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- Opa! New flavors from Rio
My friends Jeroen & Dre are working on an amazing project called Favela Painting that I wrote about a while ago.
Over the summer, they shot a video for the song ‘Beijo na boca’ by Rio Bebel
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Right-click + ’save link as’ (mac) ’save target as’ (pc)the video’s out and it’s awesome:
They also made a hip hop movie in favelas around Rio:
And for a final treat, here’s the ‘drunk in the morning’ mixtape by Jeroen AKA Gringo Drama:
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- Shameless Plug
[image courtesy of buttbling.com]In the words of R Kelly, “usually I don’t do this, but uh…..” there’s a couple of projects that I’m involved in coming out, so I thought why not give them a little push here…
For the next month I’ll be contributing each Friday to artreview.com. The first piece went up today. Check it here.
More importantly…
My friends Andre and Hiro just released Big Bang Beijing - a collection of photos of China’s rapidly mutating capital city along with essays from guests on subjects like propaganda, leisure, demolition, and enlightenment. Most of the images are from 2004ish to 2006ish, making the book a kind of amazing time capsule, since the city is already pretty radically different just a couple years later.
Here’s a few sample spreads…
For more info, check out Andre’s site. Buy it from Amazon.
And now that I’m on a roll, I also want to big up “The World of Madelon Vriesendorp” a collection of the work of my mf’n heart Maddie showing at the AA in London til February 8.
Check out James Westcott’s review of the show here. If you’re in London, check it out. I wish I could.
UPDATE: Listen to Maddie’s presentation at the exhibition opening here:
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- My ass went to the Shenzhen Biennale and all you got is this lousy recap
This weekend was the opening of the Shenzhen Biennale (also known by its ultra sleek ceremonial name The 2007 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture) - a three-month festival of city life, staged in an old industrial complex. The enormous show was curated by my friends Charlie Koolhaas & Qingyun Ma and featured the work of a bunch of other friends, so I went down on Saturday to support and check it out.
I’d planned to do a big, full-bodied post about the biennale, since there is almost no online evidence of its existence. But then I got there and realized my camera had no memory card, then I arrived at the site and things got all hectic with helping people move shoes and find extension chords, and reuniting with old friends, and everyone was drinking and delirious from not having slept properly for days, then it was the opening ceremony and I had to get my shit together to DJ at the after party, and, in the end, I left the place having taken five photos with my phone. For the record:
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The two other photos I mentioned were blurrier versions of those guys playing with the rubik’s cubes. So, that’s not much of a record. But even from these three I think you can sense the casual, participatory vibe that makes the biennale really fun and radically unlike the typical architectural affair.
But I don’t want to shortchange an event that my friends spent so much time and money and mental health points working on, so, like any good party crasher, I’m going to boast about what I took home in my gift bag and in the process name drop! Now then:
1. Biennale in a box
The biennale’s catalog is basically an enormous pink brick filled with black & white posters, one poster for each of the 200+ exhibits. I haven’t really looked in it yet but, like Mount Rushmore or Britney Spears’ pre-nup, I admire it for the sheer quantity of labor that went in.
2. Cool newspaper that the printer fucked up
The biennale organizers created a list of ten questions about cities, with the idea of urban regeneration and expiration in mind especially. They got a lot of interesting responses and painstakingly arranged fragments of the best ones into a series of meditations of cities and life itself. They formatted it as a newspaper with the intention of distributing them free throughout the biennale. Then the printer flaked out and somehow showed up with boxes of two separate pieces with non-sequential pages. China.
3. Rumpled print by Lok Jansen
My friend Lok is an architect and illustrator in Tokyo. A set of his pieces were printed on light boxes and hung up along a concrete wall, and everybody loves them. I don’t have a picture of that, of course. But I’m sure he will. Check his site out here.
4. Inflatable tower packaged to look like a condom
My roommate for a night Andre Schmidt has produced a blow-up version of the Berlin TV Tower. It’s cool and incredibly phallic. That doesn’t bother Andre one bit, as is evidenced by this promotional video he’s hooked up for it:
For more info on what it is and where to buy, go here.
