Negro Escandaloso 4 Ever – The Lost Tapes is a memorial work and historiography dedicated to the artist’s brother Zamir Ramirez, who died in 2014. For the past 15 years, Enver Ramirez has worked as a music producer, collaborating with most of Gothenburg’s hip hop scene. In the 1990s, he co-founded the rap collective HammerHill Click, paving the way for future generations of suburban hip hop, a legacy pursued by his younger brother Zamir Ramirez, aka Negro Escandaloso.
This work comprises a series of rap albums, fragmentary footage inherited from his brother, and the film Negro Escandaloso 4 Ever – The Lost Tapes, an ongoing project created from the artist’s collected archive material. Glimpses from the life of Zamir are interwoven with interviews, music videos, gigs and his farewell ceremony led by a shaman at lake Titicaca in Bolivia.
The music and film clips are shown on a desktop computer surrounded by various memorabilia, against a backdrop of posters illustrated by his brother’s close friend, the conceptual illustrator Dennis Chan. Here, we see Zamir Ramirez in the form of a Chakana*. The collected video material that Ramirez has edited stretches from the millennium shift until today.
* A Chakana is a step cross used by Inca and Andean pre-Inca societies.
