Die Antwoord

Photography by Kobus Holnaaler

Zef: from low avangarde to hi-fi and back
by ANTÓNIO CERVEIRA PINTO

I love being naive about music. I really am! I like it, or I don't like it. I miss almost of the gossip though.

I listen to Hip hop sampling and rap poetry as some kind of updated ex-low pop art, visually powerful, swingy, rythmic, intellectually agressive, multilayered if good enough, marvellous repetitive. It's like a techno realization of post-modern de-construction, a wall defacement, a post-marxian dérive, a suburban psychogeography. Tonight I was struck by the almost dark, deeply cool, dry and clever Die Antwoord. What a punch in my sophisticated perusal rituals! Entering the web of ¥o-Landi Vi$$er ["Fuck da System, I Got My Own System"], Ninja ["If u going thru hell … Keep Ging"] and DJ Hi-Tek ["DJ Hi-Tek Will Fuck U in The Ass"] is like feeling an exploded ex-museum crashing into my face. What the fuck is the white cube for?

For more:

• Die Antwoord website 
• Die Antwoord in Wikipedia 
• Zef definition by ¥o-Landi Vi$$er: "It's associated with people who soup their cars up and rock gold and shit. Zef is, you're poor but you're fancy. You're poor but you're sexy, you've got style."

Alex Prager

Alex Prager - "The Big Valley; Virginia", 2008.

The new Cindy star of American photography?
by ANTÓNIO CERVEIRA PINTO

I know when I see good stuff! So far the wonderland and nightmares of this young American photographer and film maker (Los Angeles, 1979) tells me that there is future beyond conventional media and old fashion realism. Her images and her perlaborations around Hollywood lost paradise certainly brings a new flavor to ex-voto iconography by Cindy Sherman, the horrors of Paul Mc Carthy, and even Nan Goldin daily dramas. Alex Prager is none of these great artists, nor is she even close to Diane Arbus, neither to my beloved Larry Clark. There's something else out there. Her work make me think, and this is the marvellous uniqueness of all ingenuous outcomes by creative sensible minds. I'm looking forward to know her future images and narratives!

For more:

• Alex Prager website
• New Photography 2010, Moma

Poema ridículo

Madrid
por ANTÓNIO CERVEIRA PINTO (2004/2012)

quem me dera nascer gato
haver Deus e amar-te
sou ateu e vagueio...
o coração raso, a razão perdida
querendo - raios me partam! - querendo...