TBA:20 INSTITUTE
Friday sessions with home school: Debajo Del Agua: The Wake Work of Enerolisa Núñez
DATE
September 25 | 4:00 PM PDT | TICKETS/WATCH
DESCRIPTION
home school screens Debajo del agua: the wake work of Enerolisa Núñez (2020), a recent work by manuel arturo abreu on Dominican musician and spiritual-cultural worker Enerolisa Núñez and her salve criolla music.
With her family band, Enerolisa Núñez, the "Queen of Salve," performs Afro-Dominican religious music in the salve style, also called palo or atabales. We review some musical examples, examine the history and context of Núñez's music and palo genres generally, and explore how Núñez navigates Afro-Dominican citizenship, or "no-citizenship" as Christina Sharpe says, in a context where palo seems to move into national prominence since the 90s, but is in fact reduced to "roots" or "folklore," not recognized as retention of living African presence and resistance in the Dominican spiritual and social fabric. We analyze the specific exploitative context of Enerolisa's collaboration with Dominican musician Kinito Mendez. Despite such marginalization, practitioners like Núñez continue to work in the wake to maintain the fullness of African spirituality in the face of the antiblack specter of "brujería" in the Christian Dominican mainstream, the commemorative national and corporate use of "folkloric" music, and what Sharpe calls oceanic time - "a time that does not pass, a time in which the past and present verge." From a space under the water, Enerolisa works to heal herself and retain her family's traditions. This talk was organized for the 2020 Black Feminist Summer School, a program of the Black Feminist Kitchen. Thank you to them.
ABOUT Friday Sessions with home school
home school is a free pop-up art school co-run by manuel arturo abreu and Victoria Anne Reis, in its fifth year of curriculum presenting multimedia, genre-nonconforming edutainment and creating welcoming contexts for critical engagement with contemporary art. For this year’s TBA Institute, home school will curate and host Friday afternoon virtual presentations and discussions with featured guests at the intersection of art, performance, and theory.
home school has previously curated exhibitions and projects with composition, Portland; Compliance Division, Portland; S1, Portland; Portland Community College Paragon Gallery; the Cooley Gallery, Reed College, Portland; MoMA P.S. 1, NYC; the Re:Art Show, old Pfizer Factory, NYC. home school has received support from the Precipice Fund, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Allie Furlotti/the Calligram Foundation, a Rhizome Net Art Microgrant, Regional Arts and Culture Council project grants, and Yale Union.
TBA:20 Institute
Connecting audiences with festival artists and their ideas - the aesthetics, politics, critical concepts, and cultural contexts that inform their work - has always been a highlight of TBA. Sustaining the discursive and participatory spirit of past festivals, this year's TBA Institute includes a mix of reading groups, discussions, artist conversations, workshops, and post-show Q&A's, all presented virtually. We will miss bringing together large groups in person for deep dialogue, but we are pleased to make the Institute program available online, with audiences, artists, and guest moderators from across time zones.
Please note that some online Institute events have limited capacity and require registration, while others are publicly accessible. Please visit pica.org/TBA to learn more about this year's TBA Institute and how to engage.