This unhinged, freewheeling music video, Lentamina, re-energises the 2000s videogame aesthetic as it presents antispecism, techno-botanism and “a new world order” as the artist behind it claims. Lentamina comes from the brain of Fede Projetti, a multidisciplinary artist and presenturo theorist, best known as Vipra Sativa his artist pseudonym under which he has taken part in the 58th Venice Biennale, Boiler Room, Terraforma festival and NTS x Diesel tracks in Rome 2023. Made in collaboration with Giorgio Cassano, Sylathas, The Circumstances and his label Halcyon Veil this video is a bit of a trip.
Lentamina appears to mean slow banger in English, it’s a made up term that was “conceived by combining the word slow (lenta) and granade (mina), in Italian Lentamina sounds a bit similar to vitamina which means vitamin and it makes me think of a surreal type of supplement that one could pop to get into a slowed-down dance mode.” Vipra Sativa told METAL. The bouncing rhythm of Vipra Sativa’s italo slowstyle nonetheless guides us giddily through this number like a racing car, like a joyride. Jarring, in your face synthetic strings tear throughout the video that, even if the tempo is slow, somehow make you need to catch your breath. Lentamina hammers home an industrial noise that matches the images of (video character) male students at work. They are building a transmitter that appears to broadcast the song into space from their car radio. They make contact and a vinyl starts being produced on a spaceship. Everything is bouncing.
The grand conductor at the helm of the reached spaceship-come-factory is personified by a pile of weed wearing sunglasses, positioned in the control room. There is a sense of ongoing analysis as numerical figures run across screens and the video’s characters take notes as they toil. The Lentamina music video culminates in a fluorescent weed shoot creating a forest that covers the earth and rises into space, the sunglasses-wearing weed protagonist looks on, expressionless. We understand success has been made, and now the plant has dominance. In a world saturated with national leaders making bad decisions, why not contact an outer-space bundle of bud to see if they have any better ideas?
Vipra Savita’s concept is grounded in presenturo theory, that he describes as “a fusion of the Italian words for present and future. Presenturo is conceived as a mode to be embodied in order to expand the now in one's own favour and avoid being enslaved by the dictatorship of time: the clock's hands are like the tracks that enables the train of capitalism to travel. It is also an imaginary dimension made of timeless times and for spiritual collective liberation. In the Presenturo era linear time does not exist and linguistic meaning in fact, has no meaning. Sonic frequencies are the only worthy vessels of communication. Within this realm warriors are fighting to win the spiritual war of love and care against any absence of the two. To be a Presenturo theorist means to adopt the Loop-chain Approach as an existential one, a loop-based approach to existence, more related to our circadian rhythm. As Gigi D’Agostino once said “Il tempo della musica è l’unico momento valido”.”