Becoming a DJ of thought

Abraham Meeuwsen: In 2020 you graduated from the KABK with the project 'MOKSI: Negotiated Memory'. Could you tell us more about this project on the representation of Surinamese women in institutional archives?

Yessica Deira: 'MOKSI: Negotiated Memory' is an ongoing live performative piece in which I investigate the private nature of analogue archives and the rapid flow of digital productions. With this project I wanted to give Surinamese women their stories back.

In the initial phase of my research, I did not yet know what exactly I was looking for in the National Archives. I decided to search through all the photo collections with the location 'Suriname' after which I eventually came across a specific report: 'Netherlands Antilles and Suriname at the time of the royal visit of Queen Juliana and Prince Bernhard in 1955'. This was the first time that a Dutch monarch visited Suriname. Queen Juliana had visited Suriname before, but as a princess. The photo report seemed to be intended as a report of her state visit, as if it were a kind of souvenir for the Dutch citizen. But what I found more important was to turn the gaze back to the viewer and to take away the power of the photographer. In this way, the power is given back to the women who are portrayed in the images.

How can we use Instagram to give Surinamese women back their stories? How do these women (re)present themselves on Instagram? Which hashtags do they use? These are just a few of the questions I try to answer with this project. By comparing keywords from the National Archives with self-made hashtags, I highlight prejudices about and the representation of Surinamese women in institutional archives compared to self-made Instagram posts. The online environment allows the visitor to interact with the archive, making it both a narrative device and an alternative tool.

'MOKSI: Negotiated Memory' aims to encourage current and future continuators and advisors of the archive to speculate together about its form and content. With this project I am thus attempting to experiment with the reconstruction of collective consciousness through images.

A.M: In your thesis 'Rhythm of Residing (contemporary music as a tool for self-knowledge)' you describe how music plays an increasingly important role in your professional practice as a graphic designer and maker. You ask yourself how music can influence the archive as we know it and as a tool for self-knowledge. How do you look at this? What is important to you in this?

YD: With this thesis I wanted to reflect on my approach to healing, feeling at home, remembering and forgetting through music from the African diaspora. How do I, born in Europe and coming from the African diaspora, deal with this process? I felt disconnected from the country my grandparents came from because I was not born there and do not speak the language. I therefore started to research artists who experiment with music to create new or forgotten stories within postcolonial history.

During my previous studies I noticed that I didn’t want to make work about my identity or about blackness. It almost felt like a kind of obligation to me as one of the few black artists at the academy, while I wanted to make work for myself, not because I’m black. Was it really up to me as a person of color to find ways to improve postcolonial thinking?

I spent too long feeling like this weird black girl who listened to different music than everyone else. And now I finally feel like my taste in music is allowed to be there and that people enjoy it. When I was 15, I didn’t want people to know what kind of music I listened to. And now I just appreciate that I can play and make what I want.

But at the same time I realized that I was subconsciously occupied with the fact that I come from the African diaspora. I started to investigate how music testifies to this subconscious search. Which artists do I listen to? What stories do they tell with their lyrics? How is the rhythm constructed? And how is this linked to my identity as an Afro-European? In my research I refer, for example, to the work of the Afro-Peruvian composer and choreographer Victoria Santa Cruz, I screamed black (1978), but also to the Rotterdam rapper Bokoedro with his FUTUREJAZZ music from the year 2035.

Other major sources of inspiration around this theme are Evan Ifekoya and Christelle Oyiri. In 'Collective Amnesia' (2018), artist Christelle Oyiri (aka DJ CRYSTALLMESS) the topics of club culture, colonial alienation and alternative temporalities. Here you can clearly see the urgency of remembering and archiving black events. In this multidisciplinary project Oyiri mixes the art of performance and DJing with film. Using archive material Oyiri investigates the forgotten urban dance style Logobi from Ivory Coast. In doing so Oyiri raises questions about the erased history of the black contribution to contemporary French music.

Evan Ifekoya is an artist and 'energy worker', who uses 'sound system' as an archetype for black expression. He speculates on the abundance of blackness through archival and audio research. At the same time, Ifekoya investigates how you can heal through rhythms and sound vibrations. This is directly related to my thesis in which I try to connect music from my youth to the music that speaks to me now.

A.M: You mentioned that your DJ name and alter ego Soft Break originated at the KABK. What is the significance of the alter ego for you as an artist and within DJing? How does this alter ego relate to daily life and to your professional practice?

YD: In 2018, under the guidance of Simon Wald-Lasowski and Job Wouters, the alter ego Soft Break was indeed created. For a whole semester, I focused on defining my alter ego. Because I had always dreamed of DJing, I decided that my alter ego had to be a DJ. The interesting thing about this project was that up until that point, I had never really tried to DJ, but was only focused on my appearance. I tried to incorporate the 'DJ life' into my daily life. I wore bright eye make-up, brightly colored clothes and I wore a different hairstyle every day. This became an important aspect of my style as a DJ. I kept this look for five months. I was completely focused on how people would see me as a DJ and how I wanted to be seen as a DJ. I also kept a diary in which I collected potential new hairstyles.

