Bodies in motion: Mass migration of biblical proportions in Santiago Mostyn + Slow Wave’s ‘SUEDI (Slow Wave edit): Two Versions’

, 13 April 2018
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Santiago Mostyn and Slow Wave (aka S W) present the online premiere of ‘SUEDI (Slow Wave edit): Two Versions,’ via AQNB today. The video features the song ‘Suedi‘ by Swedish rapper Erik Lundin, accompanied by raw drone footage of the mass migration of refugees, as well as two men wrestling.

Initially commissioned by Stockholm’s Kulturhuset Stadsteater for the Folkmusik 2.0 group exhibition, which ran October 20 to January 28, the piece was made in response to the theme of Swedish hip hop culture, as remixed by contemporary creators and artists. Mostyn, along with Susanna Jablonski and William Rickman of Slow Wave, chose to work with the ‘Suedi’ track due to its focus on cultural displacement, where Lundin explores growing up Swedish while still being treated like an immigrant.

Meanwhile, the video itself contrasts stock footage of the movement of migrants and refugees across Southern Europe, used widely by news outlets, with that of two Swedish wrestlers sparring. It juxtaposes the vast shifts in human proximity and perhaps even empathy, while insinuating an event with historical precedent. “Most important for me,” states Mostyn, “is the biblical-scale movement of bodies through a landscape. That mass of people as a body itself, rather than the specific nation states where they are being filmed, so that we understand that it could be any place, any time, it could even be one of us in there.”**

Santiago Mostyn’s ‘SUEDI (Slow Wave edit): Two Versions’ was commissioned for the Folkmusik 2.0 group exhib at Stockholm’s Kulturhuset Stadsteater, which ran October 20 to January 28, 2018.