20 Apr 11

Ever since Soulja Boy dropped his hit ‘Crank That’ in 2007 I’m totally into steeldrum riddims and other plink plonk tunes. I didn’t really like the song but I could get carried away by the instrumental version, a steeldrum riddim.
So here’s a list of tunes I played the last two years with a lot of plink plonk sounds. Featuring remixes by Rupture vs Mr Lee G, Chief Boima (from Bananaclipz), Egyptrixx, Munchi (not the Dutch Munchi who makes Moombahton) and Nicone & Sascha Braemer’s Philip Bader-Renaissance Man mix.

Very good news: I just heard Worm will have a Shangaan Electro night! The clown masked dancers Tshetsha Boys are coming along, so this is a must see show!
For everybody whose not familiar with the genre check out this video with amazing dance moves!

Enjoy:

Heart It Races – DJ Rupture’s Ital Hymn Mix Featuring Mr Lee G

Shake Them Dreads-Chief Boima

Nur Mal Kurz (Philip Bader Remix) Renaissance Man International Edit(1)

PRC89_munchi_-_Dancing_With_Wolves

Chrysalis Records (feat. Trust)

18 Apr 11

My first year as a student I lived in a shared apartment. The years after I lived in ‘antikraak’ buildings. (Anti-kraak translated as anti-squad is a way of keeping empty buildings from being squatted. Till last year squatting a building that’s been over a year empty was legal in the Netherlands. To prevent this from happening owners hire a company who sublet these places during the short in-between time when there’s no destination plan. You only pay electrical and water bills and so it’s fairly cheap.)
The best part about it was turning unconventional spaces into bedrooms and living rooms. And so I lived in a convent, a classroom, a former building of the Dutch phone company and a bunch of office buildings.
One building used to be extremely ugly and luckily after three months I moved out. It was supposed to be taken down, that was 11 years ago. Today the building is home to an art collective who uses it for studio spaces and exhibition space. Since it’s really big it’s not easy to maintain every room and really there’s no use. It still will be demolished eventually. I hadn’t been there for 11 years and was surprised to see that in one room the ivy found a way to enter the building and now is making it’s way through it. It’s becoming a contemporary urban version of sleeping beauties castle.

An old polaroid of Daniela just before I moved out of the building

12 Apr 11

Annika Syrjamaki asked me to photograph her beautiful textile designs for a newspaper she made called ‘The daily pattern’. You can see the rest of the collection here

29 Mar 11

I’ve got a long history of making self-portraits when being bored. Here are some very old ones made at a beach in former Yugoslavia.

24 Mar 11

In Caochangdi art galleries are what we call museums over here.
The scale of the white cube galleries is huge and a lot of chinese artists work pretty big also. I visited some studios in the district and it didn’t surprise me to see that they were also gigantic. There’s a rather lucky group of artists who seem to do pretty well.

I visited Chambers Fine Art gallery (Beijing) and because some things get lost in translation I was first under the impression the burned room was an art piece. It turned out that Ye Nan who is working with phosphorous hand-made paper tried to put the phosphor directly onto the wall which as you can see turned out pretty bad. The room burned down and nearly the rest of the gallery also.

Picture of a studio in Caochangdi (I’m sorry I have forgotten the name of the artist).
Picture of the burned room in Chambers Fine Art gallery.