Miranda July might be a performance artist who makes films, a filmmaker who writes fiction, or an author who creates performance art. Or perhaps the idea of being defined by just one of these forms is precisely what she’d most like to avoid as she travels fluidly through each medium, transferring the attributes of one into another with seamless grace. Her keen deployment of narrative keeps her performance work from feeling dry and excessively theory-driven, and her films resonate with an artfulness largely missing from contemporary cinema. Her work has been featured in the past two Whitney Biennial exhibitions, and her directorial debut, Me and You and Everyone We Know received the Camera D’Or at Cannes as well as a special jury prize for originality of vision at Sundance. She did not, as a child, feed Cheetos to other, younger, children.

Jockum Nordstrom was born in and lives in Stockholm, where he makes drawings of ships, tiny dioramas of cities, and men in uncomfortable suits, all rendered in a deliberately crude folk-art style. His compositions are spatially dimensionless, but the figures that populate his odd, rickety landscapes are vividly—even lewdly—robust, the rich mysteries of their private lives pooling suggestively in the impossibly steep and cavernous rooms through which they move. These might be the banished mating diagrams of the early settlers—swiftly illustrated erotic comedies that barely made the leap from the elaborate theater inside Nordstrom’s head to the collage-laden page.

In September 2005, July met with Nordstrom in Manhattan. July had just returned from the French opening of her film, and was visiting New York for a premiere, and Nordstrom was in the U.S. to attend a wedding on Long Island. They wandered the Lower East Side, eventually settling in Nordstrom’s hotel room for a conversation on art, the deceptive warmth of Spain, and a group of tourists they followed around and dubbed “the Tribe.”

I.

MIRANDA JULY: Last night I dreamt that—I think this was an anxiety dream about global warming— I dreamt that I was the only one who realized that the sky was being digitally replaced by a fake sky—like, when you looked up you could see that there were these little, sort of—

JOCKUM NORDSTROM: It looked like that yesterday.

MJ: Oh, it did?

JN: Yes.

MJ: Oh.

JN: The sky was short—it was like a theater.

MJ: Maybe that’s where I got the idea.

JN: It was a really short sky.

MJ: In the dream I kept saying to people, “Look, you can see that little part isn’t real.” I realized that this had been happening slowly over many years—the government was doing it for some reason—and my proof was that people...