Music Stuff

This month we (re)cognize and celebrate the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Inductees.

So many great names are being added to this prestigious list. Some of whom I thought had been included long ago. Congrats to all!

https://www.rockhall.com/class-2021-inductees

I would also like to acknowledge the late activist and Afrobeat pioneer, Fela Kuti, who was nominated but did not make the list this year. I hope that he will be given this honor at some point sooner than later.

In the meantime, here is a clip from a live performance in Berlin. Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr8oRpA2SpE

(Re)vival

Artist: Cristian Graure

I used to wander every day as a child. Arriving at each new place, it felt so strangely beautiful as if I found another past that I didn’t know I possessed. Ephemeral fragments from then have remained with me. Remembering forests fallen in haze, trails concealed in silence, eyes glancing back once passed, the small hands of peaceful mornings, sounds of nature enhanced in mere surfaces, the [re]vival of new days unveiled in evenings by wrists of twilight. These were moments that developed my attention in observing the life of forms in nature and the desire to understand the driving force behind them.

This growing feeling for being one with these pasts evoked my interest in gathering small relics, little natural shrines as fragments for my reflections and markings for the beginning of my artistic journey. These rituals helped me to slow down and find calmness in the smallest of things. Later on, I realized that every journey is always attended by one’s transformation, and the endings highlight the becoming as a redefined point, a metaphorical one, shared afterwards in memory as vague and imaginary.

I believe that my works question at a certain level the existence of that journey as a concrete subject (a self), emphasizing its fragmentation by deconstructing and reshaping the inner landscape according to the outer landscape. However, this continuous change endowed by the journey’s infinite power is a defining element of existence, and the acceptance of its uncertainty became an essential part of my artistic pursuits.

In photographs, as in other creative mediums that I often use, most of the artistic approaches are defined in the foreground by the personal reflections on the significance of the journey, sometimes without a human presence, for they are desired to render timeless, shared experiences and almost untouched places.

I feel that this inner quality of transfiguration also gives me as an artist clarity of purpose, to seek a language and expression through which I can render works with a universal and at the same time defining dimension for shaping and sharing my artistic self.