18:00 Presentation of images by Jim C. Nedd
20:00 Music performance by Lamin Fofana
Lamin Fofana presents BLACK METAMORPHOSIS, the first installment of an album trilogy inspired in part by Sylvia Wynter’s unpublished manuscript of the same title written in the 1970s. In his latest album, he contemplates the complicated process of understanding each other, while also desiring to accelerate the breaking of the world so we can move beyond the constraints of our time and dream up new sets of relationships. Lamin’s overlapping interests in history and contemporary circumstances and practice of transmuting text into the affective medium of sound brought him to “Black Metamorphosis” and the wider project of Black Studies. Sylvia Wynter's “Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World” is an unpublished 900-plus page manuscript written in the 1970s which is arguably one of the most important and most compelling interpretations of the black experience in the Western hemisphere.
What happens when black people find themselves in the West? What ways are African aesthetics forced to permutate, outside the margins and in the in-between spaces, and what transformative potential lies on the outskirts of normative existence, in the “liminal zones”?
Reflecting on the sonorous power of Sylvia Wynter, BLACK METAMORPHOSIS , which is the title piece on this release, this is an attempt to transmute Lamin’s interpretation of a concept he finds deeply inspiring and illuminating of his own experience as a black African in contemporary Europe.
BLACK METAMORPHOSIS is pressed on limited edition 180-gram vinyl and will be available at the event.
LAMIN FOFANA is a Sierra Leonean artist and music producer based in Berlin.
JIM C. NEDD is an Afro-Colombian interdisciplinary storyteller based in Milan.
The album launch takes place within the framework of “Archive Außer Sich” – a project of Arsenal-Institute for Film and Video Art in cooperation with Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) as part of The New Alphabet, a HKW project supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media due to a ruling of the German Bundestag. (www.archive-ausser-sich.de)
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