The Russi Hive

Alejandro Triana: Dude with the Oud — Passion, Place, and Playing Between the Notes

In Episode 10 of The Russi Hive Podcast, Alejandra sits down with Alejandro Triana—her nephew, almost-sibling, and the musician behind Dude with the Oud—for a conversation about obsession as creative fuel, the worlds we build as children, and the strange, crooked routes by which a life begins to sound like itself. The episode opens with family lore: two Alejandros, a Disney autograph book, a missing set of Ninja Turtle pages, and a childhood "crime" that somehow becomes a theory of creative temperament. For Triana, obsession was never casual. As a child, it meant entering a world completely; as an artist, it becomes a way of listening, practicing, and following a sound until it changes the shape of your life. At the center of the conversation is the oud: the ancient, fretless, microtonal instrument Triana calls the grandfather of guitars. After hearing it in a Lower East Side club, he bought one the next day and began chasing a sound that would lead him through Arabic music, flamenco, Andalusian histories, diasporic identity, and a musical language of his own. They talk about skateboarding through New York as a kid, subway musicians as early influences, the tension between practice and play, and the challenge of making music in an era that asks artists to become content creators. The episode also circles back to childhood world-building: toys with names, elaborate plots, vanished little universes, and the creative muscle that forms before anyone knows to call it art. What emerges is a conversation about self-invention, discipline, detours, and living on your own timeline. Original music and sonic identity by Antfood. Sound design: Federico Casazza. Follow The Russi Hive: YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/@russihive] Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/russihive/] TikTok [https://www.tiktok.com/@russihive] Substack [https://substack.com/@russihive]

Choghakate Kazarian: Unquicken the Pace — Curating as Medium and Letting Ideas Ripen

In Episode 9 of The Russi Hive Podcast, Alejandra sits down with Choghakate Kazarian—art historian, curator, and writer—to talk about curating as a creative medium. Kazarian’s story begins in several languages at once: Armenian, French, English, Italian—each one carrying its own atmosphere, its own way of thinking, its own private weather. Born in Armenia, raised in France, and shaped by years of looking across cultures, she speaks about language not as translation, but as a way of seeing. From there, they move into the hidden architecture of exhibition-making: the research, the rhythm, the negotiations with space and loans, and the quiet labor that allows a show to feel inevitable. For Kazarian, the curator’s hand should guide without announcing itself; when an exhibition works, the machinery recedes, and the artist comes more fully into view. They discuss Lucio Fontana, Henry Darger, Louis Michel Eilshemius, the slippery usefulness of labels like outsider art and Art Brut, and Kazarian’s unexpected turn into fashion with her Chloé exhibition at the Jewish Museum. Darger becomes a turning point: after years shaped by Duchamp and other modernist touchstones, Kazarian describes encountering his work as a before-and-after experience—one that unsettled her categories and opened a different way of seeing artistic intensity and necessity. The episode closes with a meditation on time: how ideas ripen, how exhibitions continue after they close, and why slowness can be a form of resistance in a culture obsessed with productivity. Through the work of Albert Pinkham Ryder, Kazarian reflects on revision, unfinishedness, and the delicate discipline of bringing a work to closure without pretending it is ever truly complete. Original music and sonic identity by Antfood. Sound design: Federico Casazza. Follow The Russi Hive: YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/@russihive] Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/russihive/] TikTok [https://www.tiktok.com/@russihive] Substack [https://substack.com/@russihive]

