When we try to look up celebrities (modern day gods and goddesses) with our astrological Sun sign, most of the people who turn up are white and cis-gendered. However, the signs don't look the same on everyone. They change according to the identities that impact how we experience the world and how the world perceives us. This is why I am interviewing twelve people of color and queer people of each Sun sign.
Olin Caprison is the Aries who creates and performs all the music for their musical project, VIOLENCE. They talk about stigma and violent histories through their music. Rather than obeying one genre, they dissect the genres that they work under. Their newest EP is called Human Dust to Fertilize the Impotent Garden, and they have another one called A Ruse of Power.
Ares was the god of war. What does Violence mean to you?
Violence is a necessary catalyst to many kinds of change, or growth. Although not every kind of change. It's also a part of our everyday lives. Often hidden away. People tend to think about protests, sweat shops, or child slavery in mines in the DRC that companies use to get minerals to build computers but really there's also violence in this country that's hidden just outside of view. I'm obsessed with it because I've been privy to so much of it. If not directly to me then to many of the people that have been a part of my life. Some artists decide they need to create a more accurate mirror to hold up to society.
Stereotypically, Aries is also a very masculine sign. In a past interview, you mentioned that you passed through a character representing toxic masculinity. Can you describe that character and what it felt like on you?
That character, if I'm remembering accurately, is something that's a part of me. It has to do with the projections from my environment of what I was supposed to be. The things I tried to embody. Like a shadow self.
We usually think of Aries as violence going outwards, as a warrior archetype. However, the violence of Aries can be inflicted towards the self, making it the masochist archetype as well. Can you talk how you use masochism in your work?
I think a lot of what Aries ideal selves would be relates to the warrior/hero archetype. The passion, being headstrong, and driven to push through all adversity to grasp glory. And the failed hero/warrior is a masochist. They create unattainably high standards for themselves and work above and beyond to reach and surpass those goals, often at the expense of their own wellbeing, or at the expense of those close to them. They harbor a disgust for things they consider weak, that can't live up to those unattainably high standards. this is often seen in people that can't cope with the failure of so many things in the world to live up to platonic ideals.
My identity crafting relates to this in that I am moving through these ideals, almost like a method actor, and i feel that molding and shaping in an overwhelming way. And because I lived as those people, the idea of what a human was or what I was supposed to be, It's almost as if I am putting on that old cage.
The idea of being red blooded is associated with Aries. Can you talk about the ways you reference blood or flesh with your personal veganism?
Veganism is, to me, about acknowledging the autonomy of all things labelled as subhuman in society. It is rooted in anticapitalism and anticolonialism and fighting white supremacy. All things that obliterate autonomy, that pervert the idea of the self. Capitalism commodifies not only all it touches, but all it senses; sees, hears, feels, smells. uniting to claim their own legitimacy without the biases and prejudices of white supremacy and the ideals anchored to it. To be more than just flesh and blood to be utilized as tools, as slaves, as heifers, or cut up and sold as a commodity.
