CELEBRITY PROFILE STYLING: SAM AJDANI

Sense & Style
August 2014

interview MARGAUX SALAZAR
images GEE PLAMENCO
styling IETH INOLINO
grooming LEI PONCE at MAKE UP STORE
shot on location at MANDARIN ORIENTAL HOTEL MANILA

FEATURE WRITING: Words are leisure

Manila Bulletin

Words are leisure

Top Model Stephanie Retuya on a slow boat to Mamburao, Occidental Mindoro

by Ieth Inolino
March 23, 2014

Portrait by Maan Palmiery

‘I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading. ’ — Jane Austen

She may appear painfully shy with her doll eyes glued to the book in her hands. But when she starts to talk, top model Stephanie Retuya lights up like the summer sun, as she tells you stories about modeling here and abroad, the books she has read, or her adorable daughter’s cute antics.

Recently back from modeling stints in Singapore and Korea, Stephanie has yet to take a break from work as she finds herself going from one photo shoot to another. The Asia’s Next Top Model finalist usually starts her day with basic Pilates after drinking water. If she has to go to work, which is almost every day, she makes a point of waking up early enough to prepare food she can bring to work.

Portrait by MAAN PALMIERY; photos below courtesy of Sense & Style

As long as she has a book to read, every season is top model Stephanie Retuya’s season in the sun.

This is how Stephanie gets to put her newfound fondness of cooking to good use. Growing up, Stephanie was the type you wouldn’t see holding kitchen utensils or anything from the kitchen. “But now, I’m really interested in cooking. I bake. Not all my efforts are successful but I make my own energy bars!” she beams. “I need to be healthy because before, I would eat anything and everything. But I’m naturally skinny so I feel weak.” Wanting to become healthier, she considers cooking her own food, the ideal lifestyle for her, what with models’ workday so unpredictable you never know what you’re going to be fed at gigs, if you’re going to be fed at all. “It’s both for work and personal,” she explains. “I just found myself looking for healthy choices, even for alternative recipes. So if I want to eat a certain dish, I want the healthy version. It’s not enough that you just keep buying stuff and you don’t know how to cook.”

Stephanie has also discovered a passion for tea. When she opened her cupboard one day, she was surprised by the huge selection of tea she had acquired from all her travels mainly for work. It was a welcome surprise as she now enjoys having tea while reading. “I didn’t realize I had accumulated that much, and that I am that interested in tea!” she says. “I drink tea while reading, it’s a very good combination. I read a lot. That’s my main thing.” There is no difference between buying tea and buying books, according to the tea-loving bibliophile. “I’m only happy when I’m reading,” she gushes. “Even just buying the book, the whole process of it, from choosing to paying for it, is something I really enjoy. It takes me a long time to choose a book. I go over the synopses, I take a close look at the cover, I scan through some pages… It’s quite a ritual.”

While deciding on which book to buy takes quite a while, falling in love with reading was quick and instant, all at once, like love at first sight. It started when she was a child living with her great grandmother. “She had a sari-sari store where comics were rented out,” recalls Stephanie. “That was when I unofficially learned how to read, and realized that I liked it. Then I’d borrow Archie comics from my cousins and devour them, page after page. I think that I also taught myself English by reading.”

It has been the multitude of stories that gets Stephanie hooked book after book after book. To her, books are dreammakers. They broaden her horizons, fuel her desires, enlarge her world, and take her to other, sometimes impossible places, returning her to life at the end of each page changed and unable to change back.

“When you’re a kid and you just play around, you realize you don’t know anything about the world,” muses Stephanie. “Reading made me want to travel because books have these different places, different locations, different destinations I want to see.”

Reading does take her places and gives her a refuge from tough times. When she was competing at Asia’s Next Top Model Cycle 1 in 2012, Stephanie felt at home at their model house because it had shelves upon shelves of books. “That’s the first time I ever read Stephen King and I was amazed by his writing skills,” she says. “But what helped me most of all was Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. The book was so depressing I found no reason to get depressed with my own problems.” In Singapore, Stephanie had to deal with homesickness, as she was always away for months on end just when her daughter was turning from infant to toddler. “If you are immersed in a story, there’s suspension of disbelief,” she explains. “You forget everything about your own life as you are focused on the characters.”

