UnSafety Propaganda (W/ Tarik Sadouma)

interesting it's pretty funny i think a lot of people who watched kyrax movies would be surprised that you were actually the ethical backbone of the group you know your role in those films is always as like the the zany um the zany charismatic uh cultish kind of figure

Well, either I'm acting now or I'm acting in the films, and I would like that to stay ambiguous.

So either this is my, like I call it in Scorched Earth, or Ruth calls it my face of normalcy, and it's all a lie, or the film is acting, one of the two.

I think they're mutually exclusive, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, the way I always look at it, because I have a public...

The character in my writing and public persona isn't necessarily true to who I am.

I'm obviously not as hostile as that.

But I think even the construct...

Like...

Like Kanye West, for instance, might be on some level like a performative figure, but that performance that he's created that has compelled billions of eyes to watch him over the course of two and a half decades is still coming from him.

So it's still basically like it's, you know, in the same way an artwork is a projection of the subjectivity, so is this like public figure that you create as you... you know traverse through the media

i get what you're saying i would say in scorched earth my mother the character i'm playing is called jafar al-hazrat this was my original uh facebook name my facebook has been taken down somewhere during corona probably i made some jokes about the chinese or something um and uh yeah um so there was always this character also i played this character in in keyrock I tell also in Kirok 24 in the trailer, I think also in the film, I tell about the imagination of the jerk-off spaceship where you masturbate in space.

This is part of the unsafe mythology.

So I was developing that, you know, parallel with my role in Kirok from the get-go, I would say.

So yeah, I wouldn't, I don't think I'm the person, if I have a comparison to the people I play and I think it has crystallized more my character in Scorched Earth, I would say that because there was a lot of Gonzo performance in Keyrock where it was about, you know, getting reactions about art, you know, our friend who is just, you know, deceased, you know, I mean, Charlie Sheely, who I thought was a very talented guy.

I'm sorry to put Charlie in this discussion, but I just performed with him in New York and I thought he was a great talent.

So this Gonzo performance thing is very close to my heart.

So I really enjoy discussions about art and also playing a role in that to see what people's, because you want to show what people's, frameworks are for deciding what art is basically and I think that resonated with the New York scene also very much in the figure of unfortunately too early departed Charlie Shealy But, you know, my character became more and more complex.

And I would say the only comparison between me and Jafar is their interest.

But I would say for very different reasons.

Yeah, the film's central conflict, it seems, is the characters and figures inside the unsafe house.

They are all in sort of a social dilemma where they can no longer tell whether they've joined an art collective or the mad cult of a deranged Arab guy.

you know uh which which was the funny antagonism in it but i was curious of like um if it was like a theory fiction kind of um approach where things that were sort of happening in the collective socially then informed how the film played out narratively like um I'm trying to think of another example of this kind of approach to art making.

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