An interesting point considering that I always felt different growing up as a child but always thought that it didn’t really bother me. I was apparently wrong and therefore began to compare the performance and appearance of a DJ to the same duality found within the African diaspora.

Dr. Charissa Granger – musicologist and at that time academic researcher at Erasmus University in the field of the relationship between music and postcolonial and decolonial experiences – pointed out to me the way I talk about music and structure my ideas. She suggested to take a personal position towards obtaining knowledge through music, since I am not a music theorist but a musician. I agree with her and therefore try to make this topic more accessible to people who may not know much about music but feel a strong need to reconnect with their (musical) roots.

It was Dr. Granger who then referred me to DJ Lynnée Denise. She coined the term 'DJ Scholarship' to reposition the role of the DJ from party starter to DJ as archivist, cultural custodian and information specialist of music with critical value. Or as DJ Lynnée Denise puts it: “DJ Scholarship is Diggin' through the sonic/literary crates, Chasin' Samples, Album cover analysis, Liner note criticism. DJ as archivist.”

My alter ego Soft Break is like my writer's voice. I determine the flow, the rhythm, the tone, it's my view of the world and my translation of it. It's a creative game between my ego and my alter ego. For me, my alter ego also refers to WEB Du Bois' term 'double consciousness' - the internal conflict that minorities experience in a society based on white power - and the term 'triple consciousness' - where black women have to see themselves not only through the lens of black and white, but also through the lens of patriarchy.

A.M: Would you say that creolization (the idea of ​​'moksi') also plays a big role in the art world and for you as an artist, since the bridges between art, design and music are increasingly being crossed these days? You also seem to experience less reluctance to express yourself within music. Would you say that this musical expression does indeed offer more freedom?

YD: For me, music is another way to create stories and express myself. If I can do it visually, why not through music? Why am I so hesitant to address certain stories about colonialism in graphic design? And is it actually less scary if I can express myself musically? The music speaks for me and I decide how the story is told. Music is healing for me.

The English word creole is derived from the French créole, which in turn came from the Portuguese crioulo, a diminutive of cria meaning a person raised in one's home. Cria is derived from criar, meaning "to raise or bring up," itself derived from the Latin creare, meaning "to make, bring forth, produce, beget"; also the source of the English word "create."

It is almost impossible for many black people to trace exactly where you come from. The term 'Moksi' is Sranan Tongo for the word 'mixed'. In Suriname you say 'Moksi Meti' if someone has multiple ethnicities or mixed blood. This literally means 'mixed meat'. We also have a recipe called moksi meti, it contains meat from roasted chicken, roasted pork and roasted pork belly. There is no one standard recipe, one likes to make it differently than the other and that is allowed in the Surinamese kitchen. We exchanged languages, spices, music and food. It is not the culture that binds the people, who are now partly of African origin and are now spread all over the world, but an identity of passions.

I find that colonialism is still a powerful aspect of our family history, but we rarely talk about slavery and colonialism. Novelist Ralph Ellison argues that “we share a hatred for the alienation that Europeans impose on us in the process of colonization, and we are more bound by our common suffering than by our pigmentation. But even this identification is shared by most non-white peoples, and while it has great political value, its cultural value is almost zero.” Yet we are all responsible for talking about our shared history. It is important to know both sides of a story. We create the future together. We talk too much about how we are different and not about how we are similar.

Stef Blok, former Minister of Foreign Affairs, claimed in 2018 that “Suriname is a failed state due to ethnic divisions”. Many Dutch-Surinamese people were shocked. First and foremost because we were not brought to Suriname voluntarily. It was not our decision, but we were forced to learn to live together, we did not even speak each other’s languages. Because Suriname is the most diverse country in the world, I would like to state that it is beautiful how different cultures came together and even created a new language to communicate with each other.

A.M: Nowadays, there is rarely an artist who works in one specific field. This crossover between different art forms is very prominent in graphic design. Have you perhaps always been a DJ since when designing you also tend to take different elements and ideas and try to mix them together to make them work?

YD: As Adam Good puts it: “The innovators of the future will be the DJs of thought, sampling, mixing, and spinning all existing ideas and thought-objects into ever new structures. They will remix what we know into what we could know. They will show the academy how to dance.”

As I mentioned before, I have a background in creating visual stories and more recently my interest shifted to creating sonic stories. My Creole heritage plays a big role in how I approach graphic design and my musical expressions. Graphic design as we know it today is fluid. There is rarely an artist these days who works in just one specific field. We mix photography with typography, we mix furniture design with textile design. And just like music, there is a voice, there is rhythm in graphic design, think of grids, think of the way different fonts reinforce each other.

