2002 - 2003

You Take All My Time

“... When Bushmen make up the chorus in his music video “you take all my time” (2002/2003) surprisingly enough one doesn’t associate this with racist or exoticist images. It’s much rather blacks as they are seen through children’s eyes. Their eyes and mouth, the strong features, which children also start to paint first, are with Egill’s Bushmen white, they stick out. And one realizes quickly that on the pictorial level they connect the singer Egill to the cartoon figure that, like Egill, stands on the stage. Though the Bushmen are also human, yet with their white eyes and big white mouths they easily spill over into the comic-like. With their black skin they also form the bridge to the small figure, also black, whose eyes and mouth light up white. One almost feels that there is a formal connection between Egill, the chorus and the cartoon figure. The artist becomes thereby a part of the tableau himself, becomes pure form. A picture that refers only to itself.
It’s a world organized according to similarities. Signs that occur in it refer to nothing at first; rather, they carry all conceivable possibilities in their form, only to then become something else through metamorphosis... Music is arguably the most semantically open medium and even the lyrics he uses are directed more towards their sound than their meaningful content. The English words become sounds, musical imitations of the foreign tongue. A particular sound could mean three to four different words.
Thus in “You take all my time” the visual landscape becomes a music video. Sounds, syllables, colors and forms weave themselves together and bring a fantastical universe into being before our eyes, full of its own unique regularities and its own particular beauty.”

(extract from text by Adina Popescu
translation by Karsten Schoellner)