This and That in Space Mag
Posted on June 8, 2012
This month’s Space Magazine Ibiza features a page on This and That. Don’t miss it!
by Adriana Rispoli
The visual arts and music today more than ever, live in an undistinguishable cohabitation, an indivisible symbiosis. In the post-medial art era, images and performing arts are to be found coexisting peacefully within a single vision; countless artists have used and continuously use music as the starting point for their enquiry, from Laurie Anderson to Brian Eno, to cite just two examples. It is not difficult nowadays to find artists that are above all music composers, such as the Swedish Tobias Bernstrup, or the German Carsten Nicolai – aka Alva Noto – or even interesting collaborations as can be found in Frankfurt’s Cocoon club, where the “visions” of its founder Sven Vath join the visions of other great artists like Andreas Gursky.
It is in this virtuous SCIA where Davide Squillace’s new project is to be found – This and That Lab, a record label with the mission to create a platform of creative artists, to promote collaboration between electronic music and all other art forms in order to generate new projects from an anarchic and synergetic point of view, felt by the founder to be essential. “People talk about strengthening the connection between music and art, but why do they have to be mutually exclusive? It is our aim to join them together to make one richer and more expressive art form”, maintains Squillace, DJ, producer and owner of the label, born in Naples and long-time Barcelona resident, a leading figure on the international electronic music scene that has numerous active collaborations with prestigious brands, notably Desolat, SCI+TE, Supernature, Viva, Nervous and Saved.
Freedom in art is the key ingredient of This and That Lab that strives to create a fusion among various fields of art, to introduce a transversality that takes music out of a strict categorisation, to generate an atmosphere of viral stimulation. Internationally renowned artists have already been called on to collaborate on the label’s first launch. Piero Golia (Naples, 1974, lives and works in Los Angeles), among the most talented Italian artists in the last decade, has given his consent for the first coverage of This and That Lab, creating a “portrait” of the logo, a distinguishing strategy of the artist. With his habitual and presupposed irony, Golia engages in the controversy between academic and conceptual, surpassing the classical tradition of the portrait-still life oil painting, choosing as subjects only inanimate objects from his everyday world, cataloguing practically everything that surrounds him and that pleases him most. The presentation video for This and That Lab is aligned with the pop-surrealist versatility of the Argentinean Gastón Liberto. A video-animation – activated by Gonzalo Tugas – that over the notes of “Piece of You” brings to life a set of perturbing characters through interchangeable cubes, a symbol of a subtle but necessary transmutation. An optimum start then for This and That Lab and the certainty that with the team’s enthusiasm will soon predominate as a reference hub for lovers of music and art without boundaries.
