This column is from the summer 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. Buy the individual issue, or subscribe and get 4 issues delivered to your door each year.
The Strangest Person I Know is a new VICE column, in which we interview strange people and then ask them who the strangest person they know is so we can interview them too, creating a never-ending daisy chain of spiraling human strangeness in an increasingly square world. You can read the previous edition, about Russia’s foremost enema artist in exile, here.
Next up is Sol, a 26-year-old costume designer, scriptwriter, and performer recommended by last week’s candidate. Named after an English soccer player who is synonymous with treachery in certain corners of North London, Sol escaped an exurb upbringing and spent their college years dallying with Viennese Actionism before exploding into the capital’s queer underground, gracing raves, club nights, and theaters with performative attempts to grapple with their past through the mediums of horror and pain.
VICE phoned them for a chat.
VICE: Have you always performed solo?
Sol: Pretty much. I respond to things I’m going through, or past trauma that’s lived in me the whole time. That’s what makes it quite dark and uncomfortable for me and whoever’s watching.
What have some of the wilder performances involved?
Body horror, blood, physical endurance… My solo shows have all been about how much the body can take, physically. Now, it’s more about the effect that endurance has on me emotionally and containing that to the point where it then affects the body. Rather than, like, shoving a metal rod up my ass (below, right) or hitting myself with a hammer.
“In day-to-day life, I’m very reserved.”
I think I saw the metal rod on Instagram. How does the crowd respond to your shows?
I started out performing at club nights and raves, where people are just there to have a good time. I moved away from those spaces: it didn’t feel true to where I was coming from. In more formal theater spaces, people’s reactions are very different. They seem to be uncomfortable and shocked by what’s happening. Performing is the only way I can make sense of my mind, which I think is quite confusing to some people.
That said, you seem different in real life to how you present online.
Yeah, I get this a lot. In my day-to-day life, I’m very different, I’m very reserved.
What’s London like compared to where you grew up?
Where I’m from, people like me just don’t exist. Everyone around me was very traditional—you finished school, you got a job, got a house, had a baby, and that was your life. Even my family, they’re all like that. Since coming to London, my whole life has changed. I’m a completely different person from who I was before.
This column is from the summer 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. Buy the individual issue, or subscribe and get 4 issues delivered to your door each year.
The post The Strangest Person I Know: Sol appeared first on VICE.
