says. “They’re just
these weird soundscapes, but
they come from something that’s
very close to me.”—L.R.
“We didn’t have art in our schools,
so instead I did graffiti,” explains
Roberto Lugo, a ceramist raised in the
Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia.
Lugo eventually sought out a formal fine arts
education, including a residency at a studio
in Kecskemét, Hungary, which equipped
him with the technical skills to apply icons of
the street culture of his youth (Air Jordans,
bubble letters, portraits of the Notorious B.I.G.)
to classically sculpted porcelain. At this month’s
Salon Art + Design show in Manhattan, Lugo will
debut new objects in his Stuntin’ series. “Historically,
anthropology used ceramics to let us know what was
happening,” he says. “I see my role as an artist but also as
an archivist. I don’t want things we are doing in my
community to get lost.”—lilah ramzi
VLIFE
86 NOVEMBER 2019 VOGUE.COM
DESIGN: IMAGE BY KENEK PHOTOGRAPHY; COURTESY OF WEXLER GALLERY. MUSIC: © JOKKO.
