Mendez’s cultural highlights

 MENDEZ, in their blond era, at Studio Richter Mahr in December 2023. Photo by Marie Sutter

Mendez is a Margate-based writer and performer. They are the author of Rainbow Milk (Dialogue), which was a 2020 Observer Best Debuts pick, shortlisted for the Gordon Burn, Jhalak and Polari First Book prizes, and optioned for TV. They write reviews and personal essays for the London Review of Books, and have contributed fiction and non-fiction pieces to Art Review, Esquire, The Face, Frieze, boy.brother.friend, the Guardian, Times Literary Supplement and WritersMosaic. They are working on their second novel.

Novel: Tragic Magic by Wesley Brown (Daunt Books, 2025)

I have written the foreword to this republished 1978 debut novel, originally edited and published by Toni Morrison at Random House. ‘Mouth’ is out on parole after doing time as a conscientious objector, and reaches out to high-five New York only to be left hanging and blue-balled. Jazz-soaked, with hilarious dialogue, set against a backdrop of the post-Black Power Movement culture of resistance, Brown and Tragic Magic were ahead of their time in critiquing masculinities.

Album: Endlessness by Nala Sinephro (Warp Records, 2024)

Speaking of jazz, if Alice Coltrane’s Journey in Satchidananda had been infused with peak Kraftwerk electronics rather than plucked Indian and Middle-Eastern strings, it might have sounded something like Nala Sinephro’s Endlessness (endlessness being a major theme of Kraftwerk’s 1977 album Trans-Europe Express). Present without being intrusive, with celestial synths and a gaze of wonderment, this is the perfect album to write to, and another killer set from a Warp Records artist.

Residency: Studio Richter Mahr

Composer Max Richter and artist Yulia Mahr generously offer residencies to emerging musicians at their Oxfordshire studio complex, and I became the first writer invited to spend a week in one of their shepherd’s huts back in November 2023. I long to return to the peaceful, calm and creative environment they foster and slink along the studio walls like a cat while masterpieces are being made. It actually feels as if at any moment someone might make David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy there.

Exhibition: Donald Rodney: Visceral Canker at Whitechapel Gallery (until 4 May) 

Donald Rodney is my fourth-dimension dance partner. I grew up in his hometown (West Bromwich), both of us born to parents of Jamaican descent. He co-founded the Blk Art Group in 1982 (the year I was born), with close links to the University of Wolverhampton, literally next door to Molineux Stadium where I was baptised in 1998 (the year of his passing). The first time I encountered Rodney was in the Barbican’s The Surreal House exhibition in 2010, where his arresting 1997 work ‘In the House of My Father’ was on display. Whitechapel Gallery’s install is a retrospective and separate archive, collecting most of what survives of Rodney’s work, which, among other things, utilised the substances of chronic illness to critique the history of systemic and scientific racism.

Film: Neptune Frost (dir. Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman, 2021)

Did someone call for an ‘Afrofuturist sci-fi punk musical’ set around the coltan mines of Burundi? Writer and co-director Saul Williams is a poet and long-standing activist who has continuously platformed the plights of oppressed peoples globally, and Neptune Frost weaves together the stories of an intersex hacker transitioning, and a coltan miner grieving the loss of his brother due to workplace violence. Separately they journey to join the Universal Goldmine community, protected against the human rights abuses of big tech suffered acutely by African labourers. The film’s soundtrack Universal Goldmine, which includes songs from Williams’ solo albums rendered by the cast, is recommended in its own right.  

Favoured WritersMosaic writer:

Derek Owusu. One of the sweetest and most sensitive people I know and an incredible poetic writer. Special shoutouts to Colin Grant, a brilliant writer who champions us all.

Taíno Mendez

Taíno Mendez is an essayist, novelist and critic.