From the Parisian underground djing scene to the Mediterranean white island of Ibiza, Dan Ghenacia (Enghien les bains, 1973) the acclaimed DJ and visual artist, premiered last Friday, July 26th an immersive art exhibition at Ocean Drive Talamancain which he fuses two sides of the same Dan: music and visual art.
California was the place where his love for music blossomed, at the age of 20, Ghenacia was filled with house and psychedelia.
In 1998, in Paris, he started DJing professionally, in an after party called Kwality, space “where I was really working on what I’m doing today, working on my style, I could experiment. That time was very special” declares Dan Ghenacia.
His signature techno-deep-house sound not only earned him notoriety, but inspired a new generation of DJs.
His talent undoubtedly had to be exploited, so, a few years later, he founded his own record label Freak N’Chic, with which he released artists such as Dyed Soundorom, Djebali, Shonky and Jamie Jones, among other great artists.
However, a disagreement between the financial partners ended the label in 2009. Three years later, Apollonia would see the light of day, together with Dyed Soundorom and Shonky, marking the beginning of a new stage in the Parisian’s career.
Have a Good Trip
Dan Ghenacia who has spent many summers in Ibiza says that the island “is really the beginning of my career, everything really starts, for me, in Ibiza. DC10“.
This season he presents a new facet of his art with the exhibition Have a Good Trip, his first art show at the Ocean Drive Talamanca hotel. Ocean Drive Talamanca. This exhibition undoubtedly pays particular homage to Ibiza, with a unique perspective that oscillates between meditation, dreams and contemplation, inviting, through his aerial photographs and videos to experience the island in a new way.
The exhibition can be visited until August 18For more information, please visit the Ocean Drive Talamanca
Dan Ghenacia between visual art, music and pandemic
-How did you begin your path through art? -My father had an art gallery, so I was always attracted to art.
It was one of the most common themes at home.
I was in search of images, in 2014, for Apollonia, on Google with keywords like trance, meditation, frequency, turntable, psychedelic, and I discovered a machine from the 1960s, called the Dream Machine. The Dream Machine is a rotating device that creates a flickering effect, a strobe effect, that impacts the optic nerve when you look at it with your eyes closed and puts you in a meditative state of psychedelic travel. This 1960’s machine had all my keywords, and I found the plans on the internet.
But I didn’t do anything with the project from 2014 until 2020, when the pandemic hit, and I was thinking a lot about this Dream Machine, at that crazy time when you couldn’t travel, and I was thinking about the possibility of internal travel, and that’s how I started working on the project.
I made the first one with a turntable and a piece of cardboard, because they used a turntable to spin the cylinder and that’s how I started working on the project. 
This exhibition is an installation with photographs and videos of clouds captured from the window of an airplane.
In the Dream Machine, you have to close your eyes and you start to see colors, patterns.
It’s an experience that really touches your memory.
When I took my first flight after the pandemic, it reminds me how much I’ve missed the clouds, seeing the clouds, how much I’ve missed traveling.
The clouds remind me of the vision of the Dream Machine because it’s generative, it’s always moving.
And so I decided to take pictures and videos and bring it back to Earth.
I created these flat windows to have in your living room.
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–What is the intention you would like the audience to feel? It isan invitation to travel.
It’s a moment, when you look at the clouds on the plane, it’s probably a moment when you stop to think.
Your brain, in general, doesn’t have the Internet, it’s a great moment for me.
And it’s a moment that I really wanted to take me back to Earth.
Great artists, great inspirations
–Who inspired you in your career? I amvery inspired by Brion Gysin, who invented the Dream Macrhine. Dream Macrhine, he is the creator of Beat Generationa group of intellectuals very interested in meditation, in psychedelic worlds and they used a lot of psychedelic drugs to experiment new things.
And in terms of music, I have been very inspired by the American West Coast music of the 1990s and early 2000s.
I’m a big fan of black music in general and especially Prince.
The name Apollonia comes from Prince, Apollonia Six was one of the singers produced by Prince. -What will be your future projects? –I‘m goingto start a new project, I have a new EP coming out on Stratasonic, a new label in Los Angeles. It will be released on September 14 and will be called Rouge ou Noir. Always working in this direction, I try to bring my career as a DJ and visual artist together, and create a bridge between the two, and use the skills of both to create music, to create artwork music.
This is exactly what I’m trying to do.
