Spring Festival Awakening
Synonymous with dreams of scorched earth, sun warped vistas and crushed beer cups, a short trip away from our overcast shores will find a desire to unfurl a tent unencumbered by drawn out winters
As much as the British festival scene is one inexplicably bound to the fairer months, synonymous with dreams of scorched earth, sun warped vistas and crushed beer cups, a short trip away from our overcast shores will find a desire to unfurl a tent unencumbered by drawn out winters.
In Tilsburg, The Netherlands, a city otherwise known for its 10 day long gay pride funfair and as the country’s former wool capital, Roadburn festival delivers the world’s foremost selection of psychedelic, doom and avant-garde metal. Now in its sixteenth year, Roadburn succeeds not only in fulfilling its mandate of pushing the boundaries of “left field, sonic pleasures’, but also in booking the most eclectically named line-up imaginable. This year’s roster achieves nomenclatural brilliance through stoner metal outfit Acid Witch, Italian prig-rockers Claudio Simonetti’s Goblin and blackened death champions Goatwhore.
Frozen Dead Guy Days Festival
Way out West and on the weekend of the 13h of March, the small town of Nederland, Colorado will host the 14th annual Frozen Dead Guy Days. The festival is conceptually based on the story of Bredo Morstøl. At the start of the 90s, Bredo posthumously found himself in California after his grand-son Trygve flew him across the Atlantic in a cryogenically frozen state. After several years on ice at Trans Time Cryonics, Bredo decided to bridge the middle management gap and set up a facility of his own in Nederland. A couple of visa failures and a house eviction later, and word of Trygve’s corpse, located in a small, unpowered shack, leaked to the public and became a sensation. The subsequent rallying around of the aptly named “Ice Man” led to the town’s sponsored upkeep of the corpse and the initiation of the Frozen Dead Guy Days. This year’s festival highlights include Coffin Racing, Costume Polar Plunging, live music, a frozen t-shirt contest, Ice Turkey Bowling, Brain Freeze Contests, a parade of hearses, the Frozen Dead Poet Slam and the now infamous, Frozen Salmon Toss.
National Pyrotechnic Festival
In the southern Mexican town of Tultepec, the first half of March is dedicated to honouring the towns booming fireworks industry. In celebration of St John, patron saint of the pyrotechnics guild, the National Pyrotechnic Festival is two weeks filled with firework displays and firework based events. As well as a strong selection of regional food, attendees will witness the Castillo de Torre, a musical firework competition fought between 7 display teams, and the Pamplonas; a take on the Spanish bull running event in which 300 bull shaped wagons rumble through the town, firing rockets and roman candles at the hoards of scrambling onlookers.
New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival
And in conclusion of the rich, overlooked months of the spring festival scene, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival offers the perfect transition into the summer month of May. Alongside the Folklife Village, its cowboy bullwhip weavers and handcrafted accordions, this year’s festival offers a particular focus to the influence of Louisiana native American culture in the shaping of New Orleans. With music from Elton John, The Meters and Gurrumul, the lineup is also phenomenal.
Fahamu Pecou: Challenging Masculinity in the Media
With his painting All Dat Glitters Ain’t Goals recently featured alongside those by the likes of Gustav Klimt and Jean-Michel Basquiat on the fictional set of new American TV show ‘Empire’, Fahamu Pecou is an artist well on his way to achieving similar status in the real art world
With his painting All Dat Glitters Ain’t Goals recently featured alongside those by the likes of Gustav Klimt and Jean-Michel Basquiat on the fictional set of new American TV show ‘Empire’, Fahamu Pecou is an artist well on his way to achieving similar status in the real art world.
Working primarily through the medium of paint, Pecou utilises his own image as a black male to comment on contemporary representations of black masculinity as it is commonly depicted in hip-hop music and entertainment, satirising the over-inflated egos, explicit wealth, and bravado in his work:
“I appear in my work not in an autobiographical sense, but as an allegory. My character “Fahamu Pecou is The Shit!” embodies the traits typically associated with black men in hip-hop and juxtaposes them within a fine art context. This character becomes a stand-in to represent the ideals and ideas of black masculinity and both the realities and fantasies projected from and onto black male bodies.”
Exploring this territory breeds questions of what happiness and fulfilment actually are, skilfully tackled in recent exhibition ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ in New York’s Lyons Wier Gallery:
Pecou’s work asks “Who are we minus the labels and attachments of popular culture? What does "happy" actually look, and feel, like?”
The artist’s most recent solo show was at the Museum of Contemporary art of Georgia, a series of studies exploring the ability of black males to succeed in modern society; entitled ‘GRAV•I•TY’, the paintings used the fashion trend of ‘saggin’’ as an allegory to comment on contradictions of mobility, access and agency for young black men.
Other notable projects by the artist include a series of conversations that took place in the spring last year; entitled interSessions, Pecou invited figures from the hip-hop community to dialogue with figures from the art world on issues on a range of subjects related to the arts and entertainment, and their impact on popular culture and society.
Also working as a performance artist, writer, and scholar, Pecou is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the Institute of Liberal Arts Emory University in Atlanta.
Fahamu Pecou Art