Animistic Beliefs & Jeisson Drenth CACHE/SPIRIT
CACHE/SPIRIT is the alien love child of Animistic Beliefs and media artist Jeisson Drenth. Originally conceived in conversations in Rotterdam, this project now lives as a digital network of ideas, interactions and files that manifest in different configurations. CACHE/SPIRIT is a space where studying ‘the self’ and the ‘other’ meets avant-garde audiovisual production using a rich collection of techniques, instruments, moving images and languages from various times and territories.
From it’s conception in 2019 this collaboration brought forth the track and music video “An Eye for A.I.”, the spellbinding live A/V show that premiered at Trauma Bar und Kino in Berlin a series of experimental interactive publications created within the Online Artist Residency programme of Dgtlfmsnm (in collaboration with HELLERAU and Shape Platform) and finally the CACHE/SPIRIT Video Installation that has been exhibited at Cynetart (Dresden), MUTUALISM (Zurich) and TENT Museum (Rotterdam).
contact: chloe@annexagency.co.uk & katarzyna@annexagency.co.uk
CACHE/SPIRIT Live AV
CACHE/SPIRIT Live AV with both its contemplative and frenetic character, combines Animistic Beliefs other-worldly sounds with Jeisson Drenth’s unique visual language of techno-spirituality. It is a warm invitation into the minds of three distinct artists that passionately try to make sense of the visible and invisible world.
The Rotterdam-based duo Animistic Beliefs repurpose forms from techno and electro to create exhilarating hybrids, applying a fresh perspective that is both deeply personal and political. ‘Animism’ is the idea found in indigenous belief systems that all objects, creatures and places possess a spiritual essence. Pre-colonial thought, traditions and music connected with Marvin’s Moluccan and Linh’s Vietnamese-Chinese heritage are key inspirations and tools through which the duo explore their experience as queer POC living in the Netherlands. The project introduces different languages and instruments, like Vietnamese and Colombian writings, percussion instruments native to the Maluku Islands and contemporary image production techniques like search algorithms and 3D scanning.
CACHE/SPIRIT Live AV Premiered at Trauma Bar und Kino in Berlin and was played as a part of Dekmantel Connects (2021) in Amsterdam.
CACHE/SPIRIT Video Installation
Video Installation, 20’22”
Digital projection, stereo sound, digital assistants, tripods, totobuang (metallophone), đàn bầu (strings), tifa (drum), synthesisers, drum computers, field recordings, phonography.
Audio mastering: Raphael Valensi
Crossing a spectrum of artistic mediums and techniques, the Rotterdam-based producers Marvin Lalihatu and Linh Luu (Animistic Beliefs) and media artist Jeisson Drenth present the immersive audiovisual installation CACHE/SPIRIT. This collaborative project merges ritualistic techno, digital image production, cultural heritage and autobiographical storytelling. The installation, on view throughout the first six weeks of the exhibition period, offers an entry into a personal, enchanting, and energetic realm where music, club culture, and art converge. An open-ended visual narrative and a progressive soundtrack map the potential and limitations of perception: flickering, moving images; multiple languages; emotional landscapes; and listening forms that simultaneously fascinate, challenge, and invite reflection. Amid the haze, three small screens, distributed across the space, conjoin a large, hanging screen. Presented fragmentarily and shown poignantly on these screens are conversations between the artists that underlie the work. These conversations include matters of displacement, inherited family traumas, non-Western cosmologies, and subjectivity in the digital age. Threaded through the work is the philosophy of animism – the belief that all objects, creatures, trees, rocks, rivers and the natural world as a whole are sentient and spiritual beings with souls. The journey the artists render in contemporary image production techniques is also about subverting dominant ways of seeing and being seen in a fast-paced hyper-technological reality. This collaborative effort mirrors the artists’ anti-racist and queer political standpoints. Creating their universe with drum machines and synthesisers, percussion instruments from the Maluku Islands, moving images, and texts, the artists usher us into a cosmological domain that invites different radical perspec