It has been said that a true reader reads everything. Stephanie has a wide range of reading preferences, from award-winning literature to bestselling pop fiction to trash plain and simple. She reads anything, regardless of author or genre or writing style. “I devour everything,” she admits. “Even if you’re heartbroken, you can read a happy or depressing book. Like Twilight, the material is very elementary and the writing is like a first draft, but it has helped me. It’s so cliché but it’s how I dealt with first love and the first heartbreak in college. For me, even if it’s such a bad book, it doesn’t matter because it allows me to live for a moment a life that isn’t my own.”

The most dreaded question any bookworm is unprepared to answer is almost always who their favorite author or what their favorite book is. But if Stephanie must answer, she would say Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. In this one book, she sees much of herself in the lead character Elizabeth Darcy (née Elizabeth Benneth), the most beloved of Austen heroines, whose main conflict is her desire to marry for love under circumstances that pressure her to marry for convenience. “She’s courageous. At that time, women had no choice who they married as long as the men could provide for them or pay the dowry. But she would always say no to her parents,” she says of her favorite protagonist. “I read it in high school and I really looked up to her—her courage and the way she carried herself without men, without social pressure.”

Like any avid reader, Stephanie has no idea how many books she has read, but who’s counting? “I even started borrowing books at a Korean library when I worked in Korea. I wanted books I could dispose of after reading, so I need not lug them around with me when I traveled,” she says. “I blame all the money I’ve ever spent on excess baggage on books because I used to travel around with at least five books in my bag. Now, I try to bring no more than two, which is a good thing because then there is room for what I often find at nice bookstores and libraries.”

Wherever she is, whatever she’s doing, Stephanie always reads. “Even when I need to pee, while walking to the bathroom and walking back from there, I’m reading!” she says. If the book is really good, she reads it anywhere. But if she had a choice, the beach would be the perfect spot to disappear into a book, sinking herself between the pages, while digging deep into the sand with her toes.

‘If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else

is thinking.’

—Haruki Murakami

Stephanie recommends these books for your summer reading:

1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen—a classic

2. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green—it’ll make you cry

3. Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder—contemplate and understand the history of philosophy

4. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown—historical fiction adventure (And it’s the first book I bought with my meager allowance!)

5. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank—to immerse yourself in her inspiring story and so you won’t forget how cruel this world could be

And here’s where you should read them:

1. By the beach

2. Your favorite spot in the house

3. Coffee shops

4. Train

5. Anywhere with a good book is a great place to be

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all. —Oscar Wilde

http://www.mb.com.ph/words-are-leisure/

FEATURE WRITING: Glam grotesque

Manila Bulletin

Glam grotesque

Avant-garde jewelry artist and experimental sculptor Michelline Syjuco draws more inspiration from a DVD marathon than from the party-of the-century or the fanciest vacation.

by AA Patawaran and Ieth Inolino

March 9, 2014

Do you remember the movie Terminator, that old 1984 Arnold Schwarzenegger flick about the future? Chances are, sculptor and jewelry artist Michelline Syjuco remembers that macabre scene very well, with the last of humanity waging a desperate war against the machines and running for dear life on a carpet of skulls some time in 2029. If she hasn’t seen it yet, we’ll be delighted to invite her to a DVD-Cheetos night. She’d like that very much, thank you.

Images by Maan Palmiery

Unless art beckons, which sometimes has her beating a sculpture to shape on the rooftop or in the backyard at 3 a.m., at the risk of waking up the neighborhood, Michelline is a self-confessed couch potato. Given a choice between the party-of-the-century and a DVD marathon, she’ll quickly change into pajamas and ask for lots of popcorn. “I can’t believe I was the last person who saw the third season of The Game of Thrones!” she gushes.

In fact, make her choose between flying first-class to Amanoi in Vietnam and staying home to watch Sinbad and the Seven Seas on YouTube and Michelline is very likely to choose the latter. “I’m afraid to fly,” she admits, but then there’s her art that takes her places, so chances are, she’ll fly anyway with her heart in her throat.

Since National Artist for Sculpture Napoleon Abueva took note of a sculpture she wore as a bracelet at one of her rare appearances in the social circuit and inspired her to go to town with her wearable art, Michelline’s has been a name to drop in the fashion circles and she has dazzled that world of fleeting trends and fickle tastes with her standout, statement jewelry, but like her work, like her parents, the poet and visual artist Cesare Syjuco and the painter and performance artist Jean Marie Syjuco (all her siblings, sisters Maxine and Beatrix and her two brothers, are also artists or artistic), her name as a brand and the art behind the name have the promise of longevity worthy of a museum. She is an artist, first of all.

