French artist Pierre Gaignard went searching for the Atlanta, Georgia rapper Young Thug (Jeffrey Lamar Williams) in Abruzzo.Gaignard didn’t find Young Thug in the Italian hills, but he says he did find “mythological characters of tradition” that reminded him of the rapper, such as an Abruzzen who wore an Atlanta Falcons football jersey, which is part of a sculpture shown in Gaignard first solo exhibition in Paris. The artist has also managed to create a 50-minute film about the musician.In “2 Cups Stuffed,” Galerie Eric Mouchet showcases work from Gaignard’s residency in Abruzzo. Industrial machinery becomes the focus alongside anthropological films about the local terrain, people and traditions.His new film about Young Thug, entitled “Thug King, an extraordinary rendezvous with my brother,” will be shown February 23 at the Maison Européene de la Photographie.The artist became obsessed with the rapper after a DJ friend and friends in the hip-hop community introduced him to his music.“I’m a mono-maniac. I listen to one thing all the time,” he says. “He has an incredible voice. He speaks about my time. I feel like his brother.”Splicing private videos and photos of the rapper with other clips found on the internet, Gaignard has stitched together a fictional biopic told from the point of view of Young Thug’s brother.The disembodied voice of the rapper’s dead brother narrates the tale of disaffected longing in monotone, French-accented English. He paints Atlanta in melancholy poetry as an expansive dystopian metropolis of lights and glittering glass high-rises that they can’t escape.Young Thug and his friends rip through the streets on ATVs and motorbikes, drink soda and cough syrup concoctions, freestyle rap and conquer stage shows in their quest to become rich and famous and break through the city limits. The rapper’s sexuality becomes the object of controversy in homophobic local media because of his style and his affectionate pet names for men in his entourage, but Gaignard lifts the character out of criticism and makes him something cosmic and transcendent.“No one knows who Jeffrey is,” the narrator pines at the end. “He is no longer a man or a woman… He is Atlanta.”For the gallery exhibition, the artist also found inspiration in a two-second clip of an Adidas sneaker-testing machine he saw while chasing Young Thug on the Internet. Gaignard recreated the spinning contraption complete with bright white kicks, titled “Movement towards Fils2pute semantics (From Adidas Lab)”.Contrasting with the sleek machinery, a rickety mechanical olive picker rattles in the gallery with an accompanying film about harvesting olives. Gaignard explains that the laborers no longer sing while working as they did before mechanization because the machine makes too much noise. The link to Young Thug, he says, is that the rapper speaks over “the machine.”Gaignard hopes Young Thug will see his cinematic love letter, but he’s undecided on what reaction he wants, if any at all.“It’s like sending a bottle on the sea,” says Gaignard. “We write a letter without knowing if we will get a response. I feel very close to him. Maybe I expect an answer, I don’t know. I don’t know if I want one. It’s something a little romantic.”2 Cups Stuffed is on show at Galerie Eric Mouchet until March 5.
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