Yslam Boys
“WE HAVE NO MESSAGE”: this is the only refrain perpetually reiterated by collective Yslam Boys on their works, in their captions, in the answers they give when asked about their practice. Yet, it’s almost impossible not to grasp the quantity of symbolic references and citations that populate the imagery built around their personal universe. A ludic universe where names are appropriated swapping “i’s” with “y’s”. Disruptive, irreverent, eclectic, the collective lingers in a constant state of almost uncanny mystery regarding what they do, who they are and how many : their practice spans from ready-made digital illustrations to emo-trap EPs randomly dropped on SoundCloud, from video-making to live performances like a dj-set aired from the terraces of a monastery in the Apulia region (Italy), all the way to Ynstagram, a never-ending performance consisting in social media trolling and in their unpredictable use of their Instagram account. Account that was recently banned from the platform for violating the community guidelines by posting a link to “XXYYXX”, a stream-of-consciousness novel published in 2019 on Pornhub in the form of posts, marking the official birth of the collective. We had a chat over video-call discussing hyperstitions, capitalistic symbolism and surreal anecdotes.
It's quite significant the fact that this interview is happening not long after Instagram banned your original account, means through which everything was born. How and when were Yslam Boys formed?
X: the original idea of Yslam Boys was conceived in a now cleared refugee squat in Athens called Exarcheia, where we arrived in the far ’69 via a Flixbus from Berlin. There we were in three of the former five founders, then one of them died of overdose – RIP, case closed – while of the other one we lost track completely, in theory they should be in Iceland playing the game of lights and shadows, because you know, over there for six months there’s no light and for the other six it’s always daytime. Anyway, in Exarcheia arrives Calim, a Kurdish refugee, with no documents, no clothes, nothing. We were in the subway, he stops me and tells me that here in Europe we lack a radical group of people. I mean, there’s no “European fundamentalism”. It makes sense, the idea of a fundamentalist cell that basically does nothing fundamentalist but only has the fundamentalist attitude.
In your works you “steal” indistinctly the logos of brands and multinational platforms such as Amazon or Netflix, mixing them up with symbols belonging to the most diverse cultures and religions, on the verge of political correctness. Today the debate about cultural appropriation is quite heated. Where do these inspirations come from? How do you relate to such debate?
Y: We will answer mentioning our first artwork, Logos, a video we made stealing 4-5 videos of others (such as Nick Land’s and stuff) and we juxtaposed the Nike swoosh on top of them. The question there was extremely related to the concept of the new religiosity of consumerism. Today people don’t go to church on Sundays, they go to the Malls. We provoke cultural appropriation to suggest how certain types of phenomena – specifically related to the masses – that were once connected to religion, have now been passed onto capitalistic processes: this all branding of anything, where people’s identity is translated into the need to look for logos, for symbols that are actually symbols of capitalism. And we push these boundaries to show how these two things are actually the same, how religious symbols and brands exercise the same power over the masses.
You once told me that at 2020 New Year’s Eve you predicted Yslam Boys would break up in September 2020. During that occasion you were staging a live-typing performance at a rave organized by music events collective équipe fatale in an abandoned place in some woods in the Apulian region. Your project was born as a “ghost project”, a “screen deep fake collective” with no intention to go beyond the virtual performance and enter the real world, the art market, the production of concrete artworks. Yet, after your first personal exhibition in Berlin at Hošek Contemporary Gallery in August and the ban on your original Instagram account with the subsequent loss of a built fanbase and of all the archival material of screenshots, posts and performative DMs, your prediction manifested itself within a pretty precise time margin. How do you feel about it? Do you think your “death” was determined more by the deactivation of your Instagram account or rather by the actual formalisation of your practice?
X: That prediction we did, that within 8-9 months we would break up, was actually a “hyperstition”. A hyperstition not related to our splitting as a collective as much as to how in September 2020 Yslam Boys would be formalised, branded, becoming themselves a logo, together with all a series of formal characteristics that a logo brings with itself, thus losing our initial verve.
Y: If I can use a metaphor, “break-up” makes me thing of the phenomenon of glaciers breaking up and the question works the same way climate change does: climate change doesn’t exist until people talk about it. So in a way Yslam Boys had to “break up” because this break-up would be the reason why people would start talking about Yslam Boys, so Yslam Boys is actually born from its death, from a hyperstitional death sentence.
