Skrillex amplifies Arab womanhood, high art out of creative therapy, and Dirk Koy’s morphing streets. Post-holiday A/V
Back from holidays, so let’s kick ourselves back into our multitudinous selves, with some a/v from the dot-commons. First, a banger…
From DJ Mag:
Skrillex has released the music video for his single, ‘XENA’, featuring Palestinian singer, composer, and flutist, Nai Barghouti. Watch the video below.
The short film was directed by Amara Abbas. As per the video’s description, a team of over 75 creatives in total worked on the short film, which “alternates between moments of conflict, resistance, fear, love, festivities, prayer, and dance.”
Reflecting on the project, Abbas said, “The film is around female passion/rage, liberation, duality of culture, freedom of choice and resistance. It is about the women who are leading revolution in systems that are designed against them... it’s about what this movement represents, what these young women represent — and what they inspire.”
She continues, “Not a lot of us have experienced being in regions where such intense events have occurred and the bones of what has happened is still very much there. This film is, in some way, the phoenix moment of women who are living this reality.”
‘XENA’ was originally released earlier this year on Skrillex’s fourth studio album, ‘Quest For Fire’, via Atlantic Records/OWLSA. Featuring Palestinian artist, Nai Barghouti, the track draws on the similarities between the structures of Arabic pop and dubstep, and features rural Egyptian percussion such as Darbouka.
Sharing a short clip from a studio with Skrillex from when they were working on the track, Barghouti wrote on Instagram: “I still remember the very first time we met. We shook hands and just kind of knew that something great will come out of it. Beyond thrilled and honored to be part of this incredible track with the one and only @skrillex.”
Skrillex has announced that he is partnering with OXFAM International to support donations towards the Turkey-Syria Earthquake Appeal, to support those who may be experiencing displacement and similar circumstances as a result of the event. All those who may be able to help are encouraged to donate here.
Founded in 1974 at the height of the US disability-rights movement, the Creative Growth Art Center is an Oakland-based nonprofit organisation that ‘advances the inclusion of artists with developmental disabilities in contemporary art’.
For the organisation’s director Tom di Maria, this means helping to fill in the gaps in a public education system that leaves behind those with disabilities, but also taking their artistic development seriously in an art world that has, historically, marginalised such artists.
And, as di Maria notes in this peak behind the centre’s walls, the project has produced some incredible success stories, including that of the US artist Judith Scott (1943-2005), who was born with Down’s syndrome, had undiagnosed deafness and never developed language.
However, as the film details, Scott ultimately found a new way to communicate with the world when she discovered fibre sculpture at the Arts Center, and has since been widely celebrated for her work.
From the work of Dirk Koy, see biog below:
Dirk Koy, born in 1977, is a Basel-based artist active in various fields of moving image creation. After studying visual communication at the Academy of Art and Design in Basel, which he completed in 2002, Dirk Koy worked at KMS-Team Munich in the field of graphic design and animation, and then cofounded the visual communication studio Equipo in 2007. In 2016 he founded the experimental film studio Dirk Koy Bild und Bewegung.
His works lie at the junction between a graphic, photographic and video approach anchored in the tangible and a digital work. They propose to experience the meeting of the real world with a virtual universe, of the analogical with the digital, while revealing the pictorial quality of digital contexts.
The plurality of digital technologies employed by Koy in the realization of his works, such as 2d and 3d animation, drones, photogrammetry, 3d scanning, augmented reality and virtual reality, as well as the manipulation of the various parameters of operating software whose limits he tests, attest to his interest in experi- mentation.
In his works representing distortions of the real world through these different digital processes, he thus gives a singular view of everyday life.