The Opioid Crisis Lookbook Schinkel Pavillon Takeover
20. August 2022
Skeletal, feral, new rocks only, easy launch of OCL’s new zine. Organized by Samuel Staples and The Opioid Crisis Lookbook.
The Opioid Crisis Lookbook (the first narco-capitalism fueled lifestyle magazine) presents Real Homo Norwegian Black Metal Stories Zine Launch with Bjarne Melgaard, Dasha Zaharova and Dustin Cauchi in the Schinkel Pavillon’s iconic upper level.
The narratives that will unfold before you start in the socially utopic Oslo of the late 1980s where a group of teens created the sound of True Norwegian Black Metal, one of the most extreme musical manifestations of wrath and indignation of the 20th Century. These teens understood that as in the Matrix franchise, the real or reality is what sticks. It is a construct, a proposition that can be refused, accepted or replicated.
The realities they constructed, like the new names they gave themselves, were dark, archaic and childish. They dwelled in Transylvanian Castles, sipping Diet Coke and shit beer. They role-played ‘Medieval', made pacts with forest spirits, dyed their blonde hair jet-black and summoned evil legions to curse their parent's reality with shame, arson, murder, suicide and incarceration.
Corpse paint, a make-up look that imitates the hollowness and paleness of a decomposing body, is a violent manifestation of every individual's right to reality. It is also an armor and a symbol of hope to those who have been marginated, ridiculed and hunted down. Someone once wrote that only someone as bullied as Pelle "Dead" Ohlin could come up with something like corpse paint. Pain is a path that connects us; it rattles the stability of the constructs that exist outside and within us all.Violence is not the only way out or forward; empathy over wrath is a good way to manage our fears of becoming our fathers.”
Founded in 2019 by the artist Dustin Cauchi, The Opioid Crisis Lookbook is the first narco-capitalism fueled lifestyle magazine. Existing both online and in print it maps and styles the crisis, providing a journey through one of the most deadly epidemics of our time by invoking the visual language of fashion and popular culture. The focal point is a relation to addiction but “OCL is about drug culture and addiction as much as it about the colossal failure of a system that is drawing its final breaths.”
Dealing in crises, dope-spawned cultures, consumer poetics and architectures of addiction, OCL collects and shares symbols, marginal narratives, images, stories and myths along with exclusive and repurposed texts, interviews, journalism, and fiction revolving around life on planet earth in the time of high capitalism by focusing on its ultimate cultural soap opera: The Opioid epidemic in the United States.
Since the 90s' the opioid epidemic has haunted the United States, causing the death of over half a million people. Ever tightening its grip since the release of OxyContin, the epidemic has been a quiet storm raging through American bedside drawers stacked with pills. Cheap and highly addictive painkillers flourish in the pharmaceutical market thanks to those who tirelessly promote and prescribe them. SACKLER-owned Purdue Pharma dropped Oxycontin in America in 1996, marketed aggressively and by any means - from bribing to cheap cute plushies in the form of 80mg pills and giveaways for GPs and sales rep’s kids. As these kids grew up Prescription-born addictions to OxyContin turned to heroin, lives into ashes.
Before Netflix sensationalism, the crisis was chronicled mainly through Journalistic-media and documentation. In this streamlined process of info distribution many narratives and voices have been suppressed, misunderstood and side-lined. One of the OCL’s objectives has been to map out the crisis like a war, making marginal narratives available and offering a rewriting of dominant narratives and a celebration of the cultures that the crisis is creating in all their monstrosity and sublimity. Shame and taboo free.
Real Homo Norwegian Black Metal Stories
From Oslo, Norway to Rural Michigan via Memphis, Tennessee; the untold stories of Norwegian Black Metal
Featuring Marcus Mamourian, Heather Marlatt, Jack Kilmer, Lola Chantrelle Mitchell aka Gangsta Boo, and many more.
Concept and individual artworks by Bjarne Melgaard, Dasha Zaharova and Dustin Cauchi
Edited by Dasha Zaharova and Dustin Cauchi
Graphic design by Dasha Zaharova and Dustin Cauchi
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29.7 x 21cm
40 Pages
Includes a giant pull-out poster and fun activities
PUBLISHED BY THE OPIOID CRISIS LOOKBOOK STUDIOS 2022
MADE BY MACHINES AND HUMANS ON THE GLAMOROUS PLANET EARTH