And no, all the time cocooned before the TV screen, lost in fantasy worlds or gripped in horror or in awe of the Apocalypse, is no time wasted—it has helped produce the avant-gardiste in Michelline and that’s why her work, many of which crafted from unlikely materials, such as horns and spikes, gears and knobs, and other implements reminiscent of torture chambers, has been making such a statement. In her book, fashion demands some daring. If you must wear art, prepare to shock, prepare to awe, or at least make people stop to think or even start a conversation.

“Oh I love violence in movies,” beams Michelline. “It’s shock therapy. I love fantasy. I remember, our very first Betamax was The Beastmaster. I’ve probably watched it a hundred times I’ve already memorized every line.” When she was about five, she often found herself at her father’s or her mother’s studio. Left to her own devices, sometimes bored out of her wits, as both parents were busy doing their art, she often tinkered with scrap she found around the studio—pieces of wood, screws, bolts, nails—and once created a creature out of them. Impressed, her father urged her to carry on and, thanks maybe to her fascination with the realm of the unearthly, The Beastmaster, Conan: The Barbarian, The Never Ending Story, she had enough resources to build an army.

WEARABLE ART Clockwise from left: Serpentor Cross Pendant with quartz stones and zirconia; Hand-sculpted cuff with blue agate stones and acetylene burns; Serpentor Series Cross Pendant and Armada Series Cuffs

Fairy tales rocked Michelline’s world, but “as I got older, the dark side of fairy tales intrigued me,” she says. “I loved the ones that started out dark and were eventually revised to be more applicable for children.” Think Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. Better yet, think Snow White. “When you think about it, it’s so scary,” explains Michelline. “She died and she was brought back to life. It’s kind of morbid.” All these things, all these elements of fantasy, all these strange, shadowy, grotesque representations of possibility have, along with the creative, push-the-envelope environment in which she was raised, been her aesthetic influence, as well as her tools for creative exploration and experimentation.

For her recent collection “Theater of the Mind,” Michelline drew inspiration from the cult film Dark City, the 1998 neo-noir science fiction starring Rufus Sewell, Kiefer Sutherland, Jennifer Connelly, and William Hurt. But nothing in particular in the movie made its way into her collection. What her collection and the film have in common is a mishmash of alternate realities, dreams mingling with fears, facts meeting fantasy, all seemingly random yet well-curated collection of things that grip the senses, tickle the imagination, provoke the sensibilities. “I’m really drawn to fantasy. I like other worlds,” explains Michelline. “I like mixing eras. I don’t like everything so ordinary. Dark City is about these people living in this city where there’s never any sunlight. Everything in the city was created based on their memories and things in their minds, so it is a combination of elements. They have cars from the 1950s and some people are dressed in 1960s attire. It’s a melting pot of all their memories. ‘Theater of the Mind’ is something like that. You can’t really put your finger on it. It’s nothing really specific. It’s a mixture of everything.”

Growing up in a family of artists, Michelline has it in her DNA to live life in pursuit of great art, but even in the day-to-day company of these artists, she has been able to develop her own style, to see everything from eyes distinctly her own. She can’t be grateful enough that her parents let her find her own point of view. Her mother, for instance, never interfered with her creative impulses, although when the mood eludes the daughter, the mother is always there to push her on or at least, to remind her not to give it up.

“As kids, we attended workshops with my parents at Art Lab. It was then in EDSA,” Michelline recalls. “They used to hold workshops for young artists. I just picked up a lot of things from there. My parents don’t handle metal but it’s something I found interesting and so that’s where I’ve gone.”

Today, Michelline has her own showroom at ArtLab, which her family has since last year transported to a quieter, tree-lined street inside an exclusive village in Alabang and there it is, heralded by the shadow of a woman in distress on the wall, without the woman who casts the shadow, a portal into that fantastic world inside Michelline’s head.

‘I like mixing eras. I don’t like everything so ordinary.’

Like the pensieve in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, where one can view memories from a non-participant, third-person point of view, Michelline’s work draws her audience to the inner workings of her mind that aren’t easily revealed even when she is at her most candid, even in her most unguarded moments. But in her work, these pieces of memory, these glimpses of possible futures, these imagined realities come to the fore and, from outside looking in, we are drawn to Michelline’s world over and over again.

The catch is, as the universe is a dark infinity lit up only by heavenly bodies, by celestial beings, by divine explosions, by stars, we never know what she might come up with next.

http://www.mb.com.ph/glam-grotesque/

PROFILE STYLING: Women We Love

Sense & Style
December 2013

Daphne Osena Paez
Jasmin Curtis-Smith
Jacqueline Yuengtian Gutierrez
Rissa Mananquil Trillo