Hey I’m Chini. Spiritual leader, omnipotent owner and mentor of You Are So Overrated. I started my career as an overrated art director in Buenos Aires, Argentina, working for overrated agencies such as BBDO and DDB, where I won some of those overrated awards that overrated advertising people win. After my overrated success in the advertising world, I decided I had enough and left to Europe. There I traveled around and settled in Barcelona, a beautiful and overrated city. One year later I published a photography book called Melancolia.
In Barcelona I started working as a freelance for El Sindicato, one of the best overrated agencies in Spain. In 2001 I then founded Aäb, an overrated arty-design group together with two friends, Nico and Agus. We put our creative focus on graphics, videos and those overrated disciplines, which you can see in overrated trendy magazines and books.
In 2003 Tekko, a Canadian collective, commissioned Aäb to do a video for their ‘Future Beautiful’ book and exhibition. The exhibition went to IdN’s My Favourite Conference in Singapore and then to Resfest in 2005. For the closing of Res in Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum we were invited to show our work in a lovely overrated moment. During 5 years Aäb developed different kinds of non-commercial work like toy design, vjeying, vj workshops and a live vj set with the musician Earzumba at Sonarama (Sonar 2006). We also curated a motion graphics exhibition called Viewmaster in Maxalot Gallery (Bcn) and a lot of nonsense not worthy to mention.
In commercial terms we mostly worked for Vueling, a Spanish low-cost airline, designing the cloud that was to become their trademark as well as doing 10 TV spots, commissioned by the overrated ad agency SCPF (Bcn). One of the spots was showcased at Shots and Resfest Buenos Aires. Also we did a capsule for IdN’s My Favorite Conference and a short film called Notes Sur la Boule Amorph commissioned by Tekko for their Safety in Numbers exhibition, later showcased in the Res Magazine and Resfest Buenos Aires.
In 2006 Psyop (NY) invited us to join Blacklist. Although this was of course great recognition of our work as well as a great commercial opportunity for Aäb, I decided to leave to try something more personal. My last project was to curate and publish an illustration book called Cucciolo Encatenati.
Thereafter I started to shape up You Are So Overrated and spent most of 2006 in Buenos Aires working with my overrated friends Amautalab, mainly on two websites for Toyota (Mundo Yaris, and Yaris MusicLab), a spot for Yaris Musiclab and a clip for the Spanish pop band Amaral for their “Revolucion” clip. That year, with my friend Gachi, we did a video for The Divine Comedy’s “To Die a Virgin” single.
In 2007 I did live visual sets for Earzumba, Bradien, Nochteff and Mueran Humanos, a short film for Barcelona’s Diba Express Film Festival and tons of illustrations and sketchbooks. I also help shooting Juan Pablo Pires second film.
In July I moved to Berlin, planning to have Berlin and Barcelona as my two hq. After 8 months living in Berlin, I went to Buenos Aires for a couple of months to work in some projects with 3dn (a post production company), a video for Natalia Clavier and also djing a lot in bars and on parties with my Overrated Soundystem.
Now back in Barcelona (my main HQ) after a year away from the city, I’m getting used again to the good weather, the nice food, the crazy prices and the stupid control freak rules and regulations that the local overrated government and the police apply to the people here trying to ruin this lovely place.
So now you have a pretty good idea of what You Are So Overrated is all about. If you managed to read all this crap and didn’t go to see any bizarre stuff to YouTube instead, I hope you like my stuff and if you want, drop me a line, send me some cash or invite me for dinner.
