Our current artist in resident at AIT is Manila based Yason Banal, who will also show in the Singapore Biennale this coming September. Yason has just about completed an installation in our space in Daikanyama and will make a performance there tommorrow (Friday 9th) from 7pm. I interviewed Yason about this and post it in two parts, as it is a bit long. Pictures of AIT room now accompany the interview below.
Interview Part 1 begins below:
Hi Yason, Firstly, what is the meaning of 'Disaster but Disco'? Disco implies a place of colorful lights and pleasure, but it is offset with disaster?
Disaster But Disco, to put it plainly, is a space for both sufferance and pleasure, death and joy. Its perfectly summed up by two little known sexy starlets from the Philippine silver screen:
1) Stella Strada wrote on her suicide note: "It's a crazy planets!"
(misspelling intentional? still a mystery but hilarious and poignant just the same)
2) Azenith Briones said in the camp classic
'Temptation Island:' "There's no water. There's no food. Oh whatever, might as well dance then."
It’s this relentless drive to seek awkward pleasures and resistances as well as errors and terrors that I find interesting. Tokyo possesses this drive to go on and continue amidst tragedy - surviving disasters both natural and manmade such as earthquakes, recessions and the atomic bomb.
Disaster But Disco also stands for DBD, which in Filipino parlance alludes to pirated movies sold on the black market. I am interested in music and film cultures, and how they can be used to reflect and deflect existing forms and narratives, and hopefully create new constellations in the process.
I understand that this installation and performance is inspired by a number of different elements - the Great Earthquake of 1923 Tokyo, constellations, your interest in Death Metal music and the intense Catholic traditions in the Philippines. Can you explain a little about these elements and how have you woven these things together in this installation?
Disasters are said to be caused by the bad alignment of stars. Stars can mean both heavenly bodies in outer space or failed celebrities in media hell Constellations are like disco lights. One bulb goes off and a dark disaster can happen, like tripping on the dance floor, or an earthquake destroying a city
like Tokyo.
Constellations are formed by various bodies in space, forming various alignments. I see my work, including the AIT project, as another constellation formed by various ideas, each with a certain trajectory of its own, but hopefully all of them at sometime meet at a certain point, and make sense to the viewer somehow, however nervous the alignments may seem.
I've become acquainted with black metal music 2 years ago when I did a show for the Oslo Kunsthall in Norway. I met these kids in a club - boy were they full of angst and make up. I found the mock scary attire hilarious, and found them quite sweet and fragile. I started hanging out with a few of them on and off for two months while in Oslo. Death metal in the Philippines is also quite big, and am friends with a few musicians from that community. Death and black metal are different in aesthetic though; in this work I have geared more towards black metal, for its camp and mock evil undertones.
But both Norwegian black metal and Pinoy death metal are definitely critical, if not hateful towards Christianity. The growling reminds me of earthquakes, as much as fault lines make me think of sixties minimalism. The black metal make up and get up is a disaster, and is more disco than devil. Disasters, discos, jihads and metal concerts also cause mob hysteria, and cause agony and ecstasy at the same time. Any culture has this 'stampede' consciousness and 'religious' experience. Philippine Christian pageantry in its ritual performance and visual design is actually quite pagan, so I find that kind of surreal and subversive in a way. It has somehow effortlessly blended hardcore Catholicism with witchcraft, like a black metal gospel choir.
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