Simone Bertuzzi and Simone Trabucchi have been collaborating as Invernomuto since 2003. Their work focuses primarily on sound and the moving image, although they frequently integrate sculpture, performance, and printed media into their projects. Negus, screened in this session, is one of their essay films about sound, colonialism and diaspora. The film explores the convergence of history, myth and magic through the complex and contradictory legacies of Ethiopia's last emperor, Haile Selassie I, better known as Negus, a word that means 'king' in Ethiopia's own Amharic language. During the rule of fascist dictator Mussolini in Italy, Selassie was portrayed as a black devil, thus providing justification for the invasion of Ethiopia. This point in time coincided with the high point of Rastafarianism in Jamaica, which claimed Selassie as its living God and the resurrected black Christ. Negus thrives in the space between these two irreconcilable realities. All this is fuelled by the dual presence of two Lee 'Scratch' Perrys, one who hovers like a spiritual ghost over the Black Ark, his former recording studio in Kingston, which was burned down in the 1980s, and another who is the master of a ritual fire ceremony performed in Italy in order to invoke the spirit of the last emperor of Ethiopia.
It is precisely these connections between Italy, Ethiopia, and Jamaica that are the starting point for STILL, another expression of Simone Trabucchi's artistic research into popular music. Accompanied this time by Afro-Italian vocalist Devon Miles, she embarks on this new iteration of her incisive review of the European colonial past and pays tribute to grassroots popular culture in an unusual and hypnotic mix of dancehall with a contemporary twist, dub poetry, and Jamaican musical tradition, which revels in the legacy of Bubbling and the way it experiments with pitch and playback speeds.
The Lorem Ipsum series, named after the Latin expression used in graphic design for typographical demonstrations and false modelling designs is back, bringing you music and fun from the fringes. It does so by bringing to its audiences artists who possess their own, unique aesthetics, who blur the boundaries between disciplines, use their creations as a testing ground and place the spotlight on racialised, sexualised, dissident bodies and emerging women artists.
A 2021 Barcelona Grec Festival and Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art co-production.
TICKETS FROM JUNE 8
Photography: Moira Ricci