5. You by Dynamic City Foundation
This is a very beautiful little book about, among other things, the dreams of everyday Chinese people. Truthfully speaking, I didn’t get this book at the biennale. But it was available at the biennale, so I want to bring it up because its creator Neville Mars produced one of the most beautiful exhibits and, of course, I don’t have any photos of that. But in this case, that doesn’t matter so much because Neville has painstakingly documented it all here. Neville was also rinsing it out on the dance floor at the after party so he gets extra props for that too.
6. With/Without
This is a book about Dubai edited by my friend Shumon. I haven’t had a chance to look through it yet, but need to because I really don’t know much about Dubai.
7. Reineke Otten’s business card
Reineke produced by all accounts a very beautiful and smart exhibit on her World Skin Colors project. But half of it was removed by the Shenzhen government, because it didn’t properly identify Taiwan as part of China. One of those cultural mistakes that’s very very easy to make when you’re not in China and impossible after you’ve been here for a while. Reineke’s also a gifted photographer. Check out some of her work here.
8. The new issue of Urban China magazine
My peeps Urban China also had an exhibit at the biennale and it also was censored. They seemed to take it in stride, and gave me their latest issue about Chinatowns and it’s excellent. If you can read Chinese or are feeling adventurous, check them out here.
9. The new issue of Too magazine
Too is a good new magazine made by a crew of people in different parts of China. They made a special issue for the biennale that focuses on Shenzhen and includes a bunch of funny and fascinating portraits of people there.
10. The new issue of Prophecy magazine.
Prophecy is a magazine based in New York with a very good sense of style and the type of international spirit that I always get behind. I was introduced to its publisher Kevin and he hit me off with this. Check out the Prophecy site for more info and some very good mixes.
Last and least I have a clip of part of my set at the after party. It was described by the biennale’s head curator Charlotte Koolhaas as “music for a 12 year old’s birthday party” and includes back-to-back-to-back hits from Michael Jackson, back-to-back Britney, Chris Brown, Usher, Nina Sky, Kevin Little and some more I forgot. It gets cut off abruptly because the authorities ended the party by shutting off all the power without warning. China.
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- Nice up the Republic: a conversation with Beijing’s ambassador to reggae
One of the coolest things about being in Beijing at this point in its history is watching the ways that the city processes the huge amounts of new cultural information that enter it each day. On its surface, Beijing’s cultural identity seems pretty fixed. It’s the PRC’s symbolic center, and it needs to look the part. But if you look below the surface, you see a city passionately seeking out and soaking in new forms of life and living. For the past few months, I’ve been interviewing some of the people who seem to be at the front of this process. I’ll post up some my favorites as time goes by.
To start, here’s a conversation I had a couple weeks ago with Robin Liao. Robin owns Together Bar, Beijing’s #1 (and only) reggae spot. I hope you enjoy….
Quotables:
“Reggae in China is like blind people touching an elephant.”
“If you put Bob-anything in the internet, you get Bob Dylan.”
“Sometimes an opportunity just falls down from the sky - like a pie in the sky. But sometimes it is really a pie.”
“I’m a Gemini so I always jump.”
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- Read: Did someone say participate?
My partner Charlie brought me back a copy of “Did someone say participate?” - a new book put together by friends and all around doing it dudes Shumon Basar and Markus Miessen.
An interview I did with abortion rights activist Rebecca Gomperts is included, so, you know, do like Missy says…
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- Favela Painting
I should also mention to UNIT friend Jeroen Koolhaas is here in Tokyo looking for galleries to exhibit an installation that he’s made to explain/publicize “Favela Painting” a project he’s doing with another friend Dre Urhahn.
Check out their site for more info, but the basic premise is to paint an entire section of Rio slum as a single, recognizable picture to help alter the image of favelas - notorious, but popular informal communities that are often left off Brazil’s maps and political agenda.
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