Eric Magassa

Reverb drift. Dub poetiks (2023/2026)

It started with an email. Two years before I participated in the residency In the Wake of the Waves in 2025 at Grimeton Radio Station, I was contacted by Onkar Kular, a researcher and professor of design, who at that time was an artist in residence at The Public Design Office in Falkenberg. Onkar Kular had observed that I document life horizontally and suggested that we take a day trip along the roads around Falkenberg. Let a playlist grow along the way. It was a sketch, loosely held, with room for something that had not yet taken shape.

We drove without a plan. Along the roads, without knowing where we were going. It became a film, an hour long. When the body becomes a compass, the eyes stop searching for the recognizable and the place is allowed to move on its own terms. The camera was an ear. Slow motion a method for lingering on what otherwise disappears in motion: the grass by the side of the road, the light over the sea, a curve that does not reveal where it leads.

Dub is never the original. It is the displacement, the aftershock, what is in between the spaces. For the film I played an improvised DJ set: spiritual jazz, spoken word and dub, layer upon layer, over what was already there. Frequencies that find their way under the skin of what you already think you understand. The bass reaches the body first, before it becomes sound.

Not knowing where you are going is opening yourself up to what only the body feels. It is a method, but also a way of letting the place exist before it has time to be named. The work arose along a country road, from inside a car. Somewhere between Falkenberg and nowhere.

– Eric Magassa

Eric Magassa works with collage, painting, photography, and video, often combining them into multifaceted, large-scale installations. His distinctive, colorful compositions revolve around decolonial narratives and issues concerning identity, place, and belonging.

https://www.magassa.com/

The residency The Public Design Office (Falkenberg Municipality, 2023) invited designers and artists to experiment with how co-creative, speculative, and critical design can prompt us to rethink the role of design in our shared, built and living environments.