Past Event: September 28, 2024
Historias Launch Block Party + The Clemente Open Studios
We were thrilled to launch our groundbreaking initiative Historias with a vibrant block party on September 28, 2024! This coincided with the 2024 edition of The Clemente Open Studios, featuring street performances, artist commissions, music, and public activations in partnership with Street Lab.
Event Highlights:
Featured Performers and Commissions
-
In PRACTICE, Afro-Diasporic cultural idioms are interwoven through dance, sound, speech acts and design to incite the critical through-lines of creolized expressive arts formed within the greater geographic contexts of the "New World". This redux iterates on the larger evening-length work - that premiered at The Clemente in 2022—as it aims to guide viewers through a performative practice, celebrate the gift of gathering, and hold space to consider the emancipatory uses of culture for radical place-making and visioning collective liberation through creative practice.
-
A dynamic performance led by artist and poet Edwin Torres where a choir of seven poets; Lydia Cortés, Sheila Maldonado, E.J. McAdams, Yesenia Montilla, Urayoán Noel, Kristin Prevallet, and Emanuel Xavier, will be conducted to bring to life five historical poems by foundational Latino poets. This bilingual performance, in both Spanish and English, oscillates between solo and collective voices, creating an organic and responsive experience. Through instant vocal arrangements, rhythm, and song, Torres guides the poets in generating spontaneous new poems while reinvigorating the original works. The performance honors the contributions of José Martí, Salomón de la Selva, Julia de Burgos, Lourdes Casal, and Clemente Soto Vélez—voices that span diverse Latin American geographies and aesthetics, deeply connected to migrant and diasporic histories, and integral to the rich Latino poetic tradition in and beyond New York.
-
No one wants to be an artist, but everyone wants to be paid for his work. - Franz Kafka
Cuarto Oscuro is a live streamed four part performance taking place in September, 2024 at the Tenement Museum and ID Studio in NYC. Inspired by Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika / The Missing Person,in which he proposes a theater that hires anyone who applies, the project will employ a cast of new immigrants, hired directly from NYC's migrant shelters. Cuarto Oscuro will stage tableaux based on a pictorial script assembled from photographs of immigrant life on the LES. The artists will then re-shoot these tableaux using a multi camera flash system in an homage to the techniques of Jacob Riis, whose photographs changed the fabric of the Lower East Side. The new image flow will be interwoven with bilingual texts generated from the work process and from ongoing interviews with the cast. Three of these sessions will be live streamed, and an edit of the entire output will be projected on the Suffolk Street facade of the Clemente Center on September 28, as part of the Historias festival.
Cuarto Oscuro is created by Lucia della Paolera and Seth Tillett, with Adrien de Mones, Nicole Fernandez, Michael Guidetti, Justine Lugli, and Sandie Luna, featuring Jhonny Alberto Sinisterra Ruiz, Ingrid Garza, Johana Maldonado, Adrián Pérez, David Rosales, and Shirley Carabali Piedrahita. The project is realized with the generous support of the Clemente Center, Tenement Museum, International Center of Photography, Joel Fitzpatrick Studio, and Bronx-based LxNY partner and co-producer ID Studio Theater.
Live streams:
9/20/24: 2-6 PM
9/22/24: 2-6 PM
9/23/24: 4-8 PM
Cuarto Oscuro is part of a large theater work called FOUNDER, scheduled for full performance in the fall of 2025.
-
“In its totality, the chorus is uncontainable, and potentially infinite, like a body of water, or a diaspora.” —Elisa Peebles on Circulo de Voces
Círculo de Voces is a public performance piece and series of talleres reimagining the choir as a public service, like a library or park. We center the voice as a primary tool for connection and collective transcendence. Inspired by the group vocalizations in Cuban Rumba and Puerto Rican Bomba, as well as Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening, Xenia is composing user-friendly pieces centering embodiment, collective improvisation and the use of references to ground the group in structure while deconstructing phrases and empowering singular voices to emerge, creating the sound of a new kind of coro, (choir).
-
From September–November, The Clemente will present Exorcism = Liberation, a public art project investigating our relationship to land, self-determination, migration, and climate disaster. Through collective citywide experiences in New York City, Chicago, and the Connecticut River Valley of Western Massachusetts, the work invites the American public to imagine alternative futures through the lens of Puerto Rican culture and the U.S.’ ongoing colonial history. Exorcism = Liberation utilizes familiar political media campaigns to immerse the public in sonic experiences, distributing stickers, posters, handmade banners, lawn signs, and pins through local community and art organizations.
Exorcism = Liberation is an act of intervention, a rehearsal for collective action during a critical American election. To learn more about the project, partners, and upcoming events, check out exorcism-liberation.net
Full Schedule of Events:
2:00–4:00PM Block Party
Live Vinyl Music set by: DJ Tresdos
3:30–4:00PM Opening Remarks
4:00–9:00PM Special Commissions & Performances
4:00PM Bulla en el Barrio, Musical Performance
4:50PM Edwin Torres, The Historias Conduction: Ancestors of Latino Poetry
With an eight poet choir: Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Lydia Cortés, Sheila Maldonado, E.J. McAdams, Yesenia Montilla, Urayoán Noel, Kristin Prevallet, and Emanuel Xavier
5:10PM Jonathan Gonzalez, PRACTICE
6:00PM Intermission with DJ Tresdos
6:40PM Xenia Rubinos, Círculo de Voces
7:15PM Kiki & the Fellas
8:00PM Closing Remarks
8:15PM Historias Closing Commission debut
Lucia della Paolera and Seth Tillett: Cuarto Oscuro
9:00PM Event ends
Block Party Participants:
Street Activations by:
Fabio Puentes: NYC Chilerican Solidarity & Resistance
Revista Balam
Street Lab
Vanessa González: Parada: La Fiesta No Termina Aquí
Yanira Castro: Exorcism = Liberation
Qi Zone Wellness: Beads & Seeds for Social Justice.
Providers are: Juan, Walter, Margarita, Carlos
Tai Chi demo by Walter Bosque, ex-Young Lord and Lincoln Detox visionary
Maria Lupianez, Steve Ellis & Melanie Vote, Drawn Together*
House of Bones*
Laura Nova, Wishing Tree*
Natalia de Campos in collaboration with Thiago Szmrecsanyi: Artists Against Apartheid*
Stacy Mehrfar: Photo Walk*
Linda Byrne & guest artist Abby Goodman: The Traveling Suitcase & The Art Cart*
*Denotes The Clemente Open Studios Participants
Community tables from:
Bluestockings Bookstore
Grand St. Settlement
District 1
Mutual Aid NYC
UnLocal
and more!
Mutual Aid NYC:
In collaboration with mutual aid organizer William Chan and the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Mutual Aid NYC will be collecting donations of urgently needed winter coats to help thousands of newly arrived asylum seekers and immigrants survive this winter. Additional items in need: children’s clothing of all sizes, under garments of all types (must be new), and metrocards. Gently used or new conditions only.
Join Us
Be part of this groundbreaking initiative, don’t miss the beat! Register for events, sign up for updates, and follow us on social media. Whether you’re a long-time advocate for cultural preservation or newly interested in Latinx narratives, Historias offers a unique opportunity to connect, learn, and celebrate together.