So how does music inform your self-knowledge? I wonder if music combined with visuals can play a bigger role in how we use the black archive as we know it today as a tool for self-knowledge. It is important that the current generation of artists from the African diaspora take it upon themselves to spread this knowledge further. Don’t be afraid to talk about traumatic experiences. We have tools like the internet to spread awareness and use our voices. Let’s generate new ways of listening to music within the postcolonial context.

A.M: You are part of the Rotterdam DJ collective AMPFEMININE. Over the past year, you worked on the documentary 'EQ The Industry'; an entirely female-produced documentary about female and non-binary producers from Rotterdam, which premiered at Theater Zuidplein in the fall of 2021. Can you tell us more about the collective and what you want to achieve with the documentary?

YD: In late 2019, AMPFEMININE, consisting of DJs Jacqueline (Nala Brown), Camille (Camgurl), Isabella (Bella Hall), Deborah (DEBORAH X) and myself, was formed out of necessity. We were all aspiring DJs at the time, looking for a sense of community. We focus on projects that focus on minority representation behind the decks.

It started with the idea to organize a festival in Rotterdam with an all-female line-up. We had zero experience with organizing a festival and didn't know what was involved. After pitching our idea, we unfortunately didn't get any subsidy. In retrospect, we can look back on that with a smile because it made sure we continued as an independent collective.

With the help of limited subsidies, we eventually made the documentary 'EQ The Industry' in collaboration with director Loes Korten. Due to the pandemic, we logically had a lot less gigs and we started speculating about what makes DJing so much fun for us and what we as a collective can do for our community in Rotterdam: discovering and sharing (new) music with others.

With the documentary we want to show what it is like for female and non-binary producers in the Rotterdam music industry. At the same time, we want to start a conversation about the relationship between producers, DJs and the different perspectives that the music scene brings with it. The documentary tells stories from the Rotterdam music scene, shared by producers Meru (MERU), Constanza (c00), Linh (Rbf.linh) and Naomi King (Shanodin). We really thought about what we wanted to show. We live in a time where women and non-binary people dare to be more vocal. Capturing these stories gives others space to talk about this topic.

We noticed that producers are often underexposed and that it is mainly about the DJs themselves. Sometimes tracklists are not shared by DJs, because they do not want to share their 'gems', because searching for new music takes a lot of time. Fortunately, you see that changing more and more. In EQ The Industry we highlight 4 female and non-binary producers/DJs who are all in a different phase of their work. They talk about their way of working, how the city of Rotterdam influences their sound and whether they experience the feeling of the glass ceiling as music producers and DJs. The documentary will probably be shown a few more times this year at different locations.

A.M: In 2019 you started in Berlin under the wings of the collective No Shade DJing under the artist name Soft Break. You indicate that DJing offers you another way to create a narrative and express yourself in a medium other than graphic design. How does that work exactly and can you tell us more about it?

YD: No Shade is a Berlin-based collective that organizes club nights and DJ training programs for female, non-binary, and trans DJs. Before I started the program, I didn’t hear a lot of women playing the kind of music that I like to play, which is breakbeats, hip-hop, and a lot of bass. I didn’t feel like I saw a lot of women behind the decks in general. So a lot of the profit is in the community, and No Shade really inspired me to start DJ collective AMPFEMININE.

I think that in the Netherlands these kinds of initiatives are still lacking too often. There is a lot going on in Rotterdam and Amsterdam, but a big difference with Berlin is that most people who work with music all come from the same collectives and play the same kind of music. That is also the reason why we started our own collective. We wondered why we always saw the same faces. It is good that people do something when it comes to music, but at some point it just becomes frustrating to always see the same mainly white men.

I have to add that when you are a collective, a lot of things are a lot easier. You can exchange thoughts and you work together. Because I know that when you are alone, it is hard to figure out where to start. And I think that if you can find people who have the same thoughts about music, DJing and culture, you should come together and help each other. We are just stronger when we are together.

A.M: Finally, can you tell us more about the projects and performances you do with design studio The Rodina, such as for Vlisco&co, Tetem and A–Z Gallery?

YD: The Rodina allowed me to explore another side of the design world and also made me think differently about my life as a graphic designer versus my life as a DJ/performer. The Rodina investigates the concept of 'playbour'; the role of play, performance and labour in their work as graphic designers. In recent years I have mainly worked on their interactive performances. During these interventions I also step into the role of an alter-ego again.

My first big project with The Rodina was 'Print Futures 1.0' for Vlisco&co. For three months we mentored inspiring creatives from Congo, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Benin and Togo. In the workshop we initiated a dialogue about contemporary symbolism, the future and the planet to create new stories about aesthetics. The exercises were meant to give freedom to experiment with techniques, but also with the fascinations and signature of each participant. The winning participants will now have their own collections at Vlisco&co, which are currently in production.

By combining different roles I continue to discover new artists and concepts and continue to develop in the field of feminist and collective frameworks, black theory and polyphony. I also learn from the new generation of makers in my role as educator at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Being part of different groups also ensures that I can apply many experiences and ideas within my own professional practice.