CENTRAL AMERICA, WHAT'S UP?
Ghetto Witchez / El Irreal Veintiuno / Anita Kirppis
New year, new horizons! For its 6th festival alongside Antigel, SHAP SHAP will be expanding its boundaries and flying to Latin America for the first time. Produced in collaboration with visual artist, curator and DJ Anita Kirppis, the opening night will take us into the ultra-underground world of Mexico and El Salvador, where spicy nights have seen the emergence of artists whose very existence is unknown in our northern latitudes. Deep into the heart of this emerging scene which Ghetto Witchez promotes through his alternative nights, independent artists, who would make our best clubbers blush with envy, meet. The second half of the night will delve into the world of El Irreal Veintiuno. Combining Latin traditions with contemporaneity, Bryan Dálvez (real name) fuels his sets with the syncopated beats of Mexican tribal music and Dembow in a post-ritualist tribute to forgotten music. This first night will end with the warm and upbeat mixes of Anita Kirppis whose music is like her Euro-Latina identity: out of bounds, uncensored and free of all stereotypes. She is living proof that there is no such thing as “Latina” popular music that one might only hear in “Latino” clubs.
From 9 p.m.
GHETTO WITCHEZ
Ghettowitchez is a web-based, multi-disciplinary platform dedicated to connecting and promoting up-and-coming DJs, producers, visual artists, and performers around Latin America.
Our work started in 2019 with the creation of a SoundCloud publishing channel and a series of underground parties, Caravana Sonora, La Ghettofabrica and Miscellanea Mágica, that ambitiously looked to enhance the party and music scenes in San Salvador, Guatemala City, and Washington DC with new and fresh sounds thanks to guests such as La Sokko (SV), Neurokill (MX), K. hole Kardashian (US/CR), sisterybroder (CO), Sister Natty (SV), DJ Guapis (MX) DJ Glen Martin (SV), Terror Puppy (GT), SHIT (AR), Reburra (SV) and la Puti Claus (SV), among others.
In 2020 we launched the Santeria Sessions in collaboration with Wide Radio (GB) and La Ghettoweb, a first live set series for YouTube produced in Mexico City. This year we look forward to collaborating with other independent and up-and-coming artists to keep our diverse music community thriving.
EL IRREAL VEINTIUNO
Hailing from the State of Mexico, Bryan Dálvez is a producer and visual designer whose current musical project as El Irreal Veintiuno has led him to consolidate a provocative style within the club scene, hybridising and developing peripheral rhythms based on an insightful and euphoric vision. Influenced by the syncopated rhythms of Mexican tribal music and Dembow, by grime and hardcore, Dálvez’s forceful work materialises with autobiographical energy, opening up new fields of possibilities between Latin traditions and contemporaneity. El Irreal Veintiuno explores fantastic ideas about memory and intense emotion in an enticing reinterpretation of contemporary Mexican soundscapes that combines harsh textures with powerful sound environments to create a post-ritualistic tribute to ancient and forgotten music.
ANITA KIRPPIS
Embodying a confident, hybrid and decolonial underground music scene, Geneva DJ Anita Kirppis translates her Euro-Latina heritage into the present and contributes to the revival of alternative club music.
With her warm and upbeat sets, Kirppis generates a lot of glitter, emotion and sweat, and above all collective trance. She joyfully mixes Afro-Latin sounds and beats with techno, EDM and dancehall, thereby (re-)establishing their place and legitimacy on a scene that has historically denigrated or forgotten them.
Far from just wanting to create an atmospheric archive, Kirppis experiences her music like she views her Euro-Latina identity: out of bounds, without censorship and against stereotypes. She is living proof that there is no such thing as “Latina” popular music that one might only hear in “Latino” clubs. In addition to deconstructing and creating a dialogue between traditional and contemporary sounds, Kirppis asserts her pop influences, adding touches of reggaeton and thus producing a unique yet strangely comfortable sound, as deep as it is joyful.
Using various formats to share the music she loves, Kirppis is also the instigator of the Santeria Fuego Club nights that promote the Latin underground scene in Geneva, by reappropriating, in an inclusive way, the music and legacies of the genre: local and international DJs perform there in total freedom.
Since 2017 Kirppis has been lightly blurring the outdated lines between the “here” and the “elsewhere”, inviting us, through her sets and events, to a straightforward, mosaic-like version of a party. She is thus living her dream of being a “border ambassador”, of transforming and rekindling, from the decolonised underground, Afro-Latin music in all its past, present and future richness.