Dub Waves & Interferences - 60th La Biennale di Venezia
Performers: Antonio Jose Guzman & Puppets Family Dance Academy, Treviso
Percussionists: Elisa “Helly” Montin and Moulaye Niang
Music: Transillumination #1 / EDS Bass Mash Up Vol. 5 by Guzman & Jankovic
Electric Dub Station Series 2020 -2030
In their ongoing artistic collaboration, Antonio Jose Guzman and Iva Jankovic incorporate indigo textiles, soundscapes, and performances to address how our world has been shaped by colonialism and migration.
Guzman and Jankovic reinterpret the history of sacred indigo textiles, which are deeply connected with colonial histories and the trade of enslaved Africans who carried the expertise of cultivating indigo with them to the Americas. The textiles in the installation feature an abstract pattern of intercultural DNA sequences that embody a global connection between the Black Atlantic.
The textiles are printed at the Ajrakh workshop of Sufiyan Khatri in Ajrakhpur, India. Using traditional manual dyeing methods, Ajrakh is a 4,000-year-old practice orally passed down through generations.
The accompanying soundscape alludes to ideas of belonging and exclusion through an exploration of diasporic sounds that combine electronic music, dub, punk, and Senegalese drums. The music resonates in a performance titled Messengers of the Sun which embodies the project’s themes such as migration, race, and cultural hybrid identities in a processional parade and dance.
—Amanda Pinatih and Britte Sloothaak
Photos: Arianna Carotta and Andrea Avezzù, Jacopo Salvi, Marco Zorzanello, Matteo de Mayda - Courtesy: La Biennale di Venezia