Novas Frequências x Fact: Aya Ibeji – KWEEN
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Novas Frequências x Fact: Aya Ibeji – KWEEN
An audiovisual piece inspired by vogue from the Brazilian artist, originally shown as part of the Rio festival’s 2020 programme.
Novas Frequências is Brazil’s most inquisitive music festival. Founded in 2011, the Rio de Janeiro-based event has played host to pioneering experimental artists from across the globe, inclusing William Basinski, RP Boo, Félicia Atkinson and many more.
Last year, as the pandemic curtailed international travel, the festival – headed by director and curator Chico Dub – decided to change its format, switching live shows for filmed performances and audiovisual works. For the first time in its history, the festival’s programming featured 100% Brazilian artists.
Fact Residency: Julianknxx
Fact Residency: Julianknxx
Julianknxx traces an expansive and ongoing conversation between the many voices, past and present, that make up the cultural patchwork of his life.
In her beautiful and devastating 2016 book
In The Wake: On Blackness and Being, scholar Christina Sharpe delivers a stark rallying cry: “We must think about Black flesh, Black optics, and ways of producing enfleshed work.” Drawing inspiration and strength from Sharpe’s words, interdisciplinary poet Julianknxx brings together sound, image and performance in a discursive, enfleshed poetic practice. His work is deeply connected both to the foundational stories and languages of his birth place of Freetown, Sierra Leone, and to the sounds and voices of his current home in London. It is the passage between these places, and their twin histories of conflict and colonialism, that the poet seeks to document, penning what he calls a “history from below.”
Julianknxx Presents: We Are What’s Left Of Us
To close his Fact Residency, Julianknxx comes together with producer Happy Cat Jay and the Zimbabwe-born, London-based soul musician THABO for a climactic performance.
Julianknxx, THABO and Happy Cat Jay begin We Are What’s Left Of Us with the sound of breathing. “The air is different now, we need to think about how we breathe,” the poet reminds us as he reflects back on a year that redefined breathing for the whole world. “Now that the pandemic has happened we’re thinking about space, we’re thinking about our health, we’re thinking about our connection to nature, breathing healthy air,” he explains. Living in fear of the very air that we share with those around us has reframed our relationship with our breathing, dictating in part how we live our lives in what’s left in the wake of COVID-19. “We have to breathe differently,” he asserts, “so this is what’s left of us.”