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Philippa Snow
Philippa Snow is a critic and essayist. Her work has appeared in publications including ArtforumThe Los Angeles Review of BooksArtReviewFriezeVogueThe NationThe New Statesman, and The New Republic. Her first book, Which As You Know Means Violence, is out now with Repeater, and she is currently working on an essay collection about famous women.  

Articles Available Online


You Don’t Think God Is Sexy?

Film Review

January 2023

Philippa Snow

Film Review

January 2023

On the most literal level, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s elliptical, spiritual-cum-sensual movie Teorema (1968) is about an entire family being driven to distraction by their...

Essay

Issue No. 31

It's Terrible The Things I Have To Do To Be Me

Philippa Snow

Essay

Issue No. 31

Here was a woman who had modelled her life so closely on Marilyn Monroe’s that doing so eventually helped...

IT IS 1 JUNE 2015 and I am standing outside no 11 rue Servandoni in Paris’s sixth arrondissement I have lived in this city, on and off, for over ten years I’ve walked in and through the Jardin de Luxembourg many times, likewise the loop around Place Saint-Sulpice (I can see now how the rue Servandoni serves as a corridor between the two) But it so happens, I realise, that I’ve never walked down this particular street before Now that I’m here, I’m wondering why it has never, not once, occurred to me to seek this building out: the building where Roland Barthes lived for twenty years, from 1960 to 1980, in an apartment on the sixth floor   I’m standing outside no 11, the street is empty, the sun is warm and I’m trying hard to feel something of the curiosity – what Barthes would call a biographical curiosity, of the kind that would unexpectedly fire him up late in life – that might have prompted me to do so   I try imagining a body For instance, leaning some of its weight against one of the heavy double doors, pushing it open, stepping inside and climbing the stairs marked B   Or a forefinger punching out the building code: once, twice, several times a day, over the space of twenty years   But the thing is: I’m finding it difficult Much easier to summon are the characters that Alexandre Dumas has live next door Here is D’Artagnan, the new Musketeer, defending Constance with clashing swords; here are the two of them creeping along this very street at dusk; here are the neighbours who close their shutters and all go to bed early   It’s not that I am uncurious about the life Barthes lived upstairs I know that’s not it, because, really, I’m fascinated   It’s more that what I am most urgently interested in – what I came here today, hot and self-conscious on the bus, especially to consider – is my own pavement position   It is 1 December 1976 and Barthes is looking out of the window He sees a woman walking with her child on the street

Contributor

November 2018

Philippa Snow

Contributor

November 2018

Philippa Snow is a critic and essayist. Her work has appeared in publications including Artforum, The Los Angeles Review of Books, ArtReview, Frieze, Vogue, The...

Essay

January 2021

An Uneasy Girl

Philippa Snow

Essay

January 2021

Even before Lucie arrives holding a shotgun, we know that the perfect family in this huge suburban house are...

Brilliant Muscles

Essay

December 2019

Philippa Snow

Essay

December 2019

‘Lindsay Lohan’s new film,’ I told almost everyone I spoke to for about two months earlier this year, ‘is about werewolf detectives.’ Nobody seemed...
Evita Vasiljeva, POSTCRETE

Art Review

February 2019

Philippa Snow

Art Review

February 2019

Lower.Green is situated in the unlikely surroundings of a near-dead mall in Norwich. It is not just any mall, but Anglia Square Shopping Centre:...
Gabriele Beveridge, Live Dead World

Art Review

November 2018

Philippa Snow

Art Review

November 2018

Several months ago, I went to a salon so small and so identikit that I do not recall the name, and against every sane...

READ NEXT

fiction

Issue No. 1

Beyond the Horizon

Patrick Langley

fiction

Issue No. 1

Listen to the silence, let it ring on. (Joy Division, Transmission) I It is not yet dawn. The city...

fiction

November 2015

Three Days in Prague

Naja Marie Aidt

TR. Denise Newman

fiction

November 2015

A sparkling frost-clear landscape exists between them under a soft and smudged sky. Irises exist, blue and yellow, and...

poetry

March 2017

Two Poems

Uljana Wolf

TR. Sophie Seita

poetry

March 2017

Mittens   winter came, stretched its frames, wove misty threads into the damp   wood. fogged windows, we didn’t...

 

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