Jaz cover issue low res - Flipbook - Page 9
Hila Angelica
INK
IN THE BLOOD
Salvation gets under the skin with Italian, Berlin-based graphic
designer, nightclub collaborator and tattoo artist Hila Angelina
photography: Dani Mejla
I
n the months leading up to the pandemic, there was growing interest in an underground nightclub called Wraith that
operated in venues in London and New
York, its key proponents, two androgynous beings by the names of Parma Ham and
Salvia were the driving forces behind it, and
around them clustered a veritable cornucopia
of creatives, performers, sexual deviants, the
unclassifiable and the undefinable, their look
a mashup of Batcave goth, Taboo extreme,
sexual fetishism, transgressive provocation,
hedonism and the alien. Abnormal normal
in other words and the person assigned with
packaging all of this into graphic form, from
its flyers to its magazine- Wraith Inertia, was
Hila Angelina, an Italian tattoo artist, graphic
designer and illustrator whose hybrid fusion
of Black Metal aesthetics, Dadaesque photomontages, illustration and gothic-battyness
have given Wraith a print style as unique as its
eclectic audience. To find out more, we tracked
her down to Berlin where she now lives…
Talking to Hila, one gets a sense that she is
a person going through a great many changes, personal, creative and locational. She left
London in 2022 for space, relationship issues
and to pursue her overriding passion in tattooing and has found in Berlin release in at
least two of these areas, she now has space
and she is working as a tattoo artist at AKA, a
renowned tattoo studio in Berlin.
However, it was in London where Hila
honed her unique visual style, firstly with
her striking and provocative black, white
and tonal collages which make for a contrasting mix of segmented female bodies,
limbs and breasts juxtaposed against spikes
and steel or plants and petals, and sometimes
the concrete and architecture that is reminiscent in places of John Heartfield (18911968), the German, Berlin-based artist and
antifascist whose savage photomontages
were deployed against the then rising Nazi
party. Hila’s montages whilst not obviously
political make powerful visual statements
in their own right. Think of the images that
make up the covers of Noise music albums
mixed with JG Ballard’s “new currency of
pain and desire”.
Then came Wraith, Parma Ham’s exercise in extraterrestrial excess where Hila’s
involvement gave the club a visual structure and image, each flyer a defining statement not just of Wraith’s venue and location
on a particular night but as importantly a
presence which, either by design or default,
was essentially unclassifiable, its genre like
its youthful allegiances, unclear. A mix of
Black Metalish graphics and Batcave gothic with punk Xerox textures decorated with
crucifixes, all coated with a hint of Satanic
decadent decay.
ll was encapsulated and came
together in Wraith Inertia, a
200 page book, part celebration and part manifesto, of
the Wraith club’s aesthetic,
exhaustively put together by Hila and Parma
Ham during the lockdown. Mixing photography with Hila’s graphics and Ham’s words it
is both a record of Wraith’s early success and
excess and Hila’s last major piece of work before leaving London.
Talking to Hila, it is obvious that her real
passion is tattooing and the whole creative
process involved in applying a design to flesh
and seeing that image become one and part
A
of another person and by extension a part of
their personality. Hila’s tattoos are very much
in her style; spikes, daggers, curves and geometric designs that fit neatly with the contours of the human body. Graphic and highly
distinctive, Hila’s latest works and larger scale
back concepts are pushing her tattooing into
even more exciting directions. Mixing layers
of greys with over layers of blacks or multiple
layers of imagery these new tattoo concepts
are bringing her tattoos and collages together
in ways I haven’t seen before in terms of representing them on human flesh which make
these designs and her future work full of exciting possibilities.
inally, and perhaps inevitably, Hila
is now collaborating with fashion
designers like Sankuanz, the radical
Chinese label that has been an exciting part of the Paris shows since
2016 where Sankuanz’s collections flirt with
“post-apocalyptic aesthetics” and “subcultures and streetwear fashion”. That ‘streetwear’ fashion now includes Hila’s distinctive
spiky designs as well. The future is, it seems,
dagger shaped.
F
Salvation/7