Children of Sirius: Day Two
Sunday, June 2, 2019 | 7-9pm | $10
Featuring performances and installations by Vitche-Boul Ra, Oro Ori, Sabrina Pantal and Chlöe Marie
Curated by 2019 Black Box Curatorial Fellow Malachi Lily
No one turned away for lack of funds
Click here for information about Children of Sirius: Day One on Saturday, June 1st, featuring Jordan Deal, Alex Farr and Marcelline Mandeng.
Program Description
You may feel like you are lost, but you are exactly where you’re supposed to be. You have stumbled upon the Children of Sirius.
The gods have come down to revel in your concepts of time and dimensions. They come as black bodies, as expansive minds, as artists. This is a declaration, a feast, a war-cry, and a lullaby. Together these voices proclaim that their experience is divine. Their present existence is of their own creation; it is holy and infinite. This art is a particular form of self-love, an intimate awareness of a cosmic truth: They are creators. They come as shapeshifters, prophets, oris, ether, and beasts, all holy in their own eyes of god.
The Black Box, the scared cave, becomes an ephemeral place of pilgrimage for all people, but especially black people, with the intention of waking the divinity within the observer in this colorful and meditative place. Marginalization, trauma, and an engrained erasure is experienced as systems and passed generationally, but through collectivity within art and expression we can rewrite patterns and remember who we are. Each individual being’s experience is a direct manifestation of creation energy and therefore is never alone. Art, as the energy release of our universe, is never a solo process as we are unconsciously connected and influenced by each other, by other realities, by the earth, tangerines, the moon, star clusters, trout, smog, woven fabric, skyscrapers, gnats, the list is infinite.
The energy of each artist has found each other once again, and even your energy as observer has returned to us, you are welcome to ascend with the Children of Sirius.
About the Artists
Oro Ori (honey/they/she)
More Info: @_oroori_
Sabrina Pantal (she/her)
Music has always been a form of expression for me. Being a self-taught musician has brought insecurity, but it also allows me to be more unique in the way I create. By combining trance-like melodies with layers of guitar, piano, and harmonies, I am able to translate more than just sounds that are pleasing to the ear. My lyrics are almost like spells that I cast and are usually based around the complexity of emotions that I feel throughout the many stages of my life. I like to explore and pull inspiration from different genres like jazz, psychedelic rock, soul, folk, and whatever else feels right in the moment. As a queer black woman deviating from the boxes that are put around the types of music we are “allowed” to produce, using this expression is very healing. I use these vibrations as a form of musical alchemy and hope that whoever is listening is left with feelings of peace and empowerment.
More Info: @soundsfromsabrina
Chlöe Marie (she/they)
I want people to know me after they watch me do something.
And this is because I have a lot of questions about the performative body:
What is the difference between the performative body and the body that lives outside of that…. or is it even outside?
What is.
When I walk through the street I’m watching performance occur in every body.
When I sleep I’m dancing, when I eat I’m dancing, when I talk I’m dancing.
I have a lot of questions about the current state of our country, and I use my moving body as a means to explore new possibilities.
I’m interested in what happens to my mind when I undergo moments of remembering previous experiences.
Because of this I’m a victim to nostalgia, and to upholding previous experiences in ways more than just commenting on the brief moment of the past.
This means I believe the past is more than a memory, because I’m still deeply affected by it everyday.
In performance I hope to access selflessness.
Vitche-Boul Ra (he/him/vaïd)
In his primary studio practice, Vitche-Boul Ra utilizes recognizable dance language and colloquial gesture to develop performance works which manifest as play. The work applies irrationality in combination with the notion of dance as recreational labour to explore experiences of elitism and the mundane. Typically the performance attempts to unclearly articulate the relationship between performing body and viewing body. This is accomplished through language and spacial relationships—always building a matrix of power in flux with shifting accountability. Through repetition of gesture, doggy language, and direct questioning, Vitche-Boul Ra manipulates real time and recollection. He establishes a game inside the viewer, confronting them with their own memory, resulting in the reaffirmation of their securities while simultaneously destabilizing them. Can they follow, or better yet, aren’t they leading?. This technique opens up the performance space as a grounds for play—a hunting ground and a jungle gym.
Particularly in video, the works become unhinged playscapes for the body to occur in. Dealing with cyclicality, rhythm, antagonistic happenstance, and misplacement, Vaïd utilizes video space to generate unorthodox quests. Videoscape is used as a tool to reveal truths within the practice and furthermore immortalize the process of questioning, and questioning fictions, that becomes prevalent in the live performances. In this method, the body—and it’s baggage—are ejected from the “real” and placed into a dangerous site of scrutiny and imaginative intangibility. Vitche-Ra allows sound, dislocated text fragments, and muddy technicality to read the body to filth, resulting in a Digital Mysticism. Expanding this conversation into the quotidian self on the street, Vitche-Boul Ra investigates the many selves inside one form—the complexity of the physical body space. Experiencing his own body as a hosting vessel, Lix Vaïd reimagines the multiple self inside the corpus form as unstable to allow for abrupt transitions of linguistic style, cultural conditioning, and coded movement resulting in “P.E.”—the Performative Erryday [life].
More Info: @vitcheboulra
About the Curator
Malachi Lily (they/them)
2019 Black Box Curatorial Fellow Malachi Lily is a shapeshifting, non-binary, black poet, artist, curator, and moth. They connect to the collective unconscious via energy work, active imagination, mysticism, myth, magick, folklore, and fairy tales. This channeling often takes the form of poetry and illustration, but at Vox Populi that work becomes curation as they connect to another artist’s energy and work beyond simply aesthetics. Malachi connects artists who are unconsciously vibrating together and uses their organizational skills to give them all a space to sing. Malachi’s curation forms a tangible permeation of a culture of Oneness – living in the reality that we all are manifestations of the same source energy and we all create our realities together. It is Malachi’s purpose to create space to uplift fellow black artists as gods, to bring balance and truth to their experiences. Malachi is a liminal being of race, gender, artistic practice, and existence reclaiming the spiritual body of black and brown people who experience generational trauma and colonization. Their work offers methods to break these individual barriers and reveals the symbols, archetypes, emotions, and lessons that exist in everyone as a collective consciousness, to heal, awake, and empower.
More information: maggielily.com / @theholyhawkmoth / @hawkmothevents
Support for Vox Populi’s Black Box Curatorial Fellowship is provided by the Dolfinger-McMahon Foundation.
ACCESSIBILITY STATEMENT
Please note that Vox Populi is located on the third floor of a historic warehouse building at 319 N. 11th Street and that there are five steps leading from the street-level to the first-floor landing where the passenger elevator picks-up/drops-off. The entry into/out of the elevator is 29-inches wide, so may not accommodate all wheelchairs or motorized chairs. Any individual requiring a ramp to navigate this entryway is encouraged to get in touch with Vox Populi ahead of time to coordinate ramp-access and discuss accessibility details. Our ramps may not be suitable for all wheelchairs or motorized chairs, so we strongly encourage anyone requiring a ramp to be in touch at: events@voxpopuligallery.org or 215.238.1236
