Fra i tanti eventi che si svolgono a Los Angeles in questi giorni c'è anche il recente film "Black to Techno" di Jenn Nkiru promosso dal gruppo Gucci.
Si tratta del quarto e ultimo episodio della serie Second Summer of Love, e traccerà il linguaggio della techno attraverso la sua città natale a Detroit e in seguito alle innovazioni berlinesi.
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BLACK TO TECHNO, a new film by artist and filmmaker, Jenn Nkiru and produced by Iconoclast, is to premiere in the Paramount Theatre on Thursday 14th February at the inaugural edition of Frieze Los Angeles. Shot on location in Detroit, the twenty-minute film charts the birth of Techno in this city and its specific cultural grounding in the black community. Investigating the roles played in this history by race, technology and geography via a series of interviews with leading academics and through unearthing long-forgotten archival footage, the film presents an original and fresh narrative on the most influential sound in modern electronic music.
Frieze Los Angeles will premiere Jenn Nkiru’s film followed by an ‘In Conversation’ talk with cultural critic and filmmaker, dream hampton.
“I assert techno is not just a musical gesture but a philosophical, sonic and anthropological one.
Detroit is the birth place of Techno – the centre of its production and innovation with Berlin its ever-loyal centre of reception and fandom.
Bound up in Techno are the particularities of a culture, people, energy, industrialism, geography, politics and future imaginings of a certain time: it is a sound of resistance, an underground sound created by young black folks in Detroit.
BLACK TO TECHNO explores these ideologies thru my sensorial audio-visual gaze: unfolding like a relic find of the watching pattern of a Detroiter across public access TV on a Friday evening — switching between the various inter-related channels of Techno.
Detroit is an incredible city: one that has given the world so much. It is dynamic, resilient and full of soul — Detroit is saving itself. This film is my love letter to this magical city and I feel honoured to have created this piece.
I hope this film shifts the mainstream understanding of this incredible sound and encourages audiences to ask questions and dig deeper.” — Jenn Nkiru
BLACK TO TECHNO is the fourth and final film in the Second Summer of Love series co-commissioned by Frieze and Gucci. Four artists have been commissioned to create films inspired by the ‘Second Summer of Love’, the explosion of electronic music and youth culture which swept the UK and Europe in 1988. Each film explores the enduring impact of acid house on contemporary culture, tracing its lineage from the home-grown Italian disco scene, via the adoption of European synth sounds in the burgeoning house and techno cultures of Chicago, Detroit and New York, to rave’s permanent rupturing and rebuilding of British identity.
Elsewhere in the series, ‘Into a space of love’ by Wu Tsang premiered at Frieze New York in May 2018 followed by Everybody in The Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992 by Jeremy Deller and Distant Planet: The Six Chapters of Simona by Josh Blaaberg at Frieze London in October 2018. The series is accompanied by four 60-second prelude films directed by Adam Csoka Keller and photographed by Evelyn Benčičová.
Private screening of ‘BLACK TO TECHNO’: 7.30pm at Paramount Studios Theatre on Thursday 14th February
Public screening of all four films: 3.30pm-6pm at Paramount Studios Theatre on Sunday 17th February
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