Dance Floor Oriented Printmaking with Hagai Farago

What is a dance floor? How can a space be transformed into a unique opportunity for dancing, diving into music, and forming magical memories?

It is these questions that Tel Aviv-based printmaker Hagai Farago finds fascinating. As a dance-music enthusiast and an artist, over the past years Hagai has explored “Dance Floor Oriented” art and design for urban and open-air music events. The latest of these events was held earlier this year in the Israeli Arava Desert; the Gil-a-Palooza.

Hagai states; “These are tragic days for everyone living in Israel, Gaza, and the Palestinian territories. It seems that violence and destruction are prevailing over peoples’ dreams for a bright future. Dreams of prosperity, peace, and safety seem naive and elusive nowadays.”

Together with a team of inspiring musicians and nightlife producers, Hagai set out to plan a music event that would convey a message of hope and recovery. Almost everyone attending the rave has known someone who was injured or killed at the Nova music festival massacre on 7.10, just a few months earlier. With these tragedies in mind, the artist set out to find the right vision for the dance floor.

As a printmaker and the art director of the Gil-a-Palooza event, Hagai was keen to develop a harmonic design and to work with natural cotton textiles. An array of 12 large-scale patterns were developed for screen printing onto over 100 cotton “flags”. This project spanned more than 60 square meters of fabric, with all motifs cut out by hand out of paper before printing. A team of textile designers and print enthusiasts came together to accomplish this large-scale production in just under 3 weeks.

So what story do these hand-printed motifs tell? Hagai tells us; “Early on in the creative process, we dove deep into the tale of the biblical flood. It seemed so appropriate to our time as it holds many contradictions: it is a tale of total destruction – that occurs by water, the source of life. It is a tale of great loss but also of the later peace and harmony that followed.”

He continues; “In the printed designs, inspired by Japanese, Egyptian, and Greek aquatic motifs, I asked to form a composition of perspectives on the moments of water covering the earth. To support the call of all peace-seekers, Israelis and Palestinians alike, for an end to the war and a dawn of a new future for all.”

@hagai_farago
www.hagaifarago.com

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