Christelle Oyiri

Music Producer, Visual Artist

February-April 2023

Christelle Oyiri aka Crystallmess

Irwin Barbé

  • Music
  • Cities
  • Detroit, Miami, New Orleans
“To what extent do movements that developed outside the dominant models manage to preserve their history?”
Who?
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I like stories–listening to them and creating them. I like telling stories in every possible form: DJ sets, musical compositions, video installations, sculptures, performances, or even texts. This heterogeneous and radically interdisciplinary dynamic is what keeps my practice evolving.

 

My work touches on issues related to the collective memory of forgotten mythologies, be they ancient or ultra-modern. Faced with the deliberate obliteration of narratives outside the dominant model, I look out for the things that lie between the lines. My research focuses on the tones, textures, and visual vernacular of music, popular cultures, and visual arts, both inside and outside the African diaspora.

 

For several years now, I have been performing worldwide as a DJ and electronic music producer. Whether it’s in my music Mere Noise (2019), Split EP (2019), released on the German label PAN, in my artistic performances, Love Mathematics (2021), RIP Aporia (2021) or Godspeed (2022), or in my video installations and sculptures, music is often the point of entry into my work–especially club music, with its regionalisms and specificities.

 

As a product of the black French working class, I am always paying tribute to its legacies and avant-gardism (in my video Collective Amnesia, for instance), while exploring the social, ethnic, and gender-related dynamics within that milieu.

 

Christelle Oyiri is a French interdisciplinary artist of mixed origin–Ivorian, Guadeloupean, and Martinican–born in the Paris region, where she lives and works. She has been performing around the world as a DJ and electronic music producer. Her work has been featured in several institutions, in France and abroad, such as the Centre Pompidou, Lafayette Anticipations, Haus der Kunst, Auto Italia (London), the Los Angeles Nomadic Division, the Musée Espace Arlaud (Lausanne), Ars Electronica (Austria) and HeK (Basel). She has recently completed a residency at Cité Internationale des Arts, in Paris, in partnership with the Art Explora Foundation.

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In partnership with

Art Explora logo
Art Explora

The brainchild of entrepreneur and philanthropist Frédéric Jousset, the Art Explora Foun-dation, which launched in November 2019, aims to close the cultural divide through a series of initiatives in France and abroad, drawing on new technologies and mobile systems open to everyone. It seeks to connect works with their audiences and to support new creation and innovation. The Foundation is supporting eight residencies for the inaugural season of Villa Albertine.  

 

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