In June 2019, Elise By Olsen was invited to deliver the graduation lecture at Elisava School of Design and Engineering in Barcelona. The lecture took form as a loose conversation with professor Saúl Baeza, taking By Olsen’s past, present and future projects as points of departure to navigate freely through her thoughts, approaches and techniques. This conversation ended up taking somewhat of a retrospective look at the way By Olsen has manoeuvred through various projects and creative formulas, reconciling the realms of fashion, art and media, from a very early age onwards. “I have a very specific duration to all of my projects and I have always had this specific narrative in mind. Recens was a very social and ideological kind of project, while Wallet is a more mature, text-heavy and critical project, so then maybe after this, I would want to go and do a highly commercial magazine or a visual publication or books. Or no publishing at all.” More than a ‘tranche de vie’ or a published lecture, this is a thorough sit-through of her narrative, publishing practice and what is becoming her career, to date.
