M HKA Ensembles

Video, 00:03:32.

Collection: Courtesy of the artist .

Halter’s video The Zimbabwean Queen of Rave, 2005, combines a personal story in relation to mass experiences. In 1991, the Zimbabwean singer Rozalla released her hit dance single Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good), the same year that Halter went to school with her brother John Miller. Having a Zimbabwean at the top of the charts worldwide was a source of pride, and she became known locally as “The Queen of Rave”. Yet it was also a moment when protests were building in neighbouring South Africa, three years before the end of apartheid and the arrival of democracy. Halter combined images of this unrest with images related to his later experience of attending mass raves in Europe and then later in Zimbabwe, to Rozalla’s track with its emancipatory title and lyrics like: “brother and sister, together we'll make it through”. Through this track, The Zimbabwean Queen of Rave describes two different scenarios, yet each guided by crowd dynamics, and the collective desire for social and political change.