Scott Asen: The Enemy Is Boredom — Taste, Risk, and Turtle Bay Records

In Episode 8 of The Russi Hive, Alejandra sits down with Scott Asen: founder of Turtle Bay Records, investor, raconteur, and proof that a life can be organized around taste, mischief, and a highly productive fear of boredom. The interview traces the unlikely arc of a man who grew up with show business in his bloodstream—his mother in vaudeville, his father a clarinet and saxophone player—and then somehow threaded his way through Groton, Harvard, Wall Street, a Cambridge piano bar, private investing, and several lives’ worth of detours. At the center of the episode is Turtle Bay Records, the jazz label Asen founded during the stillness of 2020. What started as a way to record extraordinary musicians playing older jazz has become a larger ecosystem of albums, parties, friendships, music videos, late-night performances, and an elegant excuse to keep very good people in the same room. They talk about the strange usefulness of not fitting in, old New York, and Asen’s Manhattan townhouse, affectionately known in younger circles as the “Jazz Mansion.” The result is a conversation about music, timing, nerve, and the fine art of turning an address into a scene. Original music and sonic identity by Antfood. Sound design: Federico Casazza. Follow The Russi Hive: YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/@russihive] Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/russihive/] TikTok [https://www.tiktok.com/@russihive] Substack [https://substack.com/@russihive]

Laetitia Barbier: Pocketable Museum — Tarot as Creative Language and Mirror

In Episode 7 of The Russi Hive Podcast, Alejandra sits down with Laetitia Barbier—tarot reader, writer, art historian, and longtime explorer of the strange, sacred life of images—to talk about tarot not as fortune-telling, but as a creative language. The conversation begins with Barbier’s childhood in France and her encounter with her first deck in a tobacconist’s shop. From there, they explore Barbier’s lifelong relationship to images—their power to instruct and enchant—with museums as surrogate churches and the tarot deck as a “pocketable museum”: a portable world of symbols and archetypes that keep rearranging themselves into new meaning. The core of the episode is tarot as a poetic practice. Barbier speaks about readings as intimate, collaborative encounters, where images are gathered into a kind of secret theater—opening space for reflection, vulnerability, and self-knowledge. They discuss New York’s countercultural lineages, the resurgence of tarot in a cynical age, and why people may be turning again toward ritual and symbolic depth. The episode closes by turning the cards toward creativity itself, moving from the Fool’s raw potential to the Star’s quiet clarity, with failure and transformation as part of the path. Original music and sonic identity by Antfood. Sound design: Federico Casazza. Follow The Russi Hive: YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/@russihive] Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/russihive/] TikTok [https://www.tiktok.com/@russihive] Substack [https://substack.com/@russihive]

Elizabeth Dee: Who Gets Seen — Attention, Power, and Building Independent

In this episode of The Russi Hive, Alejandra sits down with Elizabeth Dee, founder of the Independent Art Fairs, to talk about what it means to build the kinds of platforms the art world doesn’t yet know it needs. The conversation begins with Dee’s early years at Deitch Projects and the founding of Elizabeth Dee Gallery, then moves through formative exhibitions with artists such as Adrian Piper and Ryan Trecartin; the broader New York generation that emerged around shows like Greater New York at PS1/MoMA; and the delicate question of how to honor artists’ histories while helping their work find the right present-day context, audience, and future. They dig into the origins of Independent: how a handful of conversations among like-minded dealers became a different kind of New York art fair, designed for slower, more intentional looking and often centered on tightly curated, narrative-driven presentations. Elizabeth traces how the project has since grown into a larger architecture—one that includes editorial publishing, research initiatives, and an invite-only press bureau. She talks about stewardship in practice: commissioning English-language scholarship for artists from Latin America and other underrepresented contexts; using the fair’s platform to encourage collectors to look beyond a narrow “I only buy contemporary” mindset; and treating press and criticism as part of the historical record, not merely a PR afterthought. Along the way, Elizabeth speaks candidly about what it meant to build a gallery, close one, and reinvent herself through Independent—and how those experiences reshaped her thinking around risk, responsibility, and visibility. She describes the fair and its related projects as an “architecture” for showing work, where exhibition formats, commissioned texts, and press coverage all have to align. Again and again, the conversation returns to a central question: how to use that structure to give artists from different places and generations meaningful visibility, without reducing their work to another short-lived market story. Original music and sonic identity by Antfood. Sound design: Federico Casazza. Follow The Russi Hive: YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/@russihive] Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/russihive/] TikTok [https://www.tiktok.com/@russihive] Substack [https://substack.com/@russihive]