Tanyaradzwa Tawengwa live performance
PASS plays out with a live vocal and mbira performance by Zimbabwean-born musician and composer Tanyaradzwa Tawangwa.
Tawangwa is a Zimbabwean-born musician and composer. A Princeton graduate, she works between mbira, classical piano and cello, opera and popular forms.
Category: Pass Blog, Pass Radio
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Omar Berrada – Defend the Dead (on NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!)
Omar Berrada offers a meditation on poetry when it holds on to the imperative of “defending the dead,” among the traumas of history and the silences of archives. He does so via recordings of performances by NourbeSe Philip, sampled with the help of Ambrose Bye. “Zong! not only deals with an historical event (i.e. the massacre of enslaved Africans on board the Zong in 1784), but also speaks to contemporary times, in the sense that we are all contaminated by that …
Harmony Holiday : Astro/Afrosonics
Poet and choreographer Harmony Holiday digs in her Astro/Afrosonics Archive, which weaves poetry, poetics and music, through mythscientific gestures. “To access recordings and writing that unite the philosophy of collective improvisation that galvanizes black music, with the literary tradition – and creates new motifs within both disciplines – one has to practically be a savant, a collector of rare out-of-print records and books, or an archivist in one’s own right.” Harmony Holiday Harmony Holiday is the author of Negro League …
Seeing voices: Reflections on African photographic portraiture
Nontsikelelo Mutiti: Women in Self-publishing
Nontsikelelo Mutiti kicks off with a talk on women in self-publishing featuring Yolanda Sangwena (Afripop Magazine), Amy Sall (SUNU Journal), Ali Rosa–Salas (Top Rank Magazine) and Jessica Lynne (Arts.black). Mutiti is a Zimbabwean-born artist and educator. She has been a resident artist at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), Recess as well as the Centre for Book Arts in New York and is currently Assistant Professor in the New Media Department at State University of New York, Purchase College. …
Sunday 15 November Runnings
Its the final day of the Pop-up at the Performa Hub in New York. Join us at 47 Walker street at 3pm when Nontsikelelo Mutiti kicks off with a talk on women in self-publishing featuring Yolanda Sangwena (Afripop Magazine), Amy Sall (SUNU Journal), Ali Rosa–Salas (Top Rank Magazine) and Jessica Lynne (Arts.black). Next up, Africa is a Country presents Seeing voices: Reflections on African photographic portraiture, a discussion on photography with Zachary Rosen and friends. Then poet and choreographer Harmony …
Category: Pass Blog
Tags: Africa is a Country, Harmony Holiday, Nontsikelelo Mutiti, Omar Berrada
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The night ghost
PASS Pop-up has occupied the Performa 15 Hub in New York with the Chimurenga Library. Over five days, from 11 to 15 November 2015, The Library hosts PASS with a live broadcasting programme of music, interviews, and events with Chimurenga collaborators in New York, including musicians, journalists, writers, curators, and filmmakers. The live broadcast studio functions amidst an installation that brings together pop-up stores that experiment with trade, informal economies, aesthetics and body language, music and spoken word, mobility and infrastructure.
Category: Pass Blog, Pass Radio
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Innov Gnawa Live
PASS Pop-up NYC plays out with Innov Gnawa, a traditional Moroccan gnawa band based in New York City who unite music fans with their innovative, hypnotic and ecstatic take on North Africa’s trance-inducing folk tradition. This is Hashim Aidi on gnawa: ”Their music is believed to heal people possessed by jinn, or spirits. The rise of this music, which began, in the nineteen-fifties, as a marginalized Sufi practice but has become arguably the most popular music emerging from the region today, …
Hisham Aidi with Abdi Ega & Rashidah Ismaili Abubakr
Hisham Aidi hosts a conversation with writers Somali-American writer Abdi Latif Ega and poet, playwright, essayist and short story writer, Rashidah Ismaili Abubakr. Aida is the author of Rebel Music: Race, Empire and the New Muslim Youth Culture (Pantheon 2014), a study of how music—primarily hip-hop, but also rock, reggae, Gnawa and Andalusian—has come to express a shared Muslim consciousness in face of War on Terror policies. He “[T]he richest cross-fertilization that you have between American music and Islam is in …
Category: Pass Blog, Pass Radio
Tags: Abdi Latif Ega, Hisham Abdi, Rashidah Ismaili Abubakr
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‘We charge genocide’ marathon reading
Freedwomen’s Bureau (Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts) presents a marathon reading of We Charge Genocide, the historic petition to the United Nations for relief from a crime of the United States government against the negro people (1951). Rhodes-Pitts is the author of the critically-acclaimed Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America. She is working on a trilogy about African-Americans and utopia and recently launched BLACKNUSS: books and other relics, a new bookstore in Harlem.