Dead God Flow is the first installation in Berlin by artist, DJ, and producer Christelle Oyiri. It is an audiovisual environment that brings together video, sound, and spatial design. The guiding works of the project are Hauntology of an OG (2025) and Hyperfate (2022) — videos paired together for the first time and stitched together through site-specific soundtracks and lighting cues, inspiring what the artist imagines as a seance.

Sam Ozer: Let’s talk about the title—Dead God Flow.

Christelle Oyiri: It’s a reference to Friedrich Nietzsche, who said that “God is Dead” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He was not saying that God is actually dead, but that he was witnessing a new age of spiritual polarities and entering into a “suspicious era.” When Nietzsche was there, Marx was there, and Freud was there. So they gave another sense of reality to Western civilization. Before Marx, people were finding answers in religion and family structures. So when he arrives, things shift from “maybe I don't have money because God doesn't like me to maybe I don't have money because the boss actually owns all the means of production, and that's why I'm broke.” Before Freud, people would think someone was depressed because his blood was unhealthy and they needed to suck this blood out of his body…when Freud arrived, he’s like No, it’s because his dad is shit [laughs]. There is a familial tissue here that is unhealthy. These philosophers arrived in the 19th century and altered reality. For me, Nietzsche is the one who took a step back from Freud and Marx and recognized that they were dismantling everything. It's neither good nor bad; it's just what it is. He was attempting to say that our system of values is crumbling for a new system of values that are almost as strong as religion because they shape society, and they shape the fabric of politics.

I think that nowadays we're facing the same thing. People are looking for new ways to find saints, martyrs, and meaning. For instance, this guy, Charlie Kirk, got shot. I don't even want to dignify him because he's terrible, but some people are looking at him like he's a martyr. The fact that people can look up at him lets me know that God is dead for real, that there is a real spiritual bankruptcy for you to look at somebody like that as if there is some kind of sanctity about him. You know what I mean? So I think that when I did Hauntology of an OG and all of this, I was looking for meanings and a new type of saints and a new type of idolatry.

SO: Can we talk about religion and the idea of faith? You had told me that your work was always searching for faith. What about Nietzsche stood out to you?

CO: When I first learned about Nietzsche, this idea of a dead God stood out because I was in high school and in rebellion with Catholicism and anything religious. I also just wanted to piss off my parents. I was really fond of anything subversive at that time, and Nietzsche saying God is dead is quite controversial if you're in Catholic school and raised a certain way. I developed an affinity for darkness, and there is a particularity of Memphis rap that is rooted in darkness that I was drawn to. Especially the first wave of Memphis rap. I was not raised in America and in the Bible Belt, but there were a lot of similarities in the sense that when you grow up Black, whether you're African, Caribbean, or Black American, spirituality is often a very big part of your upbringing. I'm not sure if it's the case now for younger generations, but I know it was definitely the case for my generation and the one before me. Even though we have different types of spiritualities and act on them in different ways, we have a strong common ground. Juicy J, one of the founders of the mainstream Memphis rap scene, had a dad who was even a pastor. I always found it funny that there was this tension between darkness and light. A tension I never fully understood. I was always fascinated by how Black people were the most religious and had the strongest desire for salvation, considering what they went through for 400 years. As a teenager, I was always asking my parents, Why do you guys believe in God? It makes no sense as a Black person. As a community, it's really hard for us. And we went through hell. How can you find means of spiritual subsistence through to a transcendental power? And then when I grew up, I was like, but that's exactly why you find it in a transcendental power. The story of your survival is a testimony to it. When I was young, I thought that if God existed, why did we go through so much turmoil and death and literal enslavement? Now that I'm grown, I also see the contradiction and the need to find meaning, because without that, it's absolutely bleak, you know?

SO: It’s the importance of hope against the threat of nihilism.

CO: Yes, we need to be wary of nihilism. When the men of your community reach a certain potential and die very young, that’s a threat. For me, when I speak about Nietzsche, I view it through the lens of subcultural mysticism. And it is a very important philosophy to me because he discusses spirituality and symbolism. I see what Nietzsche’s talking about through the lens of subculture. When your church or your spiritual community doesn’t do right by you, or when there's a lack of representation in your community, you find comfort in new saints, which today are rappers. Rap is a subculture that is pretty dominant now, and that has its own rituals, its own mythology, and its own writing and vision of reality, so it doesn't erase spirituality, you know? With the title and the show, I wanted to find a way to merge these ideas on philosophy and music, kind of like what I do with mixing [when DJing], which is taking bits and fragments from this space and putting them into that space.

SO: I’m curious to learn more about your time in Memphis. How was it? Culturally, spiritually?

CO: When I went to Memphis, I was planning on making a music video, not a film [Hauntology of an OG]; however, on the last day of shooting, I realized that we didn’t have a lot of B-roll. So I asked everybody to wake up at 5:30 am to drive around and take some last shots. So we wake up, we get breakfast, we get coffee, we get in the car with all the equipment, and when we lower the window, we smell a really strong, really pungent smell. It was a weird atmosphere, and then we started seeing cop cars. I don't know if I'm still dreaming, and I just didn’t wake up because it was so early. We drove further down and ended up in front of the temple, which was burning.

There were journalists present, as well as people crying. It was extremely intense because I felt like in the universal imagery, especially as someone who grew up in Europe, seeing a Black church burning in the South is dreadful. I’m thinking about the KKK. Especially in the South, the church is a very sacred and social place. It’s the supportive tissue of the community. As Republicans don’t believe in the state, the church provides social structures that we have in Europe, such as food, shelter, and opportunities. Some people had been working there for more than twenty years and relied on this infrastructure, as did the homeless and single mothers.

My friend Mak [Darius "Phatmak" Clayton], a poet from Memphis who still resides there and works as a social worker, is the narrator of Hauntology and has this singular and beautiful voice. His first reaction when he saw the church was, We are cursed. As there is this idea of relying on Christianity as a vessel for salvation in the US, when he told me this, I felt like he was telling me, like, God has left here. To see this church burn, I asked myself this question: Did God actually leave the spot, you know? His immediate reaction was to tell me that he felt that we’re [people from Memphis] never going to forgive ourselves. But also, people are never going to forgive us for being the city that stopped the Civil Rights movement, for being the city where somebody who was preaching peace and unity got killed. A lot of people there carry a lot of guilt, even though they absolutely are not responsible for him [Martin Luther King Jr.] dying. Even though it's been more than sixty years, the community carries a lot of darkness from that time and from fear. They feel that this place was the ultimate stop of progress and togetherness.

SO: Do you think this sense of burden affects the music? How does the infrastructure, or lack thereof, influence cultural production?

CO: I really love anything that has to do with DIY aesthetics. I love when people who have very little means and are working with low-fi technology manage to create something that supersedes what is created in a high-fidelity mode. Memphis rap is something that even today sounds somewhat dated because it lacked the means that people had in New York or Los Angeles rap. A lot of the recording process in Memphis rap, which you hear in the sounds that I used in the exhibition, involved using a tape recorder with four tracks, which is very little. Now you have software and you can add as many tracks as you want, but even in the 90s, the infrastructure was developed in New York and in Memphis, you could hear somebody’s mom talking in the back. In New York, you had Mobb Deep and others who were producing a body of work that sounded like blockbusters. It is so insane how these styles happened at the same time, but the technology and means were so different.

SO: Was the DIY edge a stylistic choice or was it really a matter of means?

CO: It’s because the poverty level in the South is unheard of. Being poor in New York and being poor in Memphis is not the same. You have more autonomy when you're poor in Memphis because you can just take, I don’t know, your trailer and put it where you want, and nobody's gonna mess with you. That's the contradiction of America. It's either you have a lot of freedom or you don't have a lot of liberty, which is the South. And in other places, you don't have a lot of equality either, but you have structures and programs for support. In coastal cities, you may be poor, but there may be education programs and other resources available to help you live with poverty differently. You might be poor, but you have access to a free library or a place where you can learn to use the computer. You may have access to a free museum. It's not the case in the South. In my opinion, because of this discrepancy in means, a second wave of sounds in rap music and development gave birth to how modern rap sounds now. Because trap music sounds more like Memphis than what was produced in New York in the 1990s, in the face of limited resources, they created something that would last longer. In terms of the real structure of the sound, they were using the 808 [drum machine] differently in Memphis than in New York, and it's persisted until today.

SO: Beyond means and the structure of the music itself, can you speak a bit about the scouting process for rappers? I heard you sharing with a journalist some potentially pretty predatory approaches.

CO: Yes, record labels go in the hood, in the most disenfranchised places to scout for rappers that they know already have a familiarity and a proximity to gang violence. And when they sign them, they take out a life insurance policy. Many of them are 17 or 18 years old, without a lawyer, and signing a contract that includes a life insurance policy. The idea of the afterlife is quite bleak, because most of the time when they die, you see a surge in the streaming, and you see frescoes all over the city, but they are dead.

SO: This idea of a cursed prophecy crosses both Hauntology and Hyperfate. In Hyperfate, we see Tupac and Biggie, who both died in their early twenties. You also reference Princess Loko, who died at forty of heart failure, which is still incredibly young. In Hauntology, we have the cursed pyramid, and a city experiences cycles of loss. Both works explore the destruction of symbols through American culture.

CO: [In Hyperfate] I was attempting to create small monuments where people can gather and reflect. I don't want to thrive off of trauma or anything like that, but from 2020 until 2023 or something, I saw a surge in rappers dying extremely young. I think that we all know that Tupac and Biggie died young, but then I feel that during the late 2010s, we saw this accelerated process of death. I was speaking with friends who said that in no other genre do we see brutal and violent deaths this young. Rock and Roll has the 27 Club, but in rap, we are witnessing brutal deaths of 20-year-olds. Instead of having fame, money, maybe even security for your family, envy appears. I wanted to explore the concept of a prophecy and how sainthood and idolatry are portrayed through rappers–how they are unable to reach their full potential.

In Hauntology, part of the legacy of the pyramid is asking if everything is cursed in America? The Memphis Pyramid has a really weird history. It was originally built in competition with other regional monuments, such as the [Gateway] Arch of St. Louis, to have something for people to visit their city. As someone who grew up in France, which is essentially a museum, I was fascinated by the idea of searching for the perfect monument. I have a hard time with the Eiffel Tower because it comes from transatlantic slavery and from the money that they got from Haiti. I don't resonate with many monuments in Paris because I know the history behind them, but I have always been interested in art history and thinking about the process of creating a monument.

When I was in Memphis, friends told me that the guy who built the pyramid was following some kind of Indian guru who told him to put a glass skull on top of the pyramid (which is the reason you see a glass skull in my video). But the workers misunderstood and removed it. The CEO lost it because he thought they were activating a curse. Which really did happen. It was initially intended to be a monument to Memphis in ancient Egypt, but it later evolved into a music venue and a sports venue, ultimately failing. One night, the toilets even blew up, and there was literal shit flooding the pyramid during an event. The owners were so desperate, and they didn't have any hope for the place, so they sold it to Bass Pro Shops. So really super redneck type of stuff, you know? So when you enter the place, there's like stuff to go fishing and hunting instead of a super beautiful pyramid. In America, it always starts with a grand, crazy idea and it always ends with some kind of shit to sell.

SO: or actual shit even…

CO: Yes. I was also fascinated by how strong a symbol the pyramid is. Its sacredness. The fact that it's tied to Africa. Memphis is 75% Black. So it is mostly African Americans, but for the most part, they don't know anything about Africa. In the video, I wanted to restore the monumentality of the pyramid, because it doesn't exist in real life.

SO: During the installation, we discussed these early performances you did, where you cosplayed as a preacher. So I’m thinking about these conversations and how you said that at the end of the day, a lot of your work is searching for truth. Much of the work is connected to spirituality.

CO: So my mom is a Catholic, but my dad is Protestant. I feel like he became a God believer when stuff started to go to shit in his life, you know? I don't think I fully trust his vision of faith, you know? Because he just switched up when stuff started to feel weird for him. I feel like my spirituality really lies with my mom. But what I’m interested in about Protestantism, especially evangelism—that most of my family from my dad's side practices—is that more people are converting to evangelism than Catholicism. I can’t help but notice the influence of megachurches in Africa. I’ll see videos on social media of people catching the Holy Ghost or going through this crazy, insane, spiritual awakening. The first time I went to the Protestant temple with my dad, I was 17 and was fully aware that some members of my family were doing the most, in my opinion, you know? There’s some stuff I like and some that I don’t. I do believe that you can experience trance and transcendence in this type of space. But I think that if it happens, it’s coincidental; every Sunday feels a bit rehearsed. However, I also noticed that one thing I really like, which informed my performance practice, was the preacher. I felt that in Catholic culture, everything is very monotone, and in Protestant culture, especially in evangelical settings, the preacher is really on stage, almost like a rock star. He is trying to take people with him or her on a journey. In two of my performances—Love Mathematics and Rest in Peace—I act as a preacher and go among the crowd, really getting into preacher mode.

SO: Were you thinking about those works at all when you made Hauntology?

CO: I didn't think about these performances when making these works. It just all came. Now that I've been speaking to you for a few weeks, I'm noticing that a lot of my work discusses death and God. I always show my work in separate ways. I feel like it's my first time taking it in.

SO: I feel like this show at LAS really builds on the back of what you did in the Tate show last month. There is an operatic and theatrical element to how you’ve sequenced the lights and the sound and the relationship between the video and the scenography, which was very central to your project at Tate and now at LAS.

CO: We were just talking about spirituality. I think that even though I'm not conservative, and I couldn't be because of my life, I’m spiritual, and I do believe in God. What I like about sacred spaces—churches and temples, etc—is that there are a lot of rituals, a sense of poetic routine that I don’t have in my life. As I travel frequently and live in a chaotic society, I constantly seek meaning. When I get into certain spaces like this one or what I did at the Tate, I try to mobilize this desire for ritual that I lack in my life and apply it to the scenography. When you go to a Catholic church, at the end of the sermon, you have to put the body of Christ in your mouth. I love it when an exhibition can evoke a sense of ritual or convey a feeling of solemnity.

In Hauntology, Mak says that there is a greater connection with God in the dark. And I do believe that sometimes it's the person who understands the power of music and the transcendental power of the spaces that is actually more connected and more tapped in than the guy that just goes to church every weekend but hates everybody, you know? I want to create my own third spaces where I feel the same sense of togetherness without prejudice.