Arca is preparing for the release of her album KICK ii. After the joint single with Sia, she presented a video for two tracks at once, namely Prada and Rakata. The new video is a collaboration of the singer and Belgian artist Frederik Heyman, and one of the people who helped to create it was the designer and artist from Odesa, Stas aka stanislover. Especially for DTF Magazine he told us how he met the singer and how the work on Prada/Rakata was going
Stas has been following Arca for a long time and wrote to the singer on «Instagram» — he sent her a shirtless pic. He received a reply: «So beautiful!!! Thank you! And your work is bomb!» — and publication of the photo in the feed.
This conversation did not end, Arca was impressed with the designer’s work and offered to collaborate.
For Prada/Rakata Stas developed the concept and design of the weapon used by the Arca avatar in the video, drew graffiti and an exoskeleton, which the singer wants to print on a 3D-printer and use in performances in the future.
According to stanislover, he wasn’t given any framework or clear guidelines, so he «just created as he saw it, and that impressed everybody». He didn’t even know he was working on a music video.
«We’re artists and we have this format of collaboration where everyone brings their own vision and no one explains what’s needed. You’re either on the same page and hit the target, or you don’t hit it. I did that. This project was over a year in the making. I thought I knew how to be patient, but Alejandra taught me to be even more patient»
Arca participated in all stages of work on the video, «behind every detail are her ideas and thoughts, everything is thought out there»:
«Arca is an artist. She’s passionate about art, floating in it like in a mountain river in a kayak. Heyman is also a wild guy with a wild vision, they were brainstorming about it and deciding globally what it would look like».
Stas is already working on a new project of the singer, the details of which cannot be disclosed yet.
What the music video and tracks are about
«Prada is a praise of psychosexual universality, — Arca says. — It’s a song that refers explicitly to transsexuality and non-binary ways of connecting sexual energy. Prada is a song about defying shame and healing ancestral wounds. It is a song about the future of desire and love as a Mobius strip, about queerness as an engine, about sex and love, and, above all, about the simultaneous possibility of surrender and submission, and about suppressing and dominating in a co-created space of consent
«Rakata is about seduction, about the desire to drown the world in lust for shameless, judgment-free coitus, about sex as the passion of life in the face of death. It is also a reverence for the hot and humid conditions in which Latin American music grows, an appreciation of the reggaeton kings Wisin y Yandel and Tambores Venezolanos, of contemporary Venezuelan folklore, of life and eroticism born near the heat of the equator».
stanislover describes himself this way: «I prefer the word artist to painter because it more accurately reflects the way I work. My work is not rigid, I do not limit myself to any particular genre, technique or medium».
He creates installations, digital art objects, sculptures, draws graffiti, paintings, designs, and «transfers real objects into the digital environment and vice versa; experiments and combines these perspectives».
stanislover also works with Oliver Sykes, the lead singer of Bring Me the Horizon. He called Stas’ design «wild» and asked me to make sneakers for him.
He also wants to work with Lady Gaga, «because he feels the same connection with her as with Alejandra», and Kanye West, who, according to Stas, «is the most influential artist, with a broad worldview, with his vision of the world and the ability to influence it, and that’s exactly what a powerful artist should do».
