Pass Radio
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 Baseball (Fence Books, 2011), Go Find your Father/A Famous Blues (Ricochet Editions, 2014) and Hollywood Forever (Fence Books, 2016). She curates the Afrosonics archive of Jazz Poetics and audio culture, and teaches at Otis College in Los Angeles
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. …
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.
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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 …
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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.
Adrift, a soundtrack for migration: DJ Ushka & Lamin Fofana
Africa is a Country present “Adrift: A soundtrack for migration,” the second of three panels, curated by AIAC managing editor, Africa is a Radio host, and music section editor, Boima Tucker. Current and former member of the Brooklyn DJ collective Dutty Artz, DJ Ushka (Thanu Yakupitiyage) and Lamin Fofana, talk about Fofana’s recent EP as a jump-off point to discuss migration — from what the Western media has dubbed a European “migrant crisis” stemming from Africa and Syria — to …
Nontsikelelo Mutiti: Women in new media & technology
Nontsikelelo Mutiti‘s African Hair Braiding Salon at the Chimurenga Library in NYC provides a framework to publish and present a range of works that are physical and performative in nature. She gets the weekend programme started with a conversation on women in new media and technology with Torkwase Dyson, Salome Asega, Yulan Grant and Kimberly Drew (Black Contemporary Art).
Traveling the PASS Spaceways
PASS Pop-up has occupied the Performa 15 Hub in New York with the Chimurenga Library. This multi-tiered programming platform takes the form of a library-of-people, bringing together a broad spectrum of collaborators and literal bodies of knowledge in an improvised, pop-up library which also functions as radio studio and market. The Chimurenga Library engages trade as both the process of buying, selling, or exchanging goods or services and the practice of exchanging ideas, imaginaries, perceptions, and vocabularies.
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