On my radar: Wendy Erskine’s cultural highlights

The Flats (dir Alessandra Celesia, 2024)

I don’t drive – I’ve failed the test seven times – which means that I get taxis a lot. On the upside, I really enjoy having a conversation with the drivers. One of them told me last year, with much pride and enthusiasm, about this film, which features a friend of his. “You’ve got to see it!” he said. He described a scene where there is a struggle to get a coffin into the lift of a high-rise. The Flats is a documentary, directed by Alessandra Celesia set in New Lodge, north Belfast. It uses archival footage, reconstruction and interview to consider place, conflict and lives. It looks brilliant.

Merville Garden Village, Newtownabbey

If I’m being honest, it wouldn’t bother me if someone said I could never walk through a forest ever again. I’d probably be more distressed at the thought of not being able to go to a shopping centre. That said, a yearly highlight is to head to Merville Garden Village, a 1940s housing estate just outside Belfast, when cherry blossom is in season. Influenced by the Garden C city movement, the white houses and flats have a definite modernist quality, but the chief beauty of the place is in its communal cherry trees. It’s reckoned that there are almost 300 of them.

Yvonne LaFleur New Orleans

Frequently, all I want is for an elegant, gentle 78-year-old woman to take me around her labyrinthine New Orleans fashion emporium, pointing out useful suits in winter white, explaining how to sit nicely in a family photo, showing different ways of wearing a peplum. That’s Yvonne LaFleur. In her Instagram videos, she talks with love about the things in her shop, as she reverentially touches the puff sleeve of a blouse or the sash of a wrap dress. Gracious and poised, LaFleur has become an essential element of my day.

Portrait of an Island on Fire by Ariel Saramandi

Back in the early 1980s, there was a real penpal craze in our school. You could send off to a place in Turku, Finland [the International Youth Service], and get matched up with someone from a country of your choice. Although we always ended up with Austria or Germany, top of the list was Mauritius because we had studied it in geography and it seemed like utter paradise. Well, we were kids.Ariel Saramandi’s interweaving essay collection presents a courageous, stringent and mesmerising portrait of the island, her home, and the social and political effects of colonialism. She’s a great writer.

Rob Jo Star Band by Rob Jo Star Band

This rather singular album from the French group Rob Jo Star Band was released on the Dom label in 1975. It’s psych with distortion, fuzz and lots of futuristic effects, like someone turning dials on a spaceship. It’s primitive and ramshackle but also intensely atmospheric. My favourite song changes, but at present it’s Acid Revolution. It sounds like a poundshop sci-fi Velvet Underground – that’s a compliment. This album really enhances my experience at the gym. I frequently have it as my soundtrack. I love how strange it makes everything seem. Are those people doing muscle-ups real or are they aliens? Maybe I’m an alien myself.

Untitled, 1967, by Bill Bollinger

This sculpture, which I saw at an exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, is essentially a crude oil barrel filled with water. “So what?” you might say. “How is that any different to the bucket filled with rain out in my garden?” Well it’s not that I don’t know what you mean but I would reply that Bill Bollinger’s untitled piece is utterly enchanting. I could have stared into its water for ages. In its simplicity, it made so much else in the gallery seem meretricious. But it was complex too, in its surface and depth, its changing colours, its contextual implications.