Welcome to a dark world where the limits between reality and fiction blur. Avoiding categorisation (is it a music video? A fashion film? A short film?), artist Izzy Spears presents Burn ft. Leya, an audiovisual piece created by the collective Ataka 51. Skeletons, cemeteries, faceless subway passengers, and uncanny doll-like creatures populate this video that will have you dreaming — or perhaps, having nightmares.
Even if the music video is out now, the song is part of Izzy Spears’ 2024 EP, Blood, Sweat and Damnation. But it was thanks to the Farago Projects Prize that it the audiovisual piece happened. As the team behind Ataka51, the video directors, explain, “The prize was to create one of our ideas. We sent a couple outlines to Emmanuelle Atlan, Georgia Pendlebury, and Florence Tetier, and they chose this one.”
What probably attracted the jury in the first place was the multidisciplinary approach. The directors say that “limiting ourselves to just one format feels unnatural,” which is why the envisioned the video for Burn ft. Leya as something out-of-the-box. “We live in an ever-shifting and changing world, so it wouldn’t really reflect anything if we focused on that which is recognisable and easily categorised. It’s much more interesting for us to try and invent something, to mix genres and imagery, to find unexpected combinations and techniques — old ones and new.”
This approach also convinced Izzy Spears to give complete freedom to the directors, relinquishing control. “This was the first video that I didn’t create the entire idea for,” the artist confesses. “I’ll admit that at first I was sceptical and a little scared to put my artistry in someone else’s hands. But it ended up being a beautiful vision, and I will say it was their vision. They surpassed my expectations and I am eternally grateful,” he concludes happily.
Through this beautiful vision that Izzy metions, we get a music video that makes viewers question about the limits of reality. Where does it start or end? And is our day-to-day life, perhaps, also a simulation? Can we consider the digital a sort of parallel reality? Maybe one that complements our own? These are questions that inspire critical thought and reflection, but it’s hard to reach an answer. It’s better to explore those doubts artistically. “What’s real and what’s not is the first question that appears when you wake up and pick up your phone. You find yourself somewhere between everyday life and your uncanny digital feed. Looking for an imagery describing these feelings, you naturally start mixing reality and fantasy,” the team behind Ataka51 says.
And let’s not forget about the other main pillar: fashion. Working together with the Jean Paul Gaultier archive, they had access to unique pieces that helped build the nightmarish world we see in Burn ft. Leya. “The collections of the ‘90s and 20000s are masterpieces — so much energy, freedom, and creativity. We tried not only to think about the clothing and jewellery themselves but also to work with the essence of the JPG house, the imagery and the foundation of all these iconic pieces,” the team behind Ataka51 says.
But for Izzy, it was more about style than fashion — “fashion is way too broad,” he says. “Most of my clothes are thrifted hand-me-downs and recycled. It’s my style that people often mistake for a fashion trend. My style is always changing and it will continue to be a big part of my work. A lot of my work is visual — that’s where I thrive, so it will always exist within the Izzy Spears project.”
As you can see, truly brilliant pieces come out when creative minds get together for a project. “ It’s really easy to write something when you collaborate with such a charismatic persona,” Ataka51 say of working with Izzy Spears. “And it’s an amazing thing when the musician you’re working with trusts you. All the raw, kitsch, weird, and sometimes apocalyptic energy Izzy had in his songs transformed into a kaleidoscope of images. We imagined a strange and eerie world swept away by storm, like in The Wizard of Oz.”