X: Only through death we could be born again. Losing that initial romantic, anarchic verve and becoming logo(s). Which implies exhibitions, interviews, exposure to consumers, follower base and everything a brand implies.
Things that you are somehow doing for real lately: you started selling your own merch, you opened an official website, you launched your own logo in collaboration with designer mafemafe…
Y: Exactly. I’ll add something: when we improvised that NYE performance, with balaclavas on all the time, at a certain point, we went to the room where our video Logos was projected and we kneeled to pray as if the Nike logo was the new Mecca.
X: And the funny thing was that no one was understanding us, not even our lovers of the time, we were totally out-of-place
Y: the point is that we were born outside the context of contemporary art, wanting to do art. At a rave. I mean, the only “gallery” that could host us first, understanding us (not really understanding us), was a rave in the middle of South-Italian countryside, among people coming from those open-minded Berliner subcultures, happening to be back home for the holidays.
During the past few years social media have seen the most diverse creatives emerge. Except few cases, most of them do so thanks to a strong, impactful visual identity. However, when I first found you (or better, you started trolling a curatorial project of mine via DMs), I was pretty impressed by the fact that you were doing something I’d never seen anyone do before: performance art through social media trolling. Artists who have employed social media and their mechanisms as a performative platform do exist (if we think of the path opened by Amalia Ulman, for example) as well as countless explicitly troll and fake accounts, yet these latter remain mainly linked to the expressive modalities of the meme, while no one had yet exploited the DMs as a performative instrument itself. How did you come up with this idea?
Y: There is a premise to do. Yslam Boys were (and we hope will remain) a ghost project. The point is that it was supposed to be composed by people who wouldn’t expose themselves, so that no one would know the entity behind the project. This allowed us to move along new artistic frontiers such as the trolling performances with no fear. The logic behind is pretty much tied to the fact that we had no ego, in terms of presence of the artist, so this allowed us to expose ourselves so much more, basically anything was valid. We started writing to magazines, galleries and projects, always trying to reach the human side of who was behind those accounts, or trying to appeal to the dreamy side of people, asking for instance “what are your dreams?” to a gallerist. We aimed at taking away the formal structures that usually drive institutional contacts and such and reach not even the human side of the other, but rather its surreal side, we would go straight to their depths to see what happened, without many expectations or goals in mind.
Somewhat somehow in between hacking and the situationist art performance, but in a virtual version
Y: Extremely situationist. “Virtual situationismus”. Classic.
Among the many things you did you also designed your own tarot deck. How does it work and what led you to do it?
Z: Our tarots are born from the need to have a visual instrument reinterpreting our current reality. Compared to normal tarots, representing highly symbolic and stereotyped archetypes that are often difficult to interpret without proper studies, Yslam Tarots make archetypes of the things that are culturally and temporarily relevant to us (we make lots of references to fashion, design, brands, but also concepts and figures like the conspiracy, the Gen Z, the cybersex, etc.). Anytime we read them to someone we then ask them to do the same for us and it’s always interesting to see how anyone can give new interpretations we didn’t think about, even people who have no knowledge of normal tarots. Also, we continuously edit new versions of the deck changing cards and graphic designs: internet made knowledge available to anyone, but as much as a brand might be popular one day and then fall into oblivion shortly after, same with our tarots, we absorb any input available and as soon as we realize we don’t feel a certain archetype anymore we change it with another card that is more in tune with what we are experiencing in the moment. It’s similar to what we do with our own Instagram account, in a certain sense: one day it is a gallery showcasing our artworks, then a troll, then a shop with our merchandise, also its handle is continuously modified, making it difficult for people to even find or recognise us.
What will be of Yslam Boys, now the they are “dead”?
We’ll see you in another land, on other social platforms, with different names, when softwares’ll crash, will not be there
(The interview is here disturbed by Elox, a video-maker friend of the collective, joined in the video-call without prior notice by the artists themselves to purposefully mess up mid-conversation; Z comes and goes throughout the whole video-call)
How do you see yourself when you are old?
Elox: six feet under
X: heaven on Earth, like retired in Lisbon at 36 with a Brazilian woman, surf and all the required equipment at 27, a Jacuzzi at 28
Y: burnout at 27, paraplegic at 30, then a self-rediscovery at 34, middle life crisis, Ferrari and stuff and then accelerationist decline with drugs, rotten teeth at 40, 7 children and more debt than anything
Z: I don’t imagine myself being old, I’d rather see myself being 29-max 30, possibly rich.
interview FABIOLA